Board of Deputies President condemns Labour after readmittance of three suspended party members

Board of Deputies of British Jews President Marie van der Zyl has accused the Labour Party of “treating the Jewish community with contempt” following the readmittance of three party members suspended on charges of antisemitism.

Marie said: “In a matter of weeks, Labour has readmitted three individuals from across the UK who had made antisemitic and offensive comments about Jews. Welsh Assembly member Jenny Rathbone said that Jews’ security fears may be ‘in their own heads’; Scottish Labour Councillor Mary Bain Lockhart suggested that Jewish newspapers had colluded with Mossad to ‘prevent the election of a Labour Government’; while ex-Scottish Labour MP Jim Sheridan said that he had ‘lost respect and empathy for the Jewish community… due to what they and their Blairite plotters are doing’. All of these individuals have been readmitted to Labour without so much as a slap on the wrist.

“Rather than dealing firmly with antisemitism in the Party, the Labour leadership has become an enabler and even propagator of antisemitism. It has treated the Jewish community with utter contempt, ignoring its fair and necessary demands for justice. The claim that Labour takes ‘complaints of antisemitism extremely seriously’ is clearly now taken from the post-truth playbook.”