Penguin's shame

There are any number of fringe publishers peddling antisemitic and other racist diatribes.

To that list must now be added Penguin Books, which in April brought out How They Rule the World through its Ebury Books imprint.

The Spanish author, Pedro Baños, is a notorious antisemitic conspiracy theorist. The cover of his book, featuring octopus tentacles, is something of a giveaway.

Worse, Penguin went out of its way to sanitise the writer’s views, deleting from the English version a series of passages in the original Spanish text about the supposed control of the world by the Rosthschilds and George Soros.

When challenged over its behaviour, Penguin defended the book as a “robust” study of “geo-strategies and geopolitics”.

This is a deeply depressing episode and shows the wider impact of the normalisation of antisemitism that has occurred under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Penguin is an illustrious name. Like Labour, that name is now in the gutter.

The simple truth

It was bad enough that a series of Labour MPs who describe themselves as allies of our community ignored every representative Jewish body and campaigned in Peterborough for Lisa Forbes.

But the sight of them applauding her into the Commons on Monday was truly appalling.

Still, at least no one can now be in any doubt: when any of these Labour MPs repeat their claim to be opposed to antisemitism, they are simply lying.