3 UK Peers quit Labour amid party’s anti-Semitism woes

Three lawmakers resigned from Britain’s Labour party over its spiraling anti-Semitism problem.

David Triesman and Leslie Arnold Turnberg, who are Jewish, and Ara Darzi, who is not, announce on Tuesday their resignation from Labour. They will stay on as independents in the House of Lords, the upper house.

The party is no longer “a safe environment” for Jewish people, Triesman writes in his resignation letter, which came amid growing conflict inside Labour over external scrutiny of the proliferation of anti-Semitic hate in the party’s ranks. “My sad conclusion is that the Labour party is very plainly institutionally anti-Semitic,” he adds.

As “an Armenian survivor of the Armenian genocide,” writes Darzi, in his resignation letter, he has no tolerance for any “discrimination against religion or race.”

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, a far-left politician who was elected its leader in 2015, is under investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the British government’s watchdog on racism, for its handling of thousands of complaints and incidents involving hate speech and, in some cases, hate crimes.

Hundreds of Labour members, including some 20 lawmakers, have left Labour over what they called tolerance of anti-Semitism.

— JTA