There is a huge internal contradiction at the heart of the new British government’s approach to the Middle East and to its foreign policy generally. Standing on the steps of Downing Street after being appointed prime minister on July 5, Sir Keir Starmer spoke of the seriousness of purpose he intended to bring to the job: “You have a government unburdened by doctrine.… [We will] end the era of noisy performance.… Committed to a calm and patient rebuilding.” It’s a theme and a tone he has returned to in almost every utterance since he became PM: Calm, rational deliberation and a sense of seriousness of purpose. It certainly sounds good. And whatever one thinks of the merits or otherwise of the government’s policies, it has spent its first weeks carefully nurturing that idea.
With one glaring exception: the appointment of David Lammy as foreign secretary.
If Lammy came to be known for anything while Labour was in opposition, it was as a provocateur who repeatedly tweeted what might charitably be termed undiplomatic comments about foreign leaders. He reserved special bile for Donald Trump, who may well again be president of Britain’s most important ally, calling him variously “a serial liar and a cheat,” a “troll,” a “wannabe despot,” and a “racist KKK and Nazi sympathizer.” When Trump was invited to make a state visit to the UK, Lammy protested: “If I have to chain myself to the door of No 10, this black man will do it.” He is now Britain’s chief diplomat.
It’s like a bad sitcom in which, of all the 410 Labour MPs available to Sir Keir Starmer, he mistakenly alights on one of the most unsuitable to be entrusted with Britain’s relations with every other country on earth. Alas, life is not a sitcom, and the actual decision to make Lammy foreign secretary is important because it may well say more about Starmer’s judgment than it does about Lammy.
But even if Lammy had never said a word out of place, his first weeks in the job have demonstrated a more fundamental problem: what he is actually doing as foreign secretary. On July 18, two weeks to the day from when the government took office, Lammy effectively announced to the House of Commons that he was comfortable with the British taxpayer giving money to terrorists. He didn’t put it like that, of course, but his confirmation that the UK government would resume funding UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) meant just that. The Conservative government had stopped all funding in January when the Israeli government revealed that many of its employees had taken part in the October 7 Hamas massacre.
Lammy’s statement was a classic of its type—lots of meaningless blather intended to show that he was not appeasing terrorists, but in reality a craven piece of doublespeak. “I was appalled by the allegations that UNRWA staff were involved in the October 7 attacks,” he began. So appalled, indeed, that he had decided to ignore all the allegations and hand over £21 million that had been withheld by the old government. He was, he said, reassured—because “UNRWA is ensuring they meet the highest standards of neutrality and strengthening its procedures, including on vetting.”
This is the first step in what was an inevitable change of British policy under Labour toward rewarding terrorists for their terror—inevitable when one looks at electoral demography and the rise in sectarian voting that has now become a feature of British politics.
Britain is now only a theoretical ally of Israel. In practical terms, it is doing the bidding of those driven by hostility to the Jewish state. As I write in late July, the UK has just abandoned the previous government’s legal attempts (in coordination with Germany) to block the International Criminal Court’s arrest-warrant proceedings against Benjamin Netanyahu. The British government is now in effect endorsing the court’s decision to pursue the Israeli prime minister for war crimes in Gaza.
It will also publish previously confidential legal advice on British arms sales to Israel—and ban some sales. Even more than in its embrace of UNRWA and the ICC, this is pure gesture politics. UK arms sales to Israel are worth less than £50 million a year and amount to less than 0.9 percent of Israel’s total arms imports. Almost all of it relates to radars used for air defense and dual-use goods. Far more equipment (and vital intelligence) comes the other way, from Israel to the UK. The Royal Air Force relies on Israeli tech to get its planes in the air, and Israeli drones and armored-vehicle defenses protected British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Lammy is a man whose stock-in-trade is gestures. But in this sphere, the more important figure is the new attorney general (in the UK, the most senior law officer). Lord Hermer is a human-rights lawyer at the top of his profession. He is Jewish. He is also one of those left-wing Jews whose sole contribution to a self-declared love of Israel seems to be to criticize it. Last year, he was one of a group of Jewish lawyers who signed an open letter to the Financial Times demanding that Israel, in its response to the October 7 attacks, adhere to what they described as international humanitarian law. He also argued against legislation by the last government banning public bodies from boycotting Israeli goods. Now he is the point man for anything relating to international and human-rights law.
Labour’s 2024 election manifesto was deliberately short of specifics in almost every area of policy. But one of its few clear pledges was that it would recognize a Palestinian state “as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution.” In May, the Irish, Spanish, and Norwegian governments recognized a Palestinian state (a decision that showed that the way to get moderate center-left governments on your side is to murder and rape as many Jews as you can find). Recognition does nothing to further peace or the lives of Palestinians. Quite the opposite: It gives Hamas evidence to show to the Palestinians that October 7 worked, in that it led to a change of policy by those governments. This is the company the British government now says it wants to keep, by recognizing a Palestinian state.
