Lammy’s Syria Stunt: A Slap in the Face to 7/7 Victims

Right, so as Britain remembers the victims of its worst-ever terror attack, our Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, has been in Syria, shaking hands with a man who was at that time, very much part of the terror group behind it. Such is the foreign policy of the Starmer regime. As a minute’s silence was observed this morning in London to mark the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings, as flowers will be laid today in remembrance, David Lammy, a London MP, has been to Damascus, has been embracing Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former al-Qaeda commander and now the unelected head of a regime born out of unhinged conquest and leading a group borne out of al-Qaeda in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, very much proscribed in the UK, just as al-Qaeda is. But whilst people get arrested in the aftermath of a protest group becoming proscribed and therefore labelled as just as dangerous as the likes of al-Qaeda or HTS, Lammy can press the flesh, above the law as this seemingly puts him. Sold as a humanitarian reset, Lammy’s visit instead strips away any pretence that UK foreign policy is guided by principle, because what we are seeing is not diplomacy—it is sickening hypocrisy, utterly immoral and shames the memory of those who lost their lives 20 years ago in London,
Right, so today marks two decades since the coordinated bombings on London’s transport system that killed 52 people and injured hundreds more—the deadliest terrorist attack on British soil since the Second World War as that was. The nation is today pausing to remember those lost and the enduring trauma carried by survivors and families. Yet, as Britain engages in solemn remembrance, David Lammy has been photographed in Damascus in the last couple of days, shaking hands with Ahmed al-Sharaa, a man who not only still leads a group born out of al-Qaeda in the form of HTS, but was very much active within al-Qaeda at the time of the 7/7 bombings.
The timing of his trip, could not be more damning therefore. For many, the images of Lammy's visit represent not engagement but betrayal—a disturbing erasure of the suffering inflicted by deranged violence in the name of political expediency. It laid bare the cognitive dissonance of a government that will be more than happy to honour the victims of that terror attack, whilst rehabilitating its perpetrators abroad, because as we see pictures like this of Lammy shaking hands with Al Sharaa, he’s also put out a tweet today, saying:
‘Twenty years on from 7/7, I remember my friend James Adams, and all those who were murdered and the families they left behind. We carry their memory with us every day. London met terror with courage. It showed the world what it means to endure.’
You’ve literally just been shaking hands with someone linked to the perpetrators of that strike, get their names out of your mouth.
That Lammy chose this particular week to normalise relations with HTS only magnifies the perceived insult. It reinforces the belief that in the calculus of British foreign policy, the lives of 7/7 victims matter less than regional power balances and post-Assad reconstruction deals. The decision demonstrated how performative remembrance has become—a box-ticking exercise detached from the real-world implications of government conduct.
The pain of the 7/7 anniversary was thus compounded by the knowledge that Britain’s top diplomat was forging ties with someone whose ideological forebears helped inspire that very atrocity. It raises uncomfortable questions: If Britain once vowed never to negotiate with terrorists, what changed? And if the line has moved, who drew it, and who gets to ignore it?
The UK has now resumed full diplomatic ties with Syria, now under the unelected leadership of a former al-Qaeda commander and who still leads a proscribed group in HTS, lifting certain sanctions and announcing a £94.5 million aid package purportedly intended for reconstruction, education, and humanitarian relief, all part of a broader reset following the ousting of Bashar al-Assad by HTS-led forces, culminating in al-Sharaa assuming power.
But by rights this move ought to be reputational suicide for the Starmer regime. Back in March HTS forces under al-Sharaa's command massacred 1,500 Alawite civilians in a campaign of sectarian cleansing that included executions, torture, and forced displacements. These atrocities were further compounded by violence against Christians and other minorities, marking a chilling continuity between al-Sharaa's past terror ties and his current regime. That Lammy would meet such a figure just prior to the very anniversary of those bombings compounds the sense of betrayal felt by victims' families and survivors.
Yet this is the man whom Lammy, representing a Labour government that positions itself as principled and rules-based, deemed worthy of official engagement and legitimacy. Al-Sharaa's history with HTS, its links to al-Qaeda, and its continued repression of minority populations in Syria, makes it no better than the Assad regime and some might justifiably argue it’s actually worse. That the UK might now consider de-proscribing HTS indicates a deeply worrying drift away from human rights as a core principle of foreign policy and toward diplomacy of convenience.
One of the more farcical elements of the UK’s renewed engagement with Syria has been the narrative that al-Sharaa represents a step toward stability, order, and most risibly democracy. Officials have hinted that this new chapter in UK-Syria relations is a chance to promote democratic values through engagement and to influence governance in a post-Assad Syria. But this pretence that this is a democracy that can be reasoned with falls apart from the first step.
Ahmed al-Sharaa is not an elected leader. He is not democratically elected. He has been kicking the possibility of actual elections down the road further and further since assuming power. He was installed through force by HTS after a military campaign that ousted the Assad government. His authority stems not from ballots cast by a sovereign Syrian people, but seizing it from the battlefield. There has been no election, no inclusive constitutional process, and no framework for political pluralism under HTS rule. There have been massacres instead.
Al-Sharaa’s regime has been marked by repression, sectarian violence, and the suppression of basic civil liberties. Minority groups remain under threat, independent media is silenced, and dissent is met with detention or disappearance. These are religious extremists. To describe this situation as a pathway to democracy is to strip the word of all meaning.
