When the UK formally recognised Palestine last week, Keir Starmer might have thought that he had quelled mounting anger over Gaza among his backbenchers. But Labour Party conference will likely pour water on that notion. Today, a wave of emergency motions have been submitted by several constituency Labour parties and trade unions, including ASLEF, calling on the Labour leadership to recognise what is happening in Gaza as a genocide. This follows a recent UN report which found that Israel has committed four of the five defined genocidal acts since the beginning of the war against Hamas in 2023.
Labour’s conference arrangement committee (CAC) will meet at 4pm on Saturday 27 September to decide whether to allow the motions to be debated and voted on. The party’s rules stipulate that emergency motions must be “a matter of urgent and immediate importance to the discussion by the whole Labour party”. All motions call on Labour to “accept the findings of the UN Commission of Inquiry”. They call on the government to: employ all means reasonably available to prevent the “commission of genocide in Gaza”, to ban trade that aids Israel’s “violations of international law”, impose comprehensive sanctions on Israel and ensure that UK individuals and businesses are not involved in assisting the genocide.
Whether these motions make it to the conference floor will be decided later today. But their presence highlights that strength of feeling over Gaza has not weakened since the UK’s formal recognition of Palestine. Palestine Solidarity Campaign has organised a march through the centre of Liverpool today. A video, featuring the actors Steve Coogan and Maxine Peake calling on Starmer to recognise a genocide, was projected onto the entrance of the conference site early on Saturday morning.
The CAC could still rule out the debate of these motions. Earlier this week, an emergency debate on the two-child benefit cap brought by Compass and Momentum was ruled out by the committee (although it could still be debated following an appeal by the groups). Campaigners, CLPs and trade unions backing the urgent motions on Palestine are confident that the CAC will allow them to be debated. As one person close to the proceedings told me, “The CAC has ruled out other non-Palestine related emergency motions on the grounds they don’t meet the criteria (not urgent), but that’s not the case for the Palestine motions.”
Gaza has clearly not dissipated as an issue for this Labour administration, even after it took a step – formally recognising a Palestinian state – that 14 months ago would have sounded improbable. Two years on from the start of this terrible war, its presence is still keenly felt across the conference floor.
[Further reading: How Starmer can avoid civil war]
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