Whitewash: Media Silence Over Starmer’s Gaza Legacy

 On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer was given a largely respectful farewell by the ‘mainstream’ media, portraying him as a ‘decent’ man who put his country first. And now the same news organisations are burnishing Andy Burnham’s credentials to enter 10 Downing Street without actually submitting his record or policies to proper scrutiny.

Starmer’s appalling record as Prime Minister was barely touched upon in his political obituaries. In particular, his complicity in the Gaza genocide was virtually whitewashed out of existence; notably by the BBC and the Guardian.

But first, consider this selective overview of his two years in power since his ‘landslide’ victory at the 2024 General Election. (With just one-third of the electoral vote, fewer than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour achieved in both 2017 and 2019, Starmer’s Labour won around two-thirds of the parliamentary seats because of the absurd first-past-the-post UK voting system):

• On his election as PM, Starmer ditched the ten pledges he’d made during his Labour leadership campaign which had deceptively presented him as a left-leaning, progressive successor to Corbyn whom he had called his ‘friend’.
• He attempted to court right-wing Reform voters by adopting the language of the notorious Enoch Powell in warning that ‘mass immigration’ had done ‘incalculable damage’ to the British economy, and that the UK could become an ‘island of strangers’.
• He attacked pensioners, people with disabilities, families on low income with more than two children (until he did a U-turn following a huge public backlash), and migrants.
• Against strong advice, he appointed Peter Mandelson, a close friend of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as UK ambassador to the US.
• He waged war on the left wing of the Labour Party, suspended Jeremy Corbyn and many others, including numerous Jewish members.
• He undermined trial by jury and, unjustly extending the definition of ‘terrorism’, proscribed Palestine Action and oversaw the arrests of more than 3,000 peaceful protesters, many of them elderly or with disabilities, opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
• He continued to arm and support Israel during the genocide despite his obligations under the Genocide Convention to take immediate action to prevent it, welcomed Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who had used genocidal language against the Palestinians in Gaza, approved visits from Israeli military officials and thwarted calls for a ceasefire. He also allowed the RAF’s Akrotiri base in Cyprus to be used for spy flights over Gaza, sharing intelligence with Israel that was likely used to attack targets in Gaza.
• Infamously, he even declared in a live radio interview with Nick Ferrari that Israel ‘has that right’ when asked about Israel denying electricity and water to Palestinians in Gaza and, days later, tried to gaslight the public that he had not actually said that.

The list could go on and on.

As Peter Oborne, author of ‘Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza’, rightly noted of Starmer:

‘Incredibly, he leaves office without accusing Israel of ever committing war crimes.’

No tears were shed by Starmer in his ‘emotional’ Downing Street speech for the more than 73,000 Palestinans killed in Gaza, including at least 21,289 children, since 7 October 2023.

This week, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, as well as war crimes in the occupied West Bank.

In December 2024, Amnesty International published a detailed report that explained the meaning of genocide:

‘Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, five specific acts constitute the underlying criminal conduct of the crime of genocide, including: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Each of these acts must be committed with a general intent to commit the underlying act. However, to constitute the crime of genocide, these acts must also be committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such…” This specific intent is what distinguishes genocide from other crimes under international law.’ (Our emphasis)

Amnesty added a key clarification:

‘Importantly, the perpetrator does not need to succeed in destroying the targeted group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to be established. International jurisprudence recognizes that “the term ‘in whole or in part’ refers to the intent, as opposed to the actual destruction”.

In its submission to the International Court of Justice against Israel, South Africa presented a detailed legal case that Israel has committed genocide. This case has been backed by other states at the ICJ who have published their own findings of genocide. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967, reached similar conclusions in two reports in 2024: ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ and ‘Genocide as Colonial Erasure’. In 2024, Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, concluded that Israel ‘has engaged in an intentional starvation campaign against the Palestinian people which evidences genocide and extermination’. Moreover, many of the world’s leading scholars on genocide, including Israeli experts, have determined that Israel has committed genocide. The evidence is simply overwhelming.

