UK Labour adrift, despite poll wins
Recent missteps lead to questions about skills of leader Keir Starmer.
These days, the only thing that can stop the Labour Party, it seems, is the Labour Party. For more than a year, the leader of Britain’s main opposition party, Sir Keir, has sat on a double-digit lead in the polls over the Conservative Party. But a pair of embarrassing suspensions of Labour parliamentary candidates for their comments about Israel, a week after a messy reversal on climate policy, have thrown Sir Keir on the defensive, raising questions about his management skills and taking the spotlight off the long-suffering Conservatives.
“Keir has had a really good, long run but he’s not Man City,” said John McTernan, a political strategist, referring to the Manchester football club that has been a perennial Premier League champion. “The question is, can he come back next week fighting?”
Labour still holds a double-digit lead over the Conservatives in polls. It regained some of its its stride with thumping victories in two parliamentary by-elections on Thursday. And it if offers them any comfort, Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also has committed his share of missteps. But Labour’s setbacks are a reminder that with a general election still at least a few months away, Sir Keir cannot take anything for granted.
Analysts said the party’s decision to mothball its flagship climate initiative was potentially damaging because it plays into a Conservative narrative that Labour does not stand for anything. It pulled the policy after a lengthy internal debate that leaked into the public, because the price tag — £28 billion, or US$35 billion, a year — seemed untenable, given Britain’s big rise in borrowing costs since the policy was first announced in 2021.
In the case of the candidates, Labour arguably compounded its problems by acting too slowly. It stuck by one of them, Azhar Ali, for almost two days after a London tabloid, The Mail on Sunday, reported that he had claimed Israel “allowed” the Hamas attack on Oct 7, in which 1,200 civilians and soldiers were killed.
Labour eventually revoked its support for Mr Ali, even at the cost of losing the seat in the constituency of Rochdale, north of Manchester, for which he is still running. But the episode revived allegations of lingering anti-Jewish sentiment in the party’s ranks, despite Sir Keir’s concerted — and by most accounts, successful — campaign to root out systemic antisemitism.
The outcry over Mr Ali guaranteed that when another Labour candidate, Graham Jones, was accused on Tuesday of making anti-Israel remarks, the party quickly suspended him. Mr Jones had been selected to compete in the general election for a seat he once held in Lancashire.
“I don’t think it symbolises a great strand of antisemitism in the Labour Party,” said Jonathan Powell, chief of staff to a former Labour prime minister, Tony Blair. Under Sir Keir, he noted, Labour has maintained a pro-Israel position during the Israel-Gaza war. That would have been inconceivable under his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, when Labour was a hotbed of anti-Israel fervour.
Still, Mr Powell said the party could face a recurring problem if the pro-Tory press unearthed problematic statements on a variety of issues by other Labour candidates. “If you’re going to rule out candidates for seats for saying anything silly in their lives,” he said, “you’re not going to have many candidates.”
However successful Sir Keir’s campaign against antisemitism has been, the episode shows how vital it is for the party to conduct due diligence on candidates. By the time Labour cut loose Mr Ali, it was too late to replace him on the ballot for the by-election, on Feb 28. If he manages to win anyway, he will not sit in Parliament as a Labour lawmaker.
In a strange twist, Mr Ali will run against two former Labour lawmakers: George Galloway, who was expelled from the party in 2003 because of his opposition to the Iraq War and represents the Workers Party of Great Britain; and Simon Danczuk, who was suspended by Labour for sending sexually explicit messages to a 17-year-old girl. He is the candidate of the right-wing Reform UK party.
The Israel-Gaza war has put Labour in a tricky position because — alongside its support for Israel, which it shares with the Conservative government — it wants to signal to voters in Muslim communities that it understands their anguish and outrage at the rising death toll among Palestinians.
Still, critics argued the hesitation in abandoning Mr Ali revealed a weakness in Sir Keir. Some pointed to a similar dilatory debate over the future of Labour’s green policy, which analysts said became a tug of war between Sir Keir and fiscally conservative shadow chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves.
I don’t think it symbolises a great strand of antisemitism in the Labour Party.
CHIEF OF STAFF TO FORMER LABOUR PRIME MINISTER, TONY BLAIR, JONATHAN POWELL