On the day that David Lammy became Foreign Secretary he asked his department’s lawyers to review the UK’s arms sales to Israel. He had long implored his predecessor David Cameron to publish the advice he received (to no avail).
It was a sober Lammy who then rose in the House of Commons yesterday and announced that the government was suspending licences for all items that may be used in the current conflict in Gaza (such as components for fighter jets, helicopters and drones), a total of 30 out of 350. The review concluded that Israel may have committed “a serious violation of international humanitarian law” through its treatment of Palestinian prisoners (with allegations of rape and torture) and restrictions on food and medical supplies for civilians.
The decision is not militarily significant – the UK accounts for just 0.02 per cent of Israel’s arms imports – but it carries immense political weight. Mindful of this, Lammy emphasised past precedents: Margaret Thatcher imposed an arms and oil embargo on Israel during the Lebanon War in 1982; Gordon Brown’s government suspended five licences in 2009. The Foreign Secretary stressed that he made the decision “in sorrow, not in anger” and described himself as a “liberal, progressive Zionist”.
This has not prevented a political firestorm. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu branded the UK’s decision “shameful”. The Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has warned that it will “encourage our shared enemies”. Robert Jenrick, a frontrunner for the Conservative leadership, has accused the government of “shameful gesture politics to appease the hard left”. There are claims that the US, which has not suspended licences, “feels let down” by the decision (something strongly disputed by Foreign Office sources).
What’s the truth? The war in Gaza, in common with previous Middle East conflicts, has had dramatic political consequences. It helped propel five independent MPs to victory at the general election and depressed Labour’s vote share (33.7 per cent). The party is still living with the fallout from Keir Starmer’s LBC interview last October in which he suggested that Israel had “the right” to withhold water and power from Gaza.
As such, no government decision on the Middle East is taken in a political vacuum. But Lammy spoke accurately of a “quasi-legal process”. It’s one that this government has unsurprisingly followed: Starmer, who took an active role in the decision, is a lawyer (notably opposing the Iraq War as illegal); Lammy is a lawyer; Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, is a lawyer (unlike some of her Tory predecessors). Attorney General Richard Hermer, a former Doughty Street colleague of Starmer, is a leading authority on international law.
This, in short, is not a government that is likely to leave itself legally exposed. Recall that in 2019, UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia were ruled unlawful by the Court of Appeal with ministers accused of ignoring whether airstrikes that killed civilians in Yemen broke humanitarian law (a precedent which the Foreign Office kept in mind).
In his interview with Jason shortly before the general election, Lammy said of his doctrine of “progressive realism”: “We believe that we need climate action and international law to stop the darkness getting so much worse, and the world so much more dangerous. These approaches are not only our values but our necessary, essential self-interest.”
That is the context in which Lammy has acted. After the Conservative years, it might seem novel to have a government that takes this view. It was Brandon Lewis, the former Northern Ireland secretary, who exemplified the Johnson administration’s anarchic mindset when he stated that the Internal Market Bill “does break international law in a very specific and limited way”. Rishi Sunak, a supposed “moderate”, declared that he would “ignore” international law in order to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Those are not words you will hear from any of Starmer’s ministers. Yesterday’s decision was the first evidence of a quiet revolution in the UK’s approach. It won’t be the last.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Conservatives don’t know what to say about the far-right riots]
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