Keir Starmer alienates left and right on Gaza
Over the weekend, three posters appeared next to Kentish Town West overground station, plastered onto the billboards which sit under the bridge to the left of the entrance. They read: 'Wanted Keir Starmer', calling out the Prime Minister for his perceived complicity in Israel's war in Gaza. They, and other posters, popped up around London on Saturday ahead of a wider mobilisation of activists, led by Palestinian Youth Movement.
Kentish Town is at the heart of Starmer's constituency – Holborn and St Pancras – but it is also the place that the Prime Minister called home before last year's general election. His favourite pub, The Pineapple sits to the north of the area, and he still plays five-aside football on a Kentish Town pitch. It is a political home. But things are shifting. In 2019 Starmer was returned to Holborn and St Pancras with a majority of 27,763. In 2024 it had dropped to 18,884. This cannot be explained away entirely by the war in Gaza. But the pro-Gaza independent who ran against Starmer in 2024, Andrew Feinstein certainly squeezed some of his vote.
The slow gestation of the new left-wing party (whose founding is being co-led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana) has awakened talk of Feinstein's candidacy. He has said he will support and likely join the new party and Holborn and St Pancras is already being talked about as a key target (despite the next general election still being four years away).
But this is a scenario which is playing out for members across the cabinet; it is not unique to the Prime Minister. Fury over Gaza was bubbling even before the last election, now it is organised. Wes Streeting, Shabanna Mahmood and Jess Philips have already felt the heat in their constituencies. Streeting held onto his Ilford North constituency last year by just 528 votes with Philips facing a similar position, winning a majority of 693. Both constituencies featured heavily mobilised campaigns over Gaza. Protests under the banner of a 'Siege on Labour' will take place in all three of these constituencies today; Lammy and Streeting's offices will be directly targeted by protesters.
The catalyst for this was likely Starmer's decision last week that the UK will recognise the state of Palestine if the Israeli government commits to a ceasefire (government insiders have said the PM has been working on a plan for exactly how to do this for months). But the government has repeatedly been criticised for dragging its feet on the issue and last week, this disparagement grew to include members of the cabinet. The timing of last week's announcement seemed as much an act of party management as anything else.
But his announcement last Tuesday has assuaged the concerns of no one. Pro-Gaza MPs say he is not moving fast enough. A group of peers, sympathetic to Israel, said last week that Starmer risks breaking international law with his pledge, and lawyers representing the remaining hostages have expressed their fury at what they see as the UK's capitulation to the demands of Hamas. Both sides say they are being used as 'bargaining chips'. On Sunday night, Starmer came under renewed pressure to delay recognition after a senior Hamas official said the same move by the UK and other nations to recognise a Palestinian state is 'one of the fruits of October 7'.
Wider comparisons between Starmer and Tony Blair (and the rage over Iraq) are being made. For the New Labour leader, as for Starmer, a deep crisis in the Middle East has created a fresh and choleric fault line in British politics. But unlike Iraq, the war in Gaza is a crisis Starmer was dealing with before he became Prime Minister; and the damage to Labour has already been wrought. Indeed, the electoral peril to Labour over this issue already appears greater than that over Iraq. And with the arrival of a new party, whose main focus is likely to be government failures on Gaza, this is just the beginning of four years of firefighting.
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