CAA deplores responses from Jeremy Corbyn and other Labour MPs to Louise Ellman’s resignation from the Party
The resignation of Dame Louise Ellman from the Labour Party has elicited a variety of unsatisfactory responses from fellow Labour MPs.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn dismissed the resignation of yet another MP over the Party’s antisemitism with his usual platitude: “We do not tolerate antisemitism in any form whatsoever in our party or in any other part of society, just as resolutely as we are opposed to Islamophobia or any other form of racism. And I will hold that position until my dying day.”
This was despite, as another Labour MP, Wes Streeting, noted: “Labour’s leader knew what was happening to Louise…He was warned that another Jewish woman was being hounded out of the Parliamentary Party. He was asked to intervene. He chose not to. This is what institutional racism looks like.”
Harriet Harman, a former Deputy Labour Leader, said that Dame Louise’s resignation “should make every one of us in the Labour Party feel dismayed and ashamed”.
Former Shadow Home Secretary and leadership contender, Yvette Cooper, said: “Am just despairing at the way Louise Ellman has been treated and am sickened to the stomach at [the] response from some in our Party to her resignation. It shames us all that we’ve lost her.”
Sir Keir Starmer, the Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, appearing on BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show, also described the resignation as “a really low moment” but refused to cast blame on Mr Corbyn or suggest any concrete action.
Campaign Against Antisemitism welcomes the expressions of shame on the part of these MPs for remaining in an institutionally antisemitic Party, but we regret that none of them appears to have reconsidered their intentions to campaign in the next general election for Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister and for the Labour Party to win power.
Luciana Berger, another Jewish MP who quit the Labour Party over antisemitism and is now a Liberal Democrat, rightly dismissed their empty statements: “Please don’t tweet about how upsetting/awful it is that Dame Louise Ellman and I have left Labour if you’re in a position of leadership and [are] still in there.”
On 28th May, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.
In recent months, thirteen MPs and three peers have resigned from the Labour Party over antisemitism, along with a large number of MEPs, councillors and members.
Over 55,000 people have now signed our petition denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and declaring him “unfit to hold any public office.”
