I have a Czech Jewish friend, Daniel Kummerman, who grew up in the worst Communist times of the 1950s.

I met him in 1968 when he was demonstrating against the Soviet invasion to prevent the Czechs and Slovaks developing what they called “socialism with a human face”.

For that “crime” he was dismissed from university by the authorities and became a window cleaner. More than 20 years later, when Communism fell, he was rehabilitated by the government of Vaclav Havel and made Ambassador to Israel, where I met him again.

In his childhood, Daniel told me, his father always used to listen (covertly)  to the BBC and say “this story is good for Israel, that one’s bad for Israel”.

Since then, I’ve always thought that that was a fine way of looking at events — is it good or bad for Israel? And, as often as not, it turns out that what is bad for Israel is bad for the West in general.

The prospect of Jeremy Corbyn (pictured) gaining any sort of power in the election next week would be bad for Israel — as well as for Britain and the rest of the West. Corbyn’s entire career has been built around hatred of Israel and support for its enemies — Hamas and Hezbollah, Jew-murderers whom Corbyn has praised as his “friends”.

The Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, is quite right to say that Corbyn’s tolerance (to put it politely) of antisemitism makes him “unfit for office” and that the soul of Britain is at stake in this election.

Never before have we faced such a huge internal threat to our history, our present and our future democratic way of life. It really is a new poison, as the Chief Rabbi says.

 It is to me almost unbelievable that at this time, 2019, we should be on the brink of electing a government whose leaders are proud to be inspired by the same death cult philosophy — Marxism — which should be remembered for its murderous failures ever since its fatal infection began to spread in Russia almost exactly a century ago.

 It is astonishing also that the Labour Party should have nurtured for decades on its back benches MPs whose ambition was not to change political priorities through the mechanism of a democratic election but always to subvert and destroy the foundations, the institutions and the core values of the British state.

The choice in this election really is binary. On the one side is a controversial but regular politician, Boris Johnson, leading a regular party, the Conservatives. On the other is the once great Labour Party that has been dragged from its honourable roots by Corbyn and his extremist Momentum outriders, who openly plan to destroy the basic freedoms of this country.

The free press, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Ofsted have already been targeted by Corbyn. They are only the first names on his list.

Their goal is not to have office for one parliamentary term. It is to make “irreversible” changes in the way in which Britain is governed — and the principal fact which they will not want reversed is their own possible victory next week.  

William Shawcross is a writer and commentator, and the former chairman of the Charity Commission