Keir Starmer has been navigating a tricky path to maintain party discipline since the outbreak of war between Israel and Gaza.
As the conflict has grown more brutal and bloody, and outraged Labour’s MPs and grassroots, senior figures have carefully graduated the party line from full support for Israel toward calling for a ceasefire.
The Labour leader now faces growing calls to demand the UK stop selling arms to Israel, but pressure has been brought to bear not only in the realms of policy.
George Galloway’s shock victory following the Rochdale by-election made for disturbing news for the party and there has also been frustration that connects to another long-running saga: party management and the handling of antisemitism complaints.
The most recent revolt came when 20 councillors in Lancashire’s Pendle last week quit to sit as independents, accusing officials of “aggressive bullying tactics”, targeting councillors and stifling “free speech”.
It is understood several were being questioned by the party over antisemitism allegations but it represented the largest exodus of councillors under Starmer’s leadership and was not an isolated incident.
Some 70 councillors have quit Labour over its stance on Gaza in recent months, leading the party to lose its majority on five councils.
Aside from Pendle, in Burnley, a neighbouring Lancashire borough, ten councillors resigned over the refusal to back a ceasefire, switching control to a Lib Dem-Green-independent coalition.
Resignations in Norwich saw a similar shift, while councils in Oxford and Norwich are now run by minority Labour administrations.
In a separate incident unrelated to Gaza, seven Labour councillors in Sheffield were suspended for breaking the whip and voting against the city’s local plan.
They later quit the party. It came after Labour nationally placed the group in “special measures”.
That incident came in the wake of claims of “top-down control freakery” after top officials were dispatched to reform several local Labour groups seen as dysfunctional or underperforming by the party’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC).
The conduct of people on a list of more than 200 candidates being lined up to fight the party’s less winnable seats is now being combed over by officials. Special attention is being paid to where any statements on the Gaza conflict spill over into being antisemitic but all conduct is being reconsidered.
The mass resignations in Pendle followed Labour removing Azhar Ali, himself a councillor in Lancashire, as its candidate in Rochdale, after a secret recording emerged of him alleging that Israel “allowed” Hamas’ attack on 7 October to get a “green light to do whatever they bloody want”.
Graham Jones, the parliamentary candidate for the nearby target seat of Hyndburn, was at the same meeting and suspended for saying Britons who go to Israel to fight for the Israel Defence Forces “should be locked up”.
Ali, a former adviser to Tony Blair with deep roots in the party, reacted to his removal by defiantly continuing as an independent candidate in Rochdale, with campaign ads that sought to paint Starmer as “anti-Palestine”.
While cases like Ali’s appear to be clear-cut, there have been regular complaints that the party’s zero-tolerance approach to certain issues has been heavy-handed or factional, with the left-wing group Momentum accusing Starmer of marginalising the left and having an “authoritarian, anti-democratic approach to internal affairs”.
Others simply no longer feel at home in the party after the leadership ditched radical economic policies such as nationalisation, free tuition or raising income tax on top earners.
It has led some members, such as the high-profile Guardian columnist Owen Jones, who cited Starmer’s Gaza response as the last straw for him, to desert the party and encourage people to vote for independents or the Greens.
Could what some activists see as Starmer’s uncompromising drive to reform Labour have unintended consequences at the ballot box?
Insiders insist that the manifesto will be “bomb proof” from Tory attacks on economic policy and that the “lesson from Rochdale” was to double down on carrying out due diligence checks.
Starmer’s crackdown on antisemitism began in earnest with the proscription of four groups, most with communist links, in July 2021. Since then, hundreds of members have been expelled or disciplined, either for their association with those groups or other antisemitism allegations. The number disciplined, however, runs into thousands.
Figures show that while around 50,000 have joined Labour in recent years, and four in five support Starmer, 170,000 have left since the end of 2017. Labour may be glad to see the exit of campaigners who do not have mainstream views but is a fair amount of potentially politically active people at a time when trust in politics is at a 40-year low.
Many on the party’s left have claimed that the party’s approach to discipline is oppressive and that those on the receiving end are disgruntled and in some cases willing to act on their anger.
Jamie Driscoll, the North of Tyne Mayor once close to Jeremy Corbyn, was ruled out of running for the role of North East mayor for sharing a platform with Ken Loach, the filmmaker expelled from the party.
Driscoll maintains this was disproportionate and as a result is running as an independent against the Labour candidate Kim McGuinness.
Writing in i last month, the North Tyneside Mayor Jamie Driscoll, who left Labour last year after he was blocked from being the party’s candidate for mayor of the North East – a new position which is replacing the one he currently holds, also encouraged voters not to vote Labour.
“People want a Labour government to be the light at the end of the tunnel,” he wrote. “What have the Labour leadership offered? The magic growth bunny. It will hop along, and Britain will boom. No need to invest in public services. The magic growth bunny will fix the crisis in social care. The sick will walk. Greenhouse gases will chill out.”
“The sooner we upset the status quo, the sooner we will get a fair voting system, and start to run Britain in the interests of the people who do the work.”
He has gained support from others frustrated by the party, including Jones, and is one of many independents attempting to build an anti-Labour left-wing platform.
They include Akmed Yakoob, a defence lawyer endorsed by Galloway, who is standing as an independent in what may be a close-run contest to replace Andy Street as West Midlands Mayor.
While neither Yakoob or Driscoll enter the local elections as favourites, their impact on Labour, which is the main competition to a Conservative in both races, could be a bar to victory.
Labour strategists claim that any threat from the left will easily be seen off.
One Labour source said the anti-Labour left-wing trend was unlikely to cause serious issues at a general election.
“Outside of a handful of seats where it could be a problem (like the new Bristol Central, for example), I just don’t really see it cutting across the two other main forces in play which are: the level of tactical voting to get the Tories out we’re seeing discussed, and the collapse in the Tory vote with a chunk of it segmenting off to Reform,” they said, adding many who plan to vote Lib Dem or Green in the locals would be prepared to vote Labour at a national poll.
“In the main, I think when you consider the breadth of support Labour are getting at the moment, the places we’re losing some left support are from the kind of places we can probably afford to lose it – i.e. seats which already have a comfortable Labour majority in cities, and where that loss will probably be offset in any case.”
But the places where such left wingers could connect with the pro-Palestine movement in the forthcoming locals may mirror where the party suffered losses in the local elections in 2004, when then deputy prime minister John Prescott conceded the “Iraq [War] was a cloud, or indeed a shadow, over these elections”.
Labour lost control of councils, such as Peterborough, Burnley and Pendle, where there is a strong Muslim vote and failed to fend off Lib Dem attacks in university cities such as Leeds and Newcastle.
A Labour left source said: “These resignations demonstrate the risk of the Labour Leadership taking the party’s core vote for granted. Whether it’s Gaza or green investment, the danger of thinking they have ‘nowhere else to go’ is clear. And Keir may be able to ride it out now given the polling lead, but when the going gets tough, that’s when you need your base behind you.”
Given Labour’s indomitable poll lead, it is the Conservatives who will be braced for heavy losses, but sources close to Starmer would also admit they are nervous next month’s town hall vote could also throw up unwanted echoes of 2004.
