£1.5million donor quits party over ‘endorsing’ abuse

ONE of Labour’s biggest donors has quit the party over its failure to tackle anti-Semitism.

Sir David Garrard said Labour’s leadership had in effect ‘supported and endorsed’ the wave of antiSemitic abuse engulfing the party.

The property developer, who has given Labour £1.5million in the past 15 years, said the party he once supported ‘no longer exists’.

He added he was watching the crisis in the party unfold with ‘growing dismay and foreboding’.

Sir David revealed he had quit Labour after decades of membership, saying: ‘I no longer feel any affinity with, or connection to, what it seems to have become.’

He said the leadership under Jeremy Corbyn had ‘supported and endorsed the most blatant acts of anti- Semitisim’, adding: ‘It has failed to expel many of those who have engaged in the grossest derogatory fantasies about Jewish/ Zionist conspiracies – and Jewish characterisations and accusations which conjure up the very kind of anti-Semitic attacks that led to such unbearable consequences for innocent millions in the past.

‘So there no longer exists a party which even pretends to maintain and promote the principles and the integrity of what always was, to me, the Labour Party.’

On the contrary, he told The Observer, ‘I have been witnessing, since Mr Corbyn became leader, a philosophical and a political policy which espouses, in nearly every respect, the very antithesis of the great party under whose reputation, and under whose flag, it now seeks to fly and where so many other Jews were once so proud to stand’.

In response, Labour said Mr Corbyn had made it clear that ‘antiSemitism in all its forms has absolutely no place in our party and is committed to rooting it out’.

It also emerged yesterday that a Labour candidate for next month’s council elections is the former editor of a journal repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism. Sameh Habeeb, who founded and once edited The Palestine Telegraph, has been selected as candidate for the May 3 elections in Northwood, London.

The Community Security Trust, a government-backed organisation that protects Jews from attacks, has previously rebuked Mr Habeeb and the journal he edited for publishing ‘vile anti-Semitic cartoons’ and ‘Holocaust denial’ content.

Labour MP Louise Ellman, former chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement, said it was ‘deeply disturbing’ Mr Habeeb had been selected to stand for the party.

But speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, which revealed his candidacy, Mr Habeeb said there was ‘no credibility whatsoever’ in the claims made against him.

He stressed he did not agree with the offensive articles mentioned and removed them ‘promptly’.