Now that Britain has launched a new foreign policy in which we scrutinize our allies for unpleasant speech to sanction, we can surely expect much more to come from David Lammy. Right? In the name of consistency, you understand.
Cast your eye across friendly countries in the Middle East and you will find candidates jostling to join his list. One that springs to mind is Tunisia’s President Kais Saied. Bilateral trade with his country currently stands at £753 million annually, an increase of 8.7 per cent on last year. As I write, a Tunisian delegation together with ten tech startups are attending London Tech Week 2025.
Yet President Saied has explicitly renounced the two-state solution – a policy held in such totemic regard by Britain’s Labour government – instead demanding “all the land of Palestine” for the Arabs. He has also claimed that a secret “Zionist influence” was behind the naming of a destructive storm that killed thousands in Libya and described the Abraham Accords as “high treason”. Surely this is at least equivalent to the Ben-Gvirs and Smotriches of this world?
Or take Turkey, one of our esteemed NATO allies. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has distinguished himself in recent years by taking a sledgehammer to the secular liberalism of Atatürk and replacing it with a thuggish, Islamist theocracy that offers safe haven to the jihadists of Hamas.
Erdogan has long been waging an appalling war against the Kurds of northern Syria, which has involved, of course, an occupation. Recently, the Turkish strongman has been ramping up the antisemitic rhetoric with remarks like, “they are murderers, to the point that they kill children who are five or six years old. They only are satisfied by sucking their blood” and praying that God may, “destroy and devastate Zionist Israel”. Surely this appalling leader must also be firmly in Lammy’s unwavering sights.
In Egypt, meanwhile, where bilateral trade is worth £4.8 billion annually – almost as much as Israel – 87 per cent of press coverage about Jews in the state-run media was negative over the past year. It has been relentlessly peddling stereotypes about Jewish greed, referencing “the Elders of Zion”, depicting Jews as disloyal and traitorous, and claiming that the Holocaust was exaggerated. How about sanctioning the editors? The rhetoric they publish puts that of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich in the shade.
In Jordan, meanwhile, where much of British taxpayers’ money has been spent on “military training and democratisation”, an MP, Imad Al-Adwan, was convicted of smuggling weapons and gold into the West Bank, a crime that easily eclipses the indiscretions of Israel’s far-right. Thankfully, he was convicted. But what of his many fellow politicians who have made, shall we say, colourful comments?
Were Lammy to open the lid on that country’s parliament, he would find a track record including men like Suleiman Abu Yahya, who called the Jews “cowards” and claimed that Israeli soldiers wore nappies. “May Allah curse them and their nappies,” he added. The Foreign Secretary would also find Safaa Momani, who said all agreements with Israel should be annulled as “the Jews… violated their pact with the Prophet Muhammad.” And he would find Salamah Al-Bluwi, who once memorably described “the criminal Zionists” as “the sons of apes and pigs”. Sharpen that pencil, Lammy. Your list is about to get longer.
This is all before we even get to Qatar, with which Britain enjoyed £5.6bn of trade last year. State-controlled entities and Qatari nationals have snapped up £100 billion of British assets, a recent Sunday Times investigation revealed, and Qatari companies made revenues of £1.3 trillion on our shores between 2008 and 2022. It has also long pumped money into our universities, which, entirely coincidentally, seem to have a particular sympathy for Muslim Brotherhood ideology.
Despite the softening effects of abundance, it cannot have entirely escaped the Foreign Secretary’s attention that the petrostate happens to be the principal funder of Hamas, the proscribed terrorist group that benefits most from Britain’s burgeoning hostility to Israel, and runs the pernicious propaganda mouthpiece Al Jazeera?
As they enjoy a life of great luxury in the hotels of Doha, Hamas leaders must feel well at home. After all Qatar is the global capital of modern slavery, with 300,000 Arab Übermenschen sitting smugly atop a groaning pyramid of two million impoverished and indentured migrants.
I’m sure Qatari figures like Essa Al-Nassr, a hardline member of the Gulf state’s legislative body and a brigadier general in the Emiri Guard, who once described “Zionists” as “killers of prophets”, will be joining Itamar Ben-Gvir and Betzalel Smotrich on Lammy’s sanctions list very soon. Right?
You get the point. The most galling part of the whole ignominious affair is how it is so characteristic of the moral vacuity of Britain in 2025. Notably, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, neither of whom are my cup of tea, are being sanctioned for things they have said rather than things they have done.
In the weather system inhabited by Lammy, Sir Keir Starmer, Lord Hermer and the other self-regarding sailors who are steering HMS Britannia grimly onto the rocks, there is simply no fouler crime than offensive speech. Unless, of course, that offensive speech comes from the mouths of Islamists, in which case it’s basically fine.
It’s all part of the same petty myopia, isn’t it? Our overstretched police find the time to arrest 30 people a day for rudeness on social media, as well as doling out 60 “non crime hate incidents”, while radical Imams face no consequences for demanding the destruction of Jewish homes from the pulpit; Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are sanctioned while other far more repellent figures sit pretty. All are gusts of the same wind in our doomed sails.
Talk about double standards. Talk about political posturing. This cynical government has its head firmly in a place where the sun of good sense cannot shine. Sooner or later, of course, Starmer and his benighted crew will be forced to recognise that the enemies of Israel are the enemies of the West, and that weakening an ally that stands between Britain and the forces of jihad does not good foreign policy make. It will be ugly, of course, but the alternative is even more awful. We can only hope that this moment dawns before it is too late.
