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Joan Ryan resigns from the Labour party

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Joan Ryan resigned from the Labour Party last night, saying the party had become ‘institutionally antisemitic’.

She became the eighth Labour MP to resign and join the breakaway Independent Group in the last two days. Ryan has been the Chair of Labour Friends of Israel since 2015.

Ryan said Labour has become “infected with the scourge of anti-Jewish racism” and that Israel had been “singled out for demonisation and de-legitimisation”. In her resignation letter, the MP for Enfield North said she was “horrified, appalled and angered” by Labour’s failure to tackle antisemitism. She said the leadership has allowed: “Jews to be abused with impunity. The mind-set, ideology and worldview that tolerates antisemitism poses a threat to the British public, Jew and non-Jew alike. It is one that would ostracise the Middle East’s only democracy in favour of the Ayatollahs in Tehran.” Ryan added: “I cannot remain a member of the Labour party while this requires me to suggest that I believe Jeremy Corbyn – a man who has presided over the culture of anti-Jewish racism and hatred of Israel which now afflicts my former party – is fit to be Prime Minister of this country. He is not.”

Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, she said: “A Corbyn government would rupture Britain’s friendship with Israel. It would work with those who seek to demonise and delegitimise the world’s only Jewish state. And it would aid and appease Iran, an expansionist power that wishes to wipe out Israel, dominate the Middle East and bring terror to the streets of Europe. A Corbyn Government would be, as British Jews have claimed, an existential threat to the community. I will do all in my power to stop that threat from materialising.”

Ryan joins seven other Labour MPs – Chuka Umunna, Mike Gapes, Luciana Berger, Ann Coffey, Angela Smith, Gavin Shuker and Chris Leslie – who resigned on Monday to form the Independent Group in Parliament.

Writing in the Telegraph today, Fathom Journal Editor Professor Alan Johnson argues that the Labour Party “has a problem, mostly, with modern anti-Zionism which has co-mingled in an internet age with an older set of classical tropes to create a form of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism that needs to be understood and rooted out”.