Former MP Anna Turley says Northern working-class voted to reject Labour antisemitism
The former MP for Redcar has revealed that working-class voters in her constituency were outraged by Labour’s antisemitism crisis, even though the area has no Jewish community.
Anna Turley, Labour’s former MP who was defeated in her bid for reelection in the North Yorkshire constituency, disclosed that “[Jeremy] Corbyn was an issue on almost every single door,” and that antisemitism, along with Brexit and concerns about Mr Corbyn’s views on national security, were to blame for her defeat.
Mr Turley observed that her constituency is “an area where we don’t have an ethnic minority population in any way. It’s not an area where people had any Jewish connections. I think there’s only one person who identified as Jewish from the last census, as I understand. But what they said was, ‘My parents or my grandparents – they fought the war over this.’”
In the first release of its Antisemitism in Political Parties research, Campaign Against Antisemitism showed that Jeremy Corbyn is personally responsible for 24 incidents of antisemitic discourse, which was equal to fifteen percent of all recorded incidents involving parliamentary candidates and party leaders in the 2019 general election. Overall, Labour Party candidates for Parliament accounted for 82 percent of all incidents.
Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer 2019 showed that antisemitism on the far-left of British politics has surpassed that of the far-right.
On 28th May 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.