15 February 2024 , 17:51
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Nobody outside Rochdale (and not everybody in it) had heard of Azhar Ali until he put both feet in his mouth.
But he’s earned a place in political history as the man who threw away a Labour seat and boosted rock-bottom Tory election hopes. Ali was dumped by Sir Keir Starmer for absurdly claiming that Israel encouraged the murderous Hamas attack to allow an invasion of Gaza.
Rochdalians now have the unenviable task of choosing from a ragbag of candidates, none of whom is fit to represent the constituency. They include the seat’s disgraced former MP Simon Danczuk, suspended from Labour for sexting a teenager, and preening dandy George Galloway, another Labour reject.
What an unholy mess, and what a hideously indulgent distraction from the big issue behind this storm in a Lancashire hot pot: the carnage taking place in Gaza. Paralysed by vacillation over anti-Semitism in its own ranks, Labour has nothing serious to say about a gruesome war taking the lives of thousands of innocent women and children.
It’s embarrassing, and pains me to say it, but a Tory Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, and his Tory predecessor Lord William Hague, have more constructive ideas to offer than the Opposition front bench. The old diplomatic hands argue against an Israeli army onslaught on Rafah, the last refuge of fleeing civilians, and for a long-term political solution involving recognition of a Palestinian state.
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But common-sense debate is lost in the fog of a phoney war in the Pennine foothills. The good people of Rochdale deserve better than this pantomime. More to the point, it diminishes the horrors of slaughterhouse Gaza.
That is inexcusable.