Keir Starmer can’t avoid changing position on Gaza, but the path is fraught with difficulty

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Good morning. Navigating the challenge of the Israel-Hamas war poses a real and serious threat to Keir Starmer’s leadership. As a result, today’s email must, by necessity, consider some of the policy challenges of the war in order to explore what it means for British politics in general and Labour politics in particular. Some thoughts on that below.

A rethink approaches

Labour’s position on the Israel-Hamas war will continue to come under further pressure. Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham, the mayors of London and Greater Manchester, and Anas Sarwar, the party’s leader in Scotland, have all come out in favour of a ceasefire. (It’s a small but important measure of how Sue Gray, Keir Starmer’s new chief of staff, has reset and repaired relationships with the devolved governments that the Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford has yet to break ranks and join them.)

It’s a misread to see the row as a simple left vs right battle. Critics of Labour’s current position can be found right across the party and include some of the Labour leader’s most important allies. The central problem is that Labour needs the support of the liberal left middle classes and the Muslim working class to win elections. To do so it will have to find a way to finesse the current situation, and Labour’s own position on it.

This isn’t a newsletter of geopolitics and I am not going to pretend to be an expert in that, but the basic problem facing Keir Starmer is this: no expert I have talked to has yet to say anything other than “Israel’s war aims can’t be met”.

As Kim Ghattas, fellow at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics, wrote in the FT two weeks ago, “every attempt to wipe out Palestinian armed groups has only produced more extreme iterations and worse conundrums”. Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former US diplomat, warned in his op-ed this weekend that Israel’s aim of eliminating Hamas “is likely to prove impossible”.

In terms of the number of deaths per capita, the October 7 attack was greater than the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Gideon Rachman had a smart column on the historical parallels and divergences recently. But for the purposes of UK politics, here is the key section:

Israel’s vow to obliterate Hamas is strongly reminiscent of America’s pledges to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11. The US can claim a partial success in the direct struggle against al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, its leader, was killed in 2011 and the organisation has not managed to launch another spectacular attack on the American mainland.

But Islamism is an idea and terrorism is a tactic. So destroying one Islamist terrorist organisation does not end the problem. New groups, such as Isis, have emerged. Europe, in particular France, has been hit hard by Islamist terror attacks. And jihadist militants are gaining ground in Africa.

Hamas itself resembles the Taliban more than al-Qaeda because it is an actual governing authority that has run a defined territory for some years. That should be a warning because, more than 20 years after US troops entered Kabul, the Taliban are back in charge of Afghanistan.

John Sawers, the former chief of MI6, says that view will also be that of Israel’s security chiefs:

Israel’s security chiefs know the goal of destroying Hamas is probably beyond their reach. Hamas has a political base and extensive external support from Iran.  

As far as British politics is concerned, the biggest problem confronting Keir Starmer is that neither he nor his frontbenchers can mount a policy-based defence of Israel’s aims. They can make an argument that those aims are legitimate, but inevitably the longer the conflict goes on, the more the debate will shift from “are these aims legitimate?” to “can these aims be achieved?”. Given these aims come with a human cost that creates what Shimrit Meir, diplomatic adviser to former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, describes as the “moral dilemma from hell”, I think most western political parties will find it untenable to avoid calling for a ceasefire sooner or later. (One bit of evidence for that, I would say, is that Rishi Sunak’s calls with European leaders this week were heavy on the importance of restraint, while Joe Biden, too, is also talking up the importance of restraint and proportionality.)

And — as Gideon explains here — Biden’s policy (calling for a humanitarian “pause” that Sunak, like most European leaders, are slipstreaming behind) is based on a belief that Israel’s approach cannot work but the best way to make that argument is to “hug Israel close”. An added difficulty for Starmer is that he cannot easily argue that this is what he is doing, because he is not in government. He wants to demonstrate that he could pursue this strategy in office, but it is much harder to stick to it in opposition, when the argument for doing so is naturally much more abstract.

Given all of that, Labour’s policy position on this conflict is going to have to change eventually, whether Starmer himself is the agent or the victim of that change. Indeed Labour policy is already shifting de facto, in that individual Labour MPs are already changing tack to suit their own individual electorates. If Starmer does not formally change policy, I think Labour’s policy will disintegrate fairly rapidly this week, as he can’t possibly enforce Labour’s “on-paper” policy on his shadow cabinet, let alone the party as a whole.

Sunak is also going to have to adjust his policy. It is one thing to say “we want you to win”, but another to maintain that when people are asking questions about whether such a victory is even possible. The big difference of course is that for the prime minister, changing position, when he ends up doing so, will be politically painless. For Keir Starmer, the journey from his current position to a new one is fraught with difficulty — and if he mishandles it, there is a real possibility that his whole project might yet come tumbling down.

Now try this

I had a lovely time this weekend. I started my Saturday as usual with the FTWeekend, and particularly enjoyed Simon Kuper’s essay on the making of a modern oligarch, Jemima Kelly’s tour of the US’s new “anti-woke” universities, and Martin Arnold’s lunch with Christine Lagarde.

I had a marvellous evening at Kings Place listening to Night Tracks live (you can hear it on the regular programme on Radio 3 on the evenings of November 6, 7 and 8). It is difficult to pick out a high point but the real delight for me was not only hearing the wonderful music of John Foxx (of Ultravox fame) live but also his conversation with Hannah Peel. He seems to be an utterly lovely person as well as a talented musician. I’m really enjoying his latest record, The Arcades Project, which I’ve essentially had on a loop since the concert ended.

Top stories today

• Push to scrap subsidies for foreign oil and gas projects | The UK and EU will push the world’s richest countries to end subsidies for foreign oil and gas operations and coal mining at a closed-door OECD meeting next month, according to people familiar with the matter.

• Killing Kittens | The founder of a sex party planner that is part-owned by the UK government through a pandemic-era start-up fund has vowed it will be a “pin-up” for the scheme and turn a profit for the British taxpayer thanks to its pivot towards a new dating app.

• Culture secretary seeks to strengthen BBC governance | Rishi Sunak’s government will seek to strengthen governance arrangements of the BBC that oversee impartiality and complaints, the culture secretary has said, as criticism of the corporation’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war continues.

• Sturgeon’s WhatsApps | Nicola Sturgeon gave a clear commitment two years ago to forward all government WhatsApp messages and Covid communications to any subsequent public inquiries into how the pandemic was handled. However, it is understood WhatsApp messages sent by the former first minister were manually deleted from her phone, the Sunday Times’s Jeremy Watson reports.