Glasgow, United Kingdom – It has been beset by bitter resignations, selection disputes and accusations of institutional racism – but Britain’s main opposition party remains on track for a landslide victory in next month’s general election.
After 14 years playing second fiddle to the ruling right-wing Conservatives, and after four stinging general election defeats, the Labor Party is today on the brink of power, with some polls suggesting it could win a majority of more than 100 seats in July. 4.
However, if the Labor Party, led for the last four years by former Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer, manages to return to government for the first time since 2010, then it will do so, leaving a trail of unwelcome headlines in its wake. your trail. .
Last week, Faiza Shaheen, the left-wing Muslim Labor Party candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green in north-east London, revealed that she had been dropped by the party’s national executive committee (NEC) after it questioned her social media posts, including one that saw it as a 2014 The Daily Show sketch about the discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the left-wing Labor candidate for Brighton Kemptown, was also deselected last week.
He blamed “a vexatious and politically motivated complaint” for his deselection by the party, meaning he cannot now defend a seat he has held for the Labor Party since 2017. The Labor Party said the decision was due to a complaint it received about your behavior.
These resignations come as left-wing stalwart Diane Abbott, the UK’s first black MP, was reinstated into the party at the eleventh hour after being suspended from the Labor Party last year, accused of making anti-Semitic comments in a national newspaper. .
The party’s treatment of Shaheen and Abbott led seven Labor councilors in Slough to resign on Monday after accusing the movement of “institutional racism”.
Several observers accused the party of deliberately purging the left.
“Starmer’s leadership made some inevitable mistakes that it may well regret,” Colm Murphy, professor of British politics at Queen Mary University of London, said of Labor selection disputes. “In the short term, this is unlikely to matter outside of a few seats. In the long run, it’s a different story.”
Starmer took control of the Labor Party in April 2020, pledging to distance himself from his ardent socialist predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, who was repeatedly accused of turning a blind eye to allegations of antisemitism in the party.
Four years ago he suspended Corbyn as a Labor MP; now Corbyn is running as an independent candidate in his former constituency of Islington North.
Murphy told Al Jazeera that Starmer was potentially storing up problems for the future by adopting intransigent vetting procedures.
“Successful party management requires [vetting] processes must be seen as reasonable by a majority of stakeholders – otherwise the leader’s internal support base may weaken or diminish,” Murphy said.
“If the political environment becomes more difficult for the Labor Party in the future, then long-standing grievances like those generated this week could become important.”
Starmer’s reluctance to strongly condemn Israel’s bloody war in Gaza, where more than 36,000 Palestinians were killed by the US-backed Israeli military in just eight months, also cast a shadow over Labour, a traditionally left-wing party.
Dozens of Labor councilors have resigned from their positions over Starmer’s stance on Gaza since the start of the war last October.
The party’s decision to parachute Luke Akehurst, a committed Zionist and staunch supporter of Israel’s actions in the Palestinian enclave, into the safe Labor seat of North Durham for the July election, left left-leaning voters asserting that a Starmer government would govern from the right centre.
“Where is the ambition to tackle climate change, the biggest challenge of our time? It has been watered down,” said Phil Burton-Cartledge, an academic at the University of Derby.
Burton-Cartledge resigned her Labor Party membership in protest at the party’s stance on Gaza and the treatment of Abbott, Russell-Moyle and Shaheen, who declared on Wednesday that she was now running as an independent candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green .
Last month, Kamel Hawwash, a British Palestinian, told Al Jazeera that he had also abandoned his Labor Party membership to run as an independent candidate in Selly Oak.
Burton-Cartledge added: “How about tackling child poverty, some of the worst in the Western world? Economic growth is shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’ answer to everything. How will the Labor Party solve the problems of the National Health Service? Apparently, greater private sector involvement is the magic panacea.”
‘I’m really worried’
Starmer has promised to deliver real change for Britain if he succeeds Conservative leader Rishi Sunak as prime minister within four weeks.
He, for example, committed to legislating a “family-friendly” “New Deal” for British workers, including a commitment to “deliver a genuine living wage”, within 100 days of taking office. He also promised to establish a public clean energy company, Great British Energy, in a bid to tackle the cost of living crisis.
As for the conservatives in power, some of the party’s political leaders are expected to lose their seats in the elections and many have already decided to resign.
It is unclear what a conservative opposition would look like.
But recent history suggests that the parties that hand over power in the UK tend to remain in the political wilderness for more than a decade.
When Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher defeated the incumbent Labor Party government in 1979, it was 18 years before the Labor Party regained power under the leadership of Tony Blair. This defeat for the Conservatives in 1997 relegated them to 13 years in opposition before unseating Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2010.
But although Starmer is on the verge of becoming the UK’s first Labor prime minister in 14 years, many on the left remain convinced that the party represents a clear break with the Conservatives, who have adopted a hard-line approach to immigration. and threw their weight behind Israel’s war in Gaza.
“I’m really worried that if the Labor Party wins a landslide victory, and does so by going as far to the right as they did, they will take that as a blank check to continue to take the UK on a rightward trajectory,” Laura Moodie, the Scottish Green Party candidate for Dumfries and Galloway in south-west Scotland told Al Jazeera. “And I don’t think that’s the answer.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
