Factional infighting and fear of violent reprisals drove British Labour lawmakers to demand a Gaza ceasefire, a new book published in February revealed.
In their well-sourced new book Get In, British journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabrielle Pogrund traced the path of Sir Keir Starmer, a human rights lawyer who served as the Director of Public Prosecutions, to his current seat as British Prime Minister.
The book outlines how Starmer came to office with the help of strategist Morgan McSweeney or, conversely, McSweeney’s path to power through Starmer.
Chapters 17 (Israel) and 18 (Palestine), which together run 48 pages, describe the drama within the Labour Party in the months following October 7, 2023, as it attempts to return to power after more than a decade in opposition.
On the day of the October 7 massacre, Labour leader and opposition leader Starmer was at the height of his power.
It had been three years since his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, was expelled from the party for refusing to fully accept the conclusions of an independent inquiry that found that the party had failed to combat the antisemitism that had spread through its ranks during his leadership.
Since then, Starmer and McSweeney have managed to weaken Corbyn’s loyalists within the party and in the trade unions and even to shake off the dirigiste and forgiving worldview of terrorism that characterized Labour under their Corbynist rivals.
Fighting factionalism
Nationally, Labour enjoyed a clear and stable majority in the polls. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has struggled to restore confidence in the Conservative Party, which had plummeted in the polls following scandals that led to the resignations of his predecessors: Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
Labour did not even bother to formulate clear positions on the main issues, and it was clear to everyone that if it avoided mistakes, its road to power had been paved.
In the weeks after October 7, Starmer stuck to Israel's right to self-defense under international law and rejected internal pressures to join Spain, Ireland, and Norway in criticizing Israel.
McSweeney, born in 1977 and the strongman on Starmer's bench, became closely acquainted with the Hashomer Hatza'ir kibbutzim in the late 1990s as a volunteer at Kibbutz Sarid in the Jezreel Valley.
After October 7, he texted his colleagues: "If Hamas is concerned for the victims, it should return all the hostages today. We must direct the discussion to them."
Starmer called the demand for a ceasefire "theatrical politics of gestures" since both Israel and Hamas oppose it. "I want to formulate a clear position because I am talking to international partners, and I want to be credible," he told his advisers.
The IDF's aggressive bombing campaign in Gaza in the months after the massacre and the dire humanitarian situation in which the civilian population in the Gaza Strip found themselves, jeopardized the delicate balances within the party; between Muslims and Jews; students and workers; and "Corbynists" and "Blairists" and "Brownists;" which threatened to undermine the party's position.
What appeared to Israelis to be anti-Zionist demonstrations by activists, some of whom were ignorant and antisemitic, was also – and perhaps primarily – an attempt to re-form a coalition of progressive urbanites, public sector workers, and ethnic minorities as part of an internal power struggle within the opposition Labour Party.
Splintering the Labour Party
On 21 February 2024, the Scottish National Party (SNP), which competes with Labour for center-left voters in Scotland, introduced a motion in the British House of Commons calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Maguire and Pogrund reveal in their book that pressure to vote for the motion or to initiate another move in favor of a ceasefire came this time from the heart of the Labour mainstream - from moderate and right-wing lawmakers, through mayors to senior ministers in the shadow government such as David Lammy (Foreign Affairs), Wes Streeting (Health) and Lisa Nandy (International Development).
According to the description, senior Labour Party member Angela Rayner, who is considered "soft left" and close to the trade unions and is currently serving as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Housing and Local Government, "told members that Starmer's intransigence was endangering the lives of her colleagues" because it increased the chances that "some pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli who was angry about Labour's position would stab and kill an MP".
According to the authors, many lawmakers feared voting against the Scottish National Party's motion for a ceasefire. In the absence of an alternative initiative, “they are exposed to violence and threats outside their homes.”
It is difficult to assess whether the legislators’ concerns, which were clearly genuine, reflected a real threat.
Two British MPs have been murdered in the past decade: Jo Cox (Labour) by a white supremacist in 2016 and David Amess (Conservatives) by an ISIS supporter in 2021, marking the first times since the end of the conflict in Northern Ireland that sitting MPs had been murdered.
Given the tendency of British politics to issue memoirs and behind-the-scenes investigations with dizzying brevity, we probably won’t have to wait decades for material from the MI5 archives to get a satisfactory answer.
However, there is no doubt that the same aggressive coalition of progressive urbanites, public sector unions and ethnic minorities on the left; and the anti-Muslim alliance of Tommy Robinson and his friends on the right are feeding off each other and sabotaging British parliamentarism, which has served as a model for the world for generations.
Radical politics does not require violent politics. On the contrary, in recent weeks, voices in Britain have been growing stronger, claiming that only a radical and comprehensive policy change, implemented with the same determination that characterizes the Trump administration, can stop the spread of violent politics.
Can Starmer and McSweeney’s Labour Party succeed in stopping the spread of violent politics? Only time will tell.