Luke Akehurst: Labour's pro-genocide election candidate and wannabe Robespierre, who has more loyalty to Israel than to his own country

The Labour leadership have been behaving oddly in recent days.  At a stage of the election campaign where you'd think they'd be going out of their way to avoid any whiff of controversy or disunity, they've instead been openly carrying out a factional purge of left-wingers, including Britain's first black female MP, Diane Abbott. They've also been provoking fury by stitching up Labour selections at the last minute for cardboard cutout backroom boy Starmerite loyalists.  

Whenever it's been pointed out how reckless this behaviour is, a leadership apologist has popped up to insist that ordinary voters simply don't care about internal party machinations.  Which amounts to a boast that Starmer can do the most horrendous things in plain sight, in the full glare of publicity of a general election campaign, and suffer no penalty at all.  The only rational response to that is to redouble our efforts to make sure that voters do know about what's been going on, because it's actually not that difficult to understand, and it touches on something people really care about - ie. you don't want to put bullies and cheats in positions of power, because if they treat their own people so badly, how are they going to treat the rest of us?

The veteran journalist Michael Crick likened what right-wing members of Labour's NEC have been doing to schoolboys breaking into the school tuck-shop and gorging themselves sick.  These are the people who were the minority faction on the NEC during the Corbyn years and at that point were doing everything they could to undermine the leadership.  They couldn't believe their luck in later finding themselves in effective control of the party, and have abused that position at every turn by purging left-wingers in an orgy of revenge, and installing their own mates instead.  Having seen that there is nothing that will stop them doing exactly as they please, they've now gone even further by installing themselves, literally themselves, as Labour general election candidates.

The most notorious example is Luke Akehurst, who has ludicrously installed himself as Labour candidate for North Durham even though he lives hundreds of miles to the south.  Akehurst's main claim to fame is as Labour's number one fan of Israel's genocide in Gaza (although admittedly the competition is stiff).  There are numerous on-the-record comments from him in which he opposes a ceasefire and makes extremist claims such as that the UN is anti-semitic and that videos showing Israeli atrocities were staged by actors.  To my mind, though, this is his most damning comment - 

"Personal opinions, not those of WBII: I'm in favour of the major West Bank settlement blocks becoming part of Israel, and a new Palestinian state getting compensatory land swaps from pre-1967 Israel territory. I want the Golan Heights to remain part of Israel."

The Golan Heights cannot "remain" part of Israel because they are not part of Israel and never have been.  They are Syrian territory which has been militarily occupied by Israel since 1967, and they are internationally recognised as such by the UN and by virtually every country in the world.  Apart from a very recent US decision made by the Trump administration, the only country to recognise the Golan Heights as being part of Israel is Israel itself.  Simply by using the phrase "remain part of Israel", Akehurst is revealing himself to have greater loyalty to the State of Israel (or perhaps to Donald Trump) than he does to his own country, or to international law.  That alone should make him unsuitable as a candidate, before you even get to the fact that he thinks Israel should be awarded another country's land by right of conquest.

Imagine there was a Labour candidate who was going around saying that "personally, I think Donetsk should remain part of Russia" as if "personally" is an all-purpose get-out clause (Akehurst also says his opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza is a "personal" view.)  That is the precise equivalent of what is happening here.

It used to be said in relation to Cold War espionage that agents who were motivated by money were more reliable than those motivated by principle or personal loyalty.  Akehurst always stresses that he is not part of the Israeli diaspora, so it's not unreasonable to wonder what personal reward is motivating his obsessive, unquestioning loyalty to a country thousands of miles away that is committing genocide.

If Russia had bought absolute loyalty from a Starmer aide who was standing as a Labour candidate in July, that would be considered a problem.  In fact, it would be considered an absolute scandal.

*  *  *

I've profiled the constituencies of Aberdeenshire North & Moray East and Airdrie & Shotts for The National - you can read the articles HERE and HERE.