Anti-semitism crisis that drove me from Labour has only grown
In October, I left the Labour Party after 55 years as a member. I did so because I believe Jeremy Corbyn is unfit to be prime minister. This unfitness is encapsulated by his failure to accept his responsibility for the anti-semitism crisis that has engulfed Labour, and tarnished its reputation since he became leader.
Nothing that has occurred over the past six weeks has led me to change my mind. In fact, quite the opposite.
This election campaign provided an opportunity, albeit a very belated one, for Mr Corbyn to take responsibility for anti-jewish racism in the Labour Party. In his interview with Andrew Neil on Tuesday night, he once again failed to do so. His unwillingness to apologise to British Jews for the hurt, distress and fear he has caused us was unforgivable. It showed not only his lack of leadership, but the absence of compassion and empathy.
It demonstrated too his arrogant and intolerant response to criticism. Such attitudes and behaviour are highly concerning in somebody who aspires to lead our country.
Mr Corbyn dismisses the Jewish community’s concerns with contempt. It is inconceivable that he would treat any other minority group in this way.
The Labour leader’s flat denial that anti-jewish racism had risen in the party on his watch, his utterly false claim that all of those guilty of it have been investigated and punished, and his seeming reluctance to accept that blatant examples of hate speech constitute anti-semitism underline the terrible state that Labour is in.
Mr Corbyn’s apparent indifference to anti-semitism was evident in the fact that, at the launch of the party’s “Race and Faith” manifesto on Tuesday he had seated behind him one Labour candidate, Apsana Begum, who had shared statements online about the Saudi government’s “Zionist masters” and another, Claudia Webbe, who had suggested Barack Obama’s administration was in the “hold” of Israel.
Labour has selected a string of extremist candidates who have made anti-semitic statements, defended anti-semites or denied the presence of anti-jewish racism in the party.
Unsurprisingly, many are obsessed with Israel. Some have made appalling and highly offensive comparisons between the world’s only Jewish state and Nazi Germany, others have backed “violent resistance” against it.
Such individuals are not fit to be Labour candidates. They are, however, precisely the kind of candidates today’s hard-left Labour party wants to see in Parliament.
Earlier this year, Labour became the first political party, beside the fascist BNP, to be subject to an investigation for institutional antisemitism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The EHRC sets a phenomenally high bar to launch an investigation and its announcement should have been a day of deep shame for the Labour leadership. Yet instead of recognising its gravity, it is clear that Labour is attempting to smear, undermine and threaten the EHRC before its investigation is due to report next year. Coupled with attacks on the BBC following Panorama’s programme in July about Left anti-semitism, this effort to weaken any independent institution which might hold it to account is shocking. It is straight out of the populist playbook of the far-left authoritarian regimes of South America Corbyn appears to so admire, as well as the Trump and Orbán administrations he claims to detest.
The Labour Party has been a major force in my life. I joined it because I believe in its values. This, however, is the darkest and most shameful place in which the Labour Party has ever been.
Today’s Labour Party is one from which many decent-minded people, whether they are Jewish or not, will rightly recoil.
Dame Louise Ellman was Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside from 1997-2019
‘This is the darkest and most shameful place in which the Labour Party has ever been’