The main thing that occurs to me about this report is that this is a big FU to Kier Starmer. Any hope of party unity is out the window now, I don't see any way to make that possible for the next few years. Look online and you can see the betrayal narrative evolving by the hour. According to many now, Labour's right is responsible for both the loss in 2017 and the failings of the party on anti-semitism. Ghouls like Chris Williamson, despite being slammed in the report, are using it to justify their claim that they were falsely targeted and that anti-semitism claims were indeed being overinflated for political ends.
No doubt the right of the party will push back, because even though McNicol looks to have acted like a total bastard, the report itself isn't really as convincing as the cherry picked lines that people are sharing makes out. As Stephen Bush neatly puts it in the New Statesman, the executive summary writes a cheque that the report itself can't cash. It also puts it square at odds with many points in the submission that JLM made to the EHRC, which is yet another whole argument by itself.
Then of course there's the data breach angle, which speaking as someone very interested in privacy issues, is a big issue, larger than some people seem to realise. Assembling the entire report with unredacted complainants' & whistleblowers' details in it was incredibly bad practice in the first place. The fact that it was leaked shows either that a senior official leaked it, or that unredacted copies of the report were shared widely within the organisation among junior staff. In either case, poor practice was followed by a deliberate breach of sensitive personal data for political gain. I assume the ICO will now investigate.
While Starmer has commissioned an investigation, the damage is done. Not only will this keep anti-semitism in the party high in the public eye for months if not years, as the EHRC, internal and (probable) ICO investigations rake over the details, there's the political fallout itself. If the investigation disagrees with this report, it'll be called a whitewash and he'll be hated as a pro-right "Blairite" or whatever. If it backs the leaked report, and in doing so dismisses the whistleblowers highlighted by the JLM, it'll be called a whitewash by not just the right of the party, but my many of the Jewish community and he'll be painted as anti-semitic the same way Corbyn ended up being. Someone felt that deflecting the heat presumably heading their way from the EHRC investigation was worth dumping a world of shit on Starmer for. If he can come through this with the party intact he's one hell of a politician.