Labour Leaks, Peaks and Sneaks

Jeremy Corbyn undermined by GLU staff during leadership.
Credit: Jonathan Brady

So here we have it, the exposé that the Corbyn mass have been waiting for even though they themselves probably did not even know it. The document I’m of course shedding illumination on is the leaked and unredacted report entitled, ‘The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in Relation to Antisemitism, 2014 – 2019’. A pretty much do-what-it-says on the tin style document with all the attractive nature of sparsely populated red bordered  .pdf that’ll get any Corbynite smacking at the lips for the politically salacious with the added bonus of being right all along.

What we have here is an internal Labour party investigation conducted in the final months of the Corbyn leadership by – presently – authors unknown. Even more relevant to this arch of Labour history is that the party’s legal team have deemed the document not fit for submission to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) as evidence for the overarching investigation into the mishandling of antisemitism complaints within the Labour party.

Contextual prose done, the meat and gravy of the report is damning in its conclusions right from the get-go and places no room for doubt on who the perceived enemies are for shortcomings of the party in recent years; the focus of this document being on the 2017 general election and party handling of antisemitism complaints. Painstaking perhaps is not the word for how laboriously the document sets up the problem at hand, the fingers of which pointing the at the perpetrators along with the symptomatic problem, factionalism (a word that will be of prime importance throughout the controversy surrounding the report). We are immediately presented with a new angle on antisemitism from the ‘faction’ of the Labour party that produced this report, the admittance that antisemitism was in fact as grave a problem as highlighted by so many in the time period 2015 - 2018 but the institutional element of this racism was in fact largely down to the Blairite wing of the party (a fairly select group of individuals) within the Governance and Legal Unit (GLU) not allowing the courageously gleaming Leader of the Opposition (LOTO) to enact swift justice.

Leaving aside the harshly unaccounted concerns for data protection claims by the publisher’s choice to release such a report unredacted and the amount payable by Labour to the named claimants on impending libel charges; it leaves me aghast in head scratching contemplation at what the actual comprehension of antisemitism is within these ranks. We began this lodged stone uncovering with lice scuttling around the party moss that have indeed always been virulently antisemitic by their use of rudimentary tropes all the way to the adherence of more “higher power” anti-Jewish political theories. However, this was harshly denied in the early stages by most and was allowed to brew until it reached the forefront of our senses. Then we uncovered more serious concerns than your average middle-aged lefty in their 70s jeering antisemitic remarks, there was cause to believe that measures of protection were being followed through to shield those who had been confident enough to bring their true feelings about Jews to the surface. And finally, the already unravelling episode concluded with findings I myself and many others had only begun to suspect, that a more sinister institutionally racist structure was at work.

Party general secretary, Iain McNicol resigns amidst the leaks.
Credit: Ben Pruchnie

At every stage of the above timeline (which is neatly summarised in the Jewish Labour Movement closing submission to the EHRC), we were provided refutations – although sometimes hard to garner considering JC’s sheer reluctance to engage with media outlets – regarding the above. The thug-like behaviour of racist individuals was part of a small minority that would be deal with through suspension; that antisemitic claims made by more senior Labour members were not in fact antisemitic and were merely forms of historical analysis and finally, that the claims made stating the attempted tampering by LOTO with the disciplinary process contrary to the findings in the Chakrabarti report were hugely exaggerated to the point of borderline falsehood.

Mary, Mary quite contrary. In the report we are faced with such deplore, from what is likely to be the very faction that denied all of the above, of the behaviour illustrated in each stage of the antisemitism epic. I almost have to fight back a cathartic grin at the thought of this orchestral internal conspiracy, crafted from reams of Whatsapp chat logs, bringing down the saviours of those who fell victim to antisemitism in much the same way that those who dared protest again the Corbyn leadership were lambasted as being part of the great Zionist project to infiltrate the far left. So, which is it? Was antisemitism grossly exaggerated to meet the political ends of those conniving Splinter Cells ready to taint the foundations of an institution from the ground up or were those same whistle blowers revealed to be the true artists of torment inflicted on the Jewish community when exposed to the cold light of day? If either theory is peddled as true, the end result is undeniably the same, Jewish members of Labour still remain victims of an inability to properly have their complaints dealt with, either at the hands of one institutionally racist faction or another. A conundrum you and I both could be pile driving into our craniums until a conclusive verdict is reached by the EHRC.

Drawing near a close, I’ll leave us thinking about the very word reappearing more than any throughout the internal report, this being factional. It is actually with a double entendre of sombreness that I trawl through the report as I witness a group that cannot get past antics that it likes to often blame the current ruling party for exhibiting and in doing so, has mendaciously lit the match on deserted territory for the newcomers to find in complete post-blaze dilapidation. Taking the investigation findings as true, I would draw two implicated conclusions. At worst case, the party was so caught up in factionalism that it could not effectively organise and govern bodies responsible with handling complaints of such a serious nature that if ignored would only be at the expense of the continued silencing of minority groups. At best case, we have a party that would resemble a primary school football match: social and political circles who’s squabbles over “who should have passed to who” only leading to more and more opposition points scored, and in this case, an own goal with finger pointing absolution as to who the culprit was.

