Controlled by the far-Left, the failure to root out anti-Semitism disqualifies the party from high office

Capital controls, higher taxes, class war: the political backdrop of the third series of the Crown on Netflix is eerily familiar. Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister of the time, was a purveyor of a form of socialism that is once again depressingly fashionable, and which will end just as disastrously if implemented anew.

Yet for all of Wilson’s errors, his misplaced faith in the ability of the state to order society, there was a world of difference between his ideology and that of the hard-Left cadre that has taken over Labour today. Wilson was sympathetic to the monarchy. He allowed the Polaris nuclear deterrent to go operational. But perhaps the most shocking difference is the way Labour’s relationship with the Jewish community has deteriorated beyond repair.

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Wilson and his party were profoundly philo-semitic; Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour turns a blind eye to the most despicable forms of anti-Semitism in its ranks. In 1964, there were no fewer than 38 Jewish Labour MPs, according to Robert Silver, author of a prescient Spectator article published 20 years later and explaining how the emergence of a radical generation, led by Corbyn and Ken Livingstone, would lead to a rupture between the party and the community.