Just days before the British general election slated for June 8th, support for the Labour Party among Jews in the UK has slipped to an all-time low.
Trailing the incumbent Conservative Party under Prime Minister Theresa May in all recent polling, the Labour Party has enjoyed a last-minute surge in pre-election surveys, narrowing a double-digit gap in mid-May to just 3-4% according to the latest YouGov polls.
Among Jews, however, support for Labour remains at a historic low, with just 13% of British Jews indicating they will vote for a Labour candidate. There are those who find even that number surprisingly high.
The poll, conducted by Survation on behalf of The Jewish Chronicle, showed Prime Minister May’s party winning a whopping 77% of Jewish voters, compared to just 13% for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. Another seven percent said they would vote for candidates from the Liberal Democrats, with the remaining three percent divided amongst UKIP, the Greens, and other minor parties.
Polls conducted on behalf of The Jewish Chronicle prior to the 2015 election showed 18 to 22% of British Jews backing the party, then under the leadership of Ed Miliband – himself a member of the Jewish community. Sixty-nine percent said they intended to vote for Conservative candidates.
In the most recent poll, however, just 14% of British Jews admitted voting for Labour in 2015, compared to 67% who said they voted for the Conservatives.
The Survation poll also showed that UK Jews viewed the Labour Party as being the most anti-Semitic of the four major parliamentary factions (the Scottish National Party was not included).
Rating the “levels of anti-Semitism among the political party’s members and elected representatives” from 1 to 5, British Jews gave Labour an average rating of 3.94 – indicating high levels of anti-Semitism in the party.
The Conservatives, by contrast, were rated at just 1.96, indicating a below-average level of anti-Semitism. The nationalist UKIP was rated 3.63 – relatively high – and the Liberal Democrats rated at 2.7, suggesting a middling level of anti-Semitism.
Earlier this week it was revealed that Labour chief Jeremy Corbyn had taken part in a ceremony in 2014 honoring Arab terrorists involved in the 1972 Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes preparing for that year’s Olympic games.