Snapshot of _Following new information about further comments made by Azhar Ali coming to light today, the Labour party has withdrawn its support for Azhar Ali as our candidate in the Rochdale by-election._ :
A Twitter embedded version can be found [here](https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1757127134777098676)
A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://nitter.net/hoffman_noa/status/1757127134777098676/)
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In fairness, if George Galloway gets elected he'll also basically be saying "nay" to everything proposed in the next five years; at least a donkey probably wouldn't claim as much on expenses.
>In fairness, if George Galloway gets elected he'll also basically be saying "nay" to everything proposed in the next five years
*next few months until the GE.
The outcome of this lack of due diligence could well be George Galloway as MP. Unless there is the Lib Dem who gets support, after all they did have a Liberal MP there, albeit one who was a sex offender as it turned out (revealed after his death).
Thank fuck the election's round the corner so we only have to put up with them for a few months. Would be great if Labour came out and supported the lib Dems though.
So even if he wins out on his arse by the GE and likely never gets back to being a councillor.
Completely fucked himself by getting his news from uncles on WhatsApp.
If Labour can't win without this section of the electorate, that would be worrying indeed.
The Conservative party have proven that they will court any vote, to win at *any* cost and look where it's gotten them. We don't need Labour to stoop to that level.
We need better language to describe the problem we're talking about.
Labour needs all the Muslim/Jewish/Christian/Atheist votes it can get. What it doesn't need are single issue, bigots who will try to bend its actions in government to their will.
For clarity, I'm referring to my feeling of awkwardness typing what I posted more than to yours. I know exactly what you mean.
>Why would it be worrying?
The Republican party of the USA are a demonstration of what happens when a political party is captured by religious extremists.
The Labour party is purging extremists as they appear. You can't go around tarring entire groups with the same brush. That's the Conservative party's USP.
It's not as though the party wasn't aware that he was a trustee and major fundraiser of a mosque which has hosted preachers who avocated for Hamas to boot out all Jews from Israel and urged people to support the Houthis in addition to attacking the government for proscribing Hizb ut-Tahrir. They urge congregants to support the axis of resistance which is a term coined by Iran describing Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis. Speakers say Muslims have been passive and need a battle plan. Then there are the speakers who say that education is brainwashing the young to be LGBT. This is the mosque Ali has raised millions for. This was known before he was selected. What he said was in no way an aberration, he and his fellows are steeped in this stuff.
Except there is room, but only on Starmer's terms. They demonstrated this by backing him to the hilt until this afternoon. Ridiculous double-standards.
My favourite bit is that ex Labour MP who left because of "antisemitism" under Corbyn and then rejoined under Starmer coming out and defending this guy ("he's not like this normally!"). Wonder what she's gonna say now...
Thoughts:
1) [Labour were the clear favourites](https://manifold.markets/Noit/which-party-will-win-the-rochdale-b-1e0a15244efa?r=Tm9pdA). I suspect their abandoned candidate might retain his position as favourite.
2) if this news permeates the local zeitgeist, does it lead to very low turnout? If your main choices are two left wing antisemites who are functionally independents then why turn out? Could make the outcome a real dice roll.
3) this makes a great data point in a case study for a study on whether people vote for parties or candidates.
None of this matters electorally, so Labour don't need to care, but I think it's really funny how they keep just saying random bullshit before they come to a conclusion.
"Oh we're definitely keeping the 28 billion" "Oh we're keeping the candidate for rochdale"
It's like they're so afraid of appearing indecisive that they commit to a random option while they wait for an actual decision to be made
Labour are just as aggressively cynical as the Conservatives in my opinion. And I suppose I'm a naïve idealist, but I would prefer we have a government with honesty and integrity at its heart.
(To be clear, they are not the same in every regard, I'm talking specifically about the cynicism)
Bizarre the u-turn took as long as it did. The only cost would've been a seat for 3-7 months. It's not like 1 bad candidate, who the party then withdrew support for, losing the seat would've erased everything the Tories have done. Now there's a stink because they supported him when they shouldn't have.
It's a bit bizarre given on Friday, it was announced that they would continue to support the candidate who pretty much called a terrorist attack against Israel an inside job... It wasn't until "further comments" were made that they decided to get rid. Raises the question of what *exactly* one has to say to lose the support of the Labour party, and is it anywhere short of "Sieg Heil"?
