Keir Starmer’s team attempted to rescue the political career of a 7 October “truther”, because he belonged to his faction. Cut out all the noise, and this is the core of the scandal involving Labour’s belatedly disowned candidate Azhar Ali in Rochdale.
Ali had, after all, told Labour members that Israel “deliberately took the security off” to knowingly allow the 7 October attack to happen to “give them the green light to do whatever they bloody want”. When these comments were leaked to a newspaper, Ali apologised, which the Labour leadership presented as a retraction and thus the matter was settled. This is an insult to any reasonable person’s intelligence.
After much uproar and further comments emerged, Labour belatedly withdrew support from his candidacy. This is an episode that offers profound lessons about the leader’s operation.
Starmer told broadcasters that he had taken “decisive action” by withdrawing support for Ali. The facts tell us otherwise. Hours after this apology, shadow cabinet minister Lisa Nandy was dispatched to campaign alongside him. Meanwhile, her colleague Nick Thomas-Symonds took to the airwaves to make a passionate case of mitigation. He emphasised how apologetic Ali was, even making a plea for sympathy on the grounds that “people can get things very wrong” and that the candidate had fallen for an “online conspiracy theory and that does not represent his view”.
The former Labour MP Louise Ellman condemned Ali’s “outrageous and deeply offensive conspiracy theories”, but added she had “known Azhar for over 20 years and he consistently supported me when I was subjected to antisemitic attacks”.
Here was an obvious operation by the Labour leadership to retain Ali as an officially backed candidate. It was only after protracted uproar and further leaked comments – where Ali was overheard accusing “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” of inflating claims of antisemitism – that Starmer was left with no option but to abandon the candidate. The double standard here isn’t subtle. If Ali had been a man of the left, the leadership would have booted him, not only immediately, but with relish, and furiously denounced him in the process.
The contrast with leftwinger Andy McDonald – a bete noire of the leadership after he resigned from the shadow cabinet in protest at Starmer’s reneged policy pledges in 2021 – is itself revealing. McDonald’s offence was declaring at a Gaza protest: “We won’t rest until we have justice. Until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty.”
This was a plea for peaceful coexistence. The claim that “between the river and the sea, Palestine will be free” is racist is passionately rebutted by supporters of Palestinian emancipation – it should be noted that the founding charter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party declares: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” But in any case, McDonald clearly used a formulation emphasising inclusivity, yet was immediately suspended.
Fellow leftwinger Kate Osamor similarly had the whip withdrawn after describing Gaza as a genocide, the very day on which the international court of justice ruled that it was “plausible” Israel’s actions could be classed as such. Both of these cases involve entirely defensible positions, and neither McDonald nor Osamor can credibly be accused of antisemitism.
Ali’s case is of an entirely different order. His defenders point to his immediate apology and retraction, but the lack of credibility aside, leftwinger Diane Abbott also offered an immediate apology and retraction for comments she made in a letter to the Observer. But no one around Starmer sought to read her comments charitably and she was suspended immediately. Her suspension has lasted 10 months with an investigation into her comments clearly in the long grass.
The truth is, Starmer’s team are simply aching for excuses to boot out leftwingers. When former leader Jeremy Corbyn was purged for his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation into antisemitism, Starmer’s allies boasted it was a “clause IV” moment – that is, an excuse to define the party against the left. That has nothing to do with antisemitism at all. Indeed, Martin Forde – commissioned by Starmer to investigate claims of racism and sexism in the party – said in reference to his report that one of his enduring concerns was the way in which antisemitism was weaponised “along factional lines”. Starmer’s delay in suspending Ali shows a clear factional double standard – which Forde warned the party must avoid to be taken seriously on anti-racism.
Starmer has so far avoided many hard questions because of his polling lead. But the brutal truth is that he could not have been a luckier general. He secured the leadership by offering a leftwing political prospectus he swiftly discarded, yet suffered no political consequences for doing so. The Tories’ comprehensive self-immolation – from Partygate, to Liz Truss’s calamitous economic experiment, to a considerable squeeze in living standards – has gifted him the next general election.
But while a large majority remains probable, it may well be team Starmer’s obsession with crushing the left that hobbles them in government. As veteran journalist Michael Crick notes, the desire to parachute only ultra-loyalists into parliamentary seats has left candidates of questionable quality, as Ali’s shockingly conspiracist comments underline. It must be remembered with a wry smile that, back in 2021, a Labour source justified the rampant exclusion of leftwing candidates with: “This isn’t factional. We just aren’t insulting voters with piss poor candidates any more.”
That parliamentary candidate Graham Jones – a staunch leadership loyalist – has been suspended for opposing Britons joining Israel’s army is absurd. But Starmer has now dug a hole big enough that his own cheerleaders will begin to fall into it.
The obsession of Labour’s ruling faction with defining themselves against the left leaves them bereft of a clear vision, underlined by their junking of their flagship £28bn-a-year green investment pledge. The Labour establishment – so scarred by their period in retreat during the Corbyn years – have been in triumphant mood after securing their absolute factional victory over the left of the party. But they are now learning that there is a price to pay for their cynicism.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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