In April 2016, former London mayor and long-standing political ally of Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party for bringing it into disrepute. Livingstone's suspension came days after his BBC interview in which he had claimed that Adolf Hitler supported Zionism before he “went mad and ended up killing six million Jews” (BBC 2016a). It was not apparent at the time, but this episode triggered what was to become one of the defining features of Corbyn's tenure as leader and one that ultimately led to his suspension from the Labour Party: the increasingly strained relationship between Labour and Britain's Jews.

To many observers, the idea that Labour and particularly Jeremy Corbyn's Labour should be responsible for anti-Jewish racism appeared counterintuitive to say the very least. Labour are the party that has consistently been preferred by the overwhelming majority of Britain's ethnic and religious minority voters (Martin 2019), and the received wisdom on the politics of Britain's Jews is one that tells a story of a strong and reciprocated historical affinity with the Labour Party. What is more, Jeremy Corbyn personally has a history of allying himself with a range of anti-racist causes, a point that has been made repeatedly by both Corbyn and his supporters over recent years. Nevertheless, the scale of Labour's problems by the end of his leadership reached the point that they were investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for their treatment of Jewish members, as the only party investigated by the EHRC since the British National Party in 2010. On 29 October 2020, the EHRC published the findings of their investigation, which found that Labour broke equality law through the harassment of Jewish members and through political interference in dealing with disciplinary cases relating to anti-Jewish prejudice (EHRC 2020).

This extraordinary event followed a protracted series of controversies surrounding antisemitism within Labour throughout the period of Corbyn's leadership (for a discussion on how Corbyn sought to limit the damage to his reputation, see Heppell 2021).