ANDREW FEINSTEIN, who is challenging Keir Starmer as an independent in the Labour leader’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency, called his opponent’s comments about the British Bangladeshi community “disgusting” during a campaign stop on Thursday. 

“He decided for unfathomable reasons to target the Bangladeshi community and Bangladeshi people,” said Feinstein. Starmer’s remarks, he added, were another symptom of “just how reactionary Keir Starmer’s Labour Party have become.”

During a televised interview with The Sun on Monday, Starmer boasted that “on the first few days in government” he would start putting migrants on planes back to their countries of origin.

“At the moment, people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed, because they are not being processed,” Starmer said.

Earlier, shadow paymaster general Jonathan Ashworth told the BBC that migrants “from countries like Bangladesh or wherever” would be sent home.

Feinstein called Labour’s targeting of the Bangladeshi community “disgusting political tactics” virtually indistinguishable from those of the Tories, Reform and Ukip.

“To be honest with you — and I don’t say this lightly given my own personal history in South Africa in the struggle against apartheid and in the post-apartheid government, and given my mother’s history as a Holocaust survivor — I honestly believe that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has a racism problem,” said Feinstein when we spoke during a campaign stop on Thursday.

Feinstein, who was a member of South Africa’s ANC government under Nelson Mandela, warned that “yesterday and the day before it was Bangladeshis who were being targeted, a community of whom we should all be proud. When my mother was a child, it was the Jews who were targeted. In South Africa it was black South Africans who were targeted. So for today, like every day for the last almost nine months, it’s not just that today we are all Palestinian. Today in Britain we are all Bangladeshi.”

Feinstein, whose wife is Bangladeshi, found Starmer’s remarks “personally offensive” but worse coming from “the leader of the Labour Party, a supposedly democratic and socialist party, who represents a constituency as diverse and as progressive as Holborn and St Pancras.”

Starmer’s use of the word “remove” rather than “return” was especially troubling, Feinstein said. “It’s dehumanising, and the question we have to ask him, because it’s he who made these disgusting remarks, is did he mean he wants to remove Bangladeshis who are already here? Because it wasn’t clear.”

Feinstein acknowledges he has an uphill battle to unseat the high-profile Starmer. “We announced the campaign literally the day before the election was announced,” he said.  

“We planned for a six-month campaign and then discovered a day later that it was going to be six weeks.” But he sees his campaign as the beginning of something larger.

“More importantly we are getting people who are fed up with politics engaged in politics again and we are going to build on that and we are going to create a movement in this country that will be second to none,” he said.

The mainstream media “are doing their best to ignore us,” said Feinstein, but his team have relied on other tactics, including “the fact that we just knock on doors. We’ve knocked on over 52,000 doors in this constituency.”

Inspired by that prospect of genuine change, rather than the empty slogan of Starmer’s Labour Party, people have flocked to the Feinstein campaign from across the country. 

Gill Higginson travelled down from Northamptonshire to canvass “because I want to see passionate MPs in Parliament,” she said. “I feel that Labour has moved very far to the right. I don’t understand it. We always have money for war, never for the health service, never for education.”

Like Feinstein, she fears that “if the mainstream parties aren’t offering something different I feel the whole country will move even further to the right.” That’s why it’s important to also pull in the other direction, she said. “What’s to say we can’t pull the Labour Party back to where they should be to represent ordinary people?” 

That goal continues to propel Feinstein forward, whether he wins or not. “We are going to build a movement that I think reflects the goodness, the humanity of the vast majority of people in Britain,” Feinstein said. Otherwise, he warned, we are left with “the best democracy money can buy.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is currently in London covering the elections.