The progressive imperialism of Keir Starmer’s Palestine policy

There are two ways to look at Sir Keir Starmer’s call for the Prime Minister ‘to press for a renewed international agreement to finally recognise the State of Palestine’ at the G7 summit. The first is cynical: that the intended audience was not the government benches or the international community, but the voters of Batley and Spen, currently weighing up whether to elect another Labour MP in next month’s by-election. At the 2011 census, almost one in five residents were Muslim and knowing what we know about how progressives view religious and ethnic minorities, it is not a stretch to assume Sir Keir was merely electioneering.

This mindset, which sees British Muslims not as individuals but as a voting bloc, and one defined by events a continent away, is not all that different to how Labour thinks about British Jews. Not only is this kind of sectarianism inimical to social cohesion and national unity, it is regressive in the way that so much progressive identity ideology seems to be.