This will keep happening until you get leftwing candidates standing explicit platforms to address material conditions rather than wanging on about the Middle East.
I disagree. Yes, terrible housing conditions in Rochdale and elsewhere need to be addressed and fixed. But it's not an either/or situation.
Many people care about their own personal material conditions, poor quality housing, homelessness, low pay, poor educational outcomes, health inequalities, and so on.
But that doesn't preclude them from caring about what's going on in the Middle East and it being a political issue here that sways people's opinions and votes.
Not least because we're partly responsible, in that Palestine was a British Protectorate before we fucked over the Palestinian people with the Balfour declaration.
There are many Palestinian-born people and British-Palestinians resident here. There are British-Palestinians who were caught up in recent events, many of whom might've been killed, many of whom have family members who've been killed. And if they've not been killed or bereaved, they or family members have been injured and/or they've been suffering through overstretched hospital facilities or lack of medical care or lack of food and water or collapsed infrastructure, ie without functioning sanitation leading to rise in disease, lack of electricity, and so on.
So it's not just some random shit happening in the Middle East that no one cares about. It's the political/personal equivalent of the Kevin Bacon game, ie six degrees of separation, in that it's not happened/happening to people on the other side of the world who we haven't heard of and don't care about, it's people we know personally, or it's our neighbour's family, or it's our doctor's family, our child's classmates family, or it's our colleague's partners family, etc, etc.
Many of those killed, bereaved, injured or otherwise adversely impacted have relatives here, school or university classmates, colleagues, neighbours, friends from mosques or community groups or mums and toddler groups or five-a-side football teammates or whatever.
Rochdale has a relatively high proportion of sub-continental Asian Muslims who will no doubt be thinking about the military and humanitarian response to Russia's attack on Ukraine as compared to Israel's massively disproportionate and indiscriminate response against an overwhelmingly civilian population. There will undoubtedly be lots of Muslims in Rochdale who've been wondering why the government and Labour Party rightly condemn Russian atrocities and help arm Ukraine and call for a ceasefire...
Yet by way of contrast, former human rights lawyer Sir Keir Starmer failed to condemn Israel's collective punishment, ie war crimes. Why is that Labour will support white Europeans but not brown Middle Eastern Muslims (who are in the mess they're in because of us, let's not forget)?
Labour has, for many, many years, taken the votes of working class Asian Muslims totally for granted.
And so maybe what's been happening in the Middle East and will be a factor for the wider electorate in Rochdale, people who recognise injustice when they see it? Maybe there will be lots of prospective voters who've been involved in Palestinian Solidarity Campaign over the years, anti-war/anti-arms trade campaigns, or y'know people who just generally think bombing the shit out of a defenceless population, as well as blatant targeting of hospitals, ambulances, schools, journalist and UN facilities and workers is really, fucking, heinously, criminally wrong, and why the fuck aren't Labour saying and doing more about this?
Does sound like he is talking about some of the genuine issues in the constitutency:
