Report claims areas with high numbers of Jews had lowest increase in support for Labour
New number-crunching indicates an inverse relationship between percentage of Jewish voters and increasing support for Jeremy Corbyn's party
Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist
Constituencies in London with the highest number of Jewish voters returned the lowest increase in the Labour vote in the last general election. And Leicester University academic Dr Daniel Allington says number-crunching indicates that “two per cent more Jews in a constituency implies a roughly one per cent smaller rise in Labour’s vote share”.
Using figures from the 2011 Census (provided by his colleague, David Beere) which show the percentage of Jews in 13 London constituencies, Dr Allington has used “regression analysis” on the rise in the Labour vote between the 2015 election and the present day. You can read his work here.
For example, where there are the smallest number of Jews living in a given constituency — such as Edmonton, where the 2011 Census indicates Jews form just 0.3 per cent of the population — the vote share for Labour has risen by 10.1 per cent from the 2015 election.
But in the two most densely Jewishly populated seats — Finchley and Golders Green and Hendon, where Jews comprise, respectively, 21.1 per cent and 17 per cent of the total voting population — the rise in Labour votes is only 4.1 and 4.5 per cent from the 2015 election. By contrast, a constituency like Holborn and St Pancras, which shows its Jewish population at just 1.9 per cent, recorded a socking 17.2 rise in the Labour vote over the last two years.
Dr Allington believes that Labour has paid a heavy price for not dealing properly with antisemitism in the party, and that this has been absorbed and recognised by Jewish voters. “Labour needs to take Jewish concerns much more seriously in the future”, he says.
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