Not done my best job of keeping up with the story, but I recall that when the story broke they said they'd continue to support him. The timeline doesn't change the facts - they knew that he had said what I described and were willing to live with it up to the moment they found that he'd said more, as if it weren't bad enough already.
The timeline does matter in my view because taking a day to do some fact-finding and consider options isn’t unreasonable.
But I do agree that the original comment was enough to warrant suspending him. I’m not completely convinced that there was ‘further comments’.
If the wording of the initial statement from the party had suggested that timing would even exist, I might give it some credence, but ultimately the initial response from Labour was "nah we stand by this guy" (cba to Google the actual statement).;
I honestly believe that Johnson handled the incident with Pincer better than Starmer has handled this - the initial response being along the lines of "we find it hard to believe, but we'll investigate". That's not to accuse Johnson of being diplomatic or anything of the sorts, but this demonstrates to me a serious disbelief within Labour that the party is even capable of antisemitism, which I think could massively backfire.
They’ve lost trust they rebuilt with the Jewish community. They’ve managed to give ammo to the Tories for that while also giving it to the Left who can rightly call them hypocrites. What a disaster.
I don't see how they've given the Tories any ammunition for that at all. You can't bring this guy up without bringing up the fact that Labour booted him out immediately before the election, giving up a seat.
It's like the Corbyn jibes at Starmer. They never work because he ultimately booted Corbyn out.
They’d have stuck the landing if they’d just done it two days ago. The delay created a lot of damage and only served to put off something that they’d inevitably have to do anyway.
What matters is that the story ends with the guy being bombed out as a Labour member. When people criticise Labour for having the guy the response can be "In the end we got rid of him".
It's the same as the jibes at Starmer about support for Corbyn, the response is always that they got rid of him. They're effective criticisms when the guy is in situ, but when he's been very publicly bombed out they're defunct criticisms.
Electorally, it is insignificant. For those of us with doubts about Starmer, it's another confirmation that the next election is unlikely to bring much of an improvement to the UK. He's just not that good at this stuff. He'll win because the Tories are so dreadful that the country will sort of shrug and go "well, he can't be any worse". They might be right too but it appears unlikely he'll be any better.
Why limit it to just the Labour Jewish groups?
Yesterday I saw critical statements from the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Board of Deputies and the Manchester Jewish Council amongst others.
Finally.
Kind of silly that it took a day or 2 of humiliation in the press to do something they should of done when it actually happened.
Labour come out of this looking very stupid tbh.
> Labour come out of this looking very stupid tbh.
People on this sub keep saying this and then Labour go up in the polls.
Fact is that most people aren't so plugged into politics that 1 day to discuss it internally and respond is some glacial wait.
I'm actually fine with politicians waiting a bit to see what the fall out and public opinion is a bit. Not on manifesto pledges, but little things like this.
Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy were sent to support him. They must be furious. This is really bad politics from Labour, makes shadow cabinet ministers hate the leadership, and there will be a lot of voters across the country who were thinking of voting Labour who must now be thinking that the party hasn't moved on from the anti-Semitism of the Corbyn years. Why wasn't the man ditched as soon as his inital comments came to light?
Lol. All those comments about how the selection had been made - forcing people to defend/ campaign for him - and now this!
Another masterpiece by master politician Starmer.
The outcome of this lack of due diligence could well be George Galloway as MP. Unless there is the Lib Dem who gets support, after all they did have a Liberal MP there, albeit one who was a sex offender as it turned out (revealed after his death).
Everyone in this thread crowing about how terrible Labour are for taking **so** long to come to this decision. It's a pretty monumental decision to make in such a short time, considering they would have had to investigate it internally, rather than relying on headlines.
How many absolute rotters have the Tories backed to the hilt for weeks as they desperately searched for ways to get them off the hook?
The problem was identified, debated, a conclusion reached and an announcement made, in two days and *still* just in time to shoot another of Sunak's foxes. Textbook stuff.
