Two key lessons come out of the chaos in the House of Commons on Wednesday: that the Labour leadership is being dragged, kicking and screaming, as a result of public pressure – and for no other reason – towards supporting a ceasefire in Gaza. But also, that Starmer will do anything to avoid a public display of how much he is out of touch, even with its own MPs.
While being pushed in the direction of a ceasefire, the Labour leadership is still hedging that with all kinds of qualifications, and is not prepared to acknowledge Israel’s savage collective punishment for what it is. Starmer is still desperate to keep Labour policy broadly in line with the US position. So the motion which Labour put to parliament was far weaker than that of the SNP, which it replaced on Wednesday. As suspended Labour MP, Diane Abbott, put it, “If Starmer really wanted a ceasefire he would table a simple amendment saying that. Instead he tables one full of weasel words.”
The revenge, which Israel has inflicted on the whole population of Gaza for the Hamas incursion, has resulted in over 30,000 deaths of non-combatants, including 10,000 children. The assault has reduced large areas of Gaza to uninhabitable rubble, including the destruction of social infrastructure that has no military value, something which in itself is a deliberate strategy.
Coming on top of the deaths and destruction, the surviving population of Gaza are facing an enormous humanitarian crisis, without sufficient food, water, medicines or shelter. The whole, monstrous Israeli campaign has created a wave of revulsion across the globe and has galvanised millions into protests and demonstrations, not least in the UK.
Western politicians have facilitated the slaughter in Gaza
One would find it hard to find an equivalent issue, in terms of the number and scale of demonstrations that have taken place in towns and cities up and down the country. Such is the scale of public abhorrence of the genocidal Israeli assault, on a largely defenceless population, that it has been acknowledged in the International Court of Justice.
Those who have facilitated the slaughter, by their continued support for Israel, people like Biden, Sunak and other Western politicians, are being forced to modify their stand on Gaza, not out of sympathy for suffering Palestinians, but for fear of the instability that Israel is creating in the Middle East and to some extent in their own countries.
The arcane rules and procedures of the House of Commons are like a foreign language to most ordinary workers, who are oblivious to them. Truth be told, the parliamentary rules are probably a mystery even to most MPs. But what is clear from the shambles in the House on Wednesday, when dozens of MPs walked out, is that the Speaker, Lyndsey Hoyle, buckled under Labour pressure to give priority to their amendment over the SNP motion on the need for a ceasefire.
Parliament does not have the same customs and procedures as typical labour movement conferences. In Parliament, even where there is an amendment, it is normal for the original motion to be voted on first, and only then to vote on amendments. According to one report, it is “very, very rare” for an opposition party to have its amendment replace another opposition party’s motion. But that is what happened.
The Speaker, Lyndsey Hoyle, had his arm twisted by Keir Starmer
Hoyle was even warned beforehand by the Clerk of the Commons that to give priority to the Labour amendment would lead to the SNP’s original motion not being voted on at all, on one of the only three days in a year allocated to SNP motions. But he gave way to pressure from the Keir Starmer, (on the spurious pretext of MPs’ safety) who made it known to Hoyle that it will be Labour MPs who will determine whether or not he remains Speaker after the next election.
Having been given priority, therefore, and with other parties refusing to participate in the proceedings, the Labour amendment was passed unanimously, amid scenes of chaos and confusion and a cacophony of different shouts. The entire rationale for the Labour manoeuvre was to avoid the situation where – following the ‘normal’ practice – Labour MPs would have been obliged to vote first on the SNP motion. Pressurising Hoyle was Starmer’s only hope of avoiding a major rebellion by Labour MPs in support of the SNP motion, as well as the severe embarassment of those right-wing Labour MPs who would not support it.
The last time the SNP put a motion calling for a ceasefire, 56 Labour MPs defied the whip. This time, with tens of thousands more deaths in Gaza, a huge humanitarian catastrophe, and the threat of a new Israeli ground offensive, there could easily have been twice that number. In the end, denied a vote on the SNP motion, Labour MPs backed their own amendment without dissent, even though it was far weaker than that of the SNP.
Even Labour’s right wing are feeling the tide of public opposition to Israel
It is an indication of the growing scale of the global revulsion against Israel that even some the right wing of the Labour Party are coming under pressure to condemn Israel. It forms the background to the suspension of two parliamentary candidates, in Rochdale and Hyndburn, both from the right wing of the party, for their comments on Israel.
Wes Streeting, Shadow Health Minister and still a stalwart of Labour’s right wing (he is expected to considerably widen the scope for private health companies to leech off the NHS when he becomes Health Minister) has now suggested that Israel has gone way beyond self-defence.
Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, has made similar comments. These people cannot argue that “things have changed”, because anyone with an understanding of Israeli politics could see what was coming a week, or even days, after the Hamas attack of October 7.
It is a disgrace that these politicians have taken so long to acknowledge, even with weasel words, the indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza, and then only because of growing public pressure. In Streeting’s own constituency in Ilford, he will face a well-supported and well-organised campaign by a supporter of Palestinian rights and he will fear that even his apparently ‘safe’ seat may not be secure at the next election.
The outlook for the people of Gaza is exceedingly bleak, to say the least. Western governments, including the USA, have explicitly said that they are opposed to a new Israeli ground offensive in Rafah where there are over a million half-starved refugees. A new IDF assault in that area risks incalculable casualties in top of those already inflicted.
The Israeli government is a monster its makers cannot control
The problem for Biden and the West however, is that their financial and military backing for Israeli over decades has created a monster that they cannot fully control. The government of Netanyahu is largely driven by the extreme right of his cabinet who want to pursue the ‘total’ destruction of Hamas – which is impossible – and for the population of Gaza to be pushed into Egypt.
Labour members will ask, why is a ceasefire more acceptable now, but it wasn’t when ‘only’ 15,000 civilians had been killed? The change of heart, if there is one, has nothing to do with a new found respect for Palestinian lives, and everything to do with the network of US and UK strategic and economic interests being potentially threatened by hundreds of thousands of refugees being forced into Egypt. Such a development would force the Egyptian regime to break its long-standing peace-treaty with Israel, and lead to widespread regional instability.
No-one can predict what will happen next. It is possible that a new ground offensive may begin in and around Rafah. It is also possible that Western pressure may stay the hand of the IDF, and a new ceasefire arranged, with an exchange of hostages, like last November.
Whatever does happen, the lives of the Gaza population have changed irrevocably. And parallel to that, Middle East politics will also be changed forever, including in Israel. The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, but even more so the scale of the death and destruction carried out by Israel afterwards, have unleashed forces of social and political change way beyond the abilities of politicians to control.
War is the midwife of historical change and particularly, it is the midwife of revolution. The more bloody and vicious the war – and this one is completely one-sided and unprecedented in the intensity of civilian deaths – the greater the change. The political representatives of capitalism are juggling with fine words and fancy rhetoric in an effort to cope with a human catastrophe in Gaza of almost unimaginable proportions; yet the political and social aftershocks have only just begun.
In the long run, it will be the morality and the political framework of capitalism that will be questioned and challenged by events. History is running ahead of Keir Starmer, but with the same mindset as all pro-capitalist politicians, he completely is blind to it.
