Sorry, what sorry? What does it mean to apologise?
Labour's candidate in the Rochdale by-election has apologised for remarks about Israel but seems to think the words are enough to clean the slate
It has been a worse weekend for the Labour Party than its leadership might have wanted. Having to announce on Thursday that a Labour government could no longer commit to spending £28 billion each year on achieving climate targets and investing in green jobs was painful, but it had been signposted for some time. Saying it out loud must, in a way, have been a relief, though Conservatives did not hold back in attacking the opposition for a “U-turn”. But that was, to be Rumsfeldian, a known known: it was a step which Sir Keir Starmer and the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had decided had to be taken to preserve the party’s economic credibility. There had already been some trimming last summer, so the worst reaction was the rolled eyes of disappointment rather than stunned outrage.
Very much an unknown unknown, however, was the revelation by The Mail on Sunday that Labour’s candidate in the forthcoming Rochdale by-election, Councillor Azhar Ali, had openly accused Israel of allowing the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023 to go ahead for its own political reasons. Recorded secretly at a Labour Party meeting shortly after the attacks, Ali held little back:
The Egyptians are saying that they warned Israel ten days earlier... Americans warned them a day before [that] there’s something happening... They deliberately took the security off, they allowed... that massacre that gives them the green light to do whatever they bloody want [in Gaza].
That was not all. When it was suggested that Starmer was held in high regard within the party, Ali could not assent.
Can I disagree with you... A lot of the MPs I’ve spoken to, non-Muslim MPs, feel that on this issue, he’s lost the confidence of the parliamentary party.
“This issue”, of course, was the Israeli military action against Gaza and the Labour leader’s refusal to call for a ceasefire.
After a bad week of their own, the Conservatives were quick to exploit this damaging revelation. Craig Tracey, MP for North Warwickshire and deputy chairman of the party, went all in.
The fact that Sir Keir’s candidate for Rochdale is spreading these bizarre and offensive anti-Israel conspiracy theories shows that for all his bluster, he’s failed to change his party. These are the ramblings of an internet crank, not someone who aspires to be a Member of Parliament.
Tracey has a point. The suggestion that the government of Israel knew that Hamas was going to launch a deadly attack on its citizens but allowed them to be defenceless, abandoning them to their fate, so that the attack could be used to justify later policy in Gaza, is a grim one, and would only be acceptable if supported by extremely persuasive evidence. To be clear, there seem to have been signs of an imminent action which Israel’s intelligence services missed, misinterpreted or underestimated, and I wrote about how bad the government’s failures might have been shortly after the attacks took place, but what Ali was suggesting is different. He was alleging a deliberate act of commission effectively to sacrifice as many innocent Israelis as necessary in order to give the government a casus belli.
Clearly Ali had no such evidence. Relatively swiftly, he issued an apology for his remarks.
I apologise unreservedly to the Jewish community for my comments which were deeply offensive, ignorant, and false. Hamas’ horrific terror attack was the responsibility of Hamas alone, and they are still holding hostages who must be released.
The Labour Party trod a delicate line in the wake of this statement. Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign co-ordinator and a careful and calculating political mind, told the BBC: “He has quite rightly apologised and completely retracted and I hope he learns a lesson from it.” The message Labour wanted to convey was that Ali was wrong, he had apologised, and the story had nothing more left to give.
The apology has not been universally accepted. The Board of Deputies of British Jews issued a starchy statement which said:
It is clear to us that Mr Ali is not apologising out of a genuine sense of remorse. Despite what he says in his apology, we do not see how we could possibly engage with him at this time, and we believe other leading Jewish communal groups will feel similarly.
(One of Starmer’s frontbench team in the House of Lords, Baroness Merron, was chief executive of the Board of Deputies from 2014 to 2020. So it is not a reflexively anti-Labour organisation.)