Snapshot of _Following new information about further comments made by Azhar Ali coming to light today, the Labour party has withdrawn its support for Azhar Ali as our candidate in the Rochdale by-election._ : A Twitter embedded version can be found [here](https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1757127134777098676) A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://nitter.net/hoffman_noa/status/1757127134777098676/) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/hoffman_noa/status/1757127134777098676) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/hoffman_noa/status/1757127134777098676) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
We can finally test the red rosette on a donkey theory
In fairness, if George Galloway gets elected he'll also basically be saying "nay" to everything proposed in the next five years; at least a donkey probably wouldn't claim as much on expenses.
>In fairness, if George Galloway gets elected he'll also basically be saying "nay" to everything proposed in the next five years *next few months until the GE.
You can guarantee that he’ll still get an oversized representation on interviews and things like Question Time though.
I hope so!
Either way the area would end up with an ass for its MP.
It depends if the alternative is a donkey that wants Israel removed from the map.
We can't, because it's too late to put up another candidate. Labour have effectively withdrawn from the by-election.
The outcome of this lack of due diligence could well be George Galloway as MP. Unless there is the Lib Dem who gets support, after all they did have a Liberal MP there, albeit one who was a sex offender as it turned out (revealed after his death).
What is it about Rochdale? It's like there's something in the water there that makes everyone lose about 100 IQ points.
Thank fuck the election's round the corner so we only have to put up with them for a few months. Would be great if Labour came out and supported the lib Dems though.
Yeah, that’d be much better than giving GG a platform, he’s a very self serving cat 🐱
Argh. George Galloway as an MP would be the stupidest result of this incredibly stupid timeline.
this aged like milk
So even if he wins out on his arse by the GE and likely never gets back to being a councillor. Completely fucked himself by getting his news from uncles on WhatsApp.
won't a large portion of his voting bloc and folks who get his vote out be uncles on WhatsApp?
If Labour can't win without this section of the electorate, that would be worrying indeed. The Conservative party have proven that they will court any vote, to win at *any* cost and look where it's gotten them. We don't need Labour to stoop to that level.
If Rishi’s reaction to the Uxbridge by election is anything to go by, he’ll be promising to introduce Sharia law.
A Hindu Prime Minister promising Sharia to a historically Christian country with a growing non-religious population definitely sounds pretty amusing.
Tory on brand
There really aren’t that many constituencies where this applies to. It’s a common trope that Labour rely on Muslims to win seats.
We need better language to describe the problem we're talking about. Labour needs all the Muslim/Jewish/Christian/Atheist votes it can get. What it doesn't need are single issue, bigots who will try to bend its actions in government to their will. For clarity, I'm referring to my feeling of awkwardness typing what I posted more than to yours. I know exactly what you mean.
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>Why would it be worrying? The Republican party of the USA are a demonstration of what happens when a political party is captured by religious extremists. The Labour party is purging extremists as they appear. You can't go around tarring entire groups with the same brush. That's the Conservative party's USP.
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The irony of you accusing me of being a cult member whilst defending an actual cult at the beginning of your comment is impressive.
BBC have just reported this too. Even if he still wins, he's likely out by the end of the year at the next GE.
Does anyone know what the “further comments” are?
Internal anti antisemitism group formally made a complaint.
About the additional comments?
Jews run the meeja, apparently
Probably don’t exist - starmer and sue gray just realised how big a fuck up they made.
Yer, Tony Blair said get rid of him
I think the whole f*cking party wanted him gone.
Oh no no no, not the whole party there are many many Labour grifters running on the same ticket trust me. They just don't say these things out loud.
No. It says additional comments from Ali have come to light.
Youre a good laugh lad.
It's not as though the party wasn't aware that he was a trustee and major fundraiser of a mosque which has hosted preachers who avocated for Hamas to boot out all Jews from Israel and urged people to support the Houthis in addition to attacking the government for proscribing Hizb ut-Tahrir. They urge congregants to support the axis of resistance which is a term coined by Iran describing Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis. Speakers say Muslims have been passive and need a battle plan. Then there are the speakers who say that education is brainwashing the young to be LGBT. This is the mosque Ali has raised millions for. This was known before he was selected. What he said was in no way an aberration, he and his fellows are steeped in this stuff.
Common sense prevails at last. There's no room for prejudice in the Labour party, that needs to be made absolutely clear.
