Labour has withdrawn its support for Azhar Ali, its candidate for this month’s Rochdale byelection, in the wake of controversial comments he made about the 7 October attacks on Israel.
In line with electoral law, Labour cannot replace Ali with another candidate because the deadline passed on 2 February. He will stand as a Labour candidate on the ballot paper, but if elected he will not hold the party whip and will sit as an independent MP.
Labour sources said that campaigners in Rochdale were told to stop leafleting and social media activity on Ali’s behalf at 5.30pm on Monday – an instruction that came from party HQ.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Labour MPs and members voiced their concern at the leadership’s continued support of Ali, saying it marked a “huge and disappointing shift” from Starmer’s promises of taking a “zero-tolerance” approach to antisemitism and all forms of racism.
Galloway, who is concentrating on Rochdale’s sizeable Pakistani and Kashmiri Muslim community for votes, is expected to benefit from the row, with some local activists saying that Ali’s suspension makes him favourite to win on 29 February.
The shadow minister Nick Thomas-Symonds told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he believed Ali had fallen “for an online conspiracy theory” and he understood the “gravity of the offence that has been caused”.
According to a story published by the Daily Mail on Monday night, Ali said “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” were “giving crap” about Andy McDonald, who was suspended by Labour after he used the controversial phrase “between the river and the sea” in a speech during a rally.
Last year, Martin Forde KC, the senior lawyer commissioned by Starmer to investigate the Labour party’s culture, criticised the leadership for vowing to take a “zero-tolerance” approach to antisemitism and all other forms of racism without having “transparent systems in place”.
Kate Osamor, a Labour MP, was suspended in January for saying Gaza should be remembered as a genocide on Holocaust Memorial Day, while McDonald lost the whip in October for telling a pro-Palestine rally: “We will not rest until we have justice.
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