Starmer Said Protesting Gaza Is ‘Un-British’ – But Abandoning Britons Isn’t?

Right, so today we mark two years since Israel began it’s genocide of Gaza. Gaza, to all intents and purposes is gone, it’s people scramble to survive amongst ruin with nowhere to go, trapped in the largest open air prison on Earth and the world still has the gall to act surprised. The death toll now reads like a population census, more buildings have been decimated than still stand from hospitals to homes, and the governments who funded it still call themselves civilised. Britain and Italy mark the anniversary not with reflection but with bans and arrests — the surest sign that they know exactly what they’ve enabled. Giorgia Meloni mocks protesters; Keir Starmer calls them un-British, when he has invited Israeli officials Israeli officials to meet with him and shake his hand, from ministers, to the President of Israel himself, whilst leaving British flotilla participants to Israel’s mercy, saying they are a matter for Israel, the British citizens who tried to deliver food to starving children are in handcuffs or cells. If there’s anything “un-British” about this moment, it isn’t the people marching for Gaza, or sailing to it — it’s the leaders criminalising morality to keep their own consciences clean. So on this Gaza anniversary, lets tell them exactly what we think of them.
Right, so two years have passed since 7 October 2023, and Gaza is ... – well what can you say? The enclave has been bombed into near-oblivion. Figures verified by the World Health Organisation just last month record at least 63,746 Palestinians killed and 161,245 injured. Other reports state that the real toll is closer to 76,000 dead, with “thousands of families wiped out completely.” More than 200,000 tons of munitions have been dropped—fifteen Hiroshimas’ worth of explosives in an area smaller than Greater London.
The United Nations and the World Bank describe the result as “uninhabitable.” Seventy-eight percent of Gaza’s buildings are damaged or destroyed. Nine in ten Gazans—1.9 million people—have been displaced, many multiple times. UNICEF counts over 50,000 children killed or maimed. The cost of reconstruction is estimated at $53 billion. Behind every statistic lies the same political fact: the governments that could have stopped this chose not to.
This is not “tragic crossfire.” It is the deliberate demolition of a society while its supposed protectors debated wording at the UN.
When loss becomes this vast, numbers risk becoming abstract and dehumanised. Yet the arithmetic matters because it exposes political will. WHO’s 63 thousand confirmed dead are already more than all Israel’s previous wars combined. The Lancet projects that indirect deaths—from hunger, disease, and lack of medical care; not to mention all of those missing presumed dead—could push the true toll above 10% of the entire population.
That estimate is grounded in modelling by the likes of Johns Hopkins University. Their “status-quo” scenario predicted 66 thousand additional preventable deaths even without escalation. Governments received those forecasts and continued approving weapons exports. Every body in WHO’s ledgers corresponds to a signature on an export licence or a trade waiver issued in London, Washington, or Brussels.
The Western moral vocabulary—“self-defence,” “proportionality,” “restraint on both sides”—has become a euphemism for deliberate paralysis. Knowing became complicity.
But when states refused to act, civilians did. The Sumud Flotilla was a humanitarian convoy of fifty boats carrying food, medicine, and baby formula to Gaza. Nearly 500 volunteers from 47 countries joined—aid workers, clergy, journalists, doctors—operating legally in international waters.
Israel’s navy intercepted them anyway. Commandos boarded at gunpoint and seized everyone on board. The intent was not confusion but deterrence: to make humanitarianism itself a punishable act.
Among the detainees were of course Greta Thunberg, but others too Yvonne Ridley, Surya McEwan, and Lorenzo D’Agostino who have all featured in recent media coverage. Testimonies describe hooding, beatings, and sleep deprivation. The Swedish Foreign Ministry confirmed Thunberg’s “harsh treatment.” McEwan’s colleagues called her capture “kidnapping,” which it was, it took place in international waters and D’Agostino described forced confessions. Of the treatment of Greta Thunberg, Turkish journalist Ersin Çelik, said they did exactly what the Nazis did. “They publicly humiliated her and targeted her specifically because she’s a well-known figure.”
More than 100 volunteers remain unaccounted for, including Scot Yvonne Ridley. Reports of some still incarcerated beginning hunger strikes have now come out as well. “They can starve our bodies,” one apparently said, “but they cannot starve our purpose.”
Photographs of ordinary citizens in Israeli handcuffs tell the story better than any statement ever could. They show how far Israel’s impunity now extends—and how silent its allies have become.
The UN acknowledged multiple complaints about torture and disappearance but confined itself to procedural concern. Yet more hand-wringing. The EU asked for “clarity.” None of the governments whose citizens were seized—Britain, Sweden, Italy, or Australia—demanded accountability.
