Interview by David Broder

Ever since his shock election to the Labour leadership in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn has been dogged by allegations of “antisemitism.” Both the media and hostile MPs claim he has failed to confront Jew-hate in party ranks — one Tory minister even said Corbyn would be “the first antisemitic Western leader since 1945.” Often bound up with debates on Israel and anti-imperialism, this has become one of the main lines of attack against Corbyn, both within and outside the party.

Yet for all the headlines about “mounting antisemitism” in Labour, we are rarely given any sense of its scale. Data released by the party in February 2019 showed that it had received 1,106 specific complaints of antisemitism since April 2018, of which just 673 regarded actual Labour members. The party membership stands at over half a million: the allegations, even if they were true, concern around 0.1 percent of the total.

Constant media talk of Labour’s “antisemitism crisis” has nonetheless warped all discussion of this issue. This is a key finding of Bad News for Labour , a new book on the party’s handling of antisemitism claims. The study is especially notable for its use of focus groups and polling to gauge public perceptions of the affair: when its authors commissioned Survation to ask 1,009 people how many Labour members faced antisemitism complaints, the average estimate — at 34 percent — was over three hundred times the published figures.