The #ILeakedTheLabourReport hashtag has been trending on UK social media today, in response to a judge’s decision this morning to throw out former Labour staffer Emilie Oldknow’s ‘fishing expedition’ attempt to force the Labour party to disclose the names of potentially innocent ex-employees whom it suspects but can’t prove to have leaked an internal party report last year that revealed WhatsApp messages by Oldknow and other senior Labour right staff.
Tweets have burgeoned on Twitter as users echo a famous scene from the film ‘Spartacus’, in which Spartacus’s fellow rebels all stand to identify themselves as him, even though they know it means execution – enough users to push the hashtag to the top of the UK trends:
The judge has reportedly awarded the Unite union’s costs against Oldknow, while the Labour party is also seeking to recover its own costs.
The party doesn’t know who leaked the documents, despite spending around £160,000 on ‘forensic’ computer specialists last year to pursue the whistleblowers, but Oldknow and her team wanted the names of people it thinks might be in the frame, presumably in order to pursue them legally.
The former staff implicated in the report have claimed that the WhatsApp messages, which included phrases such as ‘fuck off pube head’ and a discussion hoping a Corbyn supporter might die in a fire, as well as talk of channelling 2017 general election campaign funds to a secret kitty staffers wanted to conceal from Corbyn’s team and right-wing staff’s horror at the 2017 general election ‘surge‘, were misleadingly presented.
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