Candidacy of Jewish left-winger in Starmer’s seat prompts pair to issue statements trying to con pro-Palestinian voters – but they don’t even bother to tweak the wording significantly

Keir Starmer is rattled – and reportedly ‘raging’ – at the announcement that left-wing Jewish heavyweight Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP who fought apartheid under Mandela, is going to contest Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency at the next parliamentary election. Rightly so: Feinstein’s substance, integrity and principle cast a cold light on Starmer’s lack.

But the incompetence and arrogance of the Labour right can’t help showing through. Clearly someone among Starmer’s advisers has decided it’d be a good idea to finally issue a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza to try to mollify the huge numbers of voters who are outraged at Starmer’s sabotage of earlier parliamentary motions calling for one and his support for Israel’s ‘right’ to commit war crimes.

So he and Lammy duly issued statements – or, to be more precise, one statement with hardly any modification and with most of the relevant portions identical, word for word, including the final sentence:

Nobody’s buying what this pair are selling

Shoddiness, incompetence, panic, or just the basic inability in that essential Establishment skill of faking sincerity – whatever the mix, Starmer and his acolytes are just not very good. That may be fly in an interview with media giving them the usual easy ride, but it won’t fool voters furious at their complicity in Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, in Gaza.

Instead, it just shows how scared Labour is of a challenge by someone of substance, even in seats where they held a big majority last time round.

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