Last week’s U.S. midterm elections handed Democrats both chambers of Congress, as voters punished U.S. President Donald Trump for his war with Iran and the gas prices that came with it. Even U.S. Vice President JD Vance admitted as much. Crucially, it was the anti-establishment left that stole the show. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants and an unapologetic critic of Israel, became the first Muslim ever elected to the U.S. Senate. He has rightly called Israel’s destruction of Gaza a genocide, opposes U.S. military aid to Israel and told The New York Times plainly: "I don’t believe in ethno-states.” On election night, he had a message for the pro-Israel lobby as well: "To AIPAC, who spent $42 million against us: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to beat you twice.”

El-Sayed was not alone either. In Maine, Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger, ousted Republican Senator Susan Collins after clearly stating that "what’s happening in Gaza is genocide.” In Texas, James Talarico defeated Ken Paxton by more than 12 points, having publicly turned down AIPAC’s money. And New Jersey sent Adam Hamawy, a surgeon who volunteered to treat wounded Palestinians in Gaza, to the House of Representatives. Darializa Avila Chevalier, whose anti-war advocacy and record on Palestine have been truly exemplary, will join him there, as will Melat Kiros, Claire Valdez and Donovan McKinney – and the list goes on.

Predictably, progressives the world over greeted the results as a sign of hope, each finding in them a reflection of their own fortunes. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who faces a general election later this month, declared thus: "It happened in Brazil, it has just happened in the U.S., and it will happen soon in Spain.” In Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, re-elected just last month, joked that his defeated rival Flavio Bolsonaro had jinxed Trump by visiting the U.S.: "He arrived in the United States, Trump lost.”

Britain was no exception. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who succeeded Keir Starmer in July as the supposed standard-bearer of the Labour Party’s soft left, promising the public to "give them hope back,” told The Economist that "the pendulum has swung away from populism” and that "people are looking for something more hopeful, something different, more unified.” Labour lawmakers were more effusive still. Darren Jones, who until July served as Starmer’s chief secretary, hailed the "brilliant election results from our sister party.” For him, this was proof that "hope and love trumps money and division.” Similarly, Nadia Whittome celebrated the "historic victories” of "progressive Democrats.” And Naz Shah addressed El-Sayed directly: "When you vilify, smear and demonize good people who refuse to let your hate define them, other good people don’t stand by. They stand up and vote for hope over fear.”

One would think, then, that Labour shares the values it is so eager to celebrate. It does not. In Britain, people of similar political persuasions have been relentlessly demonized, not least by Burnham’s own government. Only last month, Burnham told the House of Commons that the Green Party’s "Zionism is racism” motion was "wrong,” "antisemitic” and something "this side of the House will have nothing to do with.” Last week, Labour pulled out of power-sharing arrangements with the Greens on 11 local councils, from Sheffield to Lewes, with party chair Bridget Phillipson declaring that Labour "cannot work with any party that supports it – at any level of government.” The Greens’ offense was to put into a conference motion something not far from El-Sayed’s own view of ethnostates. So much for good people refusing to stand by.

Nor is any of this new. Days before nominations closed for the 2024 general election, Starmer’s Labour removed Faiza Shaheen as its candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green. Her profile reads remarkably like El-Sayed’s: the child of immigrants, a Muslim, an Oxford-educated scholar of inequality and a critic of Israel’s war on Gaza. (In fact, El-Sayed attended one of her campaign events in South Woodford in 2019.) Among the posts held against her was one she had merely "liked,” complaining that critics of Israel are assailed by people "mobilized by professional organizations.” Labour also took issue, she said, with her talking about her "experiences of Islamophobia” in its ranks. Yet El-Sayed taunted AIPAC from the stage on election night, and Labour lawmakers cheered all the same.

The hypocrisy, of course, is to be expected at this point, and it is hardly confined to deciding who may stand for Labour or share power with it. In breaking with the Greens, Phillipson invoked a "moral obligation” and insisted that their motion "crosses a line.” Labour evidently knows where to draw lines around the words of its critics. Around the deeds of its own government, those lines are rather harder to find.

Take the illegal Israeli settlements, for example. In September, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband made quite a show of announcing a ban on settlement trade and warning those who "finance or facilitate illegal settlements” that they would "face the full force of U.K. sanctions.” Bloomberg reported at the time that British diplomats had privately assured Washington the measures were "largely symbolic.” That assurance appears to have been honored. According to an Al Jazeera investigation published this week, British public bodies have since awarded 18 new contracts worth 10.7 million pounds ($14.2 million) to firms linked to illegal Israeli settlements. Fourteen of them, mostly for roadworks in England, went to subsidiaries of Heidelberg Materials, whose Israeli arm owns a quarry in the occupied West Bank. Apparently, this was not "crossing a line.”

It seems, therefore, that for Labour, El-Sayed’s victory is something to celebrate, not to emulate. It costs nothing to applaud a Muslim critic of Israel who sits in Washington and owes nothing to Labour’s party machine. What would the party have made of El-Sayed had he been born in Chingford rather than Michigan? In all likelihood, he would have been deselected long before any voter could choose hope over fear. "Michigan chose hope,” El-Sayed declared on election night. Labour, as ever, would rather borrow it.