Curb anti-Semitism or you’ll never be PM, deputy tells Corbyn
LABOUR’S deputy leader launched a savage attack on Jeremy Corbyn yesterday as he warned a failure to deal with anti-Semitism had plunged the party into crisis.
Tom Watson said Mr Corbyn had to ‘change very, very rapidly’ to stop more MPs from following the nine who quit the party last week.
He also revealed he had handed the party leader a dossier of 50 cases where no adequate action had been taken over racist comments on social media about Jewish individuals.
In a TV interview, he demanded Mr Corbyn take personal charge of rooting out anti-Semitism because the ‘party machine’ had failed. And he urged him to change tack on Brexit and push for a second referendum.
The intervention exposed the fury among moderate Labour MPs over Mr Corbyn’s leadership and the bitter recriminations from last week’s defections.
Appearing on the Andrew Marr Show, Mr Watson, who is directly elected to his post by members, said
‘Very sad to see her go’
the situation was perilous and accused Mr Corbyn of presiding over a ‘crisis for the soul of the Labour Party’. Unless he changed, Mr Corbyn would never make it to 10 Downing Street, he said, adding: ‘My message to the Labour Party is that I know we’re in a crisis.
‘The departure of our colleagues is a real blow, and we need to understand why they felt the need to go. Because if we’re going to be in government we need to address those concerns.
‘For us to hold this party together, things have to change. There’s almost a crisis for the soul of the Labour Party now. I absolutely fear that we will lose more parliamentary colleagues. We may lose peers from the House of Lords, and we may lose members and councillors and I don’t want that to happen.’
Mr Watson said Luciana Berger, the Liverpool Wavertree MP who left for the Independent Group last week, had been ‘bullied out of the Labour Party by a small number of racist thugs’ and he was ‘very very sad to see her go’.
Hard-Left activists, he said, were causing irreparable harm by ‘pouncing’ on MPs, and bullying them on social media. Details of the antiSemitism dossier, seen by the Mail, show it included vicious racist abuse. One said of Jewish Labour MPs: ‘I don’t know what runs through their veins, not human blood.’
Mr Watson said Labour general secretary Jenny Formby’s attempts to combat anti-Semitism had ‘very patently not been adequate’ and Mr Corbyn should take a personal lead.
On Brexit, he said Mr Corbyn needed to ‘reunify our party’ and move towards a second referendum.
He also called for more centrist Labour MPs to be given jobs on the front bench and said he was going to set up a new ‘social democratic’ group of moderates to develop policies. In an interview with Sky News on Friday night, Mr Corbyn said he did not believe bullying existed in Labour on a wide scale.
When confronted with quotes from prominent Jews accusing him of not doing enough, he said there were ‘very many other people in the Jewish community’ who were happy.
A Labour Party spokesman said: ‘The Labour Party takes all complaints of anti-Semitism extremely seriously and we are committed to challenging and campaigning against it in all its forms. All complaints about anti-Semitism are investigated in line with our rules.’