Portrait of the week | 28 March 2018

Home

‘We recognise that anti-Semitism has occurred in pockets within the Labour Party,’ Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said. ‘I am sincerely sorry for the pain which has been caused.’ His remarks were released before the publication of an open letter to Labour MPs from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council which said Mr Corbyn was incapable of contemplating anti-Semitism seriously ‘because he is so ideologically fixed within a far-left worldview that is instinctively hostile to mainstream Jewish communities’. Earlier, Mr Corbyn had said: ‘I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely’ at a mural satirising Jewish financiers when he posted remarks on Facebook in 2012 opposing its removal by Tower Hamlets council, although he now realised it was ‘deeply disturbing and anti-Semitic’. Mr Corbyn sacked Owen Smith as the shadow Northern Ireland secretary for calling for a second referendum on the EU.