London’s response was the most revealing though. Despite British citizens kidnapped in international waters, in violation if international maritime law, when asked about the abductions, Downing Street said it was “a matter for Israel.” That phrase captures the collapse of British sovereignty itself: a British government surrendering jurisdiction over its own nationals to the state accused of torturing them.
The immunity granted to Israel abroad is now being reproduced at home, in the policing of protest as we’ve seen again this past weekend and the criminalisation of conscience. What began as diplomatic cover has metastasised into domestic repression.
In Italy the confrontation is on the surface. Following the flotilla attack, millions joined strikes and demonstrations. Dockworkers refused to handle any Israeli shipments. Ahead of those recent protests, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni mocked them: “A long weekend and revolution don’t go together” she said. Four days later pro-Palestine rallies are getting banned citing “security risks.”
Repression is always the reflex of a government that senses legitimacy slipping. Italy is not an exception; it is a symptom. Across Europe, states are restricting protest precisely because public empathy has become unmanageable.
If Meloni fears disorder though, Keir Starmer fears honesty, perhaps no surprise given how serially dishonest he is, but over this issue, more than usual. Yesterday he branded planned Gaza-anniversary marches as “un-British.” He’s turned our moral opposition to what Israel has been doing for two years now into an accusation of cultural treason.
Protest is not un-British. It is the foundation of every right Britain possesses—from suffrage to unionism to anti-war movements. Calling dissent un-British is historical amnesia weaponised by a man as amoral as you can get.
But he’s gone even further than that, more depraved than that. British flotilla volunteer Sarah Wilkinson was arrested at Heathrow under counter-terrorism powers after her release from Israeli detention, having taken part in the flotilla – the kidnap victim treated as the criminal. Yvonne Ridley remains imprisoned in Israel, but Starmer has already said that is a matter for Israel so what help can she expect, or would consular assistance be un-British too? Meanwhile Israeli officials directly involved in the bombardment, the likes of Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar or Air Force Commander Tomer Bar, or President of Israel itself Isaac Herzog, have been received in London, getting the red carpet treatment.
A British citizen can be tortured abroad for delivering aid, yet the architects of that torture are welcomed with handshakes on the steps of Downing Street. If Starmer wants to talk about what’s un-British its right there in photographs.
Each generation faces a moral test and we should remember that as we mark this tragic anniversary. This is ours, and our leadership has failed as far as it is possible to. When a Labour prime minister calls humanitarian protest un-British, he is not defending national values; he’s dismembering them.
The suffragettes, miners, and anti-apartheid campaigners were all branded threats to order. Their successors march for Gaza. The rhetoric has not changed; only the target has.
Starmer’s words expose a deeper fear though: that empathy might still exist in a population his party cannot control no matter how increasingly authoritarian they get. To admit Britain’s role in the genocide would mean confronting the arms exports, the intelligence sharing, the veto diplomacy. His own role in all of it too. Easier to redefine patriotism as obedience and shove another flag up his arse.
The collapse is legal as well as moral, made worse by Starmer’s legal background because we know he knows all of this. The International Court of Justice has ruled Israel’s actions “plausibly genocidal.” The International Criminal Court has opened files. The UN has ruled Israel’s actions to be genocide. Yet enforcement stalls because the governments funding Israel control the institutions judging it.
The post-war legal order functions now to punish adversaries and protect allies. The United States and United Kingdom invoke “international law” against others while vetoing it for themselves. The consequence is visible because you only need look at the state of the Gaza Strip: starvation as strategy, collective punishment as policy, immunity as entitlement.
Every press statement about Gaza is written to avoid recognition, despite having symbolically recognised it, meaning nothing as it does in practice without being backed up with action. “Tragic.” “Complex.” “Unfortunate.” The vocabulary drains the accountability from the atrocity. “Israel has the right to defend itself” is repeated as mantra even when the victims are aid convoys and hospitals and people trying to deliver baby formula.
Mainstream outlets then dutifully reproduce this framing, not holding power to account but enabling the awfulness. Deaths appear in the passive voice—“people died,” not “Israel killed them.” Israeli claims are quoted verbatim; Palestinian evidence is caveated. It is not journalism but narrative management, designed to maintain the illusion that Western policy is unquestioningly correct rather than guilty as sin and utterly complicit.
Meloni and Starmer supposedly differ ideologically, but in practice not that much since they share the same reflex: suppress empathy before it becomes resistance. Meloni bans marches; Starmer arrests protesters. Both claim to protect order while dismantling the moral foundations of democracy.
