Starmer showed how to fight left-wing antisemitism

Published

3 weeks ago

June 25, 2026

Jack Lubner

As British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer made his resignation speech on the steps of 10 Downing Street and set out his legacy, tackling antisemitism in the Labour Party was the first thing he mentioned.

It echoed his first ever address as Labour leader, in which he vowed to rip out anti-Jewish racism by its roots in his party. Six years later, Starmer can look on that part of his legacy with pride ‒ a promise solidly delivered.

Starmer’s election as Labour leader had a surreal quality to it. The latter phase of his campaign was overshadowed by the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdown. His victory speech was delivered to a camera in his living room and uploaded to Twitter. I joined a Zoom call of Jewish Labour campaigners to watch the results come in, unable to mark the moment together. Looking back, it feels like a different world.

But the politics of Britain in April 2020, and certainly of the Labour Party, were of a different world too. The leadership election came just three months after Labour’s worst election defeat since 1935. As Starmer said in Monday’s resignation speech, the party was bankrupt ‒ politically, financially, and morally ‒ under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) had begun its investigation into institutional antisemitism and by October that year, it would find the party guilty of unlawful acts against its Jewish members. Those members, including myself, had been abused and harassed, and our disciplinary cases were the subject of political interference. High-profile Jewish parliamentarians had left in disgust. In April 2020, the Labour Party itself was on the brink.

Here, Starmer’s personal leadership cannot be overstated. It was at his insistence that eradicating antisemitism was treated not only as a political issue, but a moral mission, a battle for the very soul of the Labour Party. And so, it was under his direction that internal processes were overhauled, antisemitic members expelled, antisemitic groups proscribed, and the EHRC’s report adopted in full. Even Corbyn was suspended and denied the opportunity to run again for Parliament. The result was the wholesale change in the culture of the Labour Party. By early 2023, it had been given a clean bill of health. At last, it was antisemites who felt unwelcome and left, and Jews who felt Labour was their political home once more.

But it would be remiss not to acknowledge the tensions between Starmer’s government and parts of the Jewish community since his election as prime minister. Hamas’s barbaric terrorist attacks of 7 October saw an immediate spike in antisemitism across the world, and the United Kingdom was no exception. The culmination of this in the deadly Heaton Park synagogue attack on Yom Kippur last year, the Golders Green stabbing in April, and the spate of arson attacks earlier this year saw fear reach new heights and, at times, anger towards the prime minister boil over. While always defending Israel’s right to exist and defend herself, the government’s decision to suspend some arms licences to Israel and to recognise a Palestinian state caused an outcry across significant sections of the Jewish community.

Yet, as Starmer prepares to leave Downing Street over the coming weeks, he will have delivered record funding for Jewish communal security and policing, the incoming ban on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Holocaust education in every school, and stronger powers for police to tackle antisemitism on marches. That is not something to be taken for granted.

But I think in years to come, Starmer’s legacy will be broader in scope. Working with Jewish Labour leaders, he delivered the blueprint for tackling antisemitism in left-wing political parties. As the Green Party of England and Wales now succumbs to its own antisemitism crisis ‒ some of it emanating from people expelled from Labour under Starmer ‒ the contrast in moral leadership has never been greater or starker. With anti-Jewish hate becoming an epidemic in many left-wing spaces across the world, Jews can look to Starmer’s leadership as a model for how to fight back. Amid all the political woe of being a British prime minister in the 2020s, this is certainly one part of his legacy he can be proud of.