RUTHFULLY YOURS

Labour leaders in recent days have had to distance themselves from two parliamentary candidates who have been accused of antisemitism. Azhar Ali, who is running in a by-election for the safe Labour seat in the northern town of Rochdale, was caught on tape last year suggesting Israel had allowed the Oct. 7 Hamas attack to proceed as a pretext to invade Gaza. Mr. Starmer dithered for two days after this tape was released by the Mail on Sunday last weekend over whether to allow Mr. Ali to remain in the party. He finally withdrew support when the Mail released a longer recording that revealed Mr. Ali had also inveighed against “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters.”

Graham Jones, Labour’s candidate for a seat in Hyndburn in the next general election, was taped at the same event referring to “f— Israel.” Mr. Starmer has also stripped Mr. Jones of his eligibility to represent the party. Critics inside and outside Labour are calling on Mr. Starmer to discipline other Labour politicians as well. At least one of these politicians heard Messrs. Ali and Jones deliver their remarks at that event and didn’t challenge them. Others have made different objectionable statements about developments in Israel and Gaza.

It’s an electoral nightmare for Labour and Mr. Starmer, and for more reasons than the obvious.

The obvious is that Mr. Starmer was supposed to have purged antisemitism from the party already. Mr. Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, embraced the far-left fringe’s fantasies about Jewish control of the capitalist markets and loathing of Israel as a “settler-colonialist” project of Jews and Americans. On his watch, his allies in Labour leadership all but stopped investigating allegations of antisemitic abuse among party members.

Voters noticed, and Mr. Corbyn led Labour to a historic defeat against Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2019. Voters didn’t trust Mr. Corbyn on economics, but they really didn’t trust him on culture: Labour’s serial antisemitism scandals helped drive off working-class voters, who flocked to the Tories.

Mr. Starmer’s clean-up job since replacing Mr. Corbyn in 2020 has been impressive. He apologized to Britain’s Jewish community for his predecessor’s failings, and purged Corbynistas—including Mr. Corbyn. Despite some hemming and hawing about international law, Mr. Starmer has held firm to his view that Israel has a right to defend itself after the Hamas attack.

This week’s antisemitism scandals put all that work at risk. But the greater danger to Mr. Starmer’s electoral prospects isn’t his politicians, it’s his voters.

Post-Oct. 7, Labour’s antisemitism problem has been the tendency of anti-Zionism and outright antisemitism to bleed into each other. That’s especially true within Britain’s Muslim population—which has become an important part of Labour’s base. Particularly in Rochdale, where Mr. Ali’s connections within the large Muslim community were viewed by the party as an electoral asset.

This is an ethno-religious community whose members didn’t bat an eye as Messrs. Ali and Jones said things that repulsed most British voters once they hit the pages of a newspaper. The kindest explanation for Mr. Starmer’s delay in ousting Mr. Ali wasn’t fear that to do so would hand that parliamentary seat to the Conservatives. It’s that this act of Labour discipline instead clears a path to victory for George Galloway, a crank on the far left running as an independent spoiler who’s even worse on many of these issues than Mr. Corbyn.

It’s bad enough that Mr. Ali is the sort of politician Labour was prepared to nominate for that seat. It’s far worse that Mr. Galloway is the sort of politician a core Labour voting bloc might elect instead.

This suggests that what’s happening here is more than a party fumble. This episode feeds into a much larger controversy developing in Britain around immigration and cultural integration. The question raised by these Labour ructions, and by controversies last year over anti-Israel protests on important civic occasions such as Armistice Day, is whether the U.K. is properly assimilating migrants. That a substantial population of immigrants or their first- or second-generation descendants support views that offend mainstream sensibilities points to a problem.

What would a Prime Minister Starmer do about that? Labour in recent decades has struggled to answer that question, not least because its urban left wing tars as racism any attempt to bolster assimilation. The Tories by now may be too politically exhausted to press the question effectively. But if they do, Mr. Starmer could find himself in trouble despite his big lead today in opinion polls.