“Of course, it was good that 56 Labour MPs voted for the SNP amendment for an immediate ceasefire – it should have been more.”
Hugh Lanning
By Hugh Lanning, Labour & Palestine
John Healey MP informs us that “Labour is not a protest party” – after the leadership had whipped the PLP to vote against a Gaza ceasefire.
This was news to me. Labour was founded on protest. The party’s own website explains how it was created in 1900 “as a result of many years of struggle by working class people, trade unionists and socialists, united by the goal of working class voices being represented in the British Parliament”.
If the struggles of those fighting the Poor Laws or withholding their labour during the Taff Vale Railway strike – both key to the formation of our party – were not protests, I’m not sure what they were.
So how have we gone from there to the justification of the refusal of our current leader and likely next prime minister, Hardie’s namesake, to call for a ceasefire and to threaten to sack any frontbencher who voted for one?
Were he or any Labour MP who voted against a ceasefire this week be able to wake up with a clear conscious on a day when Gaza’s parliament was blown up and Israeli soldiers raided al-Shifa hospital.
Of course, it was good that 56 Labour MPs voted for the SNP amendment for an immediate ceasefire – it should have been more. The Labour leadership framed the SNP motion as “political games”. For the thousands of dead Palestinians, it is not a game and the SNP tabled it entirely genuinely, to try to stop the slaughter.
Over 10,000 Labour Party members from over 500 CLPs have, signed the Labour & Palestine petition calling on the Labour leadership to back an immediate ceasefire. This confirms the strength of opinion at the party’s grassroots and just how out of step with members, and public opinion, Keir Starmer’s position is.
Wednesday evening’s demonstration outside parliament, ahead of the House of Commons vote, was far bigger than the organisers predicted. Starmer is risking lasting damage to Labour support, ahead of the general election. He must now listen and urgently change course.
- Hugh Lanning is an officer of Labour and Palestine and also a former Chair of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and former Deputy General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union
- ACTION: Add your name to Labour and Palestine’s call for Labour to back an immediate ceasefire
- Follow Labour and Palestine on Facebook and Twitter.
Starmer needs to step down, or be kicked out (and take Streeting with you, please).
The people and the country need a real strong Labour Government that we can wholeheartedly vote for and fully support.
Starmer has shown repeatedly he doesn’t care what Members think, doesn’t care what MPs in the Labour Party think.
I also suspect he’s not very bright; he seems permanently bemused generally, and now specifically over the Gaza situation:
“Why are all these people demonstrating, just because children are being starved, bombed, made homeless, shot at, injured, traumatised, murdered or orphaned…?”
“War crimes, what “War crimes”?”
I am so thankful that so many people ARE demonstrating, I can only sign petitions, but there they are out on the streets, and not just in London!
We have had enough of government incompetence, lack of common-sense, lack of decency and morality, and total lack of ability to actually do the job.
So, I’m ending this little heart-felt rant right back at where I started:
Starmer and his accomplices must go, they do not belong in the Labour Party.