BRITISH and US complicity in the Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people has been centre stage for months.
With the Right Honourable Sir Keir Starmer, leader of His Majesty’s Super-Loyal Opposition, marching almost in lockstep with the government, the drive to change the foreign policy of the British state is assuming the dimensions and composition of a popular front.
The people united can, unfortunately, be defeated, unless the opposition of the overwhelming majority of the British people to government policy can be translated into the kind of political action that results in a change of direction.
We can see the contours of such a profound change beginning to take shape.
Public opinion on this scale finds a multitude of different expressions. When a decisive section of the legal Establishment warns ministers that they may face a charge of complicity in war crimes, the hunt is on for a course of action which might protect them from the kind of humiliation which hitherto has been reserved only for Third World politicians whose crimes are too inconvenient for the imperial powers to ignore or who have transgressed the bounds of imperial patronage.
The sheer scale and breadth of the opposition to the Gaza genocide — which goes way beyond the masses who now turn out for national mobilisations every week — is beginning to seep into every aspect of life.
Direct action against arms and avionics firms involved in Israel’s war effort is persistent, organised, effective and produces repeated closures of the factories involved. Another dimension might be action to stop the import of Israeli arms to Britain.
Courts persist in dismissing criminal charges levied against protesters. Students have no hesitation in taking direct action against university links with firms connected to the Israeli state.
At the level of representative politics, this has already produced divisions in the ranks of both the parliamentary majority and the opposition.
For the government party, the potential loss of Conservative voters who find support for the zionist state’s war crimes too much probably weighs little in its calculations, given the catastrophic drop in electoral support already registered.
Labour has lost hosts of local councillors but the larger problem lies in the dissolution of the historic bloc which has sustained Labour in more than a century.
Leaders of Labour have usually participated in the imperial adventures of our ruling class. Clement Attlee signed up for the US war against the Korean people and, while Harold Wilson skilfully kept Britain out of the Vietnam war, actual opposition was on the streets.
Tony Blair’s joint endeavour with the US in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq again met mass opposition on the streets. But throughout there remained the vestiges of Labour’s “big-tent” identity as the federal party of labour encompassing trade unions, constituency organisations and affiliated socialist societies in which a diversity of opinion on major issues was both accepted and anticipated.
It has become increasingly clear that the present Labour leadership is not only committed to capitalist continuity in the main direction of the existing government’s policies — but it is intent on refashioning the political instrument history has given it to exclude the organised expression of opposition, discount the voices of the trade unions and turn a tin ear to Labour’s lobbies on everything from women’s rights to education policy, from the environment to peace and disarmament and most particularly on economics and foreign policy.
Labour’s large poll lead may insulate Labour this time around from the electoral consequences of its turn to full neoliberalism — but not forever.
And if Labour fails to represent working people then someone else will.
