Normally, when we talk about a party being in ‘crisis’ we are really referring to a policy dispute or a bad set of election results. But the crisis currently engulfing Labour is far more serious than that. It is about the party’s very soul, I argue in The Sun this morning.
The events of this week have demonstrated that Labour has a serious, and growing, problem with anti-Semitism. One of the party’s newly elected MPs has been suspended for making anti-Semitic comments and the party’s former Mayor of London has been suspended from the party after a bizarre and distasteful attempt to link Hitler and Zionism.
But Jeremy Corbyn has been reluctant to accept that there is a problem. On Thursday he was busy arguing that talk of a ‘crisis’ is being whipped up by those worried about the ‘strength of the party at local level’; he was being wilfully blind to the rise of anti-Semitism in the party.
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