Labour’s Pat McFadden says Sir Keir Starmer has taken the “tough but necessary decision" to withdraw support for Rochdale by-election candidate Azha Ali after "new information and more comments" came to light. Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 Keir Starmer has taken the tough but necessary decision today to withdraw support from our
00:07 candidate in Rochdale. When Keir Starmer became leader of the Labour Party he said he would
00:13 change the Labour Party and expect that every candidate and MP would operate to the highest
00:19 standards and although it was a difficult decision, today he's put those words into
00:24 action and unfortunately we've had to take this difficult decision.
00:28 New information and more comments have come to light which meant that we had to look at
00:34 this situation again. Once we saw those comments Keir Starmer took a swift decision to take
00:42 the tough and necessary action to withdraw support from Mr Ali's candidacy.
00:47 Well I think the fact that you've got the very rare circumstance where a political party
00:53 is withdrawing support from a candidate after nominations have closed so that he can't be
01:00 replaced as the Labour candidate shows that Keir Starmer takes his statements about changing
01:06 the Labour Party, takes his statements about rooting anti-Semitism out of the Labour Party
01:11 extremely seriously and even though this was a tough decision to take, he took it and in
01:17 doing so knows he did the right thing.