Sir Keir Starmer under fire after Jamie Driscoll barred from longlist

Labour's Sir Keir Starmer is under pressure over the decision to block left-leaning Jamie Driscoll from running in the North East's inaugural mayoral election.

Unite, the party's biggest union donor, warned of "serious consequences".

Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and his counterpart in the Liverpool City Region, Steve Rotherham, also criticised the decision.

Mr Driscoll is the current North of Tyne mayor.

News that Mr Driscoll, who has been described as the "last Corbynista in power" - a reference to the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn - was being excluded from the longlist to run for the new role for the wider region was revealed on Friday.

The post will cover Northumberland, Tyne and Wear and County Durham with powers over transport, housing and skills.

A senior Labour source linked the decision to Mr Driscoll sharing a panel with filmmaker Ken Loach, who was expelled from the party amid efforts to root out antisemitism.

Figures on the left of the party have blamed "factionalism" under Sir Keir's leadership.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham warned that if Labour "remains intent on only selecting nodding heads" then it will "continue to make serious policy mistakes".

"These actions by Labour are a major mistake and have serious consequences," she added.

Mr Burnham and Mr Rotherham expressed their "concern" in a joint letter to Johanna Baxter, chairwoman of Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC).

"Whilst we appreciate the NEC's important role in upholding standards within the party, and rooting out any form of antisemitism, racism and discrimination, it also has a responsibility to ensure decisions are democratic, transparent and fair," they wrote.

"To exclude a sitting mayor from a selection process with no right of appeal appears to us to be none of those things."

They said Mr Driscoll should be entitled to an appeal process and "deserves to be treated with more respect than he has so far been shown".

Speaking on Sky's Sophy Ridge On Sunday show, Mr Driscoll said preventing Labour members from having a say over whether he should represent the North East was "frankly shocking".

Defending what he described as his "fantastic" track record, he said: "In a two-party system, if you're going to ban people who are promoting socialist views from participating in that, that is really quite anti-democratic."

Mr Driscoll defended discussing Mr Loach's films, some of which have been produced in the North East, despite the director downplaying the issue of antisemitism in the party.

He added: "My understanding is he's made all sorts of clarifications that he's not a Holocaust denier and I think he wrote a letter to the New York Times explicitly saying that the Holocaust was a real event, which of course it was."

Mr Loach, the director of socially critical films including I, Daniel Blake, was expelled from Labour in 2021 during what he called at the time a "purge" of Mr Corbyn's allies.

Shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds "strongly" disagreed with claims Sir Keir was trying to purge the left of the party.

He told Sky: "Specifically in a case where somebody shares a platform with someone who themselves has been expelled from the Labour Party for their views on antisemitism, for opposing the tough action that needed to happen, that would preclude them from being a Labour candidate going forward.

"Because when we said we'd have zero-tolerance for antisemitism, when we said we would tear it out from its roots, we were serious about that."

Mr Loach had told the PA news agency that keeping Mr Driscoll off the longlist published on Friday because they shared a platform was the "lamest excuse I've ever heard".