While this is true, politics is unfortunately about feelings and optics, not actual facts.
People believe that Labour is antisemitic, and therefore that impression is going to stick with people even if it might wholly be false.
I’m not a fan of Starmer either but politics is a stupid game and I’m not so sure a different response would be a good idea to the public, as much as he should have said literally anything else.
There was definitely a lot of support for this merger - people see it as ABK’s “redemption arc”, and there was a lot of excitement around ABK games coming to GamePass / other platforms like Steam because of this.
Ultimately this is how people think: What is in the merger for them? And they don’t think macro, but just simple things like “now I can finally get this game on [platform]”