Jon Lansman, the founder of Momentum, has apologised for joining Labour’s attack on the whistleblowers who broke their silence about the party’s handling of antisemitism on Panorama last year. It is understood the apology is part of the agreed high court settlement with the former Labour party staff. Lansman said he wanted to say sorry to “the former staffers” in a tweet on Thursday morning linking to the high court statement retracting the party’s accusations that the whistleblowers had made “false and malicious” statements and were motivated by their opposition to Jeremy Corbyn. “This is a link to the Labour party’s court statement apologising to former party staffers who appeared in the Panorama programme on antisemitism. I tweeted something similar based on the party’s advice & assurances & also apologise to the former staffers,” he said. The former staff, Kat Buckingham, Michael Creighton, Samuel Matthews, Dan Hogan, Louise Withers Green, Benjamin Westerman and Martha Robinson all broke non-disclosure agreements to tell the BBC programme that they felt fatally undermined by senior Labour bosses in their attempts to tackle antisemitism, alleging consistent interference in complaints. Along with the Panorama journalist John Ware, they were paid “substantial damages” by the Labour party amounting to between £170,000 and £180,000. Lansman’s apology came after a day of bitter infighting at the Labour party and will serve to underline the continuing rivalries between old and new management.
It is in stark contrast to Corbyn, who issued a statement after the high court hearing claiming the settlement was a “political decision” against legal advice. Corbyn’s statement caused astonishment among the litigants in the libel action, with Ware confirming to the Guardian that he was “consulting his lawyers” about a libel action against the former Labour leader, raising the prospect of another costly court battle over Labour and antisemitism. The Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey, also criticised the decision to settle and called it a misuse of party funds. “The leaked report on how antisemitism was handled tells a very different story about what happened,” he said. Their statements have plunged the party back into civil war, with Dame Margaret Hodge, one of the most vocal critics of Corbyn’s approach to antisemitism, branding his statement “bizarre” on Wednesday night. “I think it’s obsessional. I cannot understand that he wants to stand on a hill and be judged by his inability and failure to tackle antisemitism. That’s what he wants to go down fighting – it is extraordinary,” she told the BBC’s Newsnight. While the shadow attorney general, Lord Falconer, said the settlement represented a closing of the chapter in Labour’s history, there is little chance of it disappearing, with the Equality and Human Rights Commission expected to publish a highly critical report in September followed by a further report by Martin Forde QC into the consequences of an internal Labour report into antisemitism that was leaked in April. The media lawyer Mark Lewis said he had been instructed by 32 individuals including Lord McNicol, the former general secretary of Labour, to sue the party in the wake of the leak. He was pursuing “five or six courses of action” including potential breaches of the Data Protection Act, breaches of confidence, misuse of private information, libel and employment law in relation to the responsibility of an employer to protect its staff regarding work issues.
Some of his clients were the target of sustained social media attacks as a result of private messages. “They include people who were high up in the Labour party and individuals lower down the ranks in the staff and others who made reports who had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Many had their messages taken out of context in the report,” said Lewis, a partner at Patron Law. Lewis told Newsnight: “McNicol is named in the report and is blamed for things that simply didn’t happen. It’s a mischaracterisation of a report which is being taken on.”