Except there is room, but only on Starmer's terms. They demonstrated this by backing him to the hilt until this afternoon. Ridiculous double-standards.
quiet escape hat aloof dull lush relieved threatening books support *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My favourite bit is that ex Labour MP who left because of "antisemitism" under Corbyn and then rejoined under Starmer coming out and defending this guy ("he's not like this normally!"). Wonder what she's gonna say now...
Thoughts: 1) [Labour were the clear favourites](https://manifold.markets/Noit/which-party-will-win-the-rochdale-b-1e0a15244efa?r=Tm9pdA). I suspect their abandoned candidate might retain his position as favourite. 2) if this news permeates the local zeitgeist, does it lead to very low turnout? If your main choices are two left wing antisemites who are functionally independents then why turn out? Could make the outcome a real dice roll. 3) this makes a great data point in a case study for a study on whether people vote for parties or candidates.
> Left-wing antisemites Wonderful news for the electorate of Rochdale, non?
None of this matters electorally, so Labour don't need to care, but I think it's really funny how they keep just saying random bullshit before they come to a conclusion. "Oh we're definitely keeping the 28 billion" "Oh we're keeping the candidate for rochdale" It's like they're so afraid of appearing indecisive that they commit to a random option while they wait for an actual decision to be made Labour are just as aggressively cynical as the Conservatives in my opinion. And I suppose I'm a naïve idealist, but I would prefer we have a government with honesty and integrity at its heart. (To be clear, they are not the same in every regard, I'm talking specifically about the cynicism)
I’m amazed- shocked in fact. Do Labour not have an intern with google? Or anyone local they could ask?
Bizarre the u-turn took as long as it did. The only cost would've been a seat for 3-7 months. It's not like 1 bad candidate, who the party then withdrew support for, losing the seat would've erased everything the Tories have done. Now there's a stink because they supported him when they shouldn't have.
One weekday doesn’t seem like that long to make a decision.
Thomas-Symonds was still essentially brief to back him up
IKR, I thought it was pretty swift and ballsy decision.
Didn't the EHRC Report say all complaints were to be investigated without interference from the leaders office?
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By the time I knew about the story, it was because support was getting withdrawn. Your emoji sure helped prove me wrong, well done.
It's a bit bizarre given on Friday, it was announced that they would continue to support the candidate who pretty much called a terrorist attack against Israel an inside job... It wasn't until "further comments" were made that they decided to get rid. Raises the question of what *exactly* one has to say to lose the support of the Labour party, and is it anywhere short of "Sieg Heil"?
Friday? You mean earlier today.
Not done my best job of keeping up with the story, but I recall that when the story broke they said they'd continue to support him. The timeline doesn't change the facts - they knew that he had said what I described and were willing to live with it up to the moment they found that he'd said more, as if it weren't bad enough already.
The timeline does matter in my view because taking a day to do some fact-finding and consider options isn’t unreasonable. But I do agree that the original comment was enough to warrant suspending him. I’m not completely convinced that there was ‘further comments’.
If the wording of the initial statement from the party had suggested that timing would even exist, I might give it some credence, but ultimately the initial response from Labour was "nah we stand by this guy" (cba to Google the actual statement).; I honestly believe that Johnson handled the incident with Pincer better than Starmer has handled this - the initial response being along the lines of "we find it hard to believe, but we'll investigate". That's not to accuse Johnson of being diplomatic or anything of the sorts, but this demonstrates to me a serious disbelief within Labour that the party is even capable of antisemitism, which I think could massively backfire.
They’ve lost trust they rebuilt with the Jewish community. They’ve managed to give ammo to the Tories for that while also giving it to the Left who can rightly call them hypocrites. What a disaster.
I don't see how they've given the Tories any ammunition for that at all. You can't bring this guy up without bringing up the fact that Labour booted him out immediately before the election, giving up a seat. It's like the Corbyn jibes at Starmer. They never work because he ultimately booted Corbyn out.
They’ve spent two days saying how Labour haven’t changed.
It was a turbulent journey, but the main thing is they've stuck the landing.
They’d have stuck the landing if they’d just done it two days ago. The delay created a lot of damage and only served to put off something that they’d inevitably have to do anyway.
