Labour Is Struggling to Keep Palestine Off Its Conference Agenda

When Keir Starmer recognised the state of Palestine earlier this month, he may have been hoping in part to head off trouble at his party’s annual conference in Liverpool, which starts today (Sunday 28 September). If so, that hope was swiftly dashed.

On Sunday, Merseyside police began arresting the more than 50 people stationed outside the conference centre, holding placards bearing the slogan: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” Applauding arrestees as police removed them from the crowd, protesters chanted: “100,000 people dead, and you’re arresting us instead.” At the time of writing, police have arrested 11 people at the Liverpool demo.

The placard-holding action is one of several identical actions held by the campaign group Defend Our Juries (DOJ) in the three months since the government proscribed Palestine Action, the first time UK terrorism law has been used against a non-violent group and a move opposed by former Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Over 1,500 people have been arrested at DOJ protests and at least 138 charged.

While the DOJ protest seemed likely to cause the biggest stir at the conference, another contingent, mobilised by far-right agitators though ostensibly protesting the government’s introduction of digital ID, outnumbered them by at least 100. One Liverpool local and Palestine protester, Rachel, who declined to give her surname fearing professional ramifications, said many of the same concerns – including government authoritarianism – were shared by right- and leftwing protesters. “The only difference is that they only want [freedoms] for white people … we want it for everyone,” Rachel said. Another Liverpudlian Palestine protester, who asked to be referred to only as Meg, said: “We fucking agree with you on a lot of stuff, we just don’t think the cause is immigrants, you stupid bastards – the cause is the government.”

Sunday’s DOJ protest follows hot on the heels of a march on Saturday, in which hundreds of Liverpudlians demanded the government stop arming Israel, calling recognition “little crumbs of liberation”. The protest vindicated Labour MPs who had expressed their concerns to the BBC that the party’s recognition of Palestine wouldn’t rehabilitate its reputation after 18 months of abetting genocide.

Labour’s previous response to the now-routine Palestine protests at its annual conference has been to dismiss the attacks as coming from the usual suspects, namely leftwing factions of the party and activists already dead-set against Labour. While this might have been true two years ago, it certainly isn’t now. On Saturday, a group of UK artists, including actors Steve Coogan and Maxine Peake and musicians Paul Weller and Paloma Faith, released a video demanding Starmer acknowledge that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide and sanction the country accordingly. Responding by saying that Labour is the party of power, not protest, as the PM did when he was glitter-bombed by a protester in 2023, would have a different ring to it now, as the government’s flexing of its power against protesters has prompted widespread concern among the international community.

Sunday’s protests upended the start of Labour party conference, which for Starmer needed to be about one thing and one thing only: taking chunks out of Nigel Farage, the man leading Labour by 12 points in the polls and who, on the present course, is set to be Britain’s next prime minister. Starmer has spent much of the past week attempting to do just that, chucking an (as-yet unquantified) load of money at the regions to “restore pride” in Britain and woo working-class voters away from Reform; meanwhile, Labour is set to announce at conference plans to build 12 new towns as part of a house-building bonanza, in defiance of what it calls Reform’s “quick fix” politics. Today, Starmer launched his most ferocious attack on Reform to date, calling Farage’s plans to abolish indefinite leave to remain  “racist” and “immoral”.

Yet much as the US Democrats did last year, Starmer is discovering that claiming the moral high ground from the far right, while equipping a genocide and offering watered-down versions of the far-right’s own policies and rhetoric, is no simple affair. 

Clive Lewis, a member of the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) of leftwing Labour MPs, told Novara Media: “If Keir Starmer can call Reform’s migrant plan ‘racist’ and ‘immoral’, then he must face up to the fact that his own government has helped mainstream the very racism he claims to oppose.”

“At the same time he was making that statement, his home secretary was doubling down on proposals to make indefinite leave to remain conditional – mimicking Farage’s calls to revoke it from people who already have it [newly-appointed home secretary Shabana Mahmood is reportedly planning new, stricter conditions for migrants seeking indefinite leave to remain, including being in work, paying national insurance and not claiming benefits]. That isn’t fighting racism, it’s pandering to it.”

“And it links directly to Gaza,” Lewis added. “This government’s refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire, its willingness to look away as civilians are bombed and starved, is part of the same political culture that ranks some lives lower than others. Racism has always been about hierarchies of suffering, and quite clearly, to this government, the lives of Gazans, of Muslims, sit far too low on that hierarchy to warrant justice.”

The Labour party declined to respond specifically to Lewis’s comments, though it stressed the difference between Farage and Mahmood’s approach to indefinite leave to remain.

Rather than attempt to address this apparent hypocrisy head-on, Labour’s approach for the past 18 months has been to gag those pointing it out. In recent weeks, the conference arrangement committee blocked more than 30 motions about Palestine from being debated at this year’s conference. Yet the committee’s attempt to stifle dissent has been somewhat abortive: around 20 Palestine-related motions, three of them submitted by trade unions and therefore less easily dismissable, managed to slip through as emergency motions – though it remains to be seen whether those motions will make it onto the conference floor.

This will be the third Labour conference at which the Gaza genocide has forced itself onto the agenda. In 2023, it coincided exactly with the start of Israel’s assault, and the 7 October Hamas attacks that triggered it. Labour immediately fell in behind its ally, with cabinet ministers offering bellicose provocations that have haunted the party ever since.

Asked by LBC’s Nick Ferrari on 11 October 2023 whether cutting off water and electricity to Gaza region was a proportionate response to the Hamas attack, Starmer suggested it was: “I think that Israel does have that right, it is an ongoing situation, obviously everything should be done within international law but I don’t want to step away from the core principles that Israel has the right to defend herself.”

That same year, Muslim MP and domestic abuse survivor Apsana Begum was forced to flee the conference after a picture of her standing at a Palestine stall triggered a torrent of misogynistic and Islamophobic abuse, prompting a police investigation. This year, it is Labour frontbenchers who are taking shelter inside the conference centre as those demanding an end to the Palestinian genocide make their case from without.

Nadia Whittome, a Labour MP and another SGC member, told Novara Media in a statement that the government should “arrest war criminals instead of peaceful protesters”.