For years, Azhar Ali dreamt of being a Labour MP. Now he won’t be. If he wins next week’s by-election in Rochdale — and he still might — Ali will not be permitted to sit for Labour, after being caught on tape spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The odd thing is, after a week of speaking to people who know him, I’m far from convinced that Ali actually believes the things he said.
What Ali said was as follows. First, that Israel had known about Hamas’s October 7 attack in advance, and allowed the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust to go ahead, in order to provide justification for an assault on Gaza. Second, that “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” were to blame for the suspension of a Labour MP.
The confusing thing about this was not just that nothing in Ali’s history indicated he might hold such views, a Jewish community leader told me last week. It was that Ali had spent much of his life trying to combat anti-Jewish sentiment. He was well known for supporting Jewish friends when they experienced racism.
Ali has been a Labour councillor for over ten years, and in 2020 received an OBE for services to the community. He was an adviser in the Blair and Brown governments, working on interfaith relations.
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Odder still: three days before The Mail on Sunday revealed Ali’s comments, but after he made them, Ali met the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester. He told them that he had personally seen incidents of antisemitism, and had been appalled. He said that, if he were elected, he would continue to be a firm ally of the community. Everyone in the room believed him.
When I began researching this article, the questions I wanted to answer were: How does someone go from being a lifelong ally of their Jewish friends to believing antisemitic tropes? What happens in their life to cause this? What media do they consume? Who influences them?
But I don’t think this is what happened to Ali. Instead, he is “simply a politician who tells the audience what they want to hear”, said a person who had known him for years. “Half an hour further down the road, and he’d be preaching differently to a different audience.”
The real question is more sinister: Why did Ali think that repeating these conspiracy theories would be helpful to him? Why did he think that this was what his audience wanted to hear?
The audience for Ali’s comments was made up of prominent Muslims in Hyndburn, Lancashire. Labour councillors had been warning that Muslim voters were moving away from the party because of Sir Keir Starmer’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Ali’s job was to fix this.
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Hyndburn is not the only place where this is happening. A recent poll for the Labour Muslim Network found that only 60 per cent of Muslims who backed Labour in 2019 intended to do so again. Labour MPs in constituencies with large Muslim populations are expecting independent candidates to challenge them at the general election over the party’s position on Gaza. In Ilford North, Wes Streeting’s constituency, a candidate has already been identified. Rushanara Ali, in Bethnal Green and Bow in east London, is also expected to face a challenger.
In Bethnal Green Road, I did not find much appetite for this. One man told me he expected he would not “be on the same page” as such a candidate. Another, accompanied by a hijab-wearing female friend, told me that he was worried about antisemitism in Labour, but would be voting for it reluctantly, because he did not want “another four years of Tory government”.
In Rochdale, I found Muslim voters who were passionate in calling for the government to help Gaza. But nobody was spewing antisemitic conspiracy theories. Mohammed Amin — co-chairman of the Muslim Jewish Forum of Greater Manchester — told me he had seen no drop-off in Muslims attending their events since October 7. So why did Ali think that repeating these claims would help his cause?
Certainly, antisemitic conspiracy theories are being circulated in parts of Muslim areas such as those in Rochdale and Hyndburn. British Muslims were likely to feel strong sympathy with the plight of Gazans, Amin said. “Most people don’t learn much about it, they don’t learn much of the history, and when you see thousands more people being killed on one side than the other, it’s easy to conclude that one side must be evil and the other is innocent. Once you believe that somebody is evil, you believe that they could do anything, including letting an attack on their own civilians happen,” he said.
Amin worries that social media has had “an incredibly damaging effect”. “Now, with Facebook and WhatsApp groups, it’s just so much easier to spread this rubbish,” he said. He had seen conspiracy theories crop up in some of the big community WhatsApp groups he is in. There, he said, they were largely ignored, because those in the groups were generally well educated but he worries about groups where this is not the case.
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Such groups are playing an important — and under-the-radar — role in this by-election. Unrepentant fans of Ali have been circulating a graphic saying he was “sacked by Starmer for speaking on Palestine”, and “It’s time to teach Starmer a lesson.”
This type of conspiracism is not just a concern among Muslims. Analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that antisemitic conspiracies after October 7 were common in far-right, far-left and Islamist online groups. From there, they trickled into the mainstream: into community WhatsApp groups and onto pastel-coloured graphics on Instagram, where they were presented without sources or context.
They found fertile ground. Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said that within hours of October 7 she saw people she knew sharing Instagram posts along the lines of, “What did people expect after years of occupation?”, or finding ways to justify the massacre. Last week the Community Security Trust published data indicating that antisemitic incidents had hit a record high — almost doubling the previous annual record.
It is hard to say what impact conspiracy theories will have in this by-election. The former Labour MP, Tony Lloyd, left a 9,668 majority when he died in January. The Conservatives are a poor second and will be lucky to cling on to that.
The former Labour MP here, Simon Danczuk, is standing for Reform and will be hoping to hoover up the fewer than 4,000 people who voted for the Brexit Party last time, plus any disaffected voters who do not fancy George Galloway. He is standing as an independent on a pro-Gaza platform and is likely to perform well at the polls. Ali’s name will still appear next to the word “Labour” on the ballot.
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Clearly, some of his supporters think this controversy might help his chances with some voters, perhaps winning them back from Galloway. Many had voted for Ali by post before the revelations emerged. “We’ve already voted Labour, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” a couple I met in Rochdale High Street told me despondently.
When Rochdale is in the news, it never seems to be for a happy reason. Corruption, grooming gangs, managed decline. Most of the voters I spoke to were weary that, once again, the place finds itself a political football: outsiders flooding in to make their ideological points, with little concern for the town itself.
“I’ve got a lot of support for civilians, people who are not part of any fighting. You’ve got to stick up for these people,” said Mohammed Miah, a 39-year-old out shopping with his teenage daughter. “But just that? No. If I see someone just getting on that sort of bandwagon? Look pal, if you’re only talking about Gaza — which I feel passionately about — but you’re not talking about Rochdale, you’re not talking about the issues and problems that we have.”
Miah was born and raised here. “I don’t recognise a lot of this place anymore,” he said. “These high streets, the amount of places that are closed. Nobody actually cares. Nobody actually cares about Rochdale itself.”
