Robert Peston Robert Peston

Labour’s failure on anti-Semitism is also a crisis of competence

There is both a moral and a practical dimension to Labour’s desperate slowness to root out anti-Semitism.

The moral one, highlighted by the Chief Rabbi last night, is whether Jeremy Corbyn is fit to be prime minister having seemingly been too tolerant for too long of avowed anti-Semites.

The practical one is that Labour is offering the most ambitious and complex programme of national reconstruction since 1945 – an expansion of the apparatus of the state on a scale we haven’t seen since at least the 1960s and probably not since 1945.

It will require management and technocratic expertise of a very high order.

And yet Labour’s administrative machine failed miserably to respond in a timely fashion to a practical challenge that was of a considerably lesser order, namely the multiple disclosures that anti-Semitism was poisoning the party.

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Robert Peston
Written by
Robert Peston
Robert Peston is Political Editor of ITV News and host of the weekly political discussion show Peston. His articles originally appeared on his ITV News blog.

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