He cleaned Labour of antisemitism, then guarded Britain’s Jews with record funding — but only after the fires, the stabbings and Heaton Park. A verdict on Keir Starmer as he leaves office.

Barring surprises, Keir Starmer will leave Downing Street on Monday. He announced his resignation on 22 June; he is expected to depart on 20 July, with Andy Burnham poised to succeed him. In his resignation speech, Starmer cast “ripping out the poison of antisemitism” from Labour as one of his defining achievements.

That was not self-flattery. On that narrow but morally central question, he had a serious case.

He inherited a party that the Equality and Human Rights Commission had found responsible for unlawful harassment and discrimination against Jews. He put Labour through a binding action plan, tougher complaints procedures, consultation with Jewish stakeholders and a prolonged monitoring process — one the EHRC concluded in 2023 only after confirming the necessary reforms had been implemented. Mainstream Jewish bodies noticed the change early. In June 2020, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, CST and the Jewish Labour Movement said matters were “moving in the right direction.” After Labour’s 2024 victory, the Board said Starmer had transformed a party once “riddled with antisemitism.”

But that credit sits beside a harsher truth. While Labour became at least a little bit safer for Jews, Britain became more frightening for many of them. On CST’s latest revised figures, annual antisemitic incidents stood at 4,298 in 2023, 3,556 in 2024 and 3,700 in 2025. CST’s 2025 report found that anti-Zionist motivation featured in 48 percent of incidents, and that “Zionist” or “Zionism” featured in 462 incidents, often as a euphemism for “Jew” or “Jewishness” or alongside other antisemitic sentiment. The same report records the fatal attack on Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur as the first lethal antisemitic terror attack in Britain since CST began recording incidents in 1984.

So was Starmer bad for the Jews? The honest answer is more uncomfortable than either his admirers or his critics would like.

Credit where it is due

Starmer did more than issue pieties. He marginalised Jeremy Corbyn — who lost the Labour whip in 2020 and was barred from standing as a Labour candidate in 2024. He rebuilt institutional relations........

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