This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

More than 100 Labour MPs, including at least 10 frontbenchers, have written to the Jewish Labour Movement, urging the group not to disaffiliate from the party and apologising for “letting our Jewish supporters and members down”.

The JLM, which has 2,000 members and has been affiliated to the party for almost a century, is to discuss at concurrent conferences in London and Manchester whether to formally sever ties with Labour over its handling of the antisemitism crisis.

Jeremy Corbyn wrote his own letter to the JLM saying he recognised the “enormous distress” caused by antisemitism and expressing his and the shadow cabinet’s “very strong desire for you to remain a part of our movement”.

The Labour leader said he understood the frustration with how the party had handled antisemitism cases, adding: “These processes have certainly moved too slowly.” He again asked for a meeting to discuss the matter – an offer declined last week.

The JLM’s parliamentary chair, Luciana Berger, was among the nine MPs who quit the party a fortnight ago. She cited antisemitic abuse as her main reason for leaving.

Their departure reignited the battle in the party over how antisemitism complaints are being dealt with – and the wider political culture.

The letter from 104 Labour MPs, which has been coordinated by the Walthamstow MP, Stella Creasy, says the MPs realised that “Labour has let our Jewish supporters and members down by failing to eradicate the antisemitism within our ranks”.

Signatories include the shadow international trade secretary, Barry Gardiner, the deputy leader, Tom Watson, the shadow Brexit minister Matthew Pennycook and the shadow housing minister Melanie Onn.

In the letter, they commit to stepping up their action against antisemitism and promoting membership of the JLM – which does not require members to be Jewish.

“Each of us recognises the leadership role we must ourselves play in addressing this toxic racism, calling out those who seek to make solidarity with our Jewish comrades a test of foreign policy and proudly standing with them in saying and acting to ensure antisemitism has no place in the Labour movement at any level,” the letter says. “We know words mean little when not backed by deeds.”

It was at the JLM’s conference last September that the former party leader Gordon Brown urged Labour’s leadership to eliminate what he called a “stain” on the party, by adopting in full the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, with all its accompanying examples – something the party’s ruling national executive committee (NEC) subsequently did.

The fresh overture from MPs to the JLM comes as the war of words over Labour’s handling of antisemitism cases shows little sign of abating.

The former minister Margaret Hodge wrote to Corbyn on Tuesday accusing him of misleading her, after emails emerged showing direct involvement by staff in his office in handling antisemitism complaints.

Corbyn later sent a robust reply to Hodge’s letter. In extracts seen by the Guardian, he criticised her for making a recording of the meeting, calling it a “total breach of trust and privacy”.

In response to Hodge’s claims about political interference in handling complaints, he insisted a “very small group” of staff in his office had been “asked for help in clearing a backlog of cases” by staff from Labour’s governance and legal unit (GLU) - and responded “in good faith”.

“The decision making remained with staff members from GLU, and there was no attempt to overrule them,” Corbyn said.

The Observer revealed on Sunday that senior figures in Corbyn’s team had been advising on how to handle complaints for several months last year.

And fresh emails leaked on Tuesday pointed to direct involvement by Laura Murray, Corbyn’s stakeholder manager, in advising against the suspension of a Labour member who had praised a mural acknowledged by the party to be antisemitic.

Murray is one of two Labour officials seconded from Corbyn’s office to provide administrative support to the party’s complaints unit, a decision Lord Falconer, who is being appointed to oversee a review of the process, described as “beyond mad”.

Falconer said he still intended to take on the role of “surveillance commissioner” for antisemitism cases, and hoped to ensure the process was “bathed in light”.

He said he planned to produce a report for the next NEC meeting in May – but then to remain in place and provide scrutiny.

The leaked emails concerned a Labour member who described a mural in London’s East End showing hook-nosed bankers as “great”. Corbyn himself had himself admitted the work used antisemitic tropes.

In the exchange from March last year, Labour’s head of disputes suggested imposing an “administrative suspension” on the individual, saying it was “in the immediate interests of the Labour party” to do so.

But Murray replied that the post pointed to ignorance, rather than antisemitism – and suggested that instead she was sent a list of questions asking “why she doesn’t realise that the mural is antisemitic”.

She continued: “Obviously if her answers show an unwillingness to be educated about these tropes then decide how best to proceed re: a suspension from there onwards.”

Murray’s father, Andrew, who is chief of staff at the Unite trade union and seconded to advise Corbyn part-time, is copied in to the email.

Corbyn’s director of strategy, Seumas Milne, his chief of staff, Karie Murphy, and Labour’s general secretary, Jennie Formby, as well as several other officials were also copied into the correspondence.

A Labour spokesperson defended the exchange. “Selecting a handful of cases from nearly a year ago, under defunct processes, is seriously misleading. This is a deeply unfair attack on staff working in good faith to apply the party rulebook to individual cases and get through the backlog of unresolved complaints Jennie Formby inherited.”

The letter says the MPs recognise the JLM as “the legitimate and long-standing representative of Jews in the Labour party”.

Another smaller group, Jewish Voice for Labour, which is not officially affiliated, has been created more recently, in which members are supportive of Corbyn’s leadership and have downplayed the issue of antisemitism in the party.

The work and pensions secretary, Amber Rudd, has demanded that her local Labour party in Hastings and Rye be put in special measures, claiming members had “deliberately goaded and baited Jews with hateful language and got away with it”.

Rudd, who has a tiny Conservative majority of 346 in the constituency, said the local party was “obsessed with peddling conspiracy theories about Jewish people”.

Hastings and Rye CLP passed a motion last week which spelt out the steps that Labour had taken to deal with antisemitism, including instigating Shami Chakrabarti’s report into racism in the party and the appointment of new staff and a legal office.

The motion suggested that some members in the party had “launched outrageous slanders but have faced no charges for bringing the party into disrepute”. It said the suspended MP Chris Williamson had been right to say Labour had done more than any other party and added that he “had nothing to apologise for”.

“This ‘crying wolf’ could cause valid warnings of antisemitism to go unheard,” the motion, says, claiming the accusations were being “criminally misused in an unscrupulous bid to destroy the Corbyn-led Labour party”.

Rudd called the motion a “disgrace” and said that Corbyn and Watson “must immediately place the CLP under special behavioural measures”.