LABOUR’S leaders were floundering today amid plummeting polling figures and an anti-semitism heresy hunt spiralling out of control.
Worse news was piled upon bad as the party struggled to stabilise itself following the decision to disown its candidate in the Rochdale by-election, Azhar Ali.
A Savanta opinion poll had the Labour lead over the Tories down by seven points, to its lowest level for eight months.
Labour had a 41 per cent vote share in the survey, down five over a fortnight, while the Conservatives were up two to 29 per cent.
The figures are seen as a public thumbs-down to party leader Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to scrap Labour’s £28 billion green prosperity plan, almost his only remaining distinctive policy.
Two by-elections being held today, in Wellingborough and Kingswood, offer the chance to steady Labour if it takes both from the Tories, as expected.
But it is the poll in Rochdale, which votes on February 29, which is causing the leadership grief.
Mr Ali was eventually suspended, although he remains on the ballot paper, after prolonged vacillation by the leadership.
He was recorded at a meeting in Lancashire last year spreading conspiracy theories and making anti-semitic remarks.
Widely criticised for not having acted more decisively, Sir Keir then over-compensated by suspending the party’s candidate for the Hyndburn constituency, ex-MP Graham Jones.
Mr Jones, a hard-right apologist for the Saudi regime, had spoken at the same meeting, saying that British citizens fighting in the Israeli army should be “locked up.”
His suspension sparked a backlash from other Labour rightwingers, dismayed that the campaign against “anti-semitism” was now affecting their own.
Former shadow chancellor Ed Balls highlighted the factional aspect, saying that “Graham Jones is not a Corbynite, not hard left. Absolutely not anti-Israel.
“To describe what he said as anti-semitic is untrue. Graham Jones is not an anti-semite.”
But the sanction was backed by the Jewish Labour Movement’s Mike Katz, who claimed that “to be in that meeting, to have heard that rhetoric, to have been a bystander, to have not called it out at the time, or indeed subsequently, really calls into play your judgement.”
There are now calls for everyone who attended the meeting — understood to be around 18 people — to be suspended from Labour on those grounds.
Leading local councillor Munsif Dad, who was present, was “spoken to” by the party today.
A mass suspension seems unlikely since the meeting was a gathering of pro-Starmer councillors looking to staunch defections from the party in a region where dozens have resigned over the leader’s backing for Israel.
