SA’s Arms Deal whistle-blower Andrew Feinstein rocks UK PM Keir Starmer in his political backyard

Andrew Feinstein, second from right, campaigning with fellow independent candidates including Jeremy Corbyn (centre) and Leanne Mohamed. (Photo: Supplied)

By Peter Fabricius

9 Jul 2024

Andrew Feinstein slashed Starmer’s majority in his London constituency, mainly because of Starmer’s prevarication over Gaza.

Apology: in the original version of this article, we suggested that Gary Lubner made political donations to the Labour Party to "help Israel" and, in part, attributed those donations to the party's “uncritical support for Israel” in the Gaza conflict. Mr Lubner, however, informed Daily Maverick that his donations were entirely unrelated to Labour's foreign policy and that he has made significant charitable donations to both Israeli and Palestinian charities working towards a two-state solution, a position which he has always supported. Daily Maverick retracts the statement.

Andrew Feinstein, the former ANC MP who blew the whistle on corruption in South Africa’s Arms Deal more than two decades ago, rattled Labour Party leader Keir Starmer by slashing his majority in his constituency in last week’s UK general elections.

Feinstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor, challenged Starmer in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency in London largely on Starmer’s refusal to call for an unconditional ceasefire in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

feinstein starmer Andrew Feinstein campaigning in Holborn and St Pancras constituency, London. (Photo: Supplied)

He didn’t beat Starmer, who led Labour to a landslide victory and is now prime minister. But he won 7,312 votes, which more than halved Starmer’s majority from 27,763 votes at the last elections in 2019 to just 11,572 last week.

And there are signs that by rocking Starmer in his political backyard, Feinstein may have helped shift Labour’s policy on Israel and Palestine — and perhaps also helped effect other policy changes.

As The Times of London noted this week: “Starmer has a populist threat to his left too. He won 18,884 votes in Holborn & St Pancras, with almost half the majority he had in 2019, after a Jewish socialist campaigning to ‘end the genocide’ in Gaza won more than 7,000 votes.”

The Times suggested that Starmer had already responded to Feinstein’s challenge in making one of his key cabinet choices, “appointing as his attorney-general Richard Hermer KC, a highly regarded and, by chance, Jewish barrister who has been vocal about Israel’s apparent human rights violations in Gaza, and who is likely to inform the position on diplomatic sanctions and arms exports to Binyamin Netanyahu’s government”.

“This was the first time in electoral history that the person running to be prime minister and likely to be prime minister because of his party’s advantage around the country, not only hasn’t increased his majority, but saw his majority slashed from 27,000 to 11,000,” Feinstein told Daily Maverick in an interview.

“And his vote was halved.”

50,000 doorsteps

Feinstein resigned from the ANC in 2001 when it refused to investigate the Arms Deal and moved to Britain. He is now a filmmaker, author, campaigner and activist. He is the executive director of Shadow World Investigations, which scrutinises mainly the international arms trade.

Feinstein said Starmer was emblematic of everything that was wrong with politics not only in the UK, but around the world where money and not principles shaped policies.

He ran against Starmer because “our politics in the UK are broken in that our politicians have never felt more removed from the people they are supposed to represent”.

Starmer claimed to be a force for unity, but instead had been “incredibly divisive … trying to push out anybody who’s vaguely left-wing”.

Starmer had been “absolutely appalling” on Gaza, said Feinstein, but had not wanted to discuss that or any other real issue, such as the cost-of-living crisis, the shortage of affordable housing and inequality.

feinstein starmer corbyn mohamed Andrew Feinstein, second from right, campaigning with fellow independent candidates including Jeremy Corbyn (centre) and Leanne Mohamed. (Photo: Supplied)

Partly because they felt the main political parties offered no real choice, more than 1,300 independents had stood in this election.

“Most of us knew that we had very little, if any, chance of winning, because only four independents have ever won seats in parliament in the last 50 years in this country.

“So, it wasn’t because I thought, oh, I definitely need to be in parliament. In fact, serving in this very sclerotic parliament didn’t appeal to me at all. But I thought it was important that he was challenged.

“And so I eventually decided to do it, to try and show that politics can be done a different way, that if you want to represent people, you actually need to talk to them and to establish what the issues are and to work with them to resolve those issues.”

He knocked on about 50,000 doors during the six-week election campaign. People opened their doors and asked him what he was doing there. When he told them he wanted to engage with them on issues they cared about, most thought the idea bizarre.

And yet the effort was worthwhile.

“The polls put me at 6% [of the vote]. And the result was 18.9%. And standing against the person who was about to be prime minister, I think it came as much of a shock to me as it did to him.”

He gave a lot of credit to the hundreds of volunteers who helped him work those 50,000 doorsteps.

“That had a big impact because the mainstream media completely ignored the campaign.”

His higher-profile campaigners included Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who berated Starmer as a “genocide enabler”.

Gaza ‘the tipping point’

For Feinstein, though he had many issues with Starmer, the “tipping point for me was Gaza.

“Given the work that I do on the global arms trade, I believe that Britain is complicit in a genocide, that it is illegally, in terms of both British and international law, selling weapons into the conflict, using our tax pounds to effectively subsidise those weapons.”

