No Corbyn allies deserve our vote
Ban entire Shadow Cabinet from leader race after anti-Semitism failure, says ex-Labour MP
EVERY member of Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet should be disqualified from becoming Labour leader because of their complicity in the party’s anti-Semitism crisis, a former MP said yesterday.
Ruth Smeeth accused them of paying ‘lip service’ to the need to tackle Labour’s anti- Jewish hate, while doing nothing to stop it.
She lambasted senior figures for their ‘silence’ – and suggested that leadership hopefuls such as Rebecca Long Bailey, Emily Thornberry and Sir Keir Starmer should be disqualified.
The warning came as the party’s justice spokesman Richard Burgon, one of Mr Corbyn’s closest allies, confirmed he will stand for the deputy leadership.
Miss Smeeth, the former Stoke MP who served as parliamentary chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement, suffered vile abuse as an MP. It included death threats that forced her to move home and to carry a panic button. She said many senior figures had ‘wanted to show solidarity in private, but have been silent in public’.
Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, she said: ‘No currently serving member of the Shadow Cabinet deserves our vote.
‘They have been timid when we needed strength. They have allowed racism in the Labour Party to be normalised... They enabled Mr Corbyn and his friends to make us a target.’
Miss Smeeth accused senior figures of keeping quiet in order to curry favour with Mr Corbyn’s hard-Left supporters, saying they had taken a ‘calculated gamble that it was better to be seen to serve with Mr Corbyn than be seen to challenge Mr Corbyn’.
She urged members of the Jewish community to join Labour in the coming weeks to influence its leadership contest.
And she said that only backbench moderates were worthy of support, saying: ‘Expunging antiJewish hate from our politics must mean the next leader has to be one of the backbenchers who have stood by us, whether that’s Jess Phillips, Lisa Nandy, Dan Jarvis or Yvette Cooper. They have all shown leadership on racism when others were cowards.’ Miss
Smeeth did not single out individual members of the Shadow Cabinet but her comments are a blow to likes of Sir Keir, Miss Long Bailey and Miss Thornberry, who have all spoken against anti-Semitism while serving under Mr Corbyn.
Mr Corbyn often claimed to have ‘zero tolerance’ for anti-Semitism but failed to act decisively – even when Jewish MPs and activists warned they were being hounded out by his far-Left supporters.