Across Europe anti-protest legislation is multiplying. Britain’s Public Order Act allows police to prohibit demonstrations deemed “disruptive” and they’ve proven keener to arrest grannies and disabled people holding cardboard placards than going after real criminals. France criminalises public solidarity with Palestine. Germany equates the keffiyeh with extremism. The purpose is not stability but deterrence—discipline by exhaustion by governments who have thrown their lot in with Israel versus publics who overwhelmingly support Palestine.
Governments call this safeguarding the public. In truth they are safeguarding themselves from the public.
But it is unsustainable and will not work. The more you attempt to crack down on dissent, the more people end up dissenting. Protests are swelling, alliances are straining, and each new atrocity strips another layer from the myth of having a humanitarian leadership. Every suppressed demonstration, every arrested volunteer, every hunger strike exposes the widening gap between rulers and ruled.
The statistics themselves form the indictment:
seventy-six thousand dead; sixty-three thousand verified; fifty thousand children; seventy-eight percent of infrastructure destroyed; fifty-three billion dollars in damages. Each number is a gravestone and a receipt.
The hypocrisy is measurable as well. Arms exports to Israel continue to rise. American weapons constitute most of the munitions dropped on Gaza, but UK shipments have risen as well. The European Union’s “dual-use” exports persist despite public outrage.
Indifference is a learned behaviour. Decades of media framing have normalised Palestinian suffering as background noise. Fear of accusations of antisemitism chills debate. Politicians exploit that fear to equate criticism of Israel with prejudice itself.
The result is moral paralysis disguised as complexity. Viewers who would never justify atrocities elsewhere call Gaza “a complicated situation.” It is not complicated. The questions are simple: is starvation acceptable policy, is bombing hospitals legal, is torturing volunteers defensible? The answer to each is obviously no. So claims of complexity only serve those who benefit from confusion – Israel and those serving their interests.
Moral leadership has migrated. It no longer resides in Western capitals but in the hands of those acting where governments will not. It lives in Yemen’s blockade of Israeli shipping, in Italy’s striking dockworkers, in the British crowds defying protest bans, and in the Ashdod hunger strikers refusing to eat while Gaza starves.
The enforcement of international law now comes from the bottom up and not the top down. Diplomats draft communiqués; citizens enforce ethics.
Britain is again at a crossroads. The question is whether it will defend conscience or criminalise it. Starmer’s “un-British” remark should be a wake up call to everyone: either protest remains a legitimate expression of principle as it has always been, or the country abandons the democratic tradition that once defined it.
The test is embodied in individual cases. Yvonne Ridley, still detained in Israel, being subjected to goodness knows what. Sarah Wilkinson, arrested as soon as she landed back in Britain. Thousands marching under surveillance. Their treatment reveals what Britain has become—a state more willing to appease a foreign power than protect its own citizens.
If this continues, the word “ally” will mean client, and “British values” will mean silence whilst becoming increasingly complicit.
The flotilla volunteers and the protesters are not fringe radicals. They are the moral remainder of a political system hollowed out by hypocrisy. They have done what governments refused to do: act according to law and conscience.
Their defiance has consequences. It demonstrates that the moral contract between citizens and state still exists, even if the state has broken it. History will remember them as the people who refused to let genocide be normalised.
In them lies the reversal Starmer fears most. Those he calls un-British are the only Britons still behaving like citizens of a democracy.
Two years on, Gaza lies in ruins, and with it the moral architecture of the West. The governments that claim to defend civilisation have sanctioned its destruction. They have turned international law into a privilege and conscience into a crime.
The only people who have acted honourably are the ones being punished for it—the volunteers, the journalists, the hunger strikers, the marchers. They are Britain now. They are Europe’s conscience. They are what remains of the idea that humanity still matters.
The façade is falling. Protests grow louder, alliances fray, and the language of denial no longer conceals the crime it was built to hide. In the end, it was not the protesters who betrayed Britain. It was the leaders who feared them.
Because nothing is more un-British—or more un-human—than silence in the face of genocide. So on this two year anniversary, lets remember who has allowed this situation to reach two years and condemn them for it.
Of course it isn’t just Starmer’s devotion to Israel above the interests of British citizens that damns him, but his weaponisation of racism alongside it, as his response to the Manchester synagogue attack has made abundantly clear, whilst his ignoring of a similar attack on a mosque in Peacehaven shows the hierarchy of racism in his Labour Party is very much still alive and kicking. Check out the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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