Feinstein said Starmer’s “lack of any sort of backbone on the issue, his uncritical support for Israel” was partly a question of ideology, but partly also the result of his main donors.

Feinstein said Starmer had forbidden anyone in his shadow cabinet from calling for a Gaza ceasefire.

“Anybody who did was either kicked out of the party or not reselected or disciplined.”

Feinstein said Starmer had not allowed anyone in his shadow cabinet to stand on a picket line of striking workers. “And this is supposed to be the Labour Party.”

‘Rightward shift’

Was this all about Starmer positioning the Labour Party in the centre to pick up swing votes?

“Well, I would say to the right of centre. He was appealing for Tory votes, which, you know, was completely unnecessary given how abject the Tories have been for years here. Labour was always going to win this election and he didn’t have to go this far right to win.”

Feinstein said Starmer’s basic political instincts — “authoritarian and undemocratic” — had also driven “this massive rightward shift in the Labour Party”.

Starmer had “lied compulsively to win the leadership of the Labour Party”, pledging to continue outgoing leader Jeremy Corbyn’s policies but doing “exactly the opposite”.

Feinstein said that, for example, Starmer had first said that Israel had the right to withhold water and power from Gaza, but when this had provoked huge outrage he had simply denied saying it.

“I just think he is sort of emblematic of everything that is wrong with our politics, not just here, but everywhere in the world, where there’s this sort of sense that you can say whatever you need to say to get elected. It doesn’t matter, you don’t get held to anything.”

He said Starmer’s people had instigated the charges that Corbyn was anti-Semitic, “which is complete nonsense, the guy’s a lifelong anti-racist. He has a big Jewish support base in his own constituency, which he’s represented for almost 40 years. They adore him.”

Starmer had “weaponised” the anti-Semitic charges “to ensure that nobody close to Corbyn could really compete for the leadership of the party. Also, he’s expelled more anti-racist Jews from the party in the time that he’s been leader, which has only been since 2019, than all other Labour leaders in the entire history of the party.”

Feinstein said Starmer never bothered to reply when Feinstein tried to intervene on behalf of these Jews. He had also ignored Feinstein when he wrote to him offering, as a global expert on the arms trade, to review the Tory proposal to spend £209-billion renewing the UK’s Trident nuclear missiles.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Keir Starmer lifts Labour to power — now to confront Britain’s staggering list of challenges

One of the big local issues Feinstein said he had campaigned on was housing, because the local county council, which had been controlled by the Labour Party for years, was “effectively trying to push poor people out of the borough, to get rid of social and council housing and build fancy office blocks and luxury apartments and things like that.

“That was the thing most common on the doorstep that people complained about. And they were told, ‘But we’ll give you alternative accommodation.’ And they discovered that it’s in Liverpool or Bolton. It’s sort of just treating people, you know, as though they’re not human beings.”

Then they discovered that the council had given £1.5-million in subsidies to Google to build a new office in Camden, right next to the council office, while local people hadn’t had repairs done to their homes despite complaining for eight or nine years.

Feinstein also campaigned on climate change, which he said was a big issue in the UK. He said Starmer, who had agreed to abide by Tory spending rules, initially pledged £28-billion to a new green plan and then slashed that to £4-billion a few weeks before voting day.

‘Act of resistance’

Starmer had claimed his manifesto was one of change for working people.

“But even the biggest trade union affiliated to the Labour Party, called Unite, refused to endorse the manifesto because it’s so weak on workers’ rights.”

Feinstein said his campaign was “an act of resistance” against this rightward shift in Labour Party politics and politics in general.

He said people who shared his views would set up local structures and a national movement to oppose these rightwing politics, “which are practised now by both the major parties”.

This sort of resistance to mainstream politics had resonated with many people in this election. This was evident after five independents — all of them ex-Labour, including Corbyn — were elected last week compared with only four independents elected to Parliament in the previous 50 years.

“It speaks to a shift in the nature of politics, and that a lot of people here just felt unrepresented by the established parties,” said Feinstein.

He said he would get involved in the new movement, locally and internationally, though he was not sure he would run for Parliament again.

“I obviously have a job and I’m writing a book at the moment on Yemen and Gaza called Making a Killing: How the West Profits from Atrocities in Yemen and Gaza, which is about the arms trade and the collapse of the international rule of law.”

Feinstein was in no doubt that his campaign had been worthwhile even though he didn’t win.

He cited The Times article quoted above which said that it was the fact that the independents got so many votes and that Starmer did so badly in his own constituency that influenced some of Starmer’s first decisions.

These included appointing as his attorney-general Hermer, “who has been quite outspoken on Israel’s violating international law” and scrapping the controversial Tory plan to have asylum seekers processed in Rwanda.

If Starmer followed through and did change the UK’s position on Gaza, “I think that that might make them more supportive of what South Africa has done at the ICJ,” he said, referring to Pretoria taking Israel to the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide in Gaza. DM

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South Africa

50,000 doorsteps

Gaza ‘the tipping point’

‘Rightward shift’

‘Act of resistance’