A CONFERENCE ORGANISED BY INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST COUNCILLORS
A CONFERENCE ORGANISED BY INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST COUNCILLORS
Labour’s withdrawal of support for Rochdale candidate Azhar Ali has unleashed a wave of ribald humour across social media, but the issues are serious. I can’t think of a more disastrous election campaign and I have been a political activist for over 50 years.
Labour was already in trouble in Rochdale because of its supine, cowardly and morally corrupt support for a massacre that has resulted in the deaths of at least 28,000 people, the majority women and children.
Labour’s vulnerability to accusations of complicity in the slaughter of innocents has been demonstrated by our growing movement of councillors across the UK, some already independent socialists, some breaking from Labour in the last few weeks.
We have acted as mouthpieces of a surging solidarity movement, marching week after week, demanding a ceasefire. Starmer’s Labour chose to justify the IDF’s disproportionate and possibly genocidal war effort, infamously saying that Israel ‘had that right.’
When its candidate Azhar Ali was found to have voiced controversial conspiracy theories Labour stood by its man, dragooning figures from the Jewish Labour Movement.
When the whole hypocritical pack of cards came crashing down, as it was always going to, these JLM figures and Labour in general ended up with more egg on their faces than could be produced by the average battery chicken farm.
It is not however Labour’s grotesque double standards and ineptitude that caused this debacle, it was its justification of ethnic cleansing and mass killing. There is a distant chance Starmer could yet, because of his lack of principle, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and he would only have himself to blame.
Alan Gibbons
February 13, 2024
