Latest news with #DavidLammy
The Guardian
an hour ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Gaza: if the UK won't act now, then when?
As hundreds of thousands of people face starvation in Gaza, this week the foreign secretary, David Lammy, joined a chorus of global condemnation over Israel's actions, describing the killing of innocent civilians seeking food and water as grotesque. But when will his words be followed by action? John Harris speaks to the UN's special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese. Plus, will the Tory reshuffle do anything to take the wind out of Nigel Farage's sails? The Guardian's senior political correspondent, Peter Walker, joins John to discuss
The Guardian
an hour ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘This is not action': MPs respond to David Lammy's condemnation of Israel
When David Lammy stood at the dispatch box to deliver a statement condemning Israel's killing of starving civilians in Gaza on Monday, he was met with anger from MPs. 'We want action, and this is not action,' thundered one Labour MP. 'Is this it?' another questioned. 'At what point does our basic humanity require us to take stronger action? Many of us think the red line was passed a long time ago,' a third said. The fury across the Commons was evident. 'Are words enough?' asked one veteran Tory. A second accused Lammy of 'complicity by inaction' and warned it could land him at The Hague. A Lib Dem highlighted that repeated UK expressions of regret had not prevented further carnage. A clearly despairing Lammy attempted to reassure the politicians the government was playing its part. 'Me raising my voice will not bring this war to an end. I lament that and I regret that. But am I sure that the UK government are doing everything in our power? Yes, I am.' But as international condemnation of Israel over the horrors it is inflicting on starving Palestinian civilians grows, Keir Starmer's government is struggling to convince the British public that it is doing enough. The outrage in the Commons is reflected across the country more widely, with the public increasingly regarding Israel's response since the October 7 attacks as disproportionate, as the atrocities continued. The government have been on the defensive, pointing out that it has restored funding to the UN agency UNWRA, provided millions in humanitarian assistance, sanctioned far-right Israeli ministers and those who committed settler violence, and broken off trade negotiations with Israel. But it has struggled to explain its export licensing regime. Ministers insist they have stopped the sale of arms, despite there still being more than 300 licences in operation. These include, they say, body armour sent to protect NGO workers, chemicals for Israeli universities and components for goods which are then transported to Nato allies. In particular, there is anger at the UK decision to allow the export of F-35 fighter jet components to Israel, which ministers argue is unavoidable because they are part of a global programme over which the UK does not have unilateral control. It exposes serious weaknesses in the regime and some believe the government should go further – with a fuller export embargo and an end to all military co-operation with Israel. Lammy has only recently sought to explain that RAF flights that overfly Gaza do not share information to help Israel conduct the war. 'We are not doing that. I would never do that,' he said this week. Starmer is also under pressure to immediately recognise a Palestinian state, both from his own back benches, within his cabinet and from the wider diplomatic community. Ministers say the UK will 'play its part' in working towards formal recognition, with a UN conference led by the French and Saudis later this month a key moment. Privately, they warn the move would only be symbolic unless there is a ceasefire first. But for many, who think the UK should be matching France's more hardline stance, that is not a good enough reason not to. 'If not now, then when?' one cabinet minister said. The government has stated it could issue more sanctions – with calls to do so against senior Israeli military officers, government ministers and even Benjamin Netanyahu himself. But that has not happened yet. Nor have suggestions it might expel the Israeli ambassador been heeded. 'That's unserious,' said one insider. The UK has also backed away from declaring that Israel has broken international law, insisting that while the government believes it is 'at risk' of doing so, it is up to the international courts to reach that judgment. Aides cite the same reason for avoiding the term 'genocide' to describe the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Back in the Commons on Monday, the criticism kept coming. 'The will of the House is clear on this matter: it wants action, not words. Why are you not hearing that?' a Labour MP asked. 'How could I not?' the foreign secretary responded. But while Lammy may have got the message, he appears to remain restricted by both the caution of the UK prime minister, and the realpolitik that there is only one foreign power that could single-handedly force an end to the conflict: the US. 'I wish we could, but the truth is … we are unable to do that just as the United Kingdom,' he told MPs. 'We have to work in partnership with our allies.' But for many, that will not be enough.
