It isn’t Louise Ellman who should have resigned from Labour. It is Jeremy Corbyn
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If anything ought to make the Labour Party ashamed of its leader, the resignation of Louise Ellman should. Of its dwindling band of Jewish members, the MP for Liverpool Riverside has been the most loyal and long-suffering. If even she can no longer stomach the poisonous atmosphere of purges and persecution, then it is time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party by telling Jeremy Corbyn to go.
When Luciana Berger left the party earlier this year, Dame Louise gritted her teeth and stayed put. When her fellow grandee Dame Margaret Hodge, the MP for Barking and former leader of Islington Council, accused Corbyn last year of not merely turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism, but being an anti-Semite himself, Dame Louise took a more emollient line. Like others, she preferred to focus on the activities of Momentum, which she said had become “a party within a party” in her constituency. But her request for an inquiry fell on deaf ears.
Her loyalty did not help. With a general election in the offing, both these Jewish women now face attempts by the hard Left to deselect them. Last month, Dame Louise broke cover to say that she “shared the fears” of other British Jews and understood why they “would seriously consider leaving the country” if Corbyn became Prime Minister. That possibility has now come closer, either with a caretaker administration coming to power in Parliament or an anti-Tory coalition emerging from an election. For Dame Louise, the moment of truth has now arrived.
She has been a Merseyside MP since 1997, after serving as leader of Lancashire County Council since 1977. She has been a Labour Party member for more than half a century. She has given it her whole working life. And now she has had enough.
“I believe that Jeremy Corbyn would be a danger to the country, a danger to the Jewish community as well, but a danger to the country too,” she told The Times. The language that Dame Louise is now using about the Labour leader should give pause to anyone who supports the party. This, after all, is a woman who has sat alongside him in Parliament for more than two decades, who knows him well and who knows the difference between a legitimate critic of Israel and a Left-wing anti-Semite. She points to his “intense hostility to the world’s only Jewish state”, which “then spills over into anti-Semitism”.
“I see no indication at all that he as leader recognises his responsibility for what’s happening, or indeed wants to do anything about it,” she says. “I suspect he thinks he’s an anti-racist and can’t emotionally accept that he could be an anti-Semite. But the fact is that he has presided over…making anti-Semitism almost mainstream within the party.”
There is no reason to doubt Louise Ellman’s sincerity or her integrity. She has resisted taking this step until the last possible moment; critics will say that she jumped before she was pushed. But the vehemence of her indictment of Jeremy Corbyn testifies to the fact that he and his faction are living in denial. The Labour Party has become an anti-Semitic organisation.
Rightly, the party is under investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Labour MPs should not wait for the EHRC’s inevitable condemnation, which may destroy its credibility once and for all. They should act now to lance the boil — if not for the sake of the party, then for the sake of the country. It isn’t Louise Ellman who should have been forced to resign from the Labour Party. It is Jeremy Corbyn.
