Dame Margaret Hodge said Labour must cleanse itself of its “nasty party” image by eliminating antisemitism nepotism and bullying.

Writing in The Observer Dame Margaret, who was elected as the new Parliamentary chair of the Jewish Labour movement by its national executive committee last week, said the party’s defeat in the election “was not down to Corbyn and Corbynism alone.” 

The veteran Barking MP was a staunch critic of Jeremy Corbyn over antisemitism in the Labour Party but said the problems facing the party were more “fundamental, more structural and more complex.”

She said while Mr Corbyn was often “despised on the doorstep” it was the “anti-western view of the world” that his party promoted that helped produce the “hideous antisemitism that infected the party and disgusted the public.”

She said she hopped the current leadership contenders would “engage in an open and honest debate about the tough challenges we face. 

“If they fail to do so, they will be doing the party a disservice.”

She said the manifesto Labour created fell short of what was needed to convince the votes. 

And was responsible for “more fear than hope in voters’ hearts and minds.”

She wrote: “Despite some individual good ideas, the confetti of policy bribes created an unbelievable and unaffordable agenda.

“I felt the manifesto was one of the most reactionary documents I had seen.

Its emphasis on a big state and on state ownership, a vilification of success and an obsession with the producers of public services, rather than the citizens for whom those services are for, together served to frighten rather than inspire the public. Recycling the policies of the 1970s proved neither radical nor transformative.”