Andy Burnham offers milquetoast sop to Palestine. Sadly for him we weren’t born yesterday

Incoming PM Andy Burnham has said the Labour Party got it wrong on Palestine and will fix up. He’s pledged to put more pressure on Israel, including possible bans and sanctions. But is he to be trusted?

Burnham told the Guardian:

I know many people feel that at the start of Israel’s military action in Gaza my party didn’t get it right and I am sorry about that. The response has too often not been good enough. We need to do better.

Adding:

We’ve got to do more to put pressure on the Israeli government … Yes, we have taken some important steps … But let’s be honest, the UK was too slow to call for a ceasefire. And we must now do more to strengthen our approach.

As the newspaper pointed out, Burnham has stopped short of naming the genocide for what it is. He prefers to talk about “war crimes”:

I have been absolutely appalled by what I’ve seen and read about the destruction of Gaza. There’s increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed.

Adding:

There must be accountability for the depth of the suffering the people of Gaza have experienced. Ultimately, however, it must be for the international courts to determine, rather than politicians.

But what to make of it?

Burnham, Israel and the soul of Labour

Burnham is certainly a better communicator than Starmer. But underneath the ‘Manchesterism’ gimmickry, his politics are cut from the same cloth. Not least on foreign policy…

As Jody Macintyre pointed out on 30 June:

Any illusions of Labour Party “change” under Andy Burnham were dispelled last week when he appointed lobbyist, Blairite minister, ex-Labour Friends of Israel chair, and Peter Mandelson’s “boy” James Purnell as his chief of staff.

And:

When Andy Burnham served as a Labour government minister, his most senior special adviser was Jennifer Gerber, an ex-chair and current director of Labour Friends of Israel. Until today, LFI refuses to reveal its donors.

But there is something else here too. And it comes down to what the Labour Party actually is. In the early days of Corbynism, eldritch lord Tony Blair penned one of his rare monthly essays slamming Jeremy Corbyn. He said that the party owed more to Methodist Christianity than Marx.

Socialist writer Richard Seymour contested this idea in his 2016 book ‘Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics.’ He argued that Labour’s historical trajectory and commitment to empire and capitalism is best explained by the “enduring significance” of “its origins in Victorian Liberalism.”

He added:

Those Labour MPs who, today, find simply unthinkable the break-up of the United Kingdom, the repudiation of Trident, and the end of the ‘special relationship’ with the United States, are in fact authentic legatees of their party’s traditions.

There are lots of arguments to be had about what Andy Burnham will do, or what he thinks on some philosophical level. And they will be had. But what isn’t going to change is that Burnham will lead a party dedicated to US empire and global capitalism. And support for the settler colonial state of Israel is a central and non-negotiable strut of those commitments.

Featured image via TRT