Antisemitism in the Labour Party

Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party has been the subject of recent public controversy, leading party leader Jeremy Corbyn to establish the Chakrabarti Inquiry in 2016. A number of party activists and several more senior figures have either been expelled or suspended after Labour Party investigations concluded they had brought the party into disrepute; some were subsequently reinstated.

Incidents continued in 2017, and British Jews polled on the subject in 2017 have ranked Labour at 3.94 (from 5) for "degree of antisemitism among the political party’s members and elected representatives", and 83% stated that racist sentiments were not adequately challenged by Labour members of parliament, members of the party, or Labour Party supporters. Some in the party have disputed that the party is antisemitic and have accused critics of willfully exaggerating incidents, with the Jewish Socialists' Group blaming " right-wing political forces".People on the Corbynite left see the recent accusations of antisemitism in the Labour Party as an attempt to conflate antisemitism with condemnation of the state of Israel and the Zionist project.

Historically, British Jews have supported the Labour movement and party, which, for most of its existence, has been regarded as uninvolved with antisemitism. The Jewish Labour Movement, the UK arm of Poale Zion, supported the Labour Party, affiliating to the party in 1920. The Labour Party had an historical affinity for Israel both because the labour movement was part of a broad, political left that historically supported national movements, and because it felt an affinity for Labor Zionism, which was the dominant movement within pre-state political Zionism, and the political identity of the founding government of Israel in 1948 and Israeli government until the election of Menachem Begin in 1967.

Although antisemitic attitudes were rare in the Party in the 1980s, in his 2016 book, The Left's Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti‑Semitism, Dave Rich attributes what he believes to be the origin of antisemitism in the Labour Party to attitudes towards Jews and Israel that began to develop among young British political activists in the early 1970s. At that time, a coalition that included Peter Hain and Louis Eakes of the Young Liberals wing of the British Liberal Party "pioneered" the reframing of the Zionist movement as an imperialist project imposing apartheid on an indigenous people.

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