After 55 years as a member of the UK Labour Party, Liverpool Riverside MP Dame Louise Ellman has resigned from the party.
Ellman, 73, tendered her resignation this past Wednesday in a letter, writing that she was “deeply troubled” by the increase in anti-Semitism she has seen and declaring that she believes party leader “Jeremy Corbyn is not fit to serve as our prime minister.”
I have made the truly agonising decision to leave the Labour Party after 55 years. I can no longer advocate voting Labour when it risks Corbyn becoming PM. I will continue to serve the people of Liverpool Riverside as I have had the honour to do since 1997. pic.twitter.com/3BTzUacZvo
— Louise Ellman MP (@LouiseEllman)
Upcoming party elections made the move a necessity, inasmuch as the lawmaker would have had to encourage her constituents to vote for Corbyn, or resign.
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Ellman is not the first Jewish senior Labour Party member to have taken this step. Over the past year there’s been a parade of Jewish lawmakers who have virtually streamed out of Labour’s ranks, all of them lamenting the party’s warm tolerance for anti-Semitic attitudes since the rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
