Voted Labour all of my life but cannot imagine myself voting for the current leadership.
I have friends (Jewish) who genuinely feel that they will be threatened if the current Labour leadership comes to power. They feel their citizenship will be questioned, violence against them will increase and be tolerated (not just the verbal kind) and that one way or another they will be encouraged to leave.
If you’re not Jewish, it can sound absurd, but then you pause and remember the Windrush scandal where British citizens, people who have lived here legally, all or most of their lives, were literally rounded up and deported within the last decade.
And then you think about the millions of EU citizens being held hostage to the current brexit negotiations and the hostile immigration policies being implemented to encourage people to leave.
And you see the rampant anti-semitism expressed on line and in the Labour Party where Jewish MPs are routinely harassed and threatened, where they require bodyguards to attend their own political conferences.
I’m not Jewish. It’s a religion with a tiny minority in the UK, and mostly people just don’t recognise the problem because they personally don’t have to deal with it. But an intolerant society doesn’t stop with just one religion, just one minority group.
And if we tolerate racism against one group, where does it ever stop.
At some level, Corbyn may or may not be anti-semitic himself. Either he is, or he is so incompetent a leader that he can’t seem to stamp it out amongst his own supporters.
Is that the choice: an anti-semite or an incompetent? Because at this moment in time, I can’t vote for either.