Do They Hear Us? We Were Right

Paul Knaggs writes:

Three years ago, at Labour’s conference in Liverpool, Keir Starmer was asked by LBC’s Nick Ferrari whether a siege was appropriate: “Cutting off power, cutting off water?” His answer was plain enough. “I think that Israel does have that right.” His office later said he meant only Israel’s right to self-defence, and Starmer insisted it had never been his view that Israel could withhold water, food, fuel or medicine. But the words were on tape, and the country heard them.

Now Liverpool again, and a different sound entirely. Ed Miliband, Foreign Secretary in Andy Burnham’s government, told conference that the suffering inflicted on Gaza and the West Bank by Netanyahu’s government is “a stain on the conscience of the world”. Then came the line that brought the hall to its feet. To the millions moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people, he said: “We hear you. You were right.”

Let us be fair, because fairness is the point. What Miliband announced is real. A ban on goods from illegal settlements. A pledge to cut off British finance, construction and services to them. Ministers now openly naming settler ethnic cleansing, the evidence of war crimes in Gaza and Israel’s illegal occupation. No British government has gone this far, and those who marched for three years deserve to see it.

But listen to who is speaking. Miliband was not a lonely voice on the backbenches. He sat on Starmer’s front bench in opposition and at his cabinet table in government, through every month in which the old line held. “You were right” is a generous thing to say to the public. It is also, whether he intends it or not, a verdict on the room he sat in. If the millions were right, the government they were arguing against was wrong, and the people who served in it owe more than an applause line.

And how were those millions treated while they were being right? The Starmer government proscribed Palestine Action. On the Sunday before Miliband spoke, police arrested around 150 people outside the conference for holding placards that read “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” One day the state arrests you for your sign. The next, the Foreign Secretary thanks you for your conscience. Both cannot be the settled position of the same party.

The genocide case brought by South Africa remains before the International Court of Justice, and the legal question will be answered there. But the dead do not wait on judgments, and they do not disappear because Labour has found a new vocabulary. So here is the test, and it is not a test of language. If Labour believes its critics were right, it should review the proscription that is still filling police vans outside its own conference. It should give a full, public account of what ministers knew and decided on arms exports while Gaza was being flattened. And it should stop asking the country to hear the new words and forget the old ones. Orwell saw this trick long ago. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” This time the Party is telling you to trust your eyes and ears. Good. Then let it answer for what they said.

And, since the Fairford Five had mocked up their van as Fuel2U in case they were stopped and asked why they had so much diesel, making it is obvious what their game was and it was not the Islamic Revolution:

Two bail decisions came within a single week. On Friday, a 37-year-old roofer named Daniel Thomas, known to his supporters as Danny Tommo, appeared at Basingstoke Magistrates’ Court. He pleaded not guilty to criminal damage after allegedly slashing a boat in the Channel with an emergency responder on board. He also denied refusing to give police the PIN to his phone. He was refused bail and sent to prison to await trial. On Monday, five young men from London, arrested in the dead of night beside an RAF base used by American bombers, were released. They had been held on suspicion of Explosives Act offences and preparing a terrorist act. Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor, head of Counter Terrorism Policing, told reporters outside New Scotland Yard that they were leaving custody on police bail under “stringent conditions”.

Many readers will look at those two outcomes and conclude the system has its thumb on the scale. The feeling is understandable. Honesty requires us to say the cases are not the same. Thomas has been charged, and a court judged whether he should wait for trial behind bars. The Fairford five have not been charged. Police released them because, for now, they either lack the evidence to charge or the grounds to ask a court for more time. That distinction matters. It also opens a more troubling question than the one being shouted on social media.

WHAT WAS IN THE VANS? 

On Sunday the country watched aerial footage of a bomb disposal robot circling three white vans near the village of Whelford. Two had their rear doors open. Large black objects lay scattered around them. Reporters near the perimeter fence heard what sounded like two controlled detonations. At least 85 homes were evacuated. By Monday afternoon every suspect was walking free, the cordon was being scaled back and residents were being told they could go home. Police have still not said what, if anything, was in those vans. 

Plenty of people will be exasperated by this, and they are entitled to be. For a day and a half the public was invited to believe that a serious bomb plot had been stopped on the edge of the Cotswolds. The authorities’ own conduct since then tells a smaller story. Suspects in a live plot to bomb an airbase are not usually back on the streets within 36 hours. Either the evidence is thinner than Sunday’s headlines suggested, or the state is asking us to trust it without showing why. Either there was a viable explosive device, or there was not. The public is owed the answer. 

If there was a working device, releasing five men without charge after so short a time is extraordinary, and ministers should explain it. If there was not, the country deserves to know why Sunday’s story looks so different by Monday. Bail in national-security cases is not unheard of: in a separate case, the husband of Labour MP Joani Reid and two other men were bailed after being arrested by counter-terrorism officers on suspicion of spying for China. What is unusual is the distance between the drama of the operation and the modesty of its result.

WHO HAS BEEN BRIEFING, AND WHY? 

Before anyone had been charged, the Daily Telegraph reported that police are understood to suspect Iran as the most likely state actor. The Iranian Embassy in London “categorically” rejected the claim. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting then said the farmer who raised the alarm “had a partial picture”. She had tried the base’s own hotline, got no answer, dialled 999, and later told the BBC the authorities had “dropped the ball”. Context matters here. In March, Keir Starmer, then Prime Minister, allowed US strikes on Iranian missile sites to be launched from Fairford. A government that has tied British soil to an American war has an obvious interest in a story about Iranian aggression on English soil. That does not make the story false. It means the story should be tested in a courtroom, not settled by anonymous briefings to friendly newspapers.

ONE LAW, FOR EVERYONE 

The principled answer to Basingstoke is not to demand that the Fairford men be locked up. It is to insist on the same standard for everyone. The presumption of liberty before trial belongs to a far-right activist accused of slashing a dinghy and to five Londoners picked up near an airbase. Those who want the state to show its evidence in one case should want it in the other. The left forgot this once. The right is forgetting it now. Thomas’s lawyers will apply again at Portsmouth Crown Court. The Fairford investigation continues. In both cases the question is the same, and it is the only one that should matter: what can the state prove? Justice is judged on evidence, not headlines, and nobody should be jailed or cleared by press briefing.