Andy Burnham Is Coming After Israel

About how the UK suffers from Muslim crime well beyond the mass rapists of the Pakistani grooming gangs, and its taxpayers are now forced to spend tens of billions of pounds every year to pay for all the welfare benefits Muslim migrants are receiving, Andy Burnham has had nothing to say. Instead, as his first major policy decision as prime minister, he has decided to impose a total embargo on goods produced in what he, and the BBC, call the “occupied West Bank.” Burnham apparently does not know, or does not care to remember, that Jews have lived in Judea and Samaria for the past 3500 years. He does not know, or care to remember, that the League of Nations created the Mandate for Palestine that included all the territory between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea, and that Mandate was intended to lead to the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. Burnham should know this. The holder of the Mandate was Great Britain.

More on Andy Burnham’s folly can be found here: “As predicted, charmless Andy Burnham is desperately targeting Israel,” Jake Wallis Simons, August 27, 2026

The country is sinking under the weight of Labour’s welfarism and cultural timidity. What’s the remedy? Whip up mob hatred of the Jews.

On a patch of grass opposite the American embassy in Nine Elms, there is a Palestine encampment, complete with all the usual Gaza rhetoric, as if the war was still going on. Similar scenes can be seen all over London, particularly in student areas and in the vicinity of Parliament.

Aside from the fact that idiots exist, none of this, on its own, may prove very much. Protest is not subversion, and nobody wants to live in a society in which free expression is repressed. As in so many other aspects of our culture, however, a bigger picture is at work.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s biggest jihadi organisation, remains entirely free to operate in this country, even as most Arab states have long since banned it outright. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, was finally designated a national security threat in July, on the very eve of Keir Starmer’s departure from Downing Street. Yet it still has not been proscribed under the Terrorism Act.

Two months ago, the British government designated the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “national security threat.” Yet for reasons that deserve to be pondered, it has still not been banned. Why not? And why has the Muslim Brotherhood, proscribed in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, not been similarly dealt with in the UK?

Then there is Westminster itself. Four independent MPs took seats in 2024 running explicitly on Gaza, part of a wider trend involving council wards where sectarian bloc voting is now openly discussed. Islamist-aligned networks have learned, with some sophistication, which levers in British public life are unguarded.

“Sectarian bloc voting” is a delicate way to describe the reality of the growing size and power of exactly one such bloc — the Muslim bloc of voters, whose members in uniting solidly behind Muslim candidates and those non-Muslims who faithfully parrot a pro-Muslim line, have greatly expanded their political power.

The people of Britain did not elect Andy Burnham. Members of his Labour Party elected him, apparently believing that his left-wing views would appeal to the Labour base.In just the first few weeks of his premiership, only 22% of the British voters support him. Meanwhile the anti-Muslim immigrant Reform Party keeps rising in the polls, and if the election were held today, the Reform Party would win.

What has Burnham done to appeal to voters on the left? Exactly one thing; he is intent on displaying his anti-Israel views by proposing to ban all goods from what he calls, most inaccurately, “the occupied West Bank.” Nothing like taking a swipe at the “colonial-settler apartheid genocidal state” of Israel to win favor on the left. Of course, by doing this, Burnham endangers military cooperation and Britain’s ability to fight terrorism with Israel, a cooperation that has been far more beneficial to the British than to the Israelis, giving the fact that the UK has access to Israel’s advanced weaponry and to Israel’s unparalleled intelligence network throughout the Middle East.

Burnham doesn’t care. He wants the support of the left, which includes the large Muslim vote, and if that means abandoning Israel, he’s prepared to do it.

Of course, there is a slight chance that he may in the end not go through with it. Only one-third of the Labour members of the House of Commons support the proposed policy of new trade restrictions targeting Israeli businesses in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”). Such a ban “would be deeply damaging to the UK national interest, the British Jewish community and Palestinian workers,” the Labour Friends of Israel said. When a boycott was placed on the Israeli company SodaStream a few years ago, because its products were produced in factories in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), SodaStream moved its facilities into Israel from the West Bank. The result? Hundreds of Palestinians who had worked at Soda Stream factories in the Wes Bank lost their jobs when the company moved.

Burnham’s proposed ban on buying goods produced in Judea and Samaria, if implemented, will have the following consequences: first, Israel will not export advanced military equipment to the UK. It will not continue to supply the UK with intelligence information. Second, most Israeli companies now in Judea and Samaria will simply move their operations into Israel proper. Third, Palestinian workers producing goods for Israeli companies in Judea and Samaria will lose their jobs. Fourth, Burnham’s transparent attempt to win Muslim votes by beating up on Israel will alienate most non-Muslim voters, who have had their fill of Islam-pandering by left-wing politicians, and they could ensure the defeat of Labour, and the triumph of Reform, at the next election.