The massive marches against Israel’s genocide that have taken place in London and other parts of the country since October have been met with hostility by Labour, putting the party at odds with some of its core electorate. In a recent speech to the Jewish Labour Movement Starmer came close to Suella Braverman’s claim that these were ‘hate marches’.  He has even felt confident enough to withdraw recognition for a future Palestinian state given when Miliband was party leader. Doing so at the height of a massacre of the population of Gaza shows how seriously a ‘human rights lawyer’ takes the rhetoric of human rights and how little concerned the Labour party membership is when a serious violation arises. Senior Labour politicians have also attacked South Africa’s submission against Israel at the ICJ, which makes a very strong case that genocide is underway in Gaza.

Labour has always been an imperialist party despite containing verbal anti-imperialists. That is part of its historic identity. The Labour movement and the Labour Party grew up during the high noon of the British Empire. The British working class, despite its oppression, benefitted from the plundering activities of the British Empire: cheap food and materials and the elimination of rival industries such as textile manufacture in India, all worked to its advantage. This posed an uncomfortable problem for Labour which any working class movement would have struggled to deal with. How can you call for the abolition of empire when such prosperity as the working class possessed depended in part on imperial exploitation?

In any case overnight abolition of the British Empire was not a practical possibility and any incoming Labour government would in practice have to administer the Empire. In 1945, the Empire had been discredited by Britain’s humiliations in the war and the Americans were intent on dismantling it. Labour acquiesced in the beginnings of its dissolution and, it has to be said, did not make a very good job of it.

America took over the job of world imperialist and Britain joined as a junior member (rather like Scotland joined England as a junior plunderer in the glory days of the British Empire). It seems though that Labour never had any real problem in fitting into the role of junior imperialist. The Attlee government sent troops to fight North Korea in 1950, Harold Wilson kept us out of the Vietnam War, but probably at the expense of the Chagos Islanders, whose country was given to the US as an airbase and its inhabitants expelled. Labour acquiesced in the atrocities in Kenya in the 1950s, suppressed Malayan independence fighters in the 1950s and connived in the coup against Suharto in Indonesia in the 1960s. Since then Labour’s record has been consistently shameful: taking part in the attack on Iraq in 2003, supporting the destruction of Libya in 2011 and supporting and even egging on the US’s proxy attack on Russia. Refusal to support an attack on Syria in 2013 is one of the very few creditable episodes in Labour’s record.

While the British Empire conferred an economic advantage on the British working class, the same cannot be said of Britain’s role as an imperial skivvy for the Americans. One of the aims of the US in launching a proxy war on Russia was to decouple Europe from mutually beneficial trade relationships between Europe and Russia. This succeeded brilliantly and we can now see how the loss of cheap energy has seriously damaged the European economy and this has impacted on the price of energy in the UK, much to the detriment of the working class. Finally, we can see that Labour resolutely supports the massacre and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed there, even acting against Labour Party members who so much as dare to raise the issue. Being an imperialist country now counts against the interests of working people, but Labour’s support for imperialism is as enthusiastic as ever.

Why has it been so easy to co-opt Labour into the American imperial enterprise? We have already noted that Labour has a long imperial history stretching back into the early Twentieth Century which made it difficult to detach itself from administering the Empire to the advantage of the working class. It gave the party racist and imperialist attitudes and reflexes which it has proved impossible to shake off. Already in the 1940s and 50s Britain under Labour attached itself with enthusiasm to America’s proxy war on the Soviet Union  and China on the Korean peninsula, thus rejoicing in the role of junior imperial partner to a country that had done more to destroy the British Empire than the Third Reich. Since then two factors have embedded Labour even more strongly within the American imperial fold. The first of these is the atrophying of working class politics, leading to a Labour party dominated by a middle class elite whose main interest is in the furtherance of their careers. It is particularly important to look carefully at the background of these leaders. The Americans are aware that if they can ‘turn’ a foreign politician at the beginning of their career they can probably control him or her for the rest of their political life. Labour members should look carefully at the American contacts of their leaders and note for example, extended sojourns in the US on scholarships, grants, or other forms of financial or educational support. The answer might surprise those who take such a look. Similar considerations apply to Labour politicians with links to Israel. Labour members have to take seriously the possibility that some of their most senior politicians are not prioritising Britain’s interests but those of a foreign power. Their actions undoubtedly suggest that this is the case, but the possibility cannot be excluded that the links are actually more sinister than that.

The second point is that the idea of ‘human rights’ has been increasingly weaponised by American imperialism. It is useful in two ways: first to attack the social structures of societies that do not wish to subordinate themselves to imperialism; second to mobilise left thinking people into antagonism against countries and societies that America wishes to attack. Similar points can be made against the ‘woke’ agenda particularly relating to the attempted destruction of traditional relationships between men and women. This approach has been very successful in recruiting ‘progressives’ into campaigns against Russia and certain African countries, not to mention gathering support for the proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. It backfired somewhat in the case of the Israeli support for Gaza, when people started to take the human rights rhetoric seriously. No matter, the Labour leadership were able to ignore a massive attack on the most fundamental human right, the right to existence, and the Labour membership meekly complied.

Labour supporters need to ask themselves this awkward question. If the party has for over a century acted like an imperialist, talked like an imperialist and cosied up to an imperialist power is it not an imperialist party itself? And then they should ask themselves, given this history will it ever be otherwise?