Ed Balls speaking to Times Radio ahead of the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission report said…

“If Jeremy had come out quickly, in a very clear way, and said not only that anti-semitism is wrong, but that it will be rooted out in the Labour Party, and that there are things I have done and said in the past, which I now regret, and I apologise for, things could have moved on. I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite. He’s not a racist man, but he undoubtedly not only stood with antisemitic people, but said things which were antisemitic. And because he wasn’t able to acknowledge that, his sort of anti-American, anti-liberal, anti-capitalist belief in his own anti-racist credentials, I think blinded him to the reality, which is if you say to, you know, to Jews who’ve been in our country for a very long time, as he said in 2013, ‘They still don’t understand English irony’, that somehow they are outsiders, they are, because of their Jewishness, that means that they are sort of foreigners in their own country, that is antisemitic. And if the leader can’t acknowledge that, and apologise and move on, it means that the whole party is then hamstrung in tackling the genuine antisemites who’ve always believed those antisemitic tropes and want to use it for their own political reasons. And so it was a tragedy and a disaster.”