THE Gazan crisis has surely exposed, if indeed it wasn’t already perfectly obvious, that Keir Starmer is prepared to brook no obstacle in his obeisance to US imperialism, even before he takes office as the British prime minister.

The title of this article refers to an infamous, patronising greeting offered to Tony Blair by George W Bush in July 2006 at the St Petersburg G8 summit. 

A few days before that summit, Hezbollah militants crossed from Lebanon into Israel and ambushed two Israeli army vehicles, killing three soldiers and capturing two others, using rockets fired on several Israeli towns as a diversion. In response Israel launched a devastating attack on Lebanon. 

According to the Lebanese government, more than 1,000 Lebanese were killed and more than 3,600 injured. Reflecting the mood of the British people, Labour MPs were appalled. According to a YouGov poll in Britain, 63 per cent believed that Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s attack had been “disproportionate.” Only 17 per cent thought it was “proportionate.” Blair, however, was determined to “take one” for the president of the US and refused to call for an immediate ceasefire. 

Together with the mammoth arrogance and misjudgement Blair showed over the Iraq war, this helped lead to his eventual departure from British politics into the gold-plated world of international “consultancy.”

The parallels with Starmer are obvious, except that Blair was already prime minister and ironically, actually a good deal more tolerant of criticism than Starmer — witness the crass handling of Andy McDonald MP. 

Starmer has not, however, been able to stifle dissent among all Labour Party members. There has been a spate of resignations of Labour councillors and office-bearers. Nor indeed has all gone well in the fiefdoms of the regional and national Labour Parties of Britain.

Take Scotland. Until this crisis, it would have been impossible to put the proverbial fag paper between the Scottish Labour Party leader Anas Sarwar and Starmer. 

However, faced with resignations of 15 Constituency Labour Party officers, protesting about being forbidden even to discuss the issue of Gaza, and no doubt much greater pressure from the Muslim community which he is part of, Sarwar eventually called for a ceasefire in Gaza and for an end to the illegal occupation and an end to the illegal siege. 

He went further, saying that Starmer had made “hurtful” comments about the conflict and that relations with the Muslim community required repair work.

Scottish Labour Party speakers appeared at Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign rallies. On the second demonstration held in Glasgow in mid-October, Pauline McNeil MSP, a long-time campaigner on Palestine, spoke powerfully, calling for an end to the pulverisation of Gaza: “I speak for Scottish Labour and for many of my colleagues who are here today. I am supported by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who also cares deeply about the Palestinian cause… Nothing can justify the indiscriminate killing and relentless bombing of Palestinian civilians trapped with nowhere to go — hospitals, schools, places of safety. Nothing can justify the wiping out of a whole people. It will not lead to peace; it is against all rules of war and established international law.”

She was followed at other demonstrations by Carol Mochan MSP, Katy Clark MSP and Mercedes Villalba MSP, who sometimes had to face anti-Starmer and anti-Labour heckling. 

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Sarwar’s position is the settled will of Scottish Labour. Shadow secretary of state for Scotland Ian Murray MP has not joined calls for a ceasefire, despite claiming on a BBC podcast that he has two bosses, Starmer and Sarwar and the recently elected Michael Shanks MP is publicly supporting Starmer’s position.  

So, who is speaking for Scottish Labour, or — put slightly differently — what do Scottish Labour Party members think about the Gaza crisis?

It is here we encounter the limitations of Sarwar’s strategy. He may, rightly, oppose Starmer’s surrender to the US on a ceasefire, but he has not mobilised the Scottish Labour Party in support of that opposition. 

Indeed, the initial advice by David Evans that Labour Party constituencies cannot even discuss the issue, which more importantly from a Scottish point of view is advice supported by “Team Scottish Labour” to the effect that “any motions no matter how well intentioned are out of order,” remains in place. 

This effectively silences CLP officers who have to judge whether their decision to allow discussion on Gaza will lead to disciplinary action. 

Indeed, Sarwar dismissed the actions of the office-bearers in Scotland, who had resigned their positions because they were gagged, as “playing games.” Would it were so. The chair of Edinburgh Northern and Leith Labour Party ruled a motion on Gaza out of order on the basis on Evans’s advice. 

Since then, in the Cities of London and Westminster CLP, Ian Martin, a former secretary-general of Amnesty International and a former general secretary of the Fabian Society who has held multiple senior UN roles, submitted a motion calling for Labour’s leadership to back the UN secretary general’s call for a ceasefire, a complete lifting of the siege and restrictions on humanitarian access in Gaza, and an end to the deliberate displacement of civilians. 

A London Labour official, very much like “Team Labour Scotland,” wrote to Ian saying that: “…any such motions will be ruled out of order.”

Apart from two motions from Aberdeen Labour Party and Glasgow City Labour Group, both more limited in scope than the statement by Sarwar, there have not been, as far as I am aware, any further motions on Gaza discussed in the Scottish Labour Party and with the chilling effect of the Evans and Team Scotland advice, that is not surprising. Nor has there been any significant presence at demonstrations beyond official speakers.  

In other words, the current crisis has not, even in Scotland, changed fundamentally how Labour Party politics are conducted. It still reflects far too closely the void that distinguished academic Peter Mair described in 2013. 

Like other aspects of citizen engagement, the democratic function of the Labour Party, including the Scottish Labour Party, has been hollowed out and replaced by technocratic manipulation in favour of Western dominated neoliberalism, much loved by Blair, Mandelson and their acolytes. A void that was filled only too briefly by the Corbyn era.

As for Starmer, his role model Tony Blair said of the Lebanon-Israeli conflict of 2006: “It wasn’t that I didn’t get public opinion on Lebanon, nor that I couldn’t have articulated it. My difficulty was that I didn’t agree with it.”

Less than a year after that atrocious error, Blair had resigned. What is Starmer waiting for?