But in terms of the domestic driver of recognition in the UK, the key point is that recognition has never been about Palestinians. It is a policy designed to appease domestic voters who are driven by an obsession with hatred of Israel—such as the hundreds of thousands of protestors who now take to the streets of London every two weeks for what the former British home secretary, Suella Braverman, rightly described as “hate marches.” These people have never and would never vote Conservative, so recognition was a nonissue after the Conservatives took power in 2010. There was no pressure from the party’s potential or actual voters.
The opposite is now true. Labour’s landslide—winning 411 of the 650 seats in parliament—will surely be the high-water mark for the party over at least the next decade. Even if the government turns out to be successful on its own terms, it is difficult to imagine it maintaining this level of support. Which is why the key statistic in this context is that Labour won its landslide while receiving only 34 percent of the overall national vote. The size of the party’s victory masks how small its winning candidates’ majorities were in many constituencies. The landslide was secured on the basis of tactical voting by third-party Liberal Democratic supporters siding with Labour to defeat the Conservatives, and by fractured right-of-center voting.
Drill down further into the makeup of the Labour ballots and the impact on policy becomes clear. With 4 million Muslims in England and Wales (6.5 percent of the population), the Muslim vote has always mattered in Britain. But until now it has never acted as a bloc or split away from the mainstream to support candidates who use intentionally divisive campaigns to appeal almost entirely—and only—to Muslims. For the first time in Britain (other than in the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland), sectarian voting became a significant driver of electoral fortunes in July, with four Muslim independent candidates who ran on a so-called pro-Gaza ticket winning, and a fifth, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (who was expelled from the party), who had a similar platform.
Labour lost these four seats to Muslim independents and came very close to losing many more—the near-losers included Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood, who are both now Cabinet ministers. In an election that saw Labour win one of its biggest-ever majorities, its overall vote total actually fell by more than 14 percent in those constituencies with a Muslim population of more than 15 percent. There are 37 constituencies with a Muslim population of more than 20 percent, while another 73 seats have a Muslim population of between 10 and 20 percent.
In other words, there are 110 constituencies with an electorally significant Muslim population. And with the large number of Labour MPs who won with small majorities now thinking about how to hold on to their seats at the next election in 2029, that Muslim vote becomes ever more important.
This matters because of what these Muslim voters want. A poll before the election for the Henry Jackson Society showed that 1 in 4 British Muslims cited the Israel/Palestine conflict as their most important election issue, compared with just 3 percent of the public. Almost half said that Jews have too much power over UK government policy. The 2024 election showed how these attitudes are moving into the political mainstream with the rise of a newly cohesive Muslim bloc vote.
This has not just happened by chance. A new organization, The Muslim Vote, describes itself as a coalition but is essentially a vehicle for groups such as Mend and the Muslim Association of Britain, which pursue Islamist, Muslim Brotherhood agendas. The Muslim Vote is not just focused on Gaza. Among its myriad demands is that a definition of “Islamophobia” be put on the statute books and that Ofcom, which regulates broadcasting in the UK, enforce a bar on so-called Islamophobia being broadcast. Where once it would have been easy to dismiss such demands and such groups as fringe, that is no longer possible. As we have seen, the Muslim vote matters, and it is surely inevitable that those Labour MPs with small majorities in constituencies with a significant Muslim vote will try to ensure their reelection at the 2029 election by bending to the demands of The Muslim Vote’s supporters and thereby neutralizing them. As the current parliament progresses, this will be one of the most significant driving forces within the Labour ranks—with an impact on policy that has not yet been fully appreciated.
Starmer is keen to appear—and, for the moment, to be—firm that he is a centrist leader of a changed Labour Party. “We were elected as a changed Labour Party and we will govern as a changed Labour Party,” he says. But unless something unprecedented happens and his government defies the usual laws of political gravity—which even Tony Blair, the most successful Labour politician of our time, could not manage to do—the party will become more unpopular over time. When you are riding high in the polls, it is easy to stand firm and ignore those pushing you in a different direction, such as over the demands of The Muslim Vote and the Gaza protest marchers. It is less easy when the momentum is against you. And the lay of the political land is clear: There is already a battle for Labour to hold off a newly confident, determined Muslim bloc vote in many seats. That is trouble enough, before one even factors in the pressure that comes when things start to go badly.
This is where the contrast with the previous government matters most in considering the future direction of the Labour government. When the Tories were under pressure, they pivoted (or at least tried to) toward the demands of their natural supporters. Labour will follow the same dynamic. The problem is that those natural supporters include the hundreds of thousands who have been marching on the streets supposedly for a cease-fire and a “Free Palestine” (although many were marching on October 14, before Israel had even begun its response to October 7). And it also includes the Muslims who demand that so-called Islamophobia be outlawed and the government act in all sorts of other Islamist-friendly ways.
It may be, of course, that Starmer will indeed not budge, no matter what the pressures. But given that one of the first acts of his government was to restore funding to UNRWA, back the ICC, and halt some arms sales to Israel—pandering to the demands of Labour’s natural supporters—the chances of that must, surely, be slim to nonexistent.
Photo: Benjamin Cremel/Pool photo via AP
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