Jess Phillips and the shame of Labour's ceasefire rebels

I can’t decide if last night’s Labour revolt was an act of pointless narcissism or sinister appeasement. Maybe it was both. On one hand it will make not the slightest difference to world affairs that 56 Labour MPs defied their party leader and backed an ‘immediate ceasefire’ in the Israel-Hamas war.

They ignored Keir Starmer’s plea for party unity on the right of Israel to defend itself against the anti-Semitic terrorists of Hamas and put their names to an SNP amendment calling for an end to the ‘collective punishment of the Palestinian people’.

Will the Israelis be quaking in their boots that such political luminaries as Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Naz Shah have insisted it lay down its arms? I doubt it. I expect the task of snuffing out the neo-fascists who murdered more than a thousand of its people feels more pressing to the Israeli establishment than the fact that some British MPs who don’t know what a woman is thinks it is committing a war crime.