There is an administrative wrinkle which binds Starmer’s hands slightly. The by-election is on 29 February, and it is now too late to change candidates. Whatever happens, Azhar Ali will be on the ballot paper as the official Labour Party candidate. Extraordinarily, the Green Party has disowned its candidate for Rochdale, Guy Otten, because of old social media posts which were critical of Islam. He, like Ali, will be in the ballot paper but the Green Party will not campaign for him, and he will not be undertaking any campaigning himself.
One can argue about Starmer’s reaction and whether he has done enough, and done all he can, in reaction to Ali’s comments. I may come back to this issue, but what I want to think about here is what apologising in circumstances like this actually means. Ali has not stinted on humility in terms of language. He apologised “unreservedly”, and corrected the record, as it were, by stating that Hamas alone was responsible for the attacks, that the hostages Hamas holds should be released and, in relation to his comments about his party leader, the “Labour Party has changed unrecognisably under Keir Starmer’s leadership, he has my full support in delivering the change Britain needs”.
This is fine so far as it goes. When you have done something wrong, apologising without qualification and acknowledging where you were in error is important, but it is not everything. There seem to me to be (at least) three important questions, without answers to which an apology, however heartfelt, is simply inadequate.
Why did you say that Israel had allowed the Hamas attacks to happen in order to give itself freedom to act in Gaza?
Did you believe sincerely at the time that what you were saying was true?
What has happened to change your mind, and why do you now think you were wrong and mistaken?
These issue matter. I don’t want to ventriloquise for Ali, but it seems to me he must either have believed that Israel had acted as he alleged (in which case, what had led him to think that, and what has now dissuaded him?), or he said it for political reasons, to portray himself as a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause and a harsh, merciless critic of the Israeli government. Given that he has adduced no evidence to explain his original statement, neither option is good, though this does seem to be a classic “fool or knave” binary.
If, as I say, he truly believed what he said was true, he should—in fact he must—explain what had brought him to that belief. The fog of war is growing thicker and thicker, and the conflict in Gaza has been particularly bedevilled by claim and counter-claim. Azhar Ali is not a bystander, but a member of Lancashire County Council since 2013 who has led the Labour group and was awarded an OBE for services to the community in 2020. More pertinently, he was one of the founding members of a Muslim taskforce created in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in 2005 to explore disaffection and address radicalisation within the Muslim community. He has described himself as “a senior government advisor, advising ministers on a range of issues including counter-terrorism”.
This is all relevant because it shows he has a long history of involvement in sensitive matters of political and religious violence and community relations. Two things flow from this almost in opposite directions: firstly, he cannot claim innocence or inexperience, which suggests he had convinced himself of what he was saying; and secondly, there was an addition burden of responsibility on him because his background and experience would give his public utterances credibility.
If he did genuinely believe what he was saying when he was recorded, why has he now apologised and recanted? The cynical explanation would be simply that he got caught, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he has a little bit more self-respect and honour than that. So what has happened? Has he read more evidence, been presented with new arguments? Has he had the impact of his words explained more clearly to him? Or has he simply has a Damascene moment, a burst of insight which revealed he was parroting baseless anti-semitic conspiracy theories? We don’t know.
I can’t see any framework more complicated than this: he was wrong then and right now (in which case what changed?); he was right then and wrong now (but is apologising insincerely because he was caught); or he was playing a political game then, has been caught out and is now, properly but incompletely, apologising. None of those scenarios covers him in glory, but without more detail from Ali himself, we cannot adjudicate.
An apology is not simply a formula of words. It is not a magical incantation which, once performed, wipes the slate clean and allows everyone to move forward. Unless we can understand Ali’s motivation when he was recorded and his motivation this weekend, his apology is meaningless, because it tells us nothing, except that he was found out. If his apology is meaningless, we, as the public, should not accept it, nor should the voters of Rochdale: it says nothing about the substance of what he did wrong, why he did it or how (and why) he has changed. As things stand, so far as I am aware, we can say only two things with confidence: he made damaging and unsupported allegations about the conduct of the Israeli government; and he now withdraws those allegations. Anything else is supposition.
