A former Labour MP and transport minister has resigned from the party after more than three decades as a member amid the ongoing antisemitism row.

Tom Harris, who represented Glasgow constituencies in the Commons for 14 years until 2015, said his decision was personal and that he did not plan to join another party.

However, Harris, a critic of Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said in his resignation letter sent to the party’s HQ last week that it was “just not the place for me any more”.

Harris told the Scottish newspaper the Herald: “It’s not a comment on any people who have chosen to remain. This is just what’s right for me. It’s just a personal thing.”

Corbyn used a column in the Guardian on Friday to break his silence over the antisemitism row engulfing Labour, acknowledging the party has “a real problem” over the issue but strongly rejecting the idea that it posed any threat to the Jewish community in the UK.



The Labour leader accepted that the party’s incomplete adoption of an internationally recognised definition of antisemitism had caused genuine worries.

“People who dish out antisemitic poison need to understand: you do not do it in my name,” Corbyn wrote. “You are not my supporters and have no place in our movement.”

He acknowledged some of the fiercest criticisms of his leadership on the issue, saying the party must show more empathy, should have reacted more quickly to cases of abuse, and should have done more to consult the Jewish community.

However, Corbyn described as “overheated rhetoric” the argument made by three Jewish newspapers in unprecedented joint front-page editorials that a government run by him would pose “an existential threat”.

In March, Harris wrote a column in the Telegraph headlined: “Jeremy Corbyn apparently cares more about power than expunging anti-Semitism from Labour” and called on it to deal with its “problem with Jews”.

Labour could “acknowledge that problem’s existence, confront it and deal with it. Or it can shrug, mutter something about UN security council resolutions and continue to court the support of those on the far left who are the source of the problem,” Harris wrote. “Jewish members of the party have scant reason for optimism about which course will be pursued.”

It was followed in early April by another headlined “Corbyn’s latest snub to the Jewish community proves he is unfit to be prime minister”.

Harris recently published a book titled Ten Years in the Death of the Labour Party, which covered the decade since Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007.



He stood for election as Scottish party leader in 2011 and the following year was forced to resign as Labour’s social media tsar after posting a spoof video online that compared the then SNP leader Alex Salmond to Adolf Hitler.