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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Politics
Rebecca Speare-Cole

General election news latest: Tory Chair James Cleverly claims Jewish families will leave UK if Jeremy Corbyn wins

James Cleverly has claimed that people he knows including Jewish families said they would leave the UK if a Jeremy Corbyn-led government was voted into power.

The Conservative Chairman, who is in charge of the party's election campaign, said he was aware of entrepreneurs, business figures and people he has known for “much of my life” who plan to leave if Labour win the election.

Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph, Mr Cleverly said: "A number of them are Jewish friends of mine who have just said that if he got anywhere near the levers of power they would be out of here."

“This isn’t just a throwaway comment," he added. "These are people who said they have actually looked at going to family in other parts of the world."

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (AFP via Getty Images)

"There shouldn’t be that kind of fear from any community in the UK about a future government," Mr Cleverly said.

It comes as Boris Johnson prepares to launch the Conservative election campaign on Wednesday ahead of December 12 when the country goes to the polls.

Earlier this week, Jonathan Romain, a senior rabbi based in Maidenhead wrote a letter to 823 families urging them to vote for whatever political party stands the best chance of beating Mr Corbyn’s Labour candidates.

Dr Romain made the unprecedented move to family members of the Berkshire shul across 16 constituencies, suggesting that "a Corbyn-led government would "pose a danger to Jewish life as we know it."

Labour has faced several allegations of anti-Semitism within the party leading the Equality and Human Rights Commission opened a formal investigation in August.

Luciana Berger, a Jewish MP, resigned in February, citing a culture of “bigotry and intimidation”.

Meanwhile, Labour has insisted it is “implacably opposed to anti-Semitism in any form”.

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