‘Hello, Andy’

Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation as prime minister of Britain couldn’t have come too soon, in our view, despite the fact that we had expressed some optimism when he came in. Sir Keir began his leadership of Labour, after all, with a stirring speech vowing to purge the party of the antisemitism that had prospered in it during the years when the party was led by Jeremy Corbyn. “Guardedly hopeful” was how these columns viewed Sir Keir’s accession.In the event, the Labour premier faltered out of the gate. He acceded to Downing Street on July 4, 2024. Some two months later, a new poll showed him 16 points underwater, a plunge of 27 points. Labour, we noted, earned 411 seats with a little more than 33 percent of the vote. We called it “shaky stuff for a landslide” and without a detailed agenda. Its slogan may have been “change,” but Britons appeared to be weighing whether all change is good.It looked as if Sir Keir’s effort just might rehabilitate Labour, which, though we don’t share its policy positions, we called “one of the storied political parties of the West.” Yet from the get-go, Labour began a retreat. It started with the very issue, hostility to Britain’s Jews and Israel, it had vowed to address. So hostile to Israel was the new foreign minister, David Lammy, that when he showed up in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to receive him.With good reason, we noted. Britain had withdrawn its challenge to the International Criminal Court’s prosecution of Mr. Netanyahu. “What a betrayal of the glorious promise of Sir Arthur Balfour’s bequest,” we said. So virulent was the hostility that at Cambridge allies of the Palestinian Arabs filmed an alleged pro-Palestinian protester using a knife and paint to damage a famed portrait, by Philip Alexius de László, of Lord Balfour.One might think that a prime minister pledged, as Sir Keir was, to defeat antisemitism in the Labour Party and beyond would have made it a priority to get to the bottom of the attack on the portrait of Balfour. The crime was allegedly filmed by allies or backers of the alleged perpetrator. Yet the country that gave us Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson has thrown up its hands and laid the case aside. Was Sir Keir ever serious about ending hostility to Israel?The modern roots of Labour’s antisemitism crisis predate World War II, on the eve of which a Tory government, led by Neville Chamberlain, issued its notorious White Paper, proposing, in the shadow of the gathering holocaust, to restrict Jews from fleeing to the land of Israel. The postwar foreign minister, the Labour Party’s Ernest Bevin, sought to enforce the White Paper, which became an ideological albatross that has burdened Labour ever since.Sir Keir, in his farewell speech, claimed to have expunged the streak that has tarnished the party’s name. Can the next prime minister sort all, or any, of this out? The leading candidate is Andy Burnham, a Mancunian. His apparent ability to bridge the factions within Labour, the Spectator reports, is summed up at Westminster by a joke. “A Blairite, a Brownite, and a Corbynite walk into a bar,” the joke goes. The bartender says: “Hello Andy.”

‘Hello, Andy’

‘Hello, Andy’

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