• AFTER two years of excuses and delays the Forde Report was finally released and it makes for grim reading.

It confirmed what many of us already knew: right-wing Labour staffers used their positions to obstruct and undermine the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, despite his democratic mandate from hundreds of thousands of party members.

Perhaps most shamefully the report also lays bare how the serious issue of anti-Semitism was used by these staffers as a weapon in their sabotage against the leadership.

This included attempts to shape the leadership election outcomes against Corbyn in 2015 and 2016 through vetting Corbyn supporting members – and peaked at the deliberate undermining of Labour’s 2017 general election operations, when senior staff covertly diverted resources to “sitting largely anti-Corbyn MPs”, instead of “pro-Corbyn candidates in potentially Tory winnable seats”. This was unforgivable.

While members from across the political spectrum of the Labour Party were working day and night to elect a Labour government, these people were undermining us at every turn.

As Forde describes, the obsessive opposition of right-wing staffers to Corbyn’s administration fuelled a toxic and abusive culture where racism and misogyny were commonplace, as evidenced in the WhatsApp conversations exposed in the leaked report.

The Forde Report also finds that during this period, BAME and female MPs were not afforded the same “level of instinctive respect” as their white or male counterparts.

Equally shamefully, Forde finds that the obsession with purging left-wing members led to the mishandling of anti-Semitism complaints.

Labour’s governance and legal unit (GLU) prioritised “suspending members who supported Jeremy Corbyn, in 2015 and 2016 over dealing with complaints of antisemitism, Islamophobia or other types of complaints”.

This is shocking. Yet Forde also finds no evidence “that the effects of factionalism have been eliminated from Party recruitment, management and promotion processes” under the current leadership.

In fact in Camden, with a long history of factional attacks against socialists within the CLP, all left-wing Labour members applicants for the councillor election were not allowed past the first stage of shortlisting. This included popular sitting councillors and community activists and organisers.

This was in a background of abusive anti-left tweets from the Labour chief whip and a Labour councillor (as reported by the CNJ).

In Islington Jeremy Corbyn has had the Labour whip removed for comments which have been repeated by Martin Forde QC.

When the right claim that they have transformed the “culture” of the party, what they mean to say is that under Corbyn they burned the house down rather than respect the left’s democratic mandate (“factionalism”) – and now they are crushing the left (“unity”).

For all those who were so inspired by the hope of real change that Corbyn’s leadership represented, whose hopes were frustrated at every turn by anti-democratic forces within our own party, we share your pain.

We urge members to stay in Labour and join Momentum in this struggle. With NEC election ballots dropping on Monday and annual conference nearly upon us, we have an opportunity now to stand up for democracy and the change we want to see. Only by staying in the party can we do this.

CAMDEN & ISLINGTON MOMENTUM STEERING COMMITTEE, JOHN WITHINGTON, TOM WAKEFORD, SHEZAN RENNY, PAUL RENNY, LUKE PEARSON

Quotes with permission from authors (Lorcan Whitehead & Hilary Schan, Momentum National Co-ordinating Group).