Labour’s Deafening Silence on Turkey’s Jailed Opposition Leader Raises Eyebrows

European leaders speak out as Istanbul’s popular mayor is imprisoned — but Labour remains curiously quiet.

One of my earliest acts of international solidarity came 45 years ago, when I joined a high-level European trade union delegation to Turkey, shortly after the military coup of 1980. We were a diverse group — British and European trade unionists — trying to make sense of a complex and tense political situation. George Bolton, the imposing leader of the Scottish Union of Mineworkers, brought a touch of working-class diplomacy to our first breakfast in Istanbul by placing two bottles of duty-free Teacher’s whisky on the table — a gesture meant to ease language barriers and lift spirits.

Nearly half a century later, Turkey is once again in the international spotlight. This time, it is due to the imprisonment of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Mayor of Istanbul and Turkey’s most popular political figure. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, increasingly seen as an autocratic ruler, has had İmamoğlu jailed — a move that has drawn condemnation across Europe.

İmamoğlu is the presidential candidate for the Republican People’s Party (CHP, by its Turkish acronym), a social democratic party and Labour’s sister party in the European political family. His arrest has sparked an outpouring of support from European institutions and social democratic leaders. The European Commission, Members of the European Parliament, and national parliamentarians across the continent have denounced the crackdown and demanded his release.

The Party of European Socialists swiftly dispatched a solidarity mission to Turkey, led by Stefan Löfven, the former Swedish prime minister. George Papandreou, former Greek prime minister and president of the Socialist International, travelled to a mass solidarity rally in Istanbul. He also penned a passionate appeal in the Greek newspaper Ta Nea, urging the release of the imprisoned mayor.

Amid this chorus of solidarity, one voice is conspicuously absent: Britain’s Labour Party.

So far, neither the Labour government nor the party itself has spoken out. This silence has deeply disappointed many in Turkey, who are hoping for a democratic future beyond Erdoğan’s rule.

Özgür Özel, the acting chairman of the CHP and a recent guest at Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, has been vocal about his dismay. “I want to hear Sir Keir Starmer’s voice,” he told the BBC in a late-night interview on Radio 4. “Where is England, the home of parliamentary democracy? Where is Labour, our sister party?”

Neither Prime Minister Starmer nor Foreign Secretary David Lammy — known for his principled stances on human rights and democracy — has made a public statement. Lammy, who restored some of Britain’s international standing by strongly backing Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, has offered nothing on Turkey’s jailing of a democratic opposition leader.

Özel has lamented that Labour “was speaking in small letters. It cannot be this quiet.” In an interview with Selin Bucak, a London-based Turkish journalist whose parents helped sustain the Labour-CHP bond during their exile in Thatcher’s Britain, Özel added: “This is not the solidarity we expected from a sister party. This is not befitting the Labour Party.”

A junior Foreign Office diplomat at the OSCE in Vienna issued a brief statement saying the UK was “monitoring recent events in Turkey” — a response that barely scratches the surface.

Erdoğan’s jailing of a key political rival echoes the tactics of Vladimir Putin. At a time when international focus was rightly centred on countering Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Sir Keir Starmer played an admirable role in restoring the UK’s foreign policy credibility. Part of that strategy, aligned with the EU’s, was to prevent Erdoğan from falling fully into the Kremlin’s orbit — a position shared by Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president.

Yet, leaders from across Europe’s political spectrum — especially those from Labour’s sister parties — have had no difficulty calling for Imamoglu’s release. Erdoğan himself is unlikely to heed such calls. But solidarity matters. Even symbolic support from Labour would be heard, and appreciated, by Turkey’s embattled democrats.

If David Lammy feels bound by the constraints of office, others in Labour should speak up. Emily Thornberry, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, could voice the concern that many Labour supporters feel. So too could other backbench MPs who stand for democratic values.

Labour has a proud history of standing up to autocrats. It has long been a leader within the European and global democratic left. Its silence now — in the face of a blatant assault on democracy by a NATO ally — is not just disappointing. It is bewildering.