Party where bigotry has found a home

FOR a party which claims to repudiate all forms of racism, this was a day of shame.

In an unprecedented demonstration of anger and hurt, members of the Jewish community descended on Parliament to warn that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has become what one of their leaders described as ‘a sewer of anti-Semitism’.

This was no fringe event. Organised by the Board of Deputies – the main body representing British Jewry – it was the Jewish mainstream taking to the streets.

Most had never demonstrated before. But they had to stand up to a party which provides cover for a whole range of loathsome anti-Semites – from holocaust deniers to peddlers of vile Jewish conspiracy theories worthy of 1930s Nazism.

In any decent organisation, such bigots would be expelled. In Labour they are not only tolerated, they’re embraced.

Mr Corbyn claims to regret the ‘pockets of anti-Semitism’ within the party; but these are just weasel words.

For decades, anti-Zionism and support for Palestinian terrorists have been part of Mr Corbyn’s hard-Left credo. And far too often, that has looked like anti-Semitism.

The latest example is his support for a disgusting mural in East London, portraying caricature Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of what appear to be naked slaves. It’s an image of which Goebbels would have been proud.

Mr Corbyn belatedly apologised but his words were hollow. In his friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah and extremist clerics, he has an appalling record of giving succour to those who hate the Jewish people.

If he really wanted to promote ‘a kinder, gentler politics’, Mr Corbyn would kick these ghastly anti-Semites out of his party. By failing to do so, he gives them a deeply sinister respectability.