• THE imbroglio around the recent report into the actions of Labour Party staff has revealed significant evidence of senior officials working against the party and its elected leaders.

The report makes serious allegations around the party’s 2017 election campaign, intentional stalling on complaints of anti-Semitism and appalling attitudes to the party’s leaders.

However, rather than deal exclusively with these grave allegations that have caused substantial anger among party members, some in the party and media seem as concerned about establishing who leaked this crucially important report.

The identity of the whistle-blower is both legally protected, and unimportant given that the information is clearly in the public interest.

Whistle-blowing is absolutely central to the functioning of democracy. It is one of the main ways that the powerful can be held to account, especially when there is an effort being made to conceal ugly and worrying truths.

The [Edward] Snowdens and [Chelsea] Mannings of this world have given citizens information they desperately need to participate in the democratic process, and have changed the world in doing so.

It is not far-fetched to say that a world without whistle-blowers is a world without democracy.

The controversial 850-page report into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party that was “leaked” to the media recently, is a case in point.

Sir Keir Starmer acted swiftly to appoint an independent investigation into the report, which we support: the culture of bullying and factionalism that the report alleges has to be dealt with.

But since then, there have been loud calls for the leakers of the report to be identified, named, investigated, suspended and criminally charged. This is wrong, both ethically and legally.

In 2019 BBC’s Panorama ran a highly controversial documentary about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

It included testimony from a range of party employees who stated that they were blowing the whistle to expose serious injustice. Many in the media and the party loudly defended their right to talk about internal party matters as whistle-blowers.

It is simply wrong, now, that those that defended the Panorama whistle-blowers the loudest refuse to do the same for the leakers of this new report.

Sir Keir writes that “equality is the moral heart of justice” on his website. That is correct, and we call on the new whistle-blowers to be treated with the same support and respect as those that came before, regardless of whether you like what they exposed.

Legally, too, the whistle-blowers acted within their rights. The Public Interest Disclosure Act protects whistle-blowers who expose wrongdoing if “in the reasonable belief of the worker” they believe that the information that is made public reveals criminal wrongdoing, a failure to meet a legal obligation and if “a miscarriage of justice has occurred or is likely to occur”.

The law protects those whistle-blowers from “any form of detriment” suffered by them for making information public.

While the legalities of this are complicated, we believe it is very clear that all of these tests are met by the circumstances.

The Labour Party, for example, was under a legal obligation to search for and then hand over all the evidence it held to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), a statutory body which is investigating the party on the issue of anti-Semitism.

Labour decided not to give the dossier over to the EHRC, which could very well be in violation of its legal duties to the EHRC.

The whistle-blowers, whoever they are, can very powerfully argue that they were working to make sure that the party did, indeed, follow the letter of the law.

Admittedly, PIDA says that documents cannot be leaked if doing so is a crime or a legal offence.

On its face, it seems that the document included personal information, and putting it in the public domain would have been a violation of the Data Protection Act.

However, that same act protects people who can show that they have put this information in the public domain because it was in the public interest; or, more importantly, they can show that they intended that the document would be used exclusively for journalistic purposes.

From what is publicly known, it appears the whistle-blower gave the report to journalists for them to expose its contents in various articles and programmes.

There are also other considerations. Practically, one of the only ways that Labour could identify the whistle-blower definitively would be to get the journalist to whom the report was leaked to reveal their source.

But this would, ironically, itself be a violation of the Data Protection Act, which requires that journalists protect confidential sources.

There is a real threat, then, that if Labour looks to expose the whistle-blowers and leave them open to all sorts of harassment, the party could end up in legal knots.

This is the last thing our beloved yet beleaguered Labour Party needs, especially when they will be going after people who put out a report in the clear public interest.

Let’s not beat around the bush. The leaked report is shocking and outrageous.

If the content of the report is true and accurate, every person in the country deserves to know about it, never mind all supporters of Labour, and, in particular, those BAME and Jewish members who will be horrified at the alleged bullying and harassment of MPs like Dianne Abbott and the stalling of anti-Semitism enquiries in an attempt to harm Jeremy Corbyn.

You may not like the message, but in the interests of justice, fairness and the law, the messengers must be protected.

We therefore call on Sir Keir Starmer, and the Labour NEC, to explicitly confirm that any investigation into the leaked report will not try to identify and expose the whistle-blowers, and, further, to commit unequivocally to directing Labour members to refrain from doing the same.

ANDREW FEINSTEIN
(author & former ANC MP, Advisory Board of the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa)

PAUL HOLDEN
(Investigative researcher & author)