Labour’s entire team of councillors in the Lancashire borough of Pendle has quit, exposing the extent to which Keir Starmer’s party has become dependent on Asian communities in some areas of Britain.
The resignations were timed just days before close of nominations in the English local council elections, which will make it difficult for Labour to find new candidates and prepare campaigns.
All ten incumbent Labour councillors in Pendle (nine of them Asians) resigned, in protest at the party leadership’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza and its handling of ‘anti-semitism’ allegations. Ten parish councillors from the Pendle area also resigned – some of them were due to be borough council candidates next month.
Not coincidentally, one of the main victims of this purge of ‘anti-semites’ was Azhar Ali – Labour’s candidate at the Rochdale parliamentary by-election – who was thrown out of the party after secret recordings emerged of Ali expressing conspiracy theories about Israel.
Ali was for years the main Labour power-broker in Pendle. He was leader of the Labour group on Lancashire County Council until the ‘anti-semitism’ scandal destroyed him, after which he was replaced by the veteran Jewish councillor Jennifer Mein (against whom H&D editor Mark Cotterill stood at the last county council elections).
These resignations reveal two contradictory facts about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
The first is that in several areas of Britain, Labour has effectively been taken over by Asians – very similar to the way in which some inner-city Labour parties were taken over by Trotskyists and other far-left sects during the 1970s. This isn’t just because of the influx of immigrants. It’s because in parallel with their arrival, traditional industries collapsed – which meant that trade unions that had been Labour’s backbone also collapsed.
But the second fact is that however powerful Asians might be in some local areas, they count for nothing at the top of the Labour Party.
Keir Starmer is absolutely determined to position his party as a close ally of Israel. The only reason he might now venture some limited criticisms of Netanyahu is that Israeli brutality has become so extreme that they are increasingly criticised by well-informed Conservatives and veteran establishment figures, such as the retired diplomat Lord Ricketts.
Starmer will very timidly echo some of these criticisms.
H&D readers should be under no illusions. Keir Starmer will at some point within the next nine months become Prime Minister and Labour will win a landslide parliamentary majority.
But the fault lines within his party – not only over Gaza but over socially liberal attitudes, feminism, and ‘trans’ rights – will continue to raise difficult questions about Labour’s identity.
Labour’s impending victory will simply expose its ideological vacuity.
It will be up to racial nationalists to frame a coherent response.
H&D will as always carry full reports on the local council elections, both here and in the print edition of our magazine.