Amid the fallout from last week’s chaos in the Commons, one question has gone largely unexplored: is Labour out of the woods on Gaza? Despite all efforts to manoeuvre itself into a safer position, the party seems to have only inflamed things further. Its ostensibly successful face-saving amendment to the SNP’s ceasefire motion – and its apparent pressure on the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, to upturn parliamentary convention – brought about a crisis in the Commons, and has done little to appease angry voters.
The resulting waves of claim and toxic counterclaim are still building: Lee Anderson’s outburst of anti-Muslim rhetoric has led to him being stripped of the Tory whip. No matter how much analysis says otherwise, particularly the sort that treats Westminster as a self-contained theatre of political gamesmanship, Labour’s victory was a pyrrhic one. It was secured in the Commons but lost outside its walls, highlighting an inescapable limitation in the party’s very coding.
Whatever motion Labour ended up ramming through, it came too late. The party’s first position on Gaza, refusing to condemn breaches of international law (or even call them that), and refusing to call for a ceasefire, has made too strong an impression for it to be erased by any new modifications. It was a position that fed into something bigger: into pre-existing reservations and dwindling faith in the party.
For those the party was trying to bring round, the manner in which it prevailed will only act to reinforce its most suspect qualities – calculating, pedantic, authoritarian. Ready to drag parliament into the mire so it could pursue its manic drive to keep control of a party narrative that now exists only in the leadership’s heads.
What they think people saw was a party seeing off its adversaries and passing a motion on a ceasefire that would placate voters. What others saw was an ugly process that frittered away any goodwill that could have come from whatever meaningful change there has been in the party’s position on Gaza. Emails from MPs to angry constituents read flatly – robotic lists of the virtues of Labour’s new position that sound like a legal exercise in argument pre-emption rather than a genuinely humbled and considered change of approach.
The party is not capable of reflection or sensitivity to the public on a matter that doesn’t sit squarely in its matrix of “electability”. Which is why it will never be out of the woods as long as the war continues. An unstoppable force has met an immovable object. In its position on Gaza, Labour is confronted with a problem that is at odds with everything that the party has made its core coping mechanisms – it cannot be blamed on the previous government for the mess it has made of things, and it cannot be credibly justified by resorting to the now familiar technical finessing of policy positions and U-turns.
Gaza is not a political issue that can be wrestled to the ground and dispatched with Starmer’s ruthless, “eyes on the prize” attitude or fixation on policy “bomb proofing” and following fiscal rules. Gaza is about real life, real death, and the genuine stirring of the sympathies and solidarities of millions in the UK and across the world.
That is a reality that many still do not quite understand, as demonstrated by the closing window of media attention and political patience on the matter, even as it rocks parliament, roils the Labour party, claims the jobs of the last home secretary and eight Labour shadow ministers, and could still claim the job of the speaker. Gaza is somehow spoken of as an irrelevance to British politics, on which it can have no effect. Calling for an immediate ceasefire is “not in anyone’s interest”, said Rishi Sunak last week.
The truth, clear to all but elided in favour of this convenient helplessness, is that Israel’s actions need both practical support and diplomatic cover. The fighting may not stop tomorrow if Britain demands it, but Israel relies on its allies, particularly those with a high international profile and status, to maintain its campaign within the realms of the reasonable and legal. Through them it fights a propaganda war – such as that against the international court of justice – which has the potential to loosen the brakes that could be applied to slow or terminate its assault. When the US vetoed a UN security council vote for a ceasefire last week, the UK abstained. All this serves to legitimise Israel’s actions and rebuff attempts at halting them.
It is entirely reasonable for a public not fooled by claims of political puniness to ask that its representatives refuse to provide this valuable service, in government or in opposition. But even if there were no tangible end goal, it is a fair demand. And it is being made more forcefully of Labour because it is seen as a government in waiting.
It’s bad luck though, for both the people and the party, that Gaza is happening at this precise moment in Labour’s history. Because the party has decided that its route to power is through demonstrating, as often and loudly as possible, that it is driven by bloodless pragmatism. Channelling and representing positions that may not have immediate practical impact, but which make people feel as though they exist in a moral universe under a righteous steward, is treated like heresy, like something that will break the spell of Labour’s rise to government. And so even when it is forced to make a stand on a point of principle, as happened last week, it is incapable of doing so in an honest, convincing way – only as a transparently tactical concession.
So whatever Labour thinks it has pulled off, it won’t be enough. And the next bump in the road is already in sight. The Rochdale byelection looms, and the SNP is planning a fresh ceasefire motion. Both will likely reopen questions that Labour hopes it has settled. But even if the party manages to weather the entire Gaza storm, there will be others that it is congenitally unsuited to deal with.
Starmer, a man summed up in a review of his recent biography as “a successful politician who does not like politics”, has chosen a business that cannot be reduced to joinery. It cannot be limited to competence on the bottom line, being a good gaffer, and political events that neatly fit football analogies. It cannot be rid of a vexing public and their scary feelings. It is big and messy and contains all of human life, at home and abroad. Yes, it involves the machinery of state and economic apparatuses, but also all matters of the heart and spirit – our need not just for management, but for meaning.
There is a French saying that roughly translates as “chase away the natural and it returns at a gallop”. On Gaza, as well as on all manner of inevitable crises, Labour is doomed to chase away the natural in politics, then watch it return at a gallop.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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