Diverting Readers’ Attention Away From The Genocide

The media’s whitewashing of Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s Gaza genocide and crimes against humanity is stunning. Searches of British newspapers using the Nexis database reveal that in the first 24 hours of Starmer resigning, there were 1,485 mentions of him. Only 30 of these had any reference to Gaza. Several of these were reports of Irish rap trio Kneecap saying farewell in Irish to Starmer (‘Slán Keir’). For example, the Independent mentioned that Kneecap released the single ‘Liars Tale’ earlier this year where they criticised Sir Keir’s stance on, as the paper put it, ‘Israel’s military offensive in Gaza’, thus avoiding use of the accurate word, ‘genocide’.

Another mention of Gaza appeared in the Daily Telegraph where associate editor Gordon Rayner noted:

‘As early as September 2024, in his first party conference speech as Prime Minister, Sir Keir gave the country a taste of the blunders to come when he called for the return of “sausages” from Gaza rather than hostages.’

That was a safe mention of ‘Gaza’ for the right-wing paper.

Only 11 of the 30 mentions of ‘Starmer’ and ‘Gaza’ also contained the word ‘genocide’. Recall, this is out of a total of 1,485 newspaper mentions of Starmer in the 24 hours after his resignation.

One such mention was in the Herald in Scotland quoting Green Party leader, Zack Polanski:

‘The vested interests that are holding this country back need to be confronted, with wealth taxes on the super-rich, utilities taken into public ownership, rent controls and affordable housing, and an end to support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

‘We are still waiting to see which version of Andy Burnham might [be] going to show up in Downing Street.’

That the Gaza genocide barely registered in media coverage of Starmer’s departure from Downing Street is utterly damning of the insular, power-hungry nexus of the British political-media establishment.

The Guardian’s ‘big hitter’ and resident Zionist Jonathan Freedland devoted around 2,000 words to the question, ‘the rise and fall of Starmer: where did it all go wrong?’. Notable features of his piece:

Mentions of genocide? Zero.

Mentions of Gaza? Zero.

Mentions of Israel’s crimes? Zero.

It takes real dedication to divert readers’ attention from Starmer’s complicity in all of the above.

Meanwhile, Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s defence and security editor, uncritically cited analysts declaring that foreign policy was an ‘area of relative strength’ for Starmer. Mark Curtis, co-director and co-founder of Declassified UK, was scathing:

‘The Guardian is such trash.’

In similar vein, Guardian political correspondent Alexandra Topping had a piece on the departing PM’s record with a section titled, ‘Success: Starmer the international statesman’. Once again, there was no mention of Gaza.

BBC News performed its usual establishment role too, steering clear of awkward mentions of the Gaza genocide; not least on BBC News at Ten on the day of Starmer’s resignation speech.

Ben Chu of BBC Verify presented an overview of ‘Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership in six charts’. None of these charts depicted the deaths, injuries or devastation wreaked by Israel in Gaza, with Starmer’s complicity. In fact, there was not a single mention of genocide, Gaza or Israel. Propaganda by omission is, of course, a dominant feature of BBC News.

In an extensive piece titled, ‘Sir Keir Starmer: Top lawyer whose “Mr Rules” approach failed to connect with the public’, BBC political reporters, Becky Morton and Brian Wheeler, managed to write 3,000 words on how Starmer ‘failed to connect with the public’ without once mentioning the Gaza genocide.

This omission is particularly glaring because one of the many reasons that Starmer is deeply unpopular with much of the public is his complicity in Israel’s massive crimes against humanity. For example, in 2025, an Opinium poll tracker found that 45 per cent of the British public explicitly disapproved of Starmer’s handling of ‘the Israel-Gaza conflict’. In particular, support for Labour among British Muslims collapsed. A 2024 Survation poll showed that British Muslims’ identification with Labour as their natural choice had plummeted from 72 per cent in 2021 to 29 per cent three years later.

