EVER since they came into government in July, Labour has been directly and indirectly supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its over 17,000 assaults on other Palestinian lands, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran. According to Declassified UK, the RAF have flown 100 spy flights over Gaza since Keir Starmer became prime minister and his government refuses to publish footage taken on one such mission on the day three British aid workers were killed by an Israeli air strike.

Meanwhile, Labour’s ban on 30 out of 350 arms licences is largely symbolic, since the export continues of components for F-35 fighter jets, which have been used in multiple war crimes including attacks on hospitals, medical personnel and defenceless civilians. Fifteen NGOs, including Amnesty International and Oxfam, have called for the British government to halt these sales, ensure the protection of Palestinian civilians and comply with “the ICJ’s orders to prevent genocide.” The plea has been ignored.

Labour’s backing of violence against Palestinians goes back a lot further than Starmer’s summer election win. In 1929, Labour’s first-ever prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, responded to a general strike and wave of protests in Palestine — then under British colonial domination — by sending troops in to kill 200 and imprison hundreds more. 

While in the 1930s and 1940s there was a Labour internal wrangle about the future of Palestine – which often took on an anti-Semitic character – the 1944 party conference was clear-cut in its declaration: “Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in.” According to historian Robert Clough, Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organisation, was shocked by Labour’s “enthusiasm” for his cause which “went far beyond our intentions.”

Clement Attlee’s 1945 election manifesto promised to support zionist settlement not only in Palestine but in Egypt, Transjordan and Syria, though the commitment was later watered down after pressure from Arab leaders and polities, some of whom were still under British imperial control.

As the cold war developed, a consequence of the Labour Establishment’s alignment with the aims of US imperialism was its unwavering endorsement of Israel’s “right to self-defence,” even when it was assaulting its neighbours. When Harold Wilson became British prime minister in 1964 he was keenly pro-Israel, providing the state with plutonium to aid its nuclear programme. 

While his catastrophic wars on Iraq and Afghanistan were in the process of slaughtering a million people, Tony Blair’s devious response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006 will remind readers of Starmer’s current lack of scruples.

“In the face of rising domestic and international outcry at Israel’s actions,” writes historian Toby Greene, “Blair gave Israel diplomatic cover, in particular by refusing to condemn Israel’s actions as disproportionate or to call for an immediate ceasefire.” Then, as now, a Labour government continued to allow British arms to be sold to Israel. 

But Labour’s participation in genocide, racism and imperialism has never been limited to the Middle East. The Ramsay MacDonald government refused to grant independence to India and introduced martial law in some regions, had Gandhi and another 30-60,000 Indians arrested, and ordered the RAF bombing and police shooting of 103 civilians.

In 1940, Labour heavyweights Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Sir Stafford Cripps were appointed to Churchill’s coalition government, which made them complicit in the forced famine of three to four million Bengalis. Indian historian Shashi Tharoor has deemed this one of the 20th century’s worst genocides. In power, Attlee bungled the partition of India, which Nehru and Gandhi warned would result in communal bloodshed — in the end, up to two million died. The 1945-51 Labour government also sponsored resurgent fascists in Greece who liquidated hundreds and gaoled 50,000, and intervened in south-east Asia to prevent Vietnam from achieving independence from France. “But for Labour,” writes Clough, “there would have been a revolutionary government in a united Viet Nam in 1945, not 1975.”

When the rubber extracted from Britain’s Malaya colony became essential to the post-war reconstruction of the British economy, Attlee took a zero-tolerance approach to the nascent independence movement, massacring unarmed civilians and herding others into concentration camps. Britain at this time was also in need of gold and, to this end, Harold Wilson, then president of the Board of Trade, struck lucrative trade deals with apartheid South Africa, which would only expand under future Labour and Conservative administrations.

As prime minister 20 years later, Wilson backed Nigeria’s genocide against the Biafran people primarily due to oil interests. Up to three million Biafrans were to die. Labour passed the notorious 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act, partly in response to racist outrage whipped up by Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech. Intended to prevent at least 200,000 desperate Kenyan Asian refugees from relocating to Britain, the legislation was so draconian that even future Tory ministers Michael Heseltine and Ian Gilmour voted against it, the latter protesting that it was “designed to keep the blacks out.”

While Labour deserves praise for not contributing troops to the Vietnam war effort, Wilson and his senior colleagues repeatedly spoke up for the US’s disastrous intervention, sold weapons to the neofascist South Vietnamese regime and authorised the British army to train its soldiers in Malaya. 

In Northern Ireland in 1969, Labour spun the deployment of troops to Belfast and Derry as a peacekeeping operation to protect both Catholic and Protestant communities, but in practice the decision buttressed the brutal Unionist regime. Under both Wilson’s premierships and James Callaghan’s brief spell as prime minister (1976-9), there were numerous SAS extrajudicial slayings and the widespread torture of IRA prisoners; and the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six were prosecuted for crimes they did not commit.

Tony Blair’s mass-murder of Muslims abroad was matched by Islamophobic subjugation at home: the introduction of the Prevent scheme to surveil and harass British Muslims, the 2006 Terrorism Act that was compared to apartheid by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and inflammatory comments made by cabinet minister Hazel Blears about the need to racially profile Muslims.

History teaches us that Labour’s penchant for war and the oppression of the Other did not begin under Blair, contra the Old Labour arguments about the neoliberal fall of the party after New Labour. That there’s been little difference on these issues between Labour and Tory governments for the last century should be a cause for regret in those who voted for Starmer as the apparently lesser of two evils.

Tom Sykes is an associate professor at the University of Portsmouth.