Sources

- Closing Submission to the Equality and Human Rights Commission on Behalf of the Jewish Labour Movement - https://www.scribd.com/document/438372031/Redacted-JLM-Closing-Submission-to-the-EHRC#fullscreen&from_embed

- Equality and Human Rights Commission Terms of Reference on the Investigation into the Labour Party - https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/terms-of-reference-investigation-into-labour-party-28-may-2019.pdf

- Labour Lawsuit - https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/labour-could-be-bankrupted-by-lawsuits-after-antisemitism-dossier-leak-1.499051

- Labour Rulebook 2019 - https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Rule-Book-2019.pdf

        - The Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry - https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Chakrabarti-Inquiry-Report-30June16.pdf

        - The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in Relation to Antisemitism 2014-2019 - https://cryptome.org/2020/04/Labour-Antisemitism-Report.pdf

The Busiest Bee in all of Walthamstow

Yes, what better way to get the vein popping juices flowing right through to my temple - which at this point houses in its sockets cathode burned eyeballs - than a back scratching write up of my mate, Ben Spence and his label Fuzzbrain Music? I'm not normally one for plastering my friend's achievements all over the internet, usually because I'm of the firm belief that what you can wax lyrical about on a public forum regarding a private relationship could probably be done so (you guessed it) in private. Anyway, the work this man single-handedly devotes to his passion and building up a whole community on simply that, is by no lesser of the words astonishing and inspiring to all who have the pleasure of crossing his path.

I met Ben through my now wife, Alisha having rekindled her secondary school friendship via the music festival Ben was running at the time with his friend DeijuVHS, which would be the first of many Lamesfests. Alisha was exhibiting her photography and of course, like most friendships we end up valuing through thick and thin, I hated the idea of another Ben straight away. This was natural for my tiny 19-year-old mind as by no means could it process someone of the same age, similar background and interests in not all too different subcultures from my own being someone I'd actually like? No, he had long hair past his shoulders and was wearing tie die, so by the law of aesthetically diametrical music enthusiasts, we could not be friends.

Eating my words has kind of become a mantra of sorts the older I get which is probably normal for most people in how they choose to identify themselves through the development of their persona. I shudder to think at the supposition that I never would have began this friendship on such superficial preconceptions but one has to be honest with themselves and admit that I was of some superficial composition myself during those days. Of course, we hit it off straight away and to tell the truth, I was in complete dumbstruck awe that someone could have such ambitious vision about a whole world they wanted to create and it made me feel like a ride-along passenger more than ever. From that point on, I did take the wild ride consisting of the adversely non-dramatic bus journey, Jubilee line train and ANOTHER bus through the abnormal void filling the space between South East and East London, depositing me slap-bang on the border between Walthamstow and Leyton. All this so I could help the busy bee be even busier.


Fast forward five years and that inter dimensional realm just on the edge of a pink and green horizon doesn't seem like the frivolous dream I shared with Ben in the downward peak of our adolescence. All of the artists in the Fuzzbrain community, whether it's the chisel-jawed Essex stunners that are Getaway driving a finely fastened guitar lead through an impossibly complex but infectious rhythm all the way to stumbling in on the collateral damage left after Tuka has just soared an incredibly serenading psalm to tape, there is always a feeling of being members of Ben's world without any of the pouted-lip exclusivity that membership contracts usually present themselves with as an invisible clause.

Drawing to a close, the "Fuzzbrain 20/20Visions" compilation will be shipping out in the first week of May and I couldn't ensue more pride for my friend. All of his charm; the undecipherable rate at which he races to finish his sentences at and outrageously paradoxical arrogance has been channelled into his love for the culture with this compilation LP as a direct byproduct.

I also did a little bio for the compilation itself which I'll paste below but until some unstoppable life altering epiphany strikes me, I am indeed Fuzzbrain Family Forever!

Fuzzbrain Music has rapidly become the bubbling epicentre of all things underground in the nation’s capital, achieving this all through the diametric tenacity of the label’s founder, Ben Spence. To suggest the label harbours an eclectic taste would be more than a dramatic understatement evidenced by the debut release birthing itself in the form of a 13-song compilation showcasing just a microcosm of the talent surrounding the label but on an audacious macro stage. From the soaring highs of R’n’B renaissance maestros, Getaway to the crushingly guttural metallic hardcore precision mastered by Splitknuckle, the variation is unrelenting in exploration. From the deeply mellow but soulful hymns orated by West London born, Tuka to the opposingly discordant tones of DeijVHS and Bl£M found in their pioneering industrial hip-hop drenched duo, never a predictable selection is anticipated anywhere across the Fuzzbrain roster. What any genre abiding enthusiast will find upon uncovering the contents of this disc is a realisation of their greatest sonic fantasies whilst simultaneously peering into the greater psyche of the label’s vision: a melting pot simmering together a multifaceted concoction of cultural influences giving off a decidedly uncompromising but wholly unifying London flavour.

