The Labour party is facing a fresh scandal. Their candidate in the forthcoming Rochdale by-election, Azhar Ali, was secretly recorded making antisemitic remarks in private.
When it was reported in the national press, the entire national leadership went into a collective public meltdown. Mr Ali has since apologised for his remarks, but the damage to the party, and himself, had already been done. Their overall campaign had already been hit by many locals criticising them for leader Sir Keir Starmer’s stance on the crisis in Gaza, many of them are Muslim. To make things worse, they have to deal with George Galloway, a former Labour MP standing for the Workers Party of Britain. He had beaten them twice before in parliamentary elections, in Bethnal Green & Bow, and Bradford West. They now face an almost certain heavy defeat at the by-election, which takes place on February 29th, with all the negative headlines that would be in the news cycle for days.
This scandal, on top of their problems over both their environmental and fiscal policies, proves beyond reasonable doubt that Labour haven’t really changed at all. Collectively, the party in parliament are ripping each other apart in public, and at present they have a substantial number of MPs who are currently suspended which have yet to have candidates selected to replace them, including the seat of the former leader Jeremy Corbyn. It’s been a complete mess. Even several commentators sympathetic to Starmer couldn’t wait to stick the boot in.
At a time when the Conservative government is causing serious damage to the UK, Starmer has shown that despite what he has done so far in trying to improve the party’s overall image, he still comes across as politically inept. Many of the current problems he has faced during his leadership could have been avoided, but this incident, and many others, will certainly be picked on by opponents during the general election campaign, and that could lead to a major factional fight over who succeeds him in the event of a heavy national defeat.