Holborn and St Pancras Votes Tomorrow With Labour Ahead
Zack Polanski, the Green leader, faces Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali in the seat Keir Starmer vacated on 1 September. Labour has held it since its creation in 1983 and is the favourite; Polanski calls the contest “really on a knife-edge” and the deputy Labour leader Lucy Powell says a Green win is “unlikely”. Labour figures are now ruling out ever working with the Greens.
Green members voted 1,022 to 813 in Brighton on Sunday to treat Zionism as racism and call for a single Palestinian state, against the wishes of four of the party’s five MPs. Labour’s chair Bridget Phillipson called it “shameful”; one minister cannot foresee the parties working together and a government official wants a coalition formally ruled out. Senior Liberal Democrats want their Southwark coalition ended, the peer Lynne Featherstone saying: “I would ditch them. Grow a pair!” The motion’s proposer, the British-Palestinian artist Lubna Speitan, was named in 2015 United States court filings as a “close friend” of Minh Quang Pham, jailed for forty years in 2016 for supporting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; she offered to testify for his defence about his mental state. The Greens say she holds no official position and that they take allegations of this nature seriously; she has not responded to the BBC. Ms Abdi-Wali, 42, leads Camden council and came to Britain from Somalia as a child. The local grievance is HS2, which permanently takes 14,404 square metres of green space and playgrounds from the constituency for a line now due to open between 2040 and 2043.