Andy Burnham has rightly spoken out on Labour's Gaza shame. Now comes the hard part

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David Hearst

Mon, 07/13/2026 - 13:20

The future prime minister should reconstruct a Labour Party with a strong moral core. This begins with Palestine and not repeating Starmer's fatal mistakes

Andy Burnham, British prime minister in waiting, delivers a speech at the People's History Museum in Manchester, Britain, on 29 June, 2026 (Reuters)

It is easy, if not to say tempting, to be cynical about Andy Burnham.

To describe him as a machine politician with a missing moral core, the perfect fodder for lobbies; the politician whose inner thoughts no-one really knows: the man who has been whisked from Makerfield to Downing Street with a minimum of scrutiny, due process, or debate.

A man on a magic carpet.

Every instinct tells me not to take Burnham at face value. But that is not what I propose to do.

I am going to take Burnham at his word when he apologised for the Labour Party’s policy on Gaza. There is a lengthy list of consequences entailed in this apology, which I spend the rest of this column writing about.

But for now, I am going to assume Burnham was speaking genuinely, out of conscience, and that this was the best possible start to his premiership.

First of all, he did not have to raise the issue of Gaza. There was no pressure on him to do so from a mostly pro-Israel Parliamentary Labour Party.

The immediate issues he will have to face as prime minister are domestic ones: the cost of living crisis, his choice of chancellor, a flat-lining economy and the size of the domestic debt.

And, secondly, there was even less incentive to raise Gaza at the very time he was being crowned the next leader of the Labour Party by 322 Labour MPs, almost 80 percent of the party.

Why Gaza

On entering Downing Street, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s first act was to shut the door on Palestine.

As leader of the opposition, he told LBC that Israel "had the right" to withhold power and electricity to the besieged enclave, a remark he tried to explain away under pressure but which only made it worse.

The UK public is not shy to call out genocide. Will the new prime minister join them?

Burnham’s first words on the threshold of power were to apologise for most of what Starmer did not do on Gaza, although he praised his predecessor for pushing the recognition of the Palestinian state.

The prime minister in waiting said the UK was too slow to call for a ceasefire, that Israel continues to violate it, that there is a surge of settler violence in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was "clearly attempting to make a two-state solution impossible".

He vowed to look at further sanctions on Israeli settlers and banning trade with the settlements.

If Burnham has assets he is bringing to the job, assets that Starmer lacked, this was the incoming man putting them front and centre on show.

The people who know Burnham in Manchester describe him as having a gift for listening to people and seizing the public mood.

He showed both traits during the bombing of the Manchester Arena, which was the nightmare start to his time as mayor, and the moment he was told that Manchester would get just £22m (approx $30m) for testing and tracing Covid. His feisty reaction earned him the title of "king of the north".

In describing Gaza as a "scar on our collective conscience", Burnham was seizing the public mood. For Gaza is no longer a niche issue of the left. It has become a mainstream bipartisan issue.

At last we have a prime minister in waiting who acknowledges that. This is in itself no mean achievement.

However, saying Gaza is a scar on our collective conscience is easier than starting to heal the wound.

Actions not words

Burnham has twice now refused to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide. Once with the excuse that he could not "judge things of that enormity from where I am as mayor of Greater Manchester".

Gaza has sparked the biggest protest movement in living memory, far outstripping the student protests in 2010 or the Iraq War in 2003. People living the length and breadth of the land from Truro to Scotland have been judging Gaza for what it is.

Apparently if you live in Manchester, you can not do that.

The second time was when he made his apology last week. Burnham said such issues were for the international courts to decide, not politicians.

This is almost as absurd.

No British court or judge has ruled about the new and highly problematic definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, but that did not stop the Labour Party adopting it.

Burnham pretends the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the world’s court, is still scratching its head about genocide in Gaza.

But that - again - is not the whole truth. These judges issued a stern warning to Israel to immediately stop the war or risk being judged genocidal.

That was over two years ago when Israeli troops entered Rafah.

Many tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have since been killed. Children have been deliberately targeted by snipers. Incubators with newborns inside have been switched off. Palestinians in Gaza are dying from diseases like renal failure and cancer because of Israel’s refusal to let them leave the besieged strip and reach hospital.

The whole of Gaza is in a continuous state of genocide.

Refusing to acknowledge this is as bad, if not worse, than Starmer’s refusal to call for a ceasefire at the start of this campaign, which Burnham specifically criticised.

