Will Labour finally stop sweeping anti-Semitism under the carpet?

In February, the co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, resigned after having publicly accused the Club of harbouring and articulating rank prejudice against Jews and other minority groups. Mr Chalmers – who is not Jewish – declared that a ‘large proportion’ of Club members had ‘some kind of problem with Jews‘. He also suggested that individual members of the Club’s executive had employed offensive language ‘with casual abandon’, and that some had gone so far as to voice support for Hamas, the terrorist organisation that currently controls Gaza and which is proud to be governed by a charter that calls upon its followers to murder Jewish people.

These were grave charges. And in order to ensure that they were not swept under the carpet Labour’s National Executive Committee asked Baroness Janet Royall to undertake a thorough investigation. Meanwhile, the NEC found it necessary to suspend from membership some of the party faithful – most notably Red Ken Livingstone – against whom (quite outside the universe of the OULC) accusations of anti-Jewish prejudice had also been made.