In mentioning criticism about the 2019 BBC Panorama episode Is Labour Anti-Semitic?, George Monbiot unfortunately omits some important details despite these having been published (This senseless lawsuit could bankrupt the Labour party and let the Tories win again, 15 February).
He refers to a tape recording which he suggests shows that the account given to Panorama by a Labour party official investigating allegations of antisemitism in Liverpool was wrong in recalling that he’d been asked by a Jewish women if he was from Israel.
In fact, the tape to which Monbiot refers is not definitive of the entirety of the conversation since it stops abruptly just at the point when the official says he was asked if he was from Israel, having been twice pressed by the woman to say which Labour branch he was from. She did not, as Monbiot writes, simply say “Oh, OK” and leave it at that when he declined to answer her question by saying it wasn’t relevant. She persisted: “Oh. No, it might not be [relevant]. Just thought it might be interesting.” So the conversation seemed to be heading in the direction recalled by the official before the tape cuts out.
Monbiot also refers to the programme’s editing of a brief clip from a former student leader, Izzy Lenga. It is true that through no fault of her own, her comments about the source of antisemitic abuse from left and right became mixed up in the editing and we should have made that distinction clearer – Hitler from the right and Holocaust denial from the left. That is why the BBC later clarified the position.
However, supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have become particularly exercised by this brief clip as if it invalidates the entire 59 minutes of the programme. It does not. Holocaust denial from the left like that experienced by Izzy Lenga has led to expulsions of Labour members for neo-Nazi views. Furthermore, the entire programme has been successfully defended in three separate defamation cases and adjudged by the broadcasting regulator Ofcom to have complied with the Broadcasting Code on both accuracy and impartiality.
John Ware
Reporter, Panorama
Neil Grant
Executive producer, Panorama
George Monbiot’s piece offers a rare glimpse of an alternative perspective on the Labour antisemitism crisis. He is right to point out that Panorama’s Is Labour Anti-Semitic? was “the most decisive blow to Corbyn’s leadership”. Our own series on Al Jazeera offered a more comprehensive critique of the film and of the broader media narrative on this issue.
Monbiot quotes the BBC’s “clarification” over the Izzy Lenga story uncritically. As edited by Panorama, Lenga’s claim was astonishing; that “every day” people in the Labour party told her “Hitler was right, Hitler did not go far enough” – comments that apparently went unchallenged. It would be hard to imagine something more defamatory to rank and file Labour members or more damaging to the party’s image.
The BBC now accepts our reporting that this in fact referred to a single incident, and that the abuse came from the far right. But it frames this as additional “context”, pointing out that Lenga said she had received “similar” abuse “from the far left”. The film’s reporter has said her comments “became mixed up in the editing.”
The bald fact is that Lenga never attributed the appalling Hitler comments to Labour members. To anyone remotely familiar with the culture of the party, the story was always extremely improbable. That it passed unquestioned through the BBC’s legal and editorial processes is profoundly worrying and indicative, as Peter Oborne says in our film, that by “the summer of 2019 … you could say whatever you liked about Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party”.
Reporters need to call out the obvious disingenousness of the BBC’s “clarification”. And the Corporation needs to answer the broader, very serious questions raised by Al Jazeera about the Panorama film – something it has so far failed to do.
Richard Sanders
Producer, The Labour Files – The Crisis (episode 2 of the Al Jazeera series)