UK’s legal duty

This is not a matter of opinion. The UK has a legal duty to uphold the ICJ's findings.

Israel has defied the ICJ repeatedly and made it absolutely clear that, whatever the outcome of the ceasefire with Hamas, it intends to engineer large-scale ethnic cleansing, or as its Defence Minister Israel Katz puts it "voluntary migration".

Read it yourself: The UN report on Israel targeting Palestinian children stands up to scrutiny

The UK’s response under Starmer was not just to look the other way. It was to arm Israel to continue its bombing campaign.

Under Starmer, the UK sent over 500 surveillance flights over Gaza whose intelligence it shared with Israel.

Each and every action the UK took was in breach of its obligations under international humanitarian law, international human rights law, the Genocide Convention, and customary international law by maintaining policies and relationships that contribute to, facilitate, or fail to prevent Israel’s unlawful conduct in the occupied Palestinian territory.

The UK’s obligations under international law are not a la carte dishes, from which a prime minister can pick and choose.

Continuing settlement expansion, annexation, apartheid, persecution and mass displacement all expose the UK to allegations of complicity in internationally wrongful acts, for which it too could be prosecuted.

Remedying this would require a swathe of actions for which neither Burnham, nor industry, nor its workforce are remotely prepared.

At a minimum it would mean suspending the UK’s existing trade agreement with Israel; prohibiting British companies from directly or indirectly supporting illegal settlements; taking enforcement action against those who do; ensuring that UK-registered charities are not raising funds for organisations or projects that entrench the occupation.

It would mean UK banning selling goods produced at settlements in the West Bank, banning British citizens from serving in the occupying Israeli army that has - and still is - committing genocide in Gaza and war crimes in West Bank and Lebanon.

It would mean cancelling all export licences for military hardware to Israel, first and foremost parts of the F-35 fighter programme. Suspending all military-to-military links and all intelligence co-operation.

This list has only just started.

The moment Burnham embarks on this path, he would walk into a blizzard of opposition from the unions - although Unite, one of the UK’s largest unions, backs a boycott - the workforce of BAE Systems, industry chiefs, the military industrial complex, the security establishment - and not least the US itself.

Just consider what happened to Robin Cook, Tony Blair’s foreign secretary who resigned over the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Cook had set out to build an ethical foreign policy. Cook championed the Chagossians' right of return to the islands that had become a US military base on Diego Garcia. Cook provoked Washington’s ire, and subsequent foreign secretaries reversed course.

Defence contracts do more than just provide cutting-edge manufacturing, design and engineering work to the UK workforce.

They lock Britain into a predetermined portfolio of policies that no government can extricate itself from easily and without substantial cost.

That’s the whole purpose of them.

Extricating the UK from supplying parts to Israel’s F-35 fighter programme would mean jeopardising a business worth $6.7bn.

The Campaign Against Arms Trade lists as many as 79 companies in Britain whose exports are covered by an Open General Export Licence (OGEL) which allows companies registered for the licence to export unlimited quantities of equipment to the relevant countries, so long as it is for the F-35, without need for individual licences.

The former foreign secretary David Lammy’s suspension of a small number of export licences was smoke and mirrors. It evaded the core of the arms trade which was hidden by OGEL.

A national disgrace

Is Burnham going to end this deceit by suspending all export arms licences to a country which is openly practicing ethnic cleansing?

Once you embark on this journey, it is difficult to know where to stop.

Palestine Action case reveals the limits of terrorism discourse

As if making a dent on all of the above was not bad enough, there is another more immediate issue, closer to home than far away Palestine.

The drama will be taking place in a court room near you almost every month from now until the next general election.

More people have been charged with terrorism offences in the weeks since Palestine Action was banned at the beginning of July last year than during the entire “war on terror”, dating back to September 2001, the Middle East Eye revealed.

Thousands of people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act since its prescription and more than 700 of them charged.

One of them is a retired magistrate from Truro, Cornwall.

Deborah Hinton, 82, a former magistrate, said of a prison sentence "Obviously I’m very upset, I’m very nervous, but I couldn’t do anything else but do what I did. I didn’t have a choice. We are heading towards an authoritarian state, and as I saw it, it was my duty to take a stand."

Hinton is not alone.

The average profile of a British "terrorist" is a woman with an average age of 57. Government statistics say that where sex is known, arrests linked to Palestine Action were 4.4 times more likely to be female, with an average age of 57 compared to 30 for non-Palestine Action-linked arrests.

As this courtroom drama has unfolded, the sentencing is getting stiffer.