There is, of course, one factor which casts a shadow over all of this, and that is the candidacy of George Galloway at the head of the Workers’ Party of Great Britain. The one-time Labour MP created the party in 2019 to “defend the achievements of the USSR, China, Cuba etc” and it is “unequivocally committed to class politics”. But let’s be clear: like anything Galloway does now, it is a vehicle to mobilise discontent among Muslims. He stood under its banner in the Batley and Spen by-election in 2021, and his main campaign issues were the Palestinian territories, the conflict in Kashmir and the suspension of a teacher at Batley Grammar School after he used the cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed published in Charlie Hebdo in a religious studies lesson. Galloway came third in the by-election with 8,264 votes (22 per cent).
From 2012 to 2015, he was MP for Bradford West as a member of the Respect Party. The previous Member, Labour’s Marsha Singh, stood down in March 2012 due to serious illness (and died that July). He was a Sikh from the Punjab and had first been elected in 1997. During the campaign, Galloway was heavily critical of the influence of baradari on the local Labour Party: an Urdu word literally meaning “brotherhood”, he blamed it for corruption and favouritism, resulting in:
Second- and third-rate politicians particularly but not exclusively from the Labour Party being elected to the city council on the basis not of ability, not of ideas, not on records of experience but on whether their father came from the same village as someone else’s father 50 or 60 years ago.
He also stressed how much he had in common with the constituency’s 38 per cent of Muslim voters: The Times described Galloway playing on his “quasi-Islamic values”, while one leaflet declared:
God KNOWS who is a Muslim and he KNOWS who is not. I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. I, George Galloway, have fought for Muslims at home and abroad, all of my life.
He also campaigned on his opposition to the war in Afghanistan. It was a successful platform, and he beat Labour’s candidate, Imran Hussain, by 10,140, winning 56 per cent of votes cast. At the 2015 general election, however, a new Labour candidate, Naz Shah, ousted him by 11,420 votes.
Galloway had begun this love affairs with the ummah in 2005. He stood under the Respect Party’s colours in Bethnal Green and Bow, challenging Labour’s Oona King who has caused some controversy among the Muslim voters in her constituency by voting to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Galloway is a long-standing advocate for the Palestinian cause and had opposed the war in Iraq fiercely; but he had a long-established relationship with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whom he had visited in Baghdad in 1994. On that occasion, he had paid public tribute to Saddam, telling him:
Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability… I can honestly tell you that there was not a single person to whom I told I was coming to Iraq and hoping to meet with yourself who did not wish me to convey their heartfelt, fraternal greetings and support.
Galloway defeated King by the slender margin of 823. At the count, he made the cause of his victory explicit: “Mr Blair, this defeat is for Iraq and the other defeats that New Labour has received this evening are for Iraq.”
When Sir Tony Lloyd died in January and a by-election in Rochdale became imminent, Galloway was always likely to stand, given the current controversy over the conflict in Gaza. He announced his candidacy less than two weeks after Lloyd’s death and declared his purpose to be “to teach Labour a lesson”. The constituency is 30 per cent Muslim, which prima facie offers Galloway a good chance of reactivating his usual platform.
Azhar Ali knows all of this. He knew what effect criticism of Israel, however it could be couched, would have in these circumstances, and he knows now that his apology will be seen by Galloway as a weakness. Outside a mosque on Friday, Galloway was asking:
How are you going to answer your children, your grandchildren, on judgment day when you are asked: “What did you do when Keir Starmer asked you to endorse what he has done?”
The fact that Ali has had to moderate, to apologise and to temper criticism of Israel will be grist to Galloway’s mill.
This story will develop over the next few days. Starmer and the Labour Party are in some ways in a difficult position: even if they emulated the Green Party and disavowed their candidate, he cannot be replaced, so they could be forgiven for seeing their options as sticking with Ali or giving a huge advantage to Galloway, who is hated like poison in the Labour leadership. But there is a principle here too: what does it mean for a public figure to apologise now? There has to be transparency and explanation, and there have to be consequences. I don’t know if Azhar Ali is a bad man at heart, but he is not, as yet, being entirely honest and open. With the stakes this high, that’s not good enough.