Labour Rehires Senior Rightwinger Whose Unit Bungled Antisemitism Complaints

A Labour rightwinger who ran the party’s complaints department at the time it bungled numerous antisemitism complaints has been rehired to his previous job.

John Stolliday has been reinstated as head of Labour’s governance and legal unit (GLU) – the body responsible for dealing with complaints.

The role was advertised in the normal way; however, party general secretary Hollie Ridley – a close ally of Keir Starmer – is understood to have made the appointment in what multiple sources told Novara Media is a factional move before her departure from her role, which will follow the party’s upcoming conference in Liverpool.

In a post on LinkedIn in July, Stolliday said: “Honoured and delighted to have been made executive director of governance and legal at the Labour party – the party I have worked at on and off for over 15 years since I started there in 2004 – and to lead the governance unit which I worked in for so many years.”

Stolliday was director of governance and legal from December 2016 to June 2018, a period in which Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader and in which the party was mired in antisemitism allegations. The crisis would dominate media coverage of Labour in the build up to the 2019 election and pave the way for Corbyn’s downfall. 

The crisis culminated in a report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) which found that Labour had breached the Equality Act in two cases, and concluded that it could have dealt with antisemitism more effectively “if the leadership had chosen to do so”. The EHRC investigation did not make any findings against Stolliday.

Stolliday’s rehiring to his previous role astonished one source who previously worked within the party.

“The party seems to be ignoring that there’s inherent risk in rehiring someone who was a director at the time of the EHRC’s focus of investigation,” the source told Novara Media. 

“If you were making reasonable decisions and not evidently political ones, you wouldn’t in a million years rehire someone who is in control in a period of such failure.”

Following Stolliday’s departure from the role in 2018, a number of improvements were made to the complaints process. 

“After the amount of time and effort that we’d put into sorting things out, to hand the keys back to someone who crashed the car in the first place was pretty galling,” the source said.

Among the findings in the EHRC report was inadequate training for individuals dealing with antisemitism complaints, as well as “evidence of a significant number of complaints relating to antisemitism that were not investigated at all”. In particular, the party would routinely not investigate social media activity that involved “mere ‘likes’ or reposts”.

This policy led to some shocking examples of antisemitism not being dealt with, the source said. “Someone could share seven posts of Holocaust denial and if they didn’t add a remark saying, ‘I agree with this, this is great’, they [the GLU] would ignore it.”

“I know there was one instance of a person sharing virulent Holocaust denial – things like ‘Auschwitz had swimming pools, the six million [deaths] number is false’ – and they didn’t get suspended because they followed this policy of not taking action if someone hadn’t commented on it.”

Responding to the EHRC investigation at the time, the party said the policy had been wrong and hadn’t been applied since mid 2018.

Leaked emails between Stolliday and another senior member of the GLU also showed that during this time, the party took over a year to suspend a member who had defended British fascists involved in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, and eight months to suspend a council candidate who claimed the Holocaust was a “hoax”.

Stolliday’s previous tenure at Labour’s GLU came while he was part of the party’s “senior management team”, a group of high-ranking officials who were bitterly opposed to Corbyn’s leadership.

A leaked document produced during Corbyn’s leadership claimed that “an abnormal intensity of factional opposition to the party leader” had “inhibited the proper functioning of the Labour party bureaucracy” and contributed to “a litany of mistakes” in dealing with antisemitism.

The document became the subject of a legal case in which the claimants, including Stolliday, alleged it contained defamatory allegations. As it wasn’t possible to identify the source of the leak, the claim was pursued against Labour itself. The party settled out of court, agreeing to compensate the claimants at a cost of an estimated £2m.

A statement read out in court by the claimants’ legal team described allegations that Stolliday had tried to obstruct action on antisemitism in order to undermine Corbyn as “false and damaging”.

The document also included messages from 2015, when it was becoming clear that Corbyn would become Labour leader, which show an exchange in which Stolliday discussed Peter Mandelson’s plan for a possible delay to the party’s leadership election by getting the other candidates to stand down, believing it would force Labour to stop the contest and therefore deny Corbyn a victory.

In a statement in open court, Stolliday’s lawyer Felicity McMahon said it was false to suggest that he took steps to undermine Labour’s ability to win the 2017 general election.

Another Labour source said of Stolliday’s return to the GLU: “It’s hard to see it as anything other than a deeply factional appointment.”

The source who previously worked in Labour said: “Hollie Ridley saw writing on the wall – she would be ousted. But they were looking for places in the party where they could place their people and maintain some control in a key area.”

Rachel Garnham, the co-chair of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, told Novara Media: “We have an important opportunity, with a new leadership, to reset the approach to party democracy and once again support grassroots engagement. 

“This means a new start, heeding the lessons of the Forde report and ensuring staff are impartial in all democratic processes.”

The source who used to work in Labour said: “We’re the ones that did the hard yards sorting it [the complaints process] out. We picked up the mess that was left after Stolliday left. We built a system that operates effectively. It was a complete mess when I started – it was just chaos – and now there is a system that actually functions. 

“Stolliday had nothing to do with that but has been allowed to swan back into this high profile role as if nothing had happened and none of these failures existed in the past.”

A Labour party spokesperson said: “The Equality and Human Rights Commission identified systemic failings in the Labour party which have since been addressed from top to bottom. 

“It is wrong and defamatory to make any false parallels between the institutional failings identified and individual members of staff.”