Breaking: People Don't Like Genocide

The UK Labour Party was punished decisively last night for its terrible stance on Gaza. Good!

Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images

On Thursday, British voters went to the polls, and the results were pretty wild. The opposition Labour Party won a pulverizing landslide, handing the ruling Conservative Party its worst defeat ever. This was an appropriate reaction to 14 years of Tory rule, in which the party embraced racism, demonized immigrants, fanned the flames of transphobia, indulged in spectacular levels of corruption and scandal, led one of the worst COVID responses anywhere in the world, and degraded living standards to such an extent that they literally stunted the growth of British children.

But if the ouster of the Tories is cause for celebration, the arrival of Labour, and new Prime Minister Keir Starmer, isn’t anything to crow about. Starmer has also embraced racism. He’s also demonized immigrants. He’s also fanned the flames of transphobia. He’s cozied up to the super-rich and refused to meaningfully tackle the horrors wrought by austerity. He has lied on an industrial scale to gain power and run the Labour Party in a way that would make Stalin proud.

And, crucially for the purposes of this piece, Starmer has been horrendous when it comes to the genocide in Gaza. Most infamously, he proclaimed in October that Israel has the right to withhold power and water from the people of Gaza.

Starmer quickly attempted to lie his way out of trouble, claiming that he hadn’t said what he had so obviously said. And after that, most people in the British political and media class moved on. It wasn’t as if Gaza was an important enough issue to make any kind of electoral difference, right?

Wrong. From Sky News (emphasis mine):

A Gaza effect has seen Labour lose a handful of seats to independents who campaigned on the conflict in the Middle East.

In total, five seats were won by candidates who had campaigned against the new government's stance on Palestine.

This includes Jeremy Corbyn keeping his Islington North seat, as well as Shockat Adam winning in Leicester South, Ayoub Khan winning Birmingham Perry Barr, Adnan Hussain winning Blackburn and Iqbal Mohamed winning Dewsbury & Batley.

Corbyn is a special case, though it’s fabulous that he won. But the other candidates came pretty much out of nowhere, overturned huge Labour majorities, and defeated very high-profile politicians in historic fashion.

It could have been even worse for Labour; pro-Palestine candidates came within a whisker of defeating top Labour politicians in a number of additional seats. Even Keir Starmer himself saw his vote fall through the floor thanks to a pro-Gaza protest effort. It was wonderful to see.

Naturally, the British press, home to some of the worst people in the world, was quick to provide some thoughtful analysis. Here’s a typically racist reaction from a columnist for the right-wing Daily Telegraph:

Ah yes, that’s the problem. These Muslims just don’t know how to integrate!

Or maybe, just maybe, people don’t like genocide, and they don’t like political parties that fail to stand against it.

All in all, the movement for Palestine made itself very loudly heard in the UK last night. Hopefully people were listening.