A chilling indictment of Corbyn’s Labour

FOR a party with a proud history of fighting racism, this was yet another very dark day indeed.

Under the headline ‘United We Stand’, three leading Jewish newspapers publish the same front-page editorial condemning Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s appalling tolerance of anti-Semitism.

The Jewish News, Jewish Chronicle and Jewish Telegraph jointly argue that the ‘stain and shame of anti-Semitism has coursed through Her Majesty’s Opposition’ since Mr Corbyn became leader in 2015. The Mail wholeheartedly agrees.

As a result, a party that was once the ‘natural home’ for many Jewish people ‘has seen its values and integrity eroded by Corbynite contempt for Jews and Israel’, they say. Who could argue with that? Or their insistence that Mr Corbyn has a ‘default blindness to the Jewish community’s fears’?

But the most worrying argument of all is that Mr Corbyn in power would amount to an ‘existential threat to Jewish life in this country’.

How chilling, and how horrifying, that in 21st century Britain, a minority group which has suffered appalling oppression through the ages fears for its very future under a Labour government.

Mr Corbyn, who wastes no opportunity to burnish his anti-racist credentials, has had three years to match his actions to his words.

But while promising a kinder, gentler politics he has allowed intolerance and hatred to run riot. He has presided over a whitewash internal review of anti-Semitism, appeared on dark corners of the internet where Jew-hatred is common parlance, and tolerated vitriolic outbursts from HardLeft allies.

Now he stands accused of turning Labour into an ‘institutionally racist party’. In recent weeks, party bosses rejected the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism – one accepted by many, including the police – and imposed its own, watered-down version.

As the three newspapers rightly argue, adopting the full definition would also require the expulsion of hundreds of Labour and Momentum members for attacks on Israel which spilled into anti-Semitism.

It was this decision which prompted Dame Margaret Hodge, courageously, to call Mr Corbyn ‘an anti-Semite and a racist’ to his face. Absurdly, she now faces disciplinary action while Mr Corbyn’s hate-mongers are given his blessing. How utterly shaming.