That BBC reporters simply ignored the issue of Gaza in their analysis of Starmer’s premiership tells us how divorced they are from reality. The fact that Sir Keir ‘Mr Rules’ Starmer broke rules under the Genocide Convention, namely to take immediate action to prevent its occurrence, went under the BBC radar. Client journalism and the Westminster bubble need to be rooted out.

‘A Brutal, Inhuman, Pitiless Political Machine’

Key requirements for achieving this would be to expose and reduce the power of the Israel lobby. Earlier this year, analysis by Mark Curtis of Declassified UK showed that Britain’s national media fails to recognise the influence, and even the existence, of an Israel lobby. In two years of reporting by seven British media outlets, Curtis found only 16 mentions of the phrase Israel lobby without speech marks. He observed:

‘Nearly all those mentions are in comment articles rather than news pieces and none we found expound on what influence such an Israel lobby might have.

‘The phrase “Israel lobby” – used with speech marks – is slightly more common in these outlets, with 26 mentions in two years, and tends to be used to quote others in a disparaging way or to suggest such a lobby does not exist.’

If the Israel lobby’s grip on the British media were not so pervasive, Starmer’s record on Gaza would have been a central feature of coverage of his resignation. Peter Oborne noted that media ‘myth-making has begun’, spinning Starmer as ‘a brave and principled politician whose heroic efforts rescued the Labour Party from bankruptcy and oblivion.’ Media broadcasts and newspaper articles uncritically relayed Starmer’s Downing Street boast that he left office with Britain’s reputation restored as a country that stands for ‘decency, respect and the rule of law’.

In an excellent piece for the indispensable Double Down News, Oborne noted that:

‘For the last four years, Keir Starmer has been in charge of a brutal, inhuman, pitiless political machine. But you simply wouldn’t know about that if you read or watched the mainstream British media.’

Owen Jones gave short shrift to Starmer’s boasts and the emotion displayed at the end of his speech:

‘Do not feel sorry for this man. He was not a good man in the wrong job. He was not a man of public service and duty who was defeated by events. He was not a man of decency and integrity who wasn’t quite up to it.

‘This was a man who lied through his teeth to become leader of the Labour Party. He justified Israeli war crimes. Arrested opponents of genocide. Attacked pensioners, disabled people, migrants. All while pocketing freebies from the rich, crushed dissent and then threw others under the bus to save himself.

‘History will damn him.’

Richard Sanders, also for Double Down News, gave a superb summary of ‘What The Media Refuses To Tell You About Keir Starmer’s Resignation’. A crucial overlooked story in the ‘mainstream’ media, said Sanders, has been an account of the deceitful and arguably illegal Morgan McSweeney-led Labour Together project that essentially adopted Starmer as a frontman in an attempt to kill off the Labour left. Paul Holden’s vital book, ‘The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy’, documented this story in detail, as discussed in an earlier media alert.

As we noted at the time, Holden’s book was blanked by the British national media, along with Oborne’s book ‘Complicit’. As far as we are aware, neither book has ever been reviewed by a major national British newspaper: an extraordinary, but entirely predictable, fact.

Sanders noted that Labour Together projected themselves as a broad inclusive movement promising a bright future for Labour:

‘through intellectual renewal, through their ability to charm, and to persuade people that they were possessed of a brilliant, forward-thinking, radical policy platform’.

The reality, under McSweeney’s leadership, was rather different:

‘Labour Together simply lied. Posing as a consensus-seeking think tank, it secretly raised three-quarters of a million pounds from hedge funds and supporters of Israel; money it illegally failed to declare, enabling it to fly under the radar as it set about systematically undermining Jeremy Corbyn, above all through the weaponisation of antisemitism. In doing so, they delegitimised the Palestinian struggle and facilitated the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, helping lay the foundations for the British establishment’s disgraceful complicity in the slaughter of the people of Gaza.’

The British media are themselves deeply complicit in this slaughter. And that is why they have remained silent about Starmer’s role in the Gaza genocide.

DC

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