The Corbyn effect

It is not the job of the JC to tell readers how to vote. For one thing, we credit our readers with more intelligence than to need guidance. But there is a much bigger factor at work. In the past two years, we have led the scrutiny of Jeremy Corbyn over his affiliations and of the Labour Party over the antisemitism in its ranks. Our poll this week shows that the Jewish community has drawn its own conclusions as to the party’s fitness for office under Mr Corbyn. The collapse in Labour support among a historically supportive community needs little further explanation. Jeremy Corbyn’s most significant achievement in his relations with the Jewish community is to have made Labour toxic. This week’s revelation that in 2014 he laid a wreath at the grave of one of the Munich Olympic terrorists is, in that respect, simply par for the course.

This has been an unusual — and, one has to say, unedifying — campaign. For all the different visions of the manifestos, voters have rarely had such an absence of real choice to make between the two main parties. Labour’s demise has been so clear that the Tories have simply had to avoid own goals – and they have not even managed that. But hostility to Labour does not equate to enthusiasm for the alternative. It has to be recognised that, after the initial betrayal of the vote for UN Resolution 2334 last December, the Conservative government has unambiguously supported Israel in international forums, as it did again last week at the WHO. But this is not an election in which voters will simply weigh up the relative merits of two competing parties. For our community, one of them has effectively ruled itself out of contention.