You can pre-order Fuzzbrain 20/20 Visions here. 

Listen to the compilation here.

   The Jinn and the Tree

      Introduction

      Its a common utterance of most people from the South Asian and Arab community to use the idea of  a Jinn to frighten. Of course there are never any real specifics (let alone by-the-book knowledge) of what religious or cultural  determinations willed these malevolent and often misunderstood beings into existence. Despise their prevailing relevance to pop culture in this sphere, I could find very limited information regarding them online and whilst what I did find mirrored the family stories used to terrify and jester simultaneously, much of the hard lore is limited to "scary jinn stories 101" Quora posts. In my mind, the Jinn has all the ingredients for a great horror story, they are like humans in image but decidedly not at all homo-sapien; they live to cause even more complication to the human condition and lastly, are rife in the Islamic world when it comes to mystery folklore.  

      1.Telling Time

Darkness waned over every visible piece of neat yellow brick that it could find, every white window pane soon willed out of existence by a force that rears its head from the underbelly of the earth, eventually discharging its incorporeal mass onto the opposing end of our sphere. The ritualistic changing of the sky in all of its delights and doubts was witnessed every evening by Mahalia with the end of every day being scrutinised even more so, down to the counting of the clocks. Her house had become full of them, not as an antique fanatic might relentlessly collect for minute technical details in machinery or for the historical value found in the epoch that it originated from, rather, Mahalia had become more concerned with time than ever before. Clocks, watches, radios and sand timers were all ways of bringing what was perceived into what could be witnessed and the structure of days had now become the prime subject of study. This is why darkness necessitated such a stern attention to detail, each time slot represented the next opening that could be filled by the absence of light or other things. It was quite apparent to Mahalia that no one ever took the time to observe how light slips away from the world, we all experience the happening of this phenomenon in plain sight and we are never puzzled at the transfer taking place.

Memoir #1

Coming to terms with the first memory of the untoward thing as less of a childhood platitude that one may compartmentalise into the library cortex of their mind but more as the influential event that it was had occupied Mahalia’s consciousness during the transition of days to nights. Like most of the memories that awake from hibernation when we least welcome them, this event took place among the familiarity of family, her grandmother’s home precisely. Within the confines of the safety in numbers barrier that a gathering of this sort drew up, Mahalia least expected to be struck, especially due to the significant confidence a person possesses in their formative years. Enthralled in whatever antics she had been involved in with her cousins, she had split off from the bulk of the group – as was all too common of her inquisitive tendencies – and found herself closer than ever before to the oak tree, the root of which anchored precisely between the partition fence running jaggedly along the neighbouring garden. It domineered over both patches of land, branches zig-zagging with almost precise intention towards its nemesis of man-made design. Mahalia was convinced one day she would awake to the tree having completed its lifelong ambition with the tips of its branches knocking on the spare room in her grandmother’s home, a thought she’d rather not allow to keep her awake in the daunting hours leading up to spending the night. 

2. Evening Haze

Repeating the process of overturning every timer and setting each stopwatch almost feverishly with the end result never bringing her anywhere closer to the ultimate goal, it was without any doubt in her mind that tonight would be the night of the capture, causing the seed planted in her mind years ago to flower at this particular destination. Time ascribing devices set up all around the house marked each moment of the current November season using whatever medium they facilitated, she did not discriminate. It had just about reached the point in the semi-detached Victorian terrace where the first trimmings of sunlight were beginning to smoulder, with each minute passed enveloping more and more into a winter equivalent of refraction; waves of blue light marred with the silence of densely inhabited streets indicated evening meals were underway and there was only a momentary release before the sand grains in each tenderly placed timer emptied. This portion of the evening had concluded, deeming the entrance of what was anticipated to exist, into our realm.

