Tory civil war breaks out over Israel
In recent months Israel’s invasion of Gaza has caused serious splits inside the Labour Party, including the resignation of numerous councillors, as we reported yesterday.
But today it was the Conservative Party’s turn for bitter divisions on the same issue, and on the broader question of Zionism.
Former Foreign Office minister Sir Alan Duncan, during an interview on LBC, rounded on fellow Tories whom he accused of “serving the interests of another country” – namely Israel.
Sir Alan specifically named Tom Tugendhat, security minister in Rishi Sunak’s government, and called for him to be sacked.
H&D‘s assistant editor exposed the extraordinary history of the Tugendhat family almost two years ago in an article at the Real History blog.
And here at H&D we reported in 2017 on the outrageous behaviour of Israeli Embassy official Shai Masot, who infiltrated the Tory party and tried to destroy Sir Alan Duncan’s ministerial career.
Perhaps today was Sir Alan’s revenge?
Whatever his motives, it now seems there is a split in Tory ranks over whether to continue the party’s policy of slavish devotion to Israel.
Labour’s Asian base crumbles
Labour’s entire team of councillors in the Lancashire borough of Pendle has quit, exposing the extent to which Keir Starmer’s party has become dependent on Asian communities in some areas of Britain.
The resignations were timed just days before close of nominations in the English local council elections, which will make it difficult for Labour to find new candidates and prepare campaigns.
All ten incumbent Labour councillors in Pendle (nine of them Asians) resigned, in protest at the party leadership’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza and its handling of ‘anti-semitism’ allegations. Ten parish councillors from the Pendle area also resigned – some of them were due to be borough council candidates next month.
Not coincidentally, one of the main victims of this purge of ‘anti-semites’ was Azhar Ali – Labour’s candidate at the Rochdale parliamentary by-election – who was thrown out of the party after secret recordings emerged of Ali expressing conspiracy theories about Israel.
Ali was for years the main Labour power-broker in Pendle. He was leader of the Labour group on Lancashire County Council until the ‘anti-semitism’ scandal destroyed him, after which he was replaced by the veteran Jewish councillor Jennifer Mein (against whom H&D editor Mark Cotterill stood at the last county council elections).
These resignations reveal two contradictory facts about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
The first is that in several areas of Britain, Labour has effectively been taken over by Asians – very similar to the way in which some inner-city Labour parties were taken over by Trotskyists and other far-left sects during the 1970s. This isn’t just because of the influx of immigrants. It’s because in parallel with their arrival, traditional industries collapsed – which meant that trade unions that had been Labour’s backbone also collapsed.
But the second fact is that however powerful Asians might be in some local areas, they count for nothing at the top of the Labour Party.
Keir Starmer is absolutely determined to position his party as a close ally of Israel. The only reason he might now venture some limited criticisms of Netanyahu is that Israeli brutality has become so extreme that they are increasingly criticised by well-informed Conservatives and veteran establishment figures, such as the retired diplomat Lord Ricketts.
Starmer will very timidly echo some of these criticisms.
H&D readers should be under no illusions. Keir Starmer will at some point within the next nine months become Prime Minister and Labour will win a landslide parliamentary majority.
But the fault lines within his party – not only over Gaza but over socially liberal attitudes, feminism, and ‘trans’ rights – will continue to raise difficult questions about Labour’s identity.
Labour’s impending victory will simply expose its ideological vacuity.
It will be up to racial nationalists to frame a coherent response.
H&D will as always carry full reports on the local council elections, both here and in the print edition of our magazine.
Labour’s multicultural crisis!
Though it still seems very likely that Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer will become Prime Minister in about a year’s time, the latest crisis in Palestine has raised problems that are rooted in Labour’s historical commitments to both Zionism and the UK’s multiracial society.
For most of its history, the Labour Party has been pro-Zionist – with the partial exceptions of the Attlee government that presided over a war against Jewish terrorists from 1945-48, and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party during 2015-20.
Successive Labour leaders (ever since Attlee’s government saw the first large-scale West Indian immigration) have become ever more committed to the vision of multiracialism and multiculturalism.
Until the 1980s it never occurred to any politician that Islam and in particular solidarity with fellow Muslims in Palestine would become a factor in British politics. Even racial nationalists during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s emphasised other reasons why non-European races and cultures didn’t belong here. Religion was rarely taken seriously as a political division (apart from Protestant v Catholic divisions in Ulster and some British cities).
But now significant numbers of Muslim councillors and MPs (as well as some pro-Palestinian, non-Muslim Labourites, usually either from the Corbynite left-wing or worried about Muslim voters in their areas) are rebelling against their leader’s support for Israel.
Starmer seems determined to distance himself from Corbyn and take Labour back to the Tony Blair era (or even the era of Harold Wilson, who from 1963-76 was the most pro-Zionist Labour leader in the party’s history).
Yet the brutality of Israel’s assault on Gaza has shocked some Muslim councillors so much that they have quit the party.
Much of the trouble has come in areas of Lancashire that are well-known to the H&D team from the 2000s when racial nationalism flourished in some racial flashpoint areas.
The leader of Burnley council has quit Labour together with ten colleagues, instantly removing Labour’s control of the council. For now they are in an independent group, and the council’s future direction is uncertain.
Councillors have also quit Labour In nearby Pendle, while in Blackburn (where H&D editor Mark Cotterill was once a councillor) there have been defections from both the Tories and Labour.
Yesterday three members of Haringey council in North London (this time non-Muslim Corbynists) joined the exodus.
For now it seems obvious that Starmer will stick with his pro-Zionist policy whatever happens. But if Israeli policy becomes even more brutal, he will start to come under pressure from more mainstream voices in his party, and the split will widen.
The tragedy in all this of course is that while Muslim councillors are prepared to speak for their brothers and sisters in Gaza, there is no racial nationalist party of any size able to speak for indigenous Britons.
