Jeremy Corbyn ‘ignored direct pleas’ from Jewish MPs over Labour antisemitism, former party chair reveals

"I can remember one particular MP – I don't want to name anybody because it's still pretty raw – who had somebody who was sending the most vile, antisemitic poison remain a member of the Labour Party.

“[Labour] wouldn't suspend this person, so they used to come along, sit bang in front of the MP” at the monthly meetings of their local constituency party, “just glaring at this MP”, he recounted.

Cryer continued: “And when you had the leader there at the, at the PLP meetings on a Monday evening – not that he came particularly often – he would just not deal with these issues”.

“I think now we know why he wasn’t dealing with it because there was a culture around him of keeping people inside who were seen as supportive of the leadership.”

The landmark report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2020 on antisemitism in Labour under Corbyn found that “there were unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination for which the Labour Party is responsible”.

It also found “evidence of political interference in the handling of antisemitism complaints throughout the period of the investigation”.

The Labour peer and one-time member of the Socialist Campaign Group – a caucus of left-wing Labour MPs – who grew up with left-wing big beasts like Dennis Skinner and Tony Benn as family friends, described going through “something of a drawn-out Damascene experience” when it came to his relationship with the left.

Although he still believes in public ownership of key industries and stronger trade union rights, he was dismayed at the inaction of the leadership of the Labour Party to deal with antisemitism and by the anti-Western worldview of many of Corbyn’s fellow travellers.

“We've got racists in our ranks and they're not doing anything about it and that goes with a worldview … which says, ‘the greatest evil in the world is Western imperialism’.

"Which basically means America, Israel, Britain; that is the absolute nub of evil in the world.”

"You end up supporting some pretty evil regimes”, including Iran and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, he said.

Cryer went on: “I've met people not in Labour anymore, but they were, who have enormous sympathy with Hamas and Hezbollah and the clerical fascists in Tehran.”

“They want to murder Jewish people. They want to send women back to the Stone Age, they want to murder gay men. That's something I just cannot associate with.

“There was this period when I started to feel… I can't associate with that worldview anymore, which is basically, for want of a better phrase, clerical fascism. Sympathy with clerical fascism.

" And there are elements in the British left who are apologists for clerical fascists, and I can't have anything to do with people like that.”

Cryer, who served as MP for Hornchurch between 1997-2005 and Leyton and Wanstead between 2010-2014, and is married to Solicitor General Ellie Reeves.

As a child, he made a fleeting cameo appearance in the film The Railway Children after his father helped bring production of the film to his Keighley constituency.

The Labour grandee told Ashworth and De Piero he would be writing a book reflecting on his time in his role as PLP chair. He was partly motivated by a sense of “catharsis”, “because those five years when Jeremy was leader… I mean, it was so tough”.