Labour avoid collapse despite leader
SURPRISED? After some of the worst political headlines ever seen, and story after story about antisemitic incidents ravaging Labour, had you expected the party’s popularity among Jewish voters to have plummeted below even the 8.5 per cent figure of a year ago?
There are a couple of explanations for this week’s slight rise to 13 per cent in the JC’s latest poll, but few of them have anything to do with Jeremy Corbyn.
Remember this is a real election and the issue carries more weight in voters’ minds during a live campaign than a theoretical posing of the question when we last polled opinion in 2016.
But the most obvious explanation seems to be that the hard work of Jewish Labour Movement activists has paid off to a very small degree.
The controversial decision, criticised by many, to put up Jewish candidates for Labour in the country’s two constituencies with the largest Jewish populations has seemingly shored up the vote. As a result, Mr Corbyn’s party stands to do only a little worse with Jews than Ed Miliband did in 2015.
But with only 13 per cent of the community backing the party, neither Jeremy Newmark in Finchley and Golders Green, nor Mike Katz in Hendon, can look forward to polling day in hopeful anticipation of victory. The majorities being defended by the Tory candidates in each constituency — 5,662 and 3,724 respectively — make Labour gains there highly unlikely.
The best that can be said is that one day in the future, should the Labour Party exist in its current form under new leadership, there may be a nucleus
of Jewish support to contribute to the inevitable rebuilding project.
The results for the other parties bring few shocks. Support for Ukip has completely collapsed, in keeping with the national picture.
The Liberal Democrats, whose senior figures have expended energy appealing to the Jewish community — particularly disaffected Labour supporters — fared little better. Just seven per cent of British Jews’ support will be a disappointing outcome for Tim Farron, and a result that does nothing to suggest he is seen as a serious contender by the community.
For Mr Corbyn, the results could hardly be worse. British Jews see him, unarguably, as the worst Labour leader in history, a man with a career-long record of defending terrorists and voting against anti-terror measures that would make our community safer.
The revelation last weekend that he was present when wreaths were laid on the graves of Palestinian terrorists, including one who played a key role in the 1972 Munich Olympics atrocity, comes as no surprise.
Over the course of the past 18 months, Mr Corbyn’s shameful past associations with the likes of blood libel cleric Raed Salah have been regularly unveiled, one-by-one, like cards being dealt from a pack.
This is a man who proudly told a parliamentary committee he had travelled to Ealing for tea with the controversial Salah because the sheikh was under house arrest.
Asked by the same committee whether the hard-left Momentum group which has supported him should be shut down because of antisemitism among members, he answered only that the group was used by activists who wanted to discuss housing and transport.
The MPs subsequently concluded that elements of Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party could be seen as “institutionally antisemitic” and he had failed to grasp “the distinct nature of contemporary antisemitism”. Dozens of his own Labour MPs believe he is unfit to be this country’s Prime Minister. British Jews, it is now clear, agree.
Other polls have shown Mrs May’s earlier mammoth lead being eaten away after weeks of a tepid, careless campaign.
The Prime Minister will have her own day of reckoning on election day and will spend years rebuilding her reputation, whatever the outcome.
But it has never been clearer: if Jeremy Corbyn takes the keys to Number 10 next week, British Jewry will have many reasons to be fearful.