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Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves was heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters during a speech at the Labour Party conference on Monday.
Two men were ejected from the conference in Liverpool after interrupting Ms Reeves's speech and unfurling a banner reading "still backing polluters, still arming Israel – we voted for change". The activists, from a group called Climate Resistance, were led away to a police van.
Ms Reeves said in response: “This is a changed Labour Party, a Labour Party that represents working people, not a party of protest.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer's party won a general election landslide in July but suffered a historic loss of support among traditionally loyal Muslim voters.
Labour has withdrawn some licences for arms exports to Israel over concerns of humanitarian violations in Gaza, but stopped short of a full embargo. Ministers have also reinstated Britain's funding for Palestinian aid agency UNRWA and dropped the UK's objection to a war crimes trial for the Israeli leadership.
On Sunday, Foreign Secretary David Lammy told a fringe event that a wider embargo would be a “mistake” that would “lead to a wider war”. Opponents of arms exports to Israel also staged a protest outside the entrance to the conference centre on Sunday.
Mr Lammy said he was "deeply worried by the growing violence and settler violence that we see in the West Bank”. He said further sanctions on Israeli settlers were being "kept under close review" but that no new measures are expected during the conference.
Sam Simons, a spokesman for the Climate Resistance group, said Labour was delivering "more of the same", including "pandering to the fossil fuel industry, the same arms licences that are fuelling a genocide in Gaza, and the same austerity that sees the poorest hit hardest".
Labour has had several events disrupted by protesters in recent years, with a climate activist heckling Keir Starmer during the party’s manifesto launch in Manchester in June and a protester throwing glitter over him during his speech to the party conference last year.
Leading pro-Palestinian figures at the Labour Party conference told The National that the party needed to immediately implement a two-way arms ban, with exports from Israel to Britain also halted.
Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, argued that because Britain had already stopped 30 out of 350 arms export licences earlier this month, then “if you accept that argument you should ban all weapons”.
“We would like to go further and see a two-way arms embargo where you not only stop selling weapons to Israel, but you stop purchasing weapons from Israel,” he sad.
His view was supported by Samayya Afzal, of the Labour Muslim Network, who started that “a lot of military equipment used in Gaza” by the Israelis was “equipment that has been sold from this country and that should be a red line for a Labour government”.
She also demanded that Labour fulfil its pre-election promise to publish the Foreign Office’s legal guidelines on the justification of Israel arms export. “We don’t know what the 350 licences are for,” she added.
Asked by The National what the new government should do in regard to the Israel-Gaza conflict she suggested it needed to make “bold vision of a solution” to the war and to recognise the Palestinian state, as had other countries such as Spain and Ireland.
