Letter from Andy Ford
While Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet are engaged in their monstrous war crime of starving two million people to death in Gaza, half of them children, what has been the real response of the UK government?
We have had the gesture politics of “recognising the state of Palestine”…at some point in the future; two lunatic far-right Israeli ministers have been sanctioned, and we are told that the talks on a UK-Israel free trade agreement “have been suspended”.
But the magazine Private Eye exposed how the existing UK-Israel Trade and Partnership Agreement continues unhindered, despite it containing a clause that says “respect for democratic principles and human rights constitute an essential element of this agreement” (Private Eye, July 11 2025).
The clause was carried over from the previous EU-Israel trade agreement, and now the EU has concluded (unsurprisingly) that Israel has breached international law by killing thousands of unarmed civilians and using starvation as a weapon of war. But, typically for the EU, the bloc could not agree on what course of action to take at a meeting in June, and suspension of their Israel trade agreement was postponed.
However, the UK, post-Brexit, is “free” to make its own decisions on trade. So Private Eye asked the Foreign and Commonwealth Office if they had reached a conclusion on whether Israel was respecting human rights, which would lead to suspension of the agreement. Their reply? “Government has already taken action and paused free trade negotiations, one of a number of actions“.
So, they haven’t considered whether starving children to death is a breach of human rights! Nothing like it has been seen since the Nazi siege of Leningrad, which everyone agreed was a war crime.
Meanwhile, we get performative nonsense masquerading as action from Keir Starmer and David Lammy. No wonder they are losing votes from the Muslim and ethnic minority communities, and, in fact, from anyone who thinks starving thousands of children to death is a crime.
Meanwhile, read this: What Gaza parents tell their children: “you’ll eat in heaven”. [Feature picture from this article in Prospect magazine]
