When Hamas launched its brutal attack on Israeli civilians in October 2023, the world reacted with horror, and rightly so.
Yet, I also knew what would follow. The attack gave the Israeli government the mandate to enact what they’ve long waited to do; unleash full-scale violence upon the Palestinian people.
Since then, we’ve witnessed what can only be described as a slow and methodical genocide. Whole families torn apart. Aid stations bombed. Hospitals targeted. Children starved.
The death toll rises every day, and so does the silence. Western governments are careful to maintain “balance” while refusing to speak the truth.
In the UK, we have to look at Labour. My party. The party that I grew up believing stood for justice and decency. Yet, as Palestinians are massacred and international law is trampled on, Labour has done… nothing. Actually, worse than nothing. It has sat by and defended inaction and the maintenance of arms deals, and criminalised protest.
It is from this moment that made me realise, the Labour Party I believed in is gone.
From Loyalty to Loss
I’ve supported Labour for as long as I can remember. My first real political memory is watching Gordon Brown lose the 2010 election, and the birth of the Tory–Lib Dem coalition that ushered in 14 years of failure.
Like many others, I held out hope with each new Labour leader. Ed Miliband championed a responsible form of capitalism and the tackling of inequality. Jeremy Corbyn went further, offering a politics rooted in compassion, anti-imperialism, and justice for the oppressed. These weren’t just policies. They were principles that any decent person would stand for.
And then along came Keir Starmer. When I first noticed him in 2016, then Shadow Brexit Secretary, I remember speaking to my mum and saying, “He’ll make a great leader of the Labour Party one day.” I believed in him.
When he won in 2020, I felt genuine hope that we were heading back to moral clarity and a government which would do genuine good.
That feeling didn’t last.
Principles Traded for Polls
It’s become clear that Starmer’s Labour is a project not of conviction, but of calculation. Policies are announced, only to be dropped. Pledges are made, then swiftly abandoned. There’s no sense of vision that I had thought there would be, just reaction to headlines and polling numbers.
The rise of populism across Europe has infected us. The latest local elections showed how deeply frustrated people are with the political establishment. Reform UK and others offer simplistic answers to complex problems, and Labour’s strategy has been to copy their homework, hoping to win by default.
The result? Labour has become a hollowed-out party more concerned with looking electable than being ethical. This issue has clearly caused problems for its members and MPs. We have a leadership which trims its sails based on the wind, rather than steering toward justice.
Palestine: The Test That Labour Failed
I think nothing has exposed this moral void more clearly than Labour’s stance on Palestine.
While bombs rain down and aid is blocked, Labour has focused on carefully chosen words, and flatly refusing to acknowledge what the Israeli government is doing as genocide.
I think we have to be clear: this isn’t complicated. No matter how much our government tries to sustain that it is. A campaign of indiscriminate killing, destruction of infrastructure, ethnic cleansing, and starvation tactics are the markers of genocide. Every international human rights organisation has said as much.
Labour’s silence is complicity.
Criminalising Dissent
So, on 20th June, the activist group Palestine Action broke into an RAF base and spray-painted a military aircraft in protest to the UK’s role in supplying arms to Israel. Their actions were nonviolent and symbolic. A minor act in comparison to what’s happening in the Middle East.
Yet Starmer, who has proven to be cautious and slow to respond, found speed and certainty this time. Within hours, there were calls from within government circles to categorise the group as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act.
Let’s take a step back here. Spray painting a plane equals terrorism. But bombing hospitals and schools with British-supplied weapons equals diplomacy?
Palestine Action has targeted arms manufacturers like Elbit Systems to disrupt the UK-Israel arms trade. Their tactics are confrontational, but they have never posed a threat to life. Labelling them as terrorists isn’t about safety. It’s about silencing dissent.
If Labour Can’t Name Genocide, What Is It For?
When did we lose the ability to say what is plainly in front of us?
It is genocide. The international legal experts say so. The evidence says so. The footage says so. But Labour, desperate not to rock the boat, refuses to say it.
If Starmer can’t bring himself to name this horror, then what is his leadership worth? His Father was a tool maker, so why is it so hard to call a spade a spade?
Labour once stood for those without power. For the oppressed, the working class, the voiceless. If it cannot stand for Palestinians in this moment, what does it stand for?
This is bigger than politics. It’s about basic humanity. And unless Labour finds its moral backbone, and fast, it will lose far more than my vote. It will lose its soul.
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