“They’ve gone too far” says ex-Labour councillor now standing against Anneliese Dodds

In the fourth of our video interview series #CanaryCandidates, we meet independent candidate Jabu Nala-Hartley – standing against Labour’s Anneliese Dodds

In recent years, Jabu Nala-Hartley was a prominent part of the Labour Party in Oxford. But she tore up her membership over Keir Starmer’s stance on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As she told the Canary:

Starmer made a statement about condoning collective punishment towards the Palestinians, and that was really really hard to take in terms of the fact that they were willing to let Israel carry out… airstrikes, bombings against civilians and kill women and children… It was as if we were not here in my party… Different shadow ministers reiterated this point…

That was what made… some of us say ‘no, they’ve gone too far’. So different councillors resigned… [In] Oxford, ten of us resigned.

And speaking about the fervent pro-Israel position of Western leaders like Joe Biden and opposition leaders like Keir Starmer, she said:

Because they have given Israel the impunity to go ahead and do what [it likes], Israel is out of control now.

Nala-Hartley’s Labour opponent in Oxford East is Anneliese Dodds, the Party Chair from 2021 to 2024 who holds a similar pro-Israel stance to most of the party’s top team under Starmer.

“Challenging the institutionalised parties”

Jabu Nala-Hartley has a background in trade unionism, education, and the campaign for a Living Wage. And she said that, in Oxford, “the cost of living crisis has been a… battle for a lot of people”, with people working on low pay having to supplement their wages with “charitable things like foodbanks”. She added:

Where I live, there’s a low life expectancy in comparison to other areas. So the inequalities are quite deep in Oxford, because we’ve got that big gap between rich and poor.

The community, she insisted, has seen their “youth services being smashed, they’ve seen their education smashed”. And she explained:

I’m encouraging people to vote because they need to participate in the political process. But also, we need a change. We need to hold politicians accountable. We need… a democratic process that engages everyone.

We need to see people challenging not just this government, [but also] challenging the institutionalised parties to understand that when we give them our vote they need to really represent us and not let us down. We need to see communities thrive again…

There’s a culture of despondency around these areas in terms of… having gone through years of… the violence of austerity, where people have lost so much…

We are having to see children living in poverty in England, which is something that… if you tell people somewhere in Africa they can’t believe it…

We’ve had a growth of billionaires and yet the poor are getting poorer. So we need the poor to really advocate… for their plight.

Local and international issues are connected

Jabu Nala-Hartley also called on voters to keep public services in mind, saying:

Believe in the services that were there. And believe that they were in safe hands… in public hands…

Those are the things that people should really think about in terms of fighting for what they have or [trying to] get back what has been lost.

And highlighting the connection between destruction abroad and at home, she emphasised:

If you don’t look after the issues in Palestine, if you don’t think about what is happening in Sudan, it’s slowly trickling back to the UK…

We are at a stage whereby, if we don’t really stand up and be counted, I feel they’re coming for us next, just like how they’re coming for the healthcare system.

For more on Nala-Hartley’s comments on the election and other issues, see the full interview on our YouTube channel:

Featured image via the Canary