There are always receipts…
Luke Akehurst, the figurehead of the hardest right faction of the Labour party, has attempted to justify the party’s unjustifiable – Labour has not even tried to justify it, just did it without explanation – decision to bar the popular and successful North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll from standing as a Labour candidate in the next mayoral election.
Akehurst chose to target – unsurprisingly – Driscoll’s appearance, or sharing a platform, with left-wing film legend Ken Loach, whose work has done more to highlight the abuse of the suffering millions in this country than the whole Labour right put together a million times over. Akehurst said that no one who ‘shares a platform with Ken Loach could possibly be a Labour candidate’, because – to paraphrase Akehurst’s bile more objectively – Loach has dared to stand up for Palestinian rights and expose the abuses by the Israeli government that pro-Israel right-wingers don’t want anyone to discuss.
But in 2016, a year and a half after becoming an MP – at a time when the renowned Loach’s long- and consistently-held views on Israel and Palestine were already well known – Starmer himself did just that. Here’s the whole thing:
The pro-Israel right’s hatred for Loach is pathological and based entirely on his principled stance on the abuse and apartheid practised by Israel, even if the language is dressed up ever so slightly.
Skwawkbox is delighted to agree that Keir Starmer is unfit to be a Labour candidate, let alone to ‘lead’ the party – but it has nothing to do with his appearance on a panel with someone whose boots he is not fit to tie.
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