Eamon Dyas
Zionism in Gaza and the support it gets from the West is a lifting of the “painted veil” that is civilisation.
Whatever happens to the Labour vote after this, Labour GH will have a ready-made excuse to explain it. The same excuse will be used to explain the lack of locally sourced energy for the Labour candidate that was apparent even before the convenient mis-step by the Labour candidate enabled Labour HQ to disown him. In fact it’s already being used in this Guardian report:
“The Labour machine is normally peerless on voting day when it comes to getting out the vote, deploying armies of door-knockers right until 10pm, cajoling people out of the house with offers of lifts to the polling station.” – The Guardian.
That the local party machine was already mis-firing was evidenced by the several desperate emails I and others as far away as London had received over the past three weeks asking us to drop everything and get up to Rochdale to help with the local campaign. This was a sure indication of the difficulties the local Rochdale party was having in getting its activists into gear. Seeing this as a sign of the extent to which the local activists were alienated by Starmer would never be admitted of course.
Starmer is not only not an inspirational leader but has created a Labour Party that has no high-flying flags by way of policies that activists can gather behind. This has taken its toll on the energy levels normally supplied by local activists at elections, at least in places like Rochdale.
He has shown himself to be devoid of principles in the manner in which he gained the leadership and his subsequent abandonment of policies he inherited and had pledged to continue. But then he went on and abandoned his own “flag-ship” green-spending policy when he thought it was being perceived as contradictory to his tight spending rules. These actions have revealed the extent to which he is prepared to make the party into a vacuous organisation that has no other purpose than getting him into no. 10 on the basis of nothing more than the fact that at least it’s not the Tory party.
Unfortunately, on 7 October 2023 Hamas did something remarkable, not only in the shock it delivered to Israeli Zionism but half a world away it revealed something that was intrinsic in Starmer’s “will to power” and which had been instrumental in facilitating the destruction of the previously activist-orientated party under Corbyn – Starmer’s avowed affinity with Zionism. The aftermath of the events of 7 October showed the extent to which Starmer was prepared to go in order to repay the debt he owed to Zionism. After all it was Zionism that had provided him with the means of destroying the Corbyn Labour Party and then consolidate his leadership of the Party and he was now in thrall to it.
What the events subsequent to 7 October showed was the utterly ruthless component necessary for the sustenance of the Zionist project. The resultant raw barbarity of that ruthlessness has been revealed to the rest of the world over the past four months and it has placed Starner in the difficult position of having to support its “blood and claw” manifestation in Gaza even to the extent of expressing support for Israel’s breaking of international law when it cut off water to the population.
This has left Starmer vulnerable to the Muslim vote and no doubt was a reason why his generals running the Party were prepared to acquiesce in a Muslim candidate in Rochdale that they wouldn’t have tolerated for a moment otherwise. Unfortunately for him that candidate misread the mandate the Party had given him and uttered a sentiment that went beyond the window-dressing role he was supposed to play. But the sentiment expressed by Azhar Ali in Rochdale – a sentiment that had already been expressed by many in Israel itself and which was not controversial among the voters of Rochdale – was deemed to have gone too far by a Labour HQ that had been sensitised to such things by the way in which it had been forged in the great “antisemitism clear-out” under Starmer.
That the decision of Labour HQ to disown the Labour candidate will adversely impact the Labour vote is certain but that decision will now be used as the means of protecting Starmer and his cohorts from the implications of the trend among activists that had already become apparent.
In the meantime Starmer will no doubt be hoping that the actions of Zionism on the other side of the world doesn’t continue to demand the repayment of his debt. But if it does even it might find that there are limits to how far he is prepared to go in meeting that debt if it comes to that debt damaging his ambition to become Prime Minister. Then again, his performance up to now would indicate that the particular point where such a consideration needs to be weighed is still some time off – such is the extent of the debt.
