Only 13% of British Jews intend to vote for Labour in the June 8 election, polling by The Jewish Chronicle and research agency Survation revealed.
In contrast, 77% intend to vote for the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats polled at 7%, while 2% said they would vote for parties outside the main three.
The near monolithic support for the Conservative Party among British Jewry comes at the tail end of a year-long period that has seen repeated antisemitism controversies in Labour, led by Jeremy Corbyn. These have included Oxford University Labour Club’s cochairman Alex Chalmers resigning in February 2016 after accusing the group and the university’s left-wing students of having “some kind of problem with Jews,” to the party’s decision at the beginning of April 2017 not to expel former London mayor Ken Livingstone after he made comments implying Hitler supported Zionism.
Of the representative group of 515 British Jews polled last week, when asked to rank the parties on a scale of 1 to 5 if they have an antisemitism problem, those surveyed gave Labour 3.94. In second place was the anti-EU and anti-immigration UK Independence Party with 3.63, with the Liberal Democrats at 2.7 and the Conservatives at 1.96.
By Josh Dell