The Hindu
an hour ago
- Politics
- The Hindu
U.K. launches first sanctions in new strategy to deter migrant crossings
The U.K. imposed sanctions on Wednesday (July 23, 2025) on more than two dozen people, groups and suppliers from the Balkans, the Middle East and China, accused of helping migrants cross the Channel. In what it called a 'landmark' first use of new powers, the move came as the government faces political pressure to stem migrant arrivals on small boats from northern France, at record levels. The asset freezes and travel bans announced target individuals and entities 'driving irregular migration to the U.K.' and include four 'gangs' and 'gangland bosses' operating in the Balkans, the Foreign Office said. They also hit a small boat supplier in China, so-called 'hawala' money movers in the Middle East, and seven alleged people-smugglers linked to Iraq. Foreign Secretary David Lammy called it 'a landmark moment in the government's work to tackle organised immigration crime', impacting the U.K. 'From Europe to Asia, we are taking the fight to the people-smugglers who enable irregular migration, targeting them wherever they are in the world,' he added. 'My message to the gangs who callously risk vulnerable lives for profit is this: we know who you are, and we will work with our partners around the world to hold you to account,' he said. 'Terrorising refugees' Prime Minister Keir Starmer took office a year ago promising to curb the journeys by 'smashing the gangs' that facilitate the crossings, but he has struggled to deliver. Nearly 24,000 migrants have made the perilous journey across the Channel so far in 2025, the highest ever tally at this point in a year. The issue has become politically perilous in the U.K., blamed for helping to fuel the rise of the far right and violence at anti-migrant demonstrations. Protests have erupted sporadically outside hotels believed to house asylum-seekers, with a recent demonstration outside one in Epping, east of London, descending into clashes that injured eight police officers. Riots sparked by the stabbing to death of three young girls in northwestern Southport a year ago also saw suspected asylum-seeker hotels attacked and anti-migrant sentiment on display. As part of its strategy to curb new arrivals, the government is also cracking down on illegal working, which European neighbours cite as a 'pull factor' for U.K.-bound migrants. It announced late on Tuesday (July 22, 2025) a new agreement with delivery firms Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats which includes sharing the locations of asylum hotels to help tackle illegal working. Meanwhile in another new tactic, artificial intelligence technology will be trialled to assess disputed ages of asylum-seekers who claim to be children, the interior ministry said Tuesday (July 22, 2025). 'Far-fetched' Wednesday's (July 23, 2025) designations represent the U.K.'s first use of its new 'Global Irregular Migration Sanctions Regime'. It claims the regime is a 'world first', empowering the Foreign Office to target foreign financiers and companies as well as individuals allegedly involved in facilitating people-smuggling to the U.K. In all, it sanctioned 20 individuals, four gangs – two Balkan groups and two of North African origin operating in the Balkans – and Chinese firm Weihai Yamar Outdoor Product Co. It has advertised its small boats online 'explicitly for the purpose of people-smuggling,' the Foreign Office said. Among those facing curbs was Bledar Lala, described as an Albanian controlling 'the 'Belgium operations' of an organised criminal group' involved in the crossings. The U.K. also targeted Alen Basil, a former police translator it accused of now leading a large smuggling network in Serbia, 'terrorising refugees, with the aid of corrupt policemen'. London hit alleged 'gangland boss' Mohammed Tetwani with sanctions, noting he was dubbed the 'King of Horgos' over his brutal running of a migrant camp in the Serbian town Horgos. Author and researcher Tom Keatinge, of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said the sanctions were 'a new front in the U.K.'s efforts to control a business model that brings profit to the enablers' and misery to victims. 'However, I would caution against overpromising,' he told AFP. 'Talk of freezing assets and using sanctions to 'smash the gangs' seems far-fetched and remains to be seen. 'History suggests that such assertions hold governments hostage to fortune.'
Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Lammy handing Hamas a get-out card is an utter disgrace
To listen to David Lammy being interviewed by the BBC, it is as though the Islamist death cult known as Hamas bears absolutely no responsibility for the ongoing tragedy in Gaza. In the parallel universe occupied by our Foreign Secretary, it is seemingly not Hamas that started the war in Gaza by carrying out the worst massacre in Israel's history or bears responsibility for failing to agree a lasting ceasefire. It is not the terrorists who are to be blamed for disrupting the aid supply lines that are essential to preventing a humanitarian disaster. Instead, Lammy believes that the enduring catastrophe that has engulfed Gaza since the October 7 attacks in 2023 is the fault of the Israeli government and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Commenting after the UK had joined 27 other countries, including Canada, France and Australia, in issuing a statement condemning Israel for depriving Palestinians in Gaza of their 'human dignity', Lammy's hyperbole knew no bounds as he declared he was 'sickened, appalled' by Israel's conduct and its 'grotesque' targeting of starving Palestinians. Lamenting the fact that the UK had neither the power nor influence to end the conflict, he warned he was prepared to impose further sanctions against Israel if hostilities did not end soon. Throughout this seemingly endless anti-Israel diatribe on the BBC, at no point did Lammy make any reference to Hamas, and the pernicious role the group has played in wilfully disrupting aid supplies to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. There was no condemnation of the campaign of tyranny Hamas continues to exercise over Gaza's civilian population, nor any mention of freezing the assets of the wealthy Hamas terrorist masterminds holed up in Qatar. This is despite mounting evidence that the Iranian-backed terrorist group is deliberately exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in the enclave for its own propaganda purposes. Hamas has been accused of targeting Palestinian civilians trying to obtain food and medical supplies provided by the US-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. This is an aid organisation set up as an alternative to the UN-sponsored UNWRA, whose humanitarian efforts have been compromised by their links to Hamas. Videos are circulating online showing Hamas terrorists rounding up recipients of US aid, with some of them being tortured and killed. Meanwhile Israeli officials have released evidence that suggests that, far from blocking supplies, Israel has allowed 950 trucks to cross into Gaza to deliver aid, and the reason it has not been distributed is because too many of the UN-sponsored aid agencies are too busy criticising the Israelis to bother collecting it. In an active war zone like Gaza it is difficult to verify these conflicting narratives. But, at the very least, it is incumbent on the UK and other Western governments to try to bring some semblance of balance and proportion to highly inflammatory allegations, such as the claim that Israel is deliberately causing mass starvation among Palestinian civilians. This is clearly beyond Lammy's diplomatic skill set, with the Foreign Secretary apparently more interested in virtue signalling to Labour's hard-Left anti-Israel lobby than making any coherent effort to address the broader, and more complex, challenges raised by the Gaza crisis. By doing so, he is essentially propagating the same twisted anti-Israel agenda promoted by supporters of Palestine Action, the direct action group that Lammy and his ministerial colleagues have just proscribed as a terrorist organisation. No wonder the Israelis have responded to the latest international condemnation of their actions by Lammy and Co as being 'disconnected from reality'. If Britain and its co-signatories are genuinely committed to an 'unconditional and permanent ceasefire' in Gaza, as the statement insists, then they should concentrate their efforts on forcing Hamas and its backers in Iran to acknowledge the inevitable, and accept that the terrorist organisation's continued presence in Gaza must end. One of the biggest obstacles to the Trump administration's attempts to broker a lasting ceasefire in Gaza has been Hamas's determination to maintain operations in Gaza, irrespective of the scale of the defeat they suffer at the hands of the Israelis. If Hamas emerges from the conflict with just a fraction of its pre-war terrorist infrastructure intact, it will hail the achievement as a major victory. Israel, like any other country that has suffered atrocities on the scale committed on October 7, insists there will be no peace in Gaza so long as Hamas remains an active presence in the enclave. Allowing Hamas to retain any vestige of influence in the territory would simply place the Israeli people at risk of suffering yet another cataclysmic terrorist attack, which is why Netanyahu is so insistent that there can be no peace in Gaza so long as Hamas remains. The key to implementing a lasting ceasefire in Gaza is not indulging in more, utterly pointless, anti-Israel Lammyesque stunts. It is forcing Hamas and its backers that its reign of terror in the enclave is well and truly over.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
British ministers are betting they won't face justice for complicity over Gaza. It's a big risk to take
