The United Kingdom's Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s latest statement on Gaza reads like a carefully rehearsed lament with soft tones, grave expressions and the ever-familiar refrain of “deep concern.” But don’t be fooled. Behind the sorrowful rhetoric is a man whose actions betray a ruthless alignment with power, not principle.
Let’s begin with the facts Starmer won’t say out loud.
Under his leadership, the Labour Party has offered no challenge to Britain’s enabling of Israel’s war on Gaza. Instead, it has tightened the noose of complicity. Just last week, Starmer welcomed the head of the Israeli air force, the same force accused of carpet-bombing civilian infrastructure and refugee camps. As children were being pulled from the rubble, Starmer and his team posed for polite diplomatic photos.
Meanwhile, Israeli troops are being trained in the U.K. This isn’t passive complicity; it’s active participation. A government-in-waiting that arms, trains and entertains a military accused of war crimes has no right to speak of “human suffering” with any credibility.
And then there’s the comment that haunts Starmer’s moral record: in October 2023, he said Israel had “the right” to cut off water and electricity to Gaza. A war crime by any definition, collective punishment is not a gray area. Yet he doubled down, refusing to apologize even after being confronted by legal experts, human rights groups and many within his own party.
To this day, Starmer has not called for a cease-fire with the urgency required. He has not suspended arms sales. He has not recognized Palestine as a state, something even France’s Emmanuel Macron, a man hardly known for moral courage, has committed to doing at the U.N. General Assembly this year.
But perhaps the most insidious act of all: Starmer criminalized Palestine solidarity itself.
From banning protests under the guise of “public order” to supporting legislation that effectively brands pro-Palestinian activism as extremism, his Labour Party has waged a quiet war on those who dare speak out for Palestinian rights. Palestine Action, which targets arms factories complicit in Israel’s military machine, has been hounded, arrested and vilified with Starmer’s legal legacy as former director of Public Prosecutions hanging heavy in the background.
In a democratic society, resistance to oppression should not be criminalized. It should be celebrated. But Starmer’s Britain is one where marching for Gaza makes you suspicious, and training the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) makes you diplomatic. This isn’t neutrality. This is cowardice in a tailored suit.
Labour once stood for internationalism, anti-colonialism and solidarity with the oppressed. Under Starmer, it has become a shadow of that legacy: polished, poll-tested and utterly bankrupt in moral courage. What’s left is hypocrisy dressed up as statesmanship. The quiet nod to war criminals. The public scolding of activists. The calculated refusal to say “Palestine” without flinching. Starmer wants to lead Britain. But what kind of Britain does he imagine? One that trains foreign soldiers to commit atrocities, silences dissent at home and offers hollow tears for the victims abroad? If so, he’s not offering leadership. He’s offering shame.
The British public, especially its younger, more informed and morally attuned generation, deserves better than this pantomime of principle. Because the people of Gaza don’t need Starmer’s sorrow. They need justice. And justice begins with truth, and ends with action.
Until then, every word he utters on Palestine is just another brick in the wall of British complicity.
