Keir Starmer already has an independents problem in parliament
There will also be huge pressure for the Labour government to reassess the legal position on arms exports to Israel
Keir Starmer was beaming as he celebrated Labour going into government in the early hours of this morning. He knows, though, that even with this huge majority that he has won, managing the Labour Party is going to be much more difficult than expected. A number of seats were either lost or run very close by: he was beaten by independent campaigner Shockat Adam.
Some senior MPs including soon-to-be cabinet ministers Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood were given the fright of their lives in their own seats: Streeting scraped back with a majority of just 528, while Mahmood’s team oscillated overnight between being confident and terrified that she would lose to independent Akhmed Yakoob. In the end, she held with a 3,421 majority.
Jess Phillips, who resigned from the Labour front bench over Gaza, was nevertheless nearly unseated by a Workers Party candidate, winning with just 693 votes. Both Streeting and Phillips described the campaign as being one of the worst they’d been through: Phillips said the behaviour of some of her opponents was “gruesome”. MPs don’t forget their campaigns easily.
More urgently than that, there will also be huge pressure for the Labour government to reassess the legal position on arms exports to Israel. The Conservative government line had been that the legal position remained the same but that if there was any evidence of Israel breaking international humanitarian law, then that would affect the export licensing.
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