At the last protest outside New Scotland Yard, 14 activists were arrested under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, which criminalises inviting support for a proscribed organisation and carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.

This has become a national disgrace.

The Palestine Action scandal was a Labour Party creation and Labour now has to stop it. It should be de-proscribed and all sentences associated with it quashed.

Otherwise Burnham will have people in court every day from now until the next election - doctors, teachers, retired magistrates - being sent down as terrorists for having done nothing more than acting on their conscience.

A decision is needed on this. And soon.

As far as we know, Burnham plans to keep Shabana Mahmoud, who has made the proscription of Palestine Action the centrepiece of her time in office as home secretary.

Opposition to Burnham’s remarks about Gaza has spent little time gathering pace.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) and Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) have conveyed "significant concerns" to Burnham’s team over his remarks. They criticise him for not mentioning the "continuing operation of Hamas" in Gaza - when it has maintained the ceasefire - or operations in the West Bank.

French commentator Bernard-Henri Levy said: "Not a single word about Hamas’s responsibility for holding its own people hostage and turning them into human shields. That is called blindness - or worse, cowardice. Shame on you, Prime Minister."

Human Rights Watch and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor have both said that they have found no evidence that Hamas has used Palestinian civilians as human shields in Gaza during the post-7 October hostilities.

By contrast, Israeli soldiers themselves have testified to Haaretz and ITV News that the Israeli army has systematically used Palestinian civilians as human shields in Gaza during the post-October 7 hostilities.

Jack Rankin, Conservative MP for Windsor, reposted the JLC/BoD statement on X, saying: "This is spot on. The pernicious obsession with Israel has fuelled antisemitism in our country. All sensible minded Brits should stand with our beleaguered Jewish neighbours. Rather than prioritising cynical political attempts to appease sectarian, Islamist and far-left voters, Andy Burnham should focus on delivering for the whole country."

Andrew Fox, Henry Jackson Society researcher, posted:“So, with Yvette Cooper, Hamish Falconer and Andy Burnham yesterday all repeating straight-up lies about Israel, including about amount of aid entering Gaza and the Hamas colonel-doctor, we can safely draw one conclusion: The Corbyn era of old, antisemitic Labour is back.”

Another Jeremy Corbyn?

One can see where all this is heading: Burnham is Jeremy Corbyn revisited and deserves the same treatment.

I am not sure a repeat of the campaign against Corbyn is going to work a second time round. Burnham developed a good relationship with the Manchester Jewish community as mayor.

How Britain's contempt for the UN enables Gaza genocide

Public opinion in Britain has hardened. Anyone on a mobile phone can see for themselves what is happening in Gaza and the occupied territories.

The civilian suffering is so overwhelming and so continuous in Gaza it defies even Israel’s ability to cover it up, still less to brand coverage of it as a "blood libel" against Jews.

But cast all notions of right and wrong aside. Consider this issue purely from pragmatic electoral politics.

We now have had two by-elections in Greater Manchester. The first was one in which Labour should have won easily but did not because Burnham was barred from standing by a Starmer-controlled National Executive Committee.

Unlike Makerfield, the Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election was strong, and the Labour vote collapsed to Hannah Spencer in the Greens' first-ever Westminster by-election victory.

Burnham is not making the same mistake that doomed Joe Biden’s presidency, Kamala Harris’ election campaign and Starmer’s two-year tenure in office.

Starmer lasted longer than a head of lettuce. It was longer than Liz Truss’ 45 day office, but his downfall was just as sudden - both he and Truss left office bewildered, stunned by the reaction of a party each leader felt was behind them.

Starmer thought he could dictate terms to a British electorate that was not having it. Every Labour MP knew that the vote in the recent local councils elections was a vote against Starmer personally.

Even when local councillors were good, they were voted against because of Starmer. He had become a massive vote loser.

Burnham is not going to repeat these mistakes.

The message to a future Labour leader is clear. Don’t take voters for granted, be they Muslim, progressive, be they from right or left.

Otherwise they will walk away from Labour forever and usher in a new era of British politics dominated by the far right.

The only way to stop this happening is to reconstruct a Labour Party with a strong moral core. This begins with Palestine and when that happens the dam of unconditional support for Israel will collapse.

The magic carpet has had many honourable appearances in literature. But it ended up as a ride in a Disney theme park.

Burnham would not want the same thing to happen to his term of office.

He is a better politician than that.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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Andy Burnham has rightly spoken out on Labour's Gaza shame. Now comes the hard part

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