By presenting al-Sharaa as a transitional figure who might oversee democratic reform, the UK government is engaging in a cynical exercise of rehabilitation for a guy who leads a movement that is still right now considered a terror group and is proscribed as such. This language of democracy provides a moral fig leaf for what is, in effect, the legitimisation of rule by a theocratic militia – Al Sharaa is now installing religious leaders as The Cradle has highlighted, rather than a state bureaucracy, a system of religious clerics has taken charge. The UK slam Iran for being a theocratic entity, al-Sharaa is doing the same now in Syria, a pro Israel version of Iran if you like.
Western mainstream media coverage has largely echoed the Labour government line though, with many outlets parroting official statements about “stability” and “transitional governance” without interrogating the legitimacy or origins of al-Sharaa’s rule. Press briefings have emphasised the UK’s role in “guiding Syria toward a peaceful future,” sidestepping the fact that the current regime is unelected, unaccountable, and rooted in violent extremism which it has still been carrying out.
In truth, this policy signals a dangerous precedent: that as long as a regime aligns with UK interests—or those of its allies—it may be granted legitimacy regardless of its democratic or terror credentials. It is a philosophy not of principled diplomacy but of convenient alliances, where democracy is invoked selectively, and only when it suits Britain’s strategic objectives.
At the same moment Lammy was pressing flesh in Damascus, his own government was prosecuting and arresting peaceful activists in London. Palestine Action, an anti-arms-trade direct action group that targeted UK-based companies supplying weaponry to Israel, was formally proscribed as a terrorist organisation on 5 July, the very day Lammy was in Syria meeting the head of HTS. The vote to outlaw Palestine Action, by bundling the group alongside two neo-Nazi organisations, making opposition politically risky, though several brave MPs stood against it, decrying the stunt pulled by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, which ensured a protest group got proscribed for the first time in British history.
Days later, 29 peaceful protestors were of course arrested at the Gandhi statue in Parliament Square for holding signs and wearing symbols supporting Palestine Action. Their crime? Expressing solidarity with a nonviolent group resisting Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.
So here lies the even more grotesque hypocrisy. While a man who was part of al-Qaeda during the 7/7 attack and has overseeing the mass killings of minorities since he took over Syria receives diplomatic handshakes and soft-power aid, British citizens resisting arms sales to an apartheid state are dragged away in handcuffs. Lammy’s policy thus reveals a strategic hierarchy of terrorism and how it is policed: one that is excused if it serves geopolitical ends, and one that is punished if it challenges the West’s allies.
The government’s actions suggest that peaceful resistance to war crimes is now more criminalised than the very militancy the UK once pledged to fight. It makes a mockery of the legal architecture built after 7/7 and 9/11, turning it into a tool of repression rather than protection.
But this is par for the course for David Lammy. Lammy in an ongoing contradiction veering from one moment speaking in moral absolutes to being morally elastic at other times. For instance, he condemned Russia’s UN veto on Sudan, describing it as a betrayal of international law, only to downplay the same international consensus on Israel’s crimes in Gaza.
He was shamed into even tepidly criticising Israel’s conduct only after significant grassroots and parliamentary pressure. World-leading genocide scholars have labelled both Starmer and Lammy as hypocrites for denying genocide in Gaza while claiming to uphold international law elsewhere. It is a pattern of deflection and selective outrage that exposes Lammy’s foreign policy as not one of principles, but of significant flex. If you don’t like these principles, I have others.
At the core of this crisis lies the question of what Britain means by "terrorism." If it is a term to describe violence against civilians for political ends, then HTS meets the definition unequivocally and therefore belongs on the proscribed list. But the state’s actions suggest that terrorism is not an objective standard anymore—it is a tool of narrative control.
Under this logic, HTS can be rehabilitated because it now aligns with the West’s regional goals. Meanwhile, Palestine Action is criminalised for embarrassing the UK’s arms trade and its complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza. It’s bad enough that Palestine Action are now deemed to be as bad as al-Qaeda, but now they are being deemed worse than HTS, who have been literally massacring Syrian minorities. Terrorism, in Lammy’s hands, Yvette Cooper’s hands, proscriptions are her remit after all, is no longer a category of crime—it is a legal convenience.
This corruption of language is one of the gravest threats to democracy. It blurs the line between dissent and danger, between critique and criminality. If the government can redefine terrorism to mean whatever is politically expedient from one minute to the next, then no activist, journalist, or political opponent is truly safe.
David Lammy’s visit to Damascus was billed as a strategic re-engagement with a troubled region. But what it exposed is the bankruptcy of Britain’s moral claims on the world stage. That the UK would embrace a regime responsible for sectarian massacres while imprisoning its own citizens for peaceful protest tells us everything about the state of British democracy and diplomacy under Labour.
In this age of performative values and weaponised law, Lammy has become the symbol of a foreign policy that condemns terrorism only when it’s inconvenient, embraces it when it’s useful, and criminalises dissent when it gets too close to home. Britain’s credibility, like its conscience, has been left to rot in the desert.
If terrorism is violence for political ends, then Lammy has simply refined its bureaucratic variant: diplomacy weaponised to silence critics, justify brutality, and obscure the UK’s own complicity. As the UK embraces HTS in Damascus while criminalising Palestine Action in Westminster, all as we remember 7/7, it sends a clear message to the world that violence is acceptable, so long as it wears the right uniform and protest, along with remembrance is politicised to suit their own ends.
The optics of those arrests under the Gandhi statue the other day though, are coming back to haunt this government too, because those who chose to stand against Palestine Action’s proscription, chose their place to do so rather cleverly, beneath the man who has come to define direct action protest. It’s blown up in the faces of Keir Starmer and the Met Police, so get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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