For months, events from Jeremy Corbyn’s disturbing past have trickled into the light. Among his many acts during his time as a backbench MP, when he could speak his mind without fear of scrutiny, he blamed Islamist terrorist attacks on Israel; defended an appalling antisemitic mural; honoured a sheikh banned from the UK for saying that Jews drink non-Jews’ blood; said that a Hamas terrorist whose life’s work was the murder of Jews was his ‘brother’; held a repulsive event on Holocaust Memorial Day in which Jews were accused of being the successors to the Nazis; tried to have the word ‘Holocaust’ removed from the title of Holocaust Memorial Day; laid a wreath at a memorial for the Black September terrorists behind the Munich Massacre; made euphemistic comments to suggest that Jews are somehow un-British and foreign to the ways of our country, and more.

In response to these revelations, Jeremy Corbyn has lied, distracted, tried to twist the definition of antisemitism to exclude his past conduct, and issued false apologies when pressure mounted. He has claimed to have been seeking peace and to have been judged out of context, but the facts show that over many years he sought to defend, honour, assist and promote antisemites, and the context is that his actions have been consistent with those of an ideological antisemite. We had hoped that the Labour Party might at some point rise to the defence of British Jews, but the institutions of the once proudly anti-racist Labour Party are now corrupted and will not act. Instead they merely persecute those members who stand up to antisemitism.

For as long as the Labour Party is in Jeremy Corbyn’s grip, it cannot be a force for good. His past demonstrates that he should never have been elected to the leadership of the Labour Party and he is unfit to hold any public office.

Antisemites must not hold positions of power.