Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn at a launch event for the Labour party’s general election campaign in London, Britain October, 2019. (Henry Nicholls/Reuters)

Forty-seven percent of British Jews would “seriously consider” emigrating if Labour party head Jeremy Corbyn is elected prime minister, according to a poll by Survation commissioned by the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), a British-Jewish advocacy group.

The poll, which was shared with the Jewish News, also found that 87 percent of respondents believed Corbyn to be anti-Semitic.


Corbyn has a long history of association with Islamists and other anti-Semitic figures. In 2009, he invited Hamas members to speak in Parliament, while on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010 he hosted an event at Parliament during which a Jewish Holocaust survivor compared the Israeli government to Nazis. He also reportedly laid a wreath at the grave of a Black September terrorist who participated in the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Corbyn has also failed to tackle anti-Semitism within the Labour party, according to an expose published in April of this year. The party received 863 complaints of anti-Semitism as of March but took action in only 101 of those cases. Members who have said such things as “Heil Hitler,” “F**k the Jews,” and “Jews are the problem,” have remained in the party despite complaints against them.

Two Jewish politicians have so far quit the Labour party, one of whom, Louise Ellman, wrote that anti-Semitism has “become mainstream in the Labour Party. Jewish members have been bullied, abused and driven out. Anti-Semites have felt comfortable and vile conspiracy theories have been propagated…The Labour Party is no longer a safe place for Jews.”



UK Jews have moved to support either the Tories, led by current Prime Minister Boris Johnson and which supports leaving the European Union, or the Liberal Democrats, which is against Brexit. Some of those surveyed in the Survation poll have said opposing Labour and Corbyn is the most important voting issue for them.

Johnson called for elections this December after his proposal to leave the European Union by October 31 was rejected by Parliament. Opposition head Corbyn agreed to the proposal on Tuesday, saying, “We will now launch the most ambitious and radical campaign for real change our country has ever seen.”

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