Gaza Broke Labour. Can Andy Burnham Fix It?
The incoming prime minister's carefully worded apology marks a significant rhetorical break with Starmer. Now MPs and voters are waiting to see if it signals a genuine political reset.
It was one of the first broadcast pool interviews Keir Starmer gave as prime minister. He was in Wales, touring the United Kingdom after Labour’s landslide victory, and I asked him about Labour’s collapse in support among Muslim voters. It was not a question Downing Street was expecting. Starmer didn’t answer it.
In the reply he gave – a clip that would go on to be watched more than 2.2 million times on X – the word “Muslim” never appeared once. What he offered instead was arithmetic. Labour had won a majority. He had a mandate. The country, he seemed to be saying, had already settled the matter, and losing safe Labour seats to independents who had campaigned on a Gaza ticket was not a significant political problem.
The exchange was symbolic of a wider approach to Gaza that would shape much of Starmer’s premiership. The calculation appeared to be that Labour’s electoral coalition was broad enough to withstand losing part of its progressive base.
Days after Hamas’s attacks in October 2023, Starmer told LBC that Israel had the right to cut off power and water to Gaza. It took him more than a week to clarify his remarks, and he never apologised. By then, the political consequences had taken on a life of their own. Councillors resigned. Independents stood and, in some places, won. The Greens attracted disillusioned progressive voters. More recently, an Opinium poll commissioned by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Friends of the Earth found that more than half of Labour voters who defected to other progressive parties cited Labour’s position on Gaza as a key reason for leaving.
That political inheritance now belongs to the incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham.