Labour’s confusing ceasefire stance

If the Scottish Labour party are keen to get one message across at their Glasgow conference, it’s that they are the party of change. ‘That is what change means. That is why change matters,’ riffed Anas Sarwar throughout his keynote speech – 14 times, to be precise. But while more specifics about Scottish Labour’s ‘change’ agenda wouldn’t have hurt, the party hardly needs to convince the public that they are committed to it – they’ve changed their position on, er, just about everything. 

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Labour remains in a muddle about its stance on Gaza. While Sarwar used his conference speech to call for an ‘immediate ceasefire’, Ian Murray MP was not quite as clear. Speaking to the conference on Saturday, the Edinburgh South parliamentarian managed to stop just short of calling for an immediate end to the fighting:

‘The situation in Israel and Palestine is heartbreaking and intolerable.