A terrible tipping point in Gaza has been reached. The number of people admitted to hospital or dying from starvation has surged. The journalists' union for Agence France-Presse (AFP) has issued a statement warning that 'without intervention, the last reporters in Gaza' will die of hunger. This is horribly shocking, but it is no surprise: after all, we are now more than 140 days into Israel's total siege on Gaza. In May, Israel abolished the UN's effective method of delivering aid in favour of a dystopian system in which Palestinians are forced to compete for a trickle of often unusable aid, and are shot at while doing so. About 1,000 civilians have been murdered while seeking food since the end of May. 'There is no case since World War II of starvation that has been so minutely designed and controlled,' declares Alex de Waal, one of the world's leading experts on hunger. Under the Geneva conventions, 'starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited'. Against this backdrop, on Monday the former Tory cabinet minister Kit Malthouse stood up in parliament and asked the foreign secretary, David Lammy, if he did 'not see the personal risk to him, given our international obligations, that he may end up at The Hague because of his inaction?' Lammy bent over the dispatch box and adopted a tone of solemn disappointment, as one might do when seeking to rise above an unprovoked insult. 'I have to tell him that it demeans his argument when he personalises it in the way that he does,' he shot back. But Malthouse did not resort to abuse. Indeed, the presiding deputy speaker did not reprimand him for unparliamentary language. Lammy intentionally conflated scrutiny with personal attack to avoid answering the question. Alas, like our prime minister, he is a lawyer by trade, and he should know that the genocide convention of 1948 identifies five punishable acts: one of them is 'complicity in genocide'. He should know that signatories to the convention have a legal obligation 'to prevent and to punish' the crime of genocide. He should also know that his country signed the convention the day it was published, and incorporated it into law 55 years ago. Israel's official position is that, when it is finished, no Palestinians will remain in Gaza. 'We are destroying more and more homes, and Gazans have nowhere to return to,' Benjamin Netanyahu openly boasts. It is building what its former prime minister Ehud Olmert says is a 'concentration camp' as the first step before deporting Gaza's survivors. Eyal Benvenisti – the Israeli lawyer who is part of the legal team defending it against accusations of genocide at the international court of justice – says this would be a 'war crime' and 'fits the definition of a 'crime against humanity''. He subsequently signed a letter declaring that this plan 'under certain conditions, could amount to the crime of genocide'. Indeed, international law leaves no room for doubt. When the UK ratified the arms trade treaty in 2014, it accepted that it must not 'authorise any transfer of conventional arms … if it has knowledge at the time of authorisation … [that] would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes'. It also accepted that this included 'parts and components' essential to the functioning of 'combat aircraft'. Lammy's government supplies Israel with components crucial for the functioning of F-35 jets, whose bombs indiscriminately destroy civilian infrastructure and shred the bodies of little children. Lammy also knows, of course, that Britain is a founding member of the international criminal court, which last year issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity. When successfully defending the sale of F-35 components in the high court, the government offered its assessment that it had not seen any evidence of women and children being deliberately targeted in Gaza, and there was no serious risk of a genocide. This contradicts dozens of American doctors and nurses who served in Gaza, who last year testified they had received the bodies of Palestinian children shot in the head or chest by Israeli snipers. Israeli soldiers have confessed that they are deliberately targeting children. Nick Maynard – a British doctor working in Gaza's Nasser hospital – says that he is seeing clusters of young teenagers who have been shot in different body parts: on one day, it's the abdomen, on another, the head or neck, on another, the testicles. 'So there's a very clear pattern and it's almost as if a game is being played,' he says. The government's official position of genocide denial contradicts the consensus of actual genocide scholars who dedicate their lives to the field. That includes Israeli academics such as Omer Bartov, a pre-eminent professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, who said that as a former IDF officer he agonised over reaching his conclusion: 'But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognise one when I see one.' Those who have facilitated or justified this abomination have no excuses, no place to hide. More than a year ago, South Africa's legal team composed a dossier detailing statements of genocidal and criminal intent issued by Israeli leaders and officials: it was 121 – pages long, and is now completely out of date. There is more video footage of civilians being slaughtered and civilian infrastructure being destroyed than any other war crime as it was happening in history. Yet not only does Britain supply Israel with those crucial F-35 components, its government refuses to describe a single Israeli act as a 'war crime', because it knows that then imposes sweeping legal obligations. Britain continues its annual trade with Israel, which last year was worth £5.8bn. Days after its tokenistic gesture of suspending trade treaty talks, Britain's embassy in Israel celebrated the arrival of the UK trade envoy. When Britain imposed sanctions on two far-right Israeli ministers, it did so on the grounds of their 'horrendous extremist language', rather than actions, because the latter implicates the British government. They refuse to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel itself. By proscribing Palestine Action, the government has assured that it is opponents of genocide who face being hauled before the dock in the here and now. Our foreign secretary no doubt believes that the impunity traditionally enjoyed by western leaders and Israel itself will protect him and his colleagues for ever. That assumes the winds will never change. There is no statute of limitation for complicity in genocide. Israel's crime is not yet complete. Lammy must believe that his freedom is safe for ever: that there will be no knock on his door in five, 10, 20 years. That is quite the bet. Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
