Labour’s problem with anti-Semitism

“JEWS have no better friends in this country than the Labour Party.” So said the Jewish Chronicle in 1920. Almost a century on the newspaper’s tone has changed. When it emerged that Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was a member of a private Facebook group littered with anti-Semitic abuse, the Jewish Chronicle’s editor penned a note of despair. “We run far, far less about [Mr Corbyn] and Labour’s anti-Semitism issue than the story probably deserves, precisely to avoid it dominating the paper.”

There has certainly been plenty that could fill its pages. Mr Corbyn’s “unwitting” membership of the Facebook group was the latest anti-Semitism row to embroil the party since he became leader in 2015. Earlier this month, the race to become general secretary was marred by anti-Semitic abuse of Jon Lansman, founder of the left-wing pressure group Momentum. A row over dealing with party members suspended for alleged anti-Semitism has rumbled for months. In 2016 Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London, was kicked out of the party for suggesting that Adolf Hitler supported Zionism “before he went mad and ended up killing 6m Jews”.