It is a sign of how badly Keir Starmer’s leadership has been performing that it came as a huge relief to his allies when Labour held on to the Batley and Spen constituency by the skin of its teeth. The party’s candidate, Kim Leadbeater, saw off her Conservative rival by just over three hundred votes — less than 1 percent. Labour’s vote share dropped by over 7 percent compared with its 2019 performance, which Starmer’s outriders like to characterize as the worst since the 1930s.

As a rule, opposition parties do not lose by-elections to the government — especially not one that has been in power for more than a decade. After the fiasco in Hartlepool at the start of May, when the Tories routed Labour by a huge margin, Team Starmer feared a second humiliation. As it turned out, support for the Conservatives dropped as well as Labour’s, though not to the same extent. The only candidate to have gained support was a maverick outsider, George Galloway, who came from nowhere to win more than a fifth of the vote.

The Batley and Spen result has clear implications for Keir Starmer’s leadership and Labour’s future election prospects, which will no doubt receive ample attention. But the internal politics of the Labour Party are much less important than what Batley and Spen tells us about Britain’s political mainstream and its shameful treatment of ethnic minorities — in particular Muslims. This by-election campaign plumbed new depths, with the Muslim population of the area branded as homophobic antisemites because they didn’t find Labour’s pitch appealing. Labour’s dominant right-wing faction is fully complicit in that collective monstering.