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Under fire over his refusal to apologise to the Jewish community for anti-Semitism, Jeremy Corbyn played his trump card. Literally. At a press conference this week, he waved documents around

that he insisted showed that Boris Johnson was going to sell the NHS to the US President as part of a post-Brexit free trade deal. At the event, journalists from Sky News and ITV both asked

Corbyn if he wanted to apologise to the Jewish community — the same question he had refused to answer four times when Andrew Neil asked it earlier in the week. The Shadow International

Trade Secretary Barry Gardiner, who was sitting next to the Labour leader, snapped at ITV’s Libby Wiener, suggesting that she might want to ask about “what we’re discussing today” and that

her question was just getting “a dig in”. It was a disgraceful response. Politicians don’t get to decide what journalists ask them — that’s the essence of a free press. It was a moment that

revealed Labour’s contempt for the media. Furthermore, the substance of the documents was somewhat different to what Corbyn claimed. The letters “NHS” appear four times. There is nothing

that indicates any desire by the UK government to grant the US total market access to the NHS. There are clearly issues around drug pricing and the role of the National Institute for Health

and Care Excellence which cannot to be ignored — but these remain the Americans’ negotiating position, nothing more. Fake news from Corbyn? Maybe. Scaremongering? Definitely. It is

noticeable that Labour has not published the full, unredacted documents online, which would allow people to search them, even though these same documents have been lurking on Reddit for

weeks. Instead, Labour handed 451 pages to the journalists attending the press conference. If this was truly about transparency, they surely would have published them on their website for

all to see. The thing I disliked most about Corbyn’s big reveal event was seeing scrubbed-up doctors paraded by Labour and handing out the documents. The Labour party is institutionally

anti-Semitic. I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be at being treated by someone endorsing such an organisation. But I also hated how Labour tried to ignore the issue during the event. Gardiner

might have been irritated by the question on the subject — Corbyn clearly was too. While, of course, we must discuss a range of issues at this election, the truth is the Labour Party does

not deserve a hearing on anything else until its deal with the anti-Semitism that now infects it. Journalists are right to keep pushing that point. Labour is obviously not the only party

with a community and race relations problem. Journalists should keep asking the Tories about Islamophobia too. Boris Johnson has written foul things about the Muslim community, and shouldn’t

be allowed to forget it. The Muslim Council of Britain was right to both back the Chief Rabbi’s condemnation of Labour and to point out the discrimination that affects their community.

Politics needs to be rid of all these kinds of racism. When dealing with Labour though, journalists are rightly hammering home the point about anti-Semitism. There is a risk that the public

will get bored of it — but they should not. It is there, it is real, and the very top of the Labour Party still will not apologise for it. The Lib Dems give an unhappy example of how an

issue, when it is not properly addressed, can dog a party. It took a number of years, but Nick Clegg eventually said sorry for going back on his pledge not to increase university tuition

fees. He had to. Every policy launch, every event, every interview until that point was marked by questions about the volte-face. Nothing could change until he had shown remorse for what had

happened. Labour’s shame over anti-Semitism is many orders of magnitude worse than the Lib Dem reversal over tuition fees — and yet the playbook for dealing with these on-going, deep-seated

issues doesn’t tend to shift all that much. Labour need to says sorry. And mean it. The Jewish community will probably not be convinced — but Labour’s campaign will be unable to move on

until it does.