The real reason for Labour’s Rochdale Islamist muddle
Azhar Ali, the Labour candidate in this month’s Rochdale byelection, has apologised for remarks he made at a private local Labour meeting last autumn. He now describes his own words as “deeply offensive, ignorant, and false”. He had said that, before the October 7 Hamas massacres, Israel “deliberately took the security off ”, so that the massacres would give them “the green light to do whatever they bloody want” in Gaza. At first, Labour kept him in post. Last night it suspended him.
Why the initial hesitancy? After all, Mr Ali was repeating a particularly repulsive current conspiracy theory, a re-confection of the old lie that Jews cunningly engineer their own persecution. People who say such things should not be a candidate for any respectable political party.
Labour faced two dilemmas, however. One, already reported, is that nominations are now closed, so Mr Ali’s name cannot be removed from the ballot paper. The party therefore wanted to make the best of a bad job and stave off victory by the extreme anti-zionist and Workers Party of Britain candidate, George Galloway.
The other dilemma, unreported, helps explain why Louise Ellman, the brave Jewish ex-mp who returned to
Labour after Jeremy Corbyn departed, stood by Mr Ali. It is because he has a long-standing record of opposition to Islamist extremism, including supporting her against attacks.
The fact he said what he did is not proof that Mr Ali has joined the lunatic fringe. It is, unfortunately, evidence that in Rochdale politics, it is not a fringe at all. By speaking as he did, he must have seen those anti-semitic elements as powerful and wanted to advance his candidacy by placating them.
For this unscrupulousness, he deserves to be thrown out. But it is also true that, if Galloway wins as a result, Rochdale’s all too numerous Islamist sympathisers will be overjoyed.
In recent days, we have had startling opportunities to look at the state of mind of two men who run a great power and one who aspires to do so again. The cast – in order of appearance – is Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The first was interviewed in Moscow, at inordinate length, by a sympathiser, Tucker Carlson. The second gave an unusual and noisy 12-minute press conference in Washington. The third – Trump – was speaking in one of his rambling mass rallies for fans in South Carolina, whose primary is imminent.
Which was the most alarming performance? The general verdict was that it was Biden’s. Attempting to disprove the claim, by the independent prosecutor who had examined his misuse of classified documents, that he suffers from memory loss, the president seemingly did the opposite, confusing Mexico and Egypt, saying that he held his dead son Beau’s “rosary of our Lady of – [the name escaped him]” and other errors. The press conference degenerated into chaos.
Putin, by contrast, was completely calm, seemingly on top of everything he chose to discuss. He gave a clear, even accomplished, account of Russian history from 862 AD. It was also mendacious and boring, but what he called his “serious talk” served his turn.
He contrived to clothe his own aggression against Ukraine in the cloak of statesmanlike wisdom, hatred of Nazism and even Christian zeal.
The Russian president easily escaped the few challenges that Carlson, without conviction, offered. He said a peace deal with Ukraine had been possible early on, but Boris Johnson had dissuaded Zelensky from doing it. Nato/the US is the aggressor and has been from way back, he said. There was stuff about Dostoyevsky and the “human-oriented” Russian soul. There were soothing words about the natural moderation of his biggest pal, China.
As for Trump, he said he had told “one of the presidents of a big country” that if European Nato countries did not pay their share for defence he would not help defend them against Russian invasion: “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”
Although Trump is right about European backsliding, his remarks were disgusting because they deliberately incited Putin to further war. They have caused outrage, but he is probably happy with that. He believes that plenty of American voters agree with him. Quite possibly, he is right.
In terms of how his power is now perceived, Biden came off the worst, causing some Democrats at last to say openly that he is too old to run again. I must say I do not share the general view that he is too old to understand the issues. He clearly does suffer from nominal aphasia – the inability to get out the right word, especially the right name, at the right moment. But when goaded, he said a few things about the policy he was pursuing over Gaza, Israel and the Middle East, and showed a clear grasp of the factors he needed to weigh in the balance. He has never been a great statesman, but he remains a shrewd operator and, in international affairs, unusually experienced.
So there we have it. Putin, the worst monster in Europe since the death of Stalin, looks well in charge as his own, rigged, election approaches. Trump, the biggest ego-maniac ever to enter the Oval Office, is where he wants to be in his election race. And Biden who, for all his faults, is not in himself a danger to world peace, is torpedoed, perhaps below the water line. Not a good week.
Trump’s remarks about Nato were disgusting – they deliberately incited Putin to further war