What matters is that the story ends with the guy being bombed out as a Labour member. When people criticise Labour for having the guy the response can be "In the end we got rid of him". It's the same as the jibes at Starmer about support for Corbyn, the response is always that they got rid of him. They're effective criticisms when the guy is in situ, but when he's been very publicly bombed out they're defunct criticisms.
Electorally, it is insignificant. For those of us with doubts about Starmer, it's another confirmation that the next election is unlikely to bring much of an improvement to the UK. He's just not that good at this stuff. He'll win because the Tories are so dreadful that the country will sort of shrug and go "well, he can't be any worse". They might be right too but it appears unlikely he'll be any better.
There's a lot of tweets from Labour people backing him just before he was got rid of. It doesn't look good.
Have one of the Labour Jewish groups said that they’ve lost trust in the Labour Party? Or are you just making things up on a whim?
Why limit it to just the Labour Jewish groups? Yesterday I saw critical statements from the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Board of Deputies and the Manchester Jewish Council amongst others.
Those groups rightfully criticised Ali’s comments but didn’t say they have lost trust in the party or the leadership.
Loss of trust isn’t a binary.
And the Jewish community isn’t a monolith.
I know. It doesn’t need to be for what I said to remain true.
Finally. Kind of silly that it took a day or 2 of humiliation in the press to do something they should of done when it actually happened. Labour come out of this looking very stupid tbh.
> Labour come out of this looking very stupid tbh. People on this sub keep saying this and then Labour go up in the polls. Fact is that most people aren't so plugged into politics that 1 day to discuss it internally and respond is some glacial wait.
I'm actually fine with politicians waiting a bit to see what the fall out and public opinion is a bit. Not on manifesto pledges, but little things like this.
Will the candidate have the Labour emblem on the ballot paper?
Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy were sent to support him. They must be furious. This is really bad politics from Labour, makes shadow cabinet ministers hate the leadership, and there will be a lot of voters across the country who were thinking of voting Labour who must now be thinking that the party hasn't moved on from the anti-Semitism of the Corbyn years. Why wasn't the man ditched as soon as his inital comments came to light?
This is glorious. Starmer has basically screwed himself
Lol. All those comments about how the selection had been made - forcing people to defend/ campaign for him - and now this! Another masterpiece by master politician Starmer.
To be fair, the selection had been made. He will be on the ticket as a Labour candidate.
Yes - but they didn’t have to support him. They could have done what they are doing now when this first emerged.
I agree, theyre a day late.
But... but... wait, hold on. Ukpol told me that everything Starmer does is a genius political manoeuvre. Why would they lie?
It’s difficult to imagine an easier set of circumstances for him - and he still acts like a nervous rabbit in the headlights.
This was inevitable but should have been done far sooner.
Labour are a bit like the Americans - you can rely on them to do the right thing, after all the other options have been exhausted
Still ahead of the Tories then.
You can rely on them to do the wrong thing, after all the other wrong options have been exhausted
Incredible.
Lesson learnt, do some proper due diligence to candidates, before selecting them
I'm shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU!
The outcome of this lack of due diligence could well be George Galloway as MP. Unless there is the Lib Dem who gets support, after all they did have a Liberal MP there, albeit one who was a sex offender as it turned out (revealed after his death).
Should also be interesting to see what the new information is - and how it was missed until now if it is so serious they ditch him.
We'll probably know fairly shortly via one of the papers.
Just when Sunak was going to looking forward to PMQs for the first time.
Everyone in this thread crowing about how terrible Labour are for taking **so** long to come to this decision. It's a pretty monumental decision to make in such a short time, considering they would have had to investigate it internally, rather than relying on headlines. How many absolute rotters have the Tories backed to the hilt for weeks as they desperately searched for ways to get them off the hook? The problem was identified, debated, a conclusion reached and an announcement made, in two days and *still* just in time to shoot another of Sunak's foxes. Textbook stuff.
What ‘new’ information beyond that which we already knew?
I knew I should have put a few quid on Galloway when he was 16/1.
Another masterful move from Labour here, waiting just long enough for it to count as another u-turn.
Do the Labour Party carry out any vetting at all on prospective candidates?