UK goes to the polls in fateful vote for Britain’s Jews

The Labour party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn has become a hotbed of anti-Semitic sentiment. 

By World Israel News Staff and AP

While most U.K. voters headed to the polls Thursday with Brexit on their minds, for Britain’s Jews the question was whether they had a future in the country.

The Labour party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn has become a hotbed of anti-Semitic sentiment.

Jewish fears were most dramatically expressed when the United Kingdom’s chief rabbi slammed Corbyn for failing to stem anti-Semitism within his party.

“A new poison – sanctioned from the top – has taken root in the Labour Party,” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis wrote in an op-ed published by The New York Times on Nov. 25.

Nearly half of British Jewry have said that they would consider leaving the country if Corbyn is elected.

Opinion polls showed Johnson’s Conservative Party in the lead, but recent surveys suggest the margin may have narrowed in the final days of campaigning, the Associated Press reports. .

Fifteen former Labour MPs took out advertisements on Wednesday in northern newspapers to warn of the the dangers in voting for Jeremy Corbyn, noting the rise of anti-Semitism in Labour and accusing the leftist leader of being “weak on national security.”

Voter turnout is high from early reports.

The Daily Mail said, “Experts have said the crowds at some of the U.K.’s 50,000 polling stations suggests that the turnout for an election dominated by Brexit and the NHS could the highest since the peak of the 1950s and early 1960s that saw Clement Atlee and Sir Winston Churchill battle to be PM.”

Matthew Goodwin, a visiting senior fellow at the Chatham House think tank, told the Associated Press, “We have to remember this is probably the most consequential election we’ve had in the post-war period.″

“At a final rally in London last night, the Opposition leader pitched himself as an outsider, telling activists: ‘Tomorrow you can shock the Establishment, by voting for hope,'” the Daily Mail reported on Thursday.

For England’s Jews, the hope is that Corbyn will lose. The failure would almost certainly end his leadership of Labour.

anti-SemitismBoris JohnsonJeremy CorbynUnited Kingdom