The Labour MPs determined to show they represent Israel, not the British people

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Mike Tapp, a minister in the Home Office, recently posted on X a “gotcha” response to Green Party leader Zack Polanski’s criticism of the Labour government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action. 

In the wake of the Court of Appeal ruling this week to uphold proscription, Polanski noted the government’s authoritarian assault on civil liberties. Thousands of grandparents –retired lawyers, doctors, vicars, army veterans – he pointed out, had been arrested on terrorism charges simply for holding a placard saying: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

In response, Tapp asked Polanski: “Do you support the Palestine Action group?”

This was Tapp’s attempt at entrapment. If Polanski answered in the affirmative, he could be jailed for up to 14 years – because of the unprecedented decision Tapp’s own Home Office took to declare Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. 

No direct action group in the UK’s history has ever before been designated a terrorist group, on a par with al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

Tapp clearly thought he was being clever. But all he was really doing was further exposing the ugly, patently authoritarian nature of the government he serves in and its complicity in Israel’s endless atrocities in Gaza.

Tapp is not some disinterested party in all this. He is a vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, the genocide-compatible wing of the Labour party that dominates the cabinet.

Investigative journalist Paul Holden noted on X: 

Tapp has taken money and benefits from Labour Together, Labour Friends of Israel and Stuart Roden, who founded the Israeli-based VC company Hetz Ventures with Judah Taub. Taub is a former IDF Special Forces operative who served as an IDF reservist in Gaza. 

The Labour government is stuffed with compromised individuals like Mike Tapp, who serve as Israel’s cheerleaders in the UK. 

In addition, or more likely as a consequence, many of these ministers, from Keir Starmer down, receive large donations from the Israel lobby. 

Polanski replied to Tapp: “The fact that your government has made it illegal for me to answer yes is a damning testament to your flagrant disregard for civil liberties.”

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The McCarthy-emulating Tapp is not some outlier in the Labour party. He is its beating heart. It was his wing of the party, at the behest of the Israel lobby and working covertly through the unlawful activities of Labour Together, that helped confect an imaginary “antisemitism crisis” in the party in the second half of the 2010s. 

Their goal was to use anti-democratic means to drive Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters out of the Labour party and put corporate donors and the Israel lobby firmly back in charge of policy.

While Tapp was seeking to jail the only Jewish leader of a major British political party this week, it emerged that another Labour MP, Peter Kyle, had reported a female constituent of his in Brighton to the police. She was arrested and charged after writing to him in protest at the government’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Kyle apparently believed that, in writing to him, her MP, the woman had committed a crime under the Communications Act by “causing him annoyance”. Presumably, Kyle finds it annoying to be reminded of his party’s collusion in genocide. 

And presumably he imagines too that, in his version of democracy, MPs should never be questioned by those they represent on ethical issues, such as complicity in a genocide. 

Shockingly the Crown Prosecution Service agreed to pursue Kyle’s case through the courts, proving once again that it is nothing more than an adjunct of the executive branch. 

In a rare sign of the independence of the judiciary – at least at its lowest levels – a local magistrate threw the case out this week. 

There is, of course, a connecting thread in these two cases: both Labour MPs hoped to use the law to crush criticism of their party’s continuing support for Israel’s genocide.

They imagine their authoritarian repression of Palestine Action can serve as a blueprint for British politics. Why not lock up opposition party leaders and any constituent who dares to write protesting at their criminal behaviour? 

This is how Starmer’s Labour party conducts its politics: through intimidation, disinformation and show trials. 

And they do it not for our benefit or, as they keep proclaiming, in the interests of “national security”. 

No, they do it for the benefit of a foreign government viewed, even in Israel, as the most extreme in its history, one that includes self-declared fascists who Israel’s former top general, Moshe Yaalon, this week compared to the Nazis.

The Starmer government is tapping deep into its own – and the British state’s – fascist instincts. And with Nigel Farage’s Reform party nipping at its heels, there is little hope that the situation is going to improve any time soon.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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