Labour Councilors Allan Barclay, Marilyn Davies and Jason Fojtik have resigned from the Labour Party over its ongoing anti-Semitism scandals.
Councilors are elected to the local council to represent the residents in the ward and their local community.
Barclay, the Mayor of Hartlepool, said that he resigned from Labour because his “fear has become a reality that the Labour Party has become a party of anti-Semites, racists and homophobes, it has indeed become the nasty party.”
In his resignation letter to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, he wrote that he feels that “Corbyn must resign and the Corbynites must be removed from the Labour Party. This is the only way that the party can become respectable again.”
Barclay had been a Labour member for more than 24 years.
Davies, a Labour and Co-op councillor in Freeland and Hanborough in Oxfordshire, told the Oxford Mail that she believes Labour “has become institutionally anti-Semitic, and I can no longer stand by in silence, because being silent is being complicit.”
Fojtik, the Labour town and district councillor for Clopton Ward in Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote on social media that he has come to the conclusion “that a party that has always been proud of its anti-racism, has become institutionally anti-Semitic under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.”
Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), a United-Kingdom based anti-Semitism watchdog, commended the three for “taking a principled stand against anti-Semitism.”
They join 11 Labour Member of Parliament (MP) who have resigned from the Labour Party over anti-Semitism in recent months.
Corbyn has repeatedly faced mounting allegations of anti-Semitism and hatred for the Jewish state.
A 2018 poll found that 86 percent of British Jews, and a plurality of the general British public, believe Corbyn is anti-Semitic.