UK voters speak to MEE about controversial pro-Israel candidate in North Durham

On a high street in the northeast of England, two men in their sixties, both called Alan, are talking about death, decline and Luke Akehurst. 

“He supports Israel, doesn’t he?” one of the Alans, a former local council worker, says of the Labour Party candidate for North Durham. “That’s him out for me.”

“The Labour man, he’s from bloody Essex,” says the other Alan, who used to work as a mechanic. “Someone told me he’ll stand anywhere if it means he gets in.”

In fact, Akehurst, aged 52, grew up in Kent, another county adjoining London. But in Stanley, a former coal mining town in County Durham, that hardly matters. 

Akehurst, who lives in Oxford and was a Labour councillor in Hackney, east London, is a southerner who had not set foot in the constituency of North Durham before becoming - as part of a process overseen by Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), a body on which he sits - its prospective MP.

He is a staunch supporter of Keir Starmer, has been the director of the pro-Israel group We Believe in Israel since it was established in 2011. 

Read more: Looking for Luke Akehurst in North Durham's left-behind towns