Labour Party's victory in the UK and its impact on the Palestinian cause by Ayiza Salman

 

Source: New Internationalist (Loredana Sanguiliano/Shutterstock)


Ayiza Salman
International Relations Researcher





Europe held one of its most momentous elections last week in Britain where socially progressive governance dominated the polls over the surging right-wing populism cursing the rest of Europe with its ultra-nationalistic ambitions and acute foreign policy implications for regions like the Middle East, where the Israeli genocide is entering its tenth month of brutality and the death toll of Palestinians could be reaching 186,000 civilians. 

In the UK, the center-left Labor Party, under Keir Starmer, won a landslide victory in general elections, marking the end of 14 years of disastrous Conservative rule under the Tory government. As his first announcement after holding office, Starmer declared the controversial Rwanda Policy, designed to fly asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda, dead and buried.

More significantly, despite being a staunch supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself, Starmer has also called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza while rumors circulate of his party possibly dropping the bid to delay the decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in issuing arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. 

However, it may be wiser to take the latter with a grain of salt since Labor owes the loss of its popular support, despite winning a majority in the parliament, to the loss of the Muslim vote over its lack of vocal condemnation of Israel’s assault on Palestinian civilians, suggesting patterns of performative hypocrisy, at best, and fruitless inaction, at worst. 

Conversely, Jeremy Corbyn’s win as an independent candidate against Labor, after decades of serving as its member and leader, in addition to Labor’s defeat in Muslim-dominated constituencies speaks of their hollow victory which has managed to change only the face of the status quo rather than bring a complete overhaul in British politics, and by extension, its foreign policy that remains complicit in Israel’s inhumane barbarity and complacent towards insurmountable Palestinian casualties. 

Finally, the rise of the far-right is also becoming equally difficult to ignore as the outspoken kingpin of Brexit, Nigel Farage, won his Reform Party a solid four-seat footing in the parliament with the simple ingredients of Islamophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric, evident in his statements otherizing the Muslim immigrants and equating them with terrorists. 

Therefore, these static political developments and a rampant xenophobia epidemic can only silence the already weakened voices in favor of the Palestinian cause. Otherwise, all will remain status quo and Gazans won’t wake up to any newer realities, just faint hopes of change propelled by boycotts, activism, and protests, spearheaded by the likes of Corbyn, independent MPs, and the British public.
 

Ayiza Salman is an undergraduate student of International Relations at the Institute of Business Management (IoBM) and a former research intern at a Karachi-based think tank, Pakistan Council on Foreign Relations (PCFR). 

The author can be reached at ayizasal@gmail.com. 








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