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Hi, I'm Anouche.

I'm Rachel.

And I'm Freddie.

And on today's episode of the New Statesman Podcast, we discuss the fallout of the Ford Report, and you ask us,

what's the point of labour if it doesn't represent organised labour?

So the Tory leadership election rumbles on, and it has been dominating the podcast for a number of episodes now.

But there is a lot going on in labour, so I'm glad that we've got the time to focus on them.

First of all, the Ford Report came out, and it made for quite a damning reading for pretty much everyone.

Rachel, do you want to take us through what the main findings were?

Yes, so this is a report which covered the period during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, and how the party handled anti-Semitism, and the so-called labour leaks report,

which was a report which was leaked, which contained a lot of leaked whatsapps.

Was that in April 2020, that was sort of just as, I remember just as the pandemic was in that thing.

And that came out on the back of some of the EHRC stuff which was being investigated at the time.

So it found basically that the party's handling of anti-Semitism was disrupted by factionalism on both sides,

so from the left and from the right, and they found that it also undermined the democratic process, and they failed the electorate as a result as an entire party.

It also went into other areas which there's been claims on the left that the right of the party during the 2017 general election tried to completely throw the election,

and that Martin Ford QC found that that wasn't the case, but it was the case that they had set up a secret operation and were putting money into certain seats.

It's been a mess and it covers a period that's long in history now, but which has been important in terms of the parties not being united now for a very long time because of just the wars that took place during this period.

...