Cathy had voted Labour all her life. Then she heard an LBC interview with Keir Starmer. In it, he was asked if it was “appropriate” that Israel should besiege Gaza, cutting off power and water. “I think Israel does have that right,” Starmer replied. Cathy immediately resigned from the party, which she joined three years ago when Starmer was elected leader. “This has been the last straw,” she tells me. Previous straws, she says, include a raft of policies that Labour had watered down, and Tory policies that Labour would not repeal. But Labour’s position on the siege of Gaza has killed off the little faith she had left.
With that one interview and his response to its fallout, Starmer has demonstrated to some Labour voters not just his failure to engage with how strongly they feel, but a wider, more perilous vulnerability in his political project: a heartless intransigence that threatens to exhaust the goodwill so far extended to him.