Memoir #2

Like the clockwork timing she would later in her life become obsessed with, the being appeared standing at the furthest point that the branches of the tree extended to in the exact opposite direction of the house, over the edge of the garden and deep into the derelict public ground that backed off from the street. Mahalia had only momentarily peeled her eyes from the base of the tree to drag them up the trunk and in doing so thrusting her neck backwards to appreciate a structure she had only eyeballed from behind sheets of glass before sharply snapping her head back down and seeing the standing man. Calling it a man was perhaps a stretch of biology as even though physically appearing as a humanoid male, the standing body gave off nothing at all as a being that which occupied a gendered space, let alone an altogether human one. Maybe it was the effect of age but the aforementioned aura of whatever appeared before Mahalia was more apparent to her than it could be to any adult – their programming would deem them incapable of making any such sighting even if what stood directly over their sleeping form would glare with such radiant intent that if it was at all of this world, the comatose body would awake in defence! The skin was translucent and reflected the slowly deepening blue evening sky in calculated mimicry, it stood taller and taller as it began its approach, igniting in Mahalia the process by which one might ascertain another person’s composition as they advance forward from the horizon and wanting to stay completely still until that subject’s complete mass is confirmed from the closing of distance. However, an injecting thrust into the right side of Mahalia’s skull let her know that it was imperative that the distance must not and should never be closed.

3. Smokeless Fire

Jinn sightings were not all too uncommon in the community, with almost all cases never being substantiated despite their consistent ease of taking the blame for whatever the said circumstance dictated. There was no shortage of the incessantly deranged, begging for the macabre to affect them for which every law-abiding Muslim knew a few of. There still however, grew a thought in Mahalia’s mind that she was one of the insane who had been unfortunate enough to see a Jinn at work in the world. If any of her sanity remained, it would be put to use on this eve before taking the exit route from her sensibility with great permanence, at least this is what she understood the manifestations of Jinn sightings to implicate. The aged dogma passed down read that an individual who is able to see a Jinn is no longer reliably cognitive, losing all harmony with the world at witnessing a rogue inhabitant of another. If this were true, Mahalia would have sacrificed 25 years to complete insanity from a single maleficent revelation. Had this meant all events leading up until now had come with a guise hellbent on concealing the real world from her? Was what she was experiencing at this precise moment not at all close to where her anatomical form actually existed? What would the future hold for such a soul whose projections were so deliberately contaminated? Among all of this, the singular protruding question imprinted as strongly as it had done so in her youth: Would the Jinn present itself to her on this night or ever again?

Memoir #3

The domineering blue mass which came attached with four limbs and a head, walked long enough to be half as close as it was when it began its impending stride, yet Mahalia had not contracted a single muscle. It was by the time it had reached the trunk itself that it seemed to grow in height, drastically more than one would assume when judging from its original position, almost as if to draw more power from the earth the closer it became to the tree’s centre of gravity. Mahalia ran. She paid great attention to the terrain than ever before, taking note of when the grass strip ended and turned abruptly to concrete, she imagined how the beast would fair against her father and how little of a chance it stood against her entire tribe. Plummeting head first into the corner arm of the sofa, she sat bolted up by an invisible wire hanger which span her gaze one hundred and eighty degrees for the first time since being in reach of the tree. Standing with a longing that extended past the limit of what it could physically engulf, the only option left for the now fully realised being was to burn its demoniac objective onto Mahalia’s suddenly watering lenses. This climax marking the end of the demon’s entry into human civilization would have been clear to any fleshly mortal and the inability to resume its pathway would subdue the desperate begging for the creature to immediately dissipate. However, what would be the flicker caught in its final glare, digging its way up from the coffined region found in Mahalia’s mental states did not strike fear in men for the power this member of negative constitution possessed but in fact, just who and what it could bring with it.

4. Around Again

Having waited in the upstairs window of the bedroom facing directly onto the lonesome tree situated to the back corner of the garden in a house now blossoming with the hissings of multiple upturned timers and the hourly chimes of grandfather clocks, Mahalia was in the final moments of her dichotomised evening and the result turned further to the negative. The artificial anticipation of an eventful morning of her parents visiting was met with the immediate deflation upon recalling this was the fourth week since they had withdrawn their contracted visits. The certainty that overcame her body just hours earlier had not dimmed and she was sure that the next night the Jinn would make its entry from the root of the tree in a mighty unveiling, proving her suspicions all along and divorcing her perpetually from doubt. As the light elapsed with slower haste, Mahalia marvelled - as she did seasonally - at the reddish tinges seeping into summer skies as probably no other person had ever done with such documented intricacy, if they had, it would be a symptom of the exposure they had undergone in the articles she poured over daily. And it was like that, another November delivered itself and Mahalia only with trinkets and texts for company now took on a new longing for fellow intelligent life and questioned when exactly this desire had penetrated into fruition. For days the stricken indefinite nature of her loneliness was what overtook all other obsessions but never did she stop to consider the inaccuracy of her internal questioning which could only truly reveal itself by pursuing the avenue leading to the unthinkable. Perhaps the longing viciously incinerated onto her when peering back into those hellish eyes of bottomless translucence had been what she craved all along and if she took but a few more steps, even more so than reuniting with her tormentor once more, she yearned initiation into the kingdom which she prematurely glimpsed whilst still a living vessel.