Normal view

The UK Must Break With Israel

‘We got Gaza wrong’, said Andy Burnham just before becoming Prime Minister. The apology was necessary after Keir Starmer’s two-and-a-half years of supporting the destruction of the Strip and losing progressive voters as a result. But if Burnham’s stance made strategic sense, limiting the contrition to his predecessor’s original mistakes in 2023 was too clever by half. Anyone who cares will know that Labour continued to supply Israel with surveillance data from RAF flights and parts destined for its F-35s, while welcoming its leaders to Britain at the height of the genocide. Throughout this bloody saga, ministers have proudly proclaimed themselves ‘Zionists’, tarred pro-Palestine protests as ‘antisemitic’, introduced a law to prevent repeated marches and banned Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist group’.

Palestine activists are therefore sceptical about Burnham’s supposed reset. Some have cautiously welcomed Ed Miliband’s appointment as foreign secretary, as well as hints that the government may take a stronger line on Israeli settlements, sanction additional Israeli ministers and restrict more arms supplies. Still, few believe that Labour can deliver anything like the change that’s needed.

The Genocide Continues

On Gaza, Burnham still talks only of the ‘disproportionate’ character of ‘what has happened’. This is the language of 2023. It fails to recognise that almost three years of deliberate Israeli destruction have inflicted appalling death, hunger and suffering. Gaza contains the world’s largest population of child amputees, and a new UNICEF study shows that the genocide has imprinted itself in children’s bodies, with one in eight showing signs of stunted growth.

Few apart from Israel’s apologists now doubt the genocide. According to polls, half the British public recognise it, despite media suppression of the term itself. Spain, the only other social-democratic government in Europe, has recognised that this is what is happening, as have Burnham’s cabinet ally, Louise Haigh, and Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. The PM needs to catch up.

The terminology is important. It captures the defining features of Israel’s policy: that it has, in the language of the Genocide Convention, ‘deliberately inflicted’ on the Palestinian national group ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction’ in Gaza. The Convention binds the UK to ‘prevent and punish’ genocide when the risk is evident, not years later when a court finally delivers a ruling. This duty was triggered in January 2024, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was a ‘plausible risk’ and deemed it necessary to order Israel not to commit genocide.

Now, for more than thirty months, Britain has not only failed in its duty but has remained actively complicit in the crime. The ministers, civil servants and commanders involved in negotiating the RAF’s aid to Israel could even be charged for it. Complicity has been fostered by the Labour Party’s longstanding support of Zionism, the Labour right’s reliance on pro-Israel donors, and its weaponisation of antisemitism to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The costs are now apparent in the rubble of Gaza, as well as in Britain’s changing electoral map.

The UK must belatedly fulfil its duty to prevent genocide and make reparation for the policies of the Rishi Sunak and Starmer governments. The genocide is ongoing and nothing has been done to aid the survivors. Meanwhile, Israel continues to expand its control of Gaza and disobey the nominal restrictions imposed by Donald Trump’s ‘peace deal’.

Recognising the genocide means that normal international relations can no longer apply to Israel; the situation demands nothing less than a repudiation of the UK’s alliance with it. The UK-Israel Military Cooperation Agreement, signed by Boris Johnson in 2020, under whose secretive terms Britain has aided the genocide, must be cancelled. Normal economic and cultural relations should be suspended. Members of the IDF who have taken part in the genocide should be denied entry to the UK, and visa-free access for Israelis should be ended to enable this.

Sanction the Occupying State

A coherent anti-genocide policy would certainly require the mother of all U-turns from Burnham. He has retained several ministers in senior roles who bear direct responsibility for the worst policies under Starmer. The temptation will be strong to keep any shift within the bounds of the symbolic and performative.

But that approach has already been tried: Starmer criticised settler excess, banned some weapons sales and sanctioned individual ministers, with little to no impact in winning back former Labour voters. It is betting a lot on Burnham’s communication skills to believe that this will work a second time. The Palestine Action ban also continues to be a major embarrassment. Almost every Labour MP voted for it, with only nine against, even though seven in ten Labour members opposed it. Unless the Supreme Court rules the ban unlawful, Burnham will have to grasp this nettle and lift it.

Labour continues to focus on intensifying violence and displacement in the West Bank, yet its response there seems to be an escalation of Starmer’s token sanctions. Labour Friends of Israel is lobbying against even this, on the grounds that sanctions on settlements will become sanctions on Israel.

But this is precisely what the sanctions should be doing: targeting the occupying state, not just the settlements it has put in place or the individual extremist politicians at its head. The illegality of the occupation was confirmed in 2024 in a comprehensive judgment by the ICJ. The Labour government, despite the faux support for international law of Starmer and his attorney general Richard Hermer, has still to respond to this ruling. A key test of the reset is whether Burnham will rise to the judgment’s challenge.

