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As Charlotte Henry wrote for TheArticle this week, the Chris Williamson case proves that the Labour Party is institutionally antisemitic. Williamson clings to the notion that he is an

‘anti-racist’ campaigner, but his unapologetic disdain for the British-Jewish community reveals that he simply doesn’t view antisemitism as racism. Ed Miliband described the Williamson

debacle as a ‘test’ for the party’s ability to tackle antisemitism. But this misses the point. There will be no resolution to the scourge of antisemitism while Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the

Labour Party. Williamson and Corbyn are close allies, and antisemitism is at the heart of Corbyn’s own political history. The Labour Party has a massive backlog of complaints of

antisemitism left unaddressed over a period of many months. Indeed, Labour‘s indifference towards mounting reports of antisemitism was cited as a key grievance of the MPs who left the party

last week to form the Independent Group. Labour’s approach to antisemitism – contrary to what Williamson argued in his incendiary remarks – has been incredibly lax. Ken Livingstone, for

example, escaped expulsion despite his flagrantly antisemitic claim that Adolf Hitler was a Zionist. The Labour party’s record on antisemitism begs the question: why decide to suspend

Williamson now? Williamson has a long history of abhorrent antisemitic remarks. At a meeting of the Labour grassroots organisation Momentum in Liverpool over the summer, Williamson attacked

Jewish communal institutions. He said that the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, the bodies which represent the British-Jewish community to the media and government,

“don’t speak for all Jews in this country.” Instead, Williamson said he would rather speak to Jewish anti-Zionist groups, such as “Jewish Voice for Labour”. In short, he only has time for

Jews who share his radical socialist worldview. Williamson also actively defended those in the party who have “allowed their passion to run away” and use language that “could be perceived as

antisemitic”. He looked on while a Momentum activist in the audience complained about “Israelis with their foot soldiers in Labour – the LFI, the JLM” who are “trying to take our democracy

away from us”, referring to Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement, the latter of which is a British-Jewish, not Israeli, group. After these abhorrent remarks targeting the

Jewish community, Williamson was still not suspended. Why now? News outlets reported that Labour “succumbed to pressure” from those concerned about antisemitism to suspend Williamson. But if

the decision on the part of Jennie Formby was due to antisemitism, why not suspend Williamson at the time of his remarks targeting the Jewish community itself? The reality is that

Williamson’s suspension is not indicative of any serious desire on the part of the Labour leadership to repair relations with the Jewish community. That opportunity has already been

squandered. It is also not indicative of any desire to implement the ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to antisemitism that Labour has committed to in word, but undermined in practice. Rather, it

appears that Williamson was suspended because he threatened something the Labour Party really does value: centralised control over their public relations and what their parliamentary members

think and say about the various controversies surrounding the party. Williamson crossed a red line– not in his antisemitism, but in his attack on Labour’s handling of the antisemitism

crisis. Under Corbyn’s leadership, it seems increasingly that Labour’s concern is not rooting out antisemitism, but maintaining an iron grip over its members.