At the beginning of 2026, Labour might have worried that an anti-Israel stance would seriously undermine Britain’s relationship with the USA. But the fallout of the Iran War means that all bets are off; Israel is increasingly criticised on all sides of US politics. Burnham might reflect that the war into which Israel bounced Trump — and which Starmer aided even while claiming not to (assistance Burnham has apparently decided to continue) — is a major contributor to Britain’s continuing cost of living crisis.

Israel is increasingly the weakest link in both far-right politics and the USA’s imperial network. Breaking with it is not only the right thing to do for Palestine; this could also be how Britain finally begins to move away from its decades-long dependence on the United States. If Burnham and Miliband cannot execute this shift, the Palestine movement, the Green Party, and the left must make it happen.

The Cost of Existence

If lowering the cost of living is the paramount test for any new governing regime, how might Andy Burnham go about it? Under Starmer and Reeves, a chorus of ministers responded to rising bills and darkening forecasts by claiming that they would pull ‘every lever’ to keep prices down.They didn’t. A wide range of levers — including perhaps the most immediately effective, price controls — were left untouched, allowing Reform UK to feed off the lifeblood of public despair. To meet its promise, Labour would have had to adopt radical policies on a scale rarely acknowledged, underpinned by a firm political resolve.There are many other priorities for a truly Labour administration, not least the fumigation that’s needed after the infestation of Mandelsonian right-wingers like Morgan McSweeney. There are international challenges across Trump’s war-torn empire, from Palestine to Iran. There’s the domination of the bond markets over economic policy, the cancerous influence of the City, out-of-control defence spending, the crisis of social care and the need to reconnect with the trade unions.But it’s the cost of living that will determine whether the government succeeds in ‘turning things around’ for many who see deprivation as the norm. Four percent of households — 2.8 million people — are reliant on food banks, with millions more suffering from food insecurity. Food inflation is far ahead of the basic rate and rising further still, with some economists predicting it will reach 10 percent this year.If reversing this trend is the only way to undermine Nigel Farage’s hope of entering Number 10, then price controls, long seen as beyond the bounds of legitimate policymaking, need to be on the table. Even Reeves’s Treasury conceded the principle when supermarket chiefs were asked — very politely — if they wouldn’t mind capping some essentials. But this tentative plea came up against the brick wall of business, retailers and orthodox economists, who protested that it would ‘distort the market’, cause shortages and increase inflation. The Chief Executive of M&S Stuart Machin (remuneration £4m last year, down from £7m the year before) summed up the industry view when he described such measures as ‘completely preposterous’. The Treasury ministers scattered like startled cats.Yet the very fact that the Treasury was willing to entertain the possibility of price controls was a major step, with implications for the new administration. While supermarkets complain of thin margins of around 2 to 4 percent, the vast trading base delivers huge aggregate profits: in 2025 Tesco turned over £3.1bn and Sainsbury’s £1bn. Recognising the reality of the situation, governments in other countries have not been so pusillanimous. France and Spain have implemented both mandatory price controls and ‘name and shame’ policies for price-gougers, benefiting consumers with no consequential rise in inflation.Though there was an inevitable outcry from business interests in each case, politicians powered through. In France, seventy-five companies including giant food manufacturers such as Unilever signed an agreement with the government to cut prices on staples, including beef, pork and milk, in the knowledge that failure to comply would lead to checks and sanctions. In Spain, the Socialist government of Pedro Sánchez has introduced targeted anti-profiteering policies alongside rent controls and energy price freezes and caps, ramping up such measures in response to Trump’s most recent military adventure.Critics in the business world are masters of self-fulfilling prophecy. They tell us that when costs are kept low demand will go up, causing retailers to hike their other prices and sending inflation skyward. But these international examples show that price controls, when properly designed and able to balance between mandatory and voluntary iterations, can avoid this doomsday scenario. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now presiding over vote-winning citywide rent freezes and a publicly-owned nonprofit grocery network. It would be self-sabotage to rule out these policies here in Britain, where polling shows that they are widely popular.In Joanna Mack’s definitive new study of UK poverty, Impoverished (2026), one of her interviewees remarks that ‘It’s not a standard of living. It’s existence.’ Behind the sterile abstractions of economic discourse there is an uncomfortable truth: without a perceptible improvement in the texture of working-class life, the change of personnel in Downing Street will not restore the fortunes of the Labour Party let alone the country. Swapping out the main character isn’t enough when the entire script needs rewriting.