In October 2023, with the bombs falling in Gaza and a siege imposed on the strip, Labour MP Lisa Nandy was invited onto BBC News to discuss Israel’s compliance with international law.
“Do you think Israel breached international law by cutting off water and power supplies”, Nandy, then shadow minister for international development, was asked.
“Look, I think this is an extraordinarily complex and fast-moving situation”, she responded, avoiding the question. “There are 200 hostages”.
Nandy was pressed another three times on whether Israel was in breach of international law, but each answer was as evasive as the last.
“I’m not going to sit in your studio and grandstand and tell you that I am going to make big pronouncements about what Israel is and isn’t doing”, she declared.
These were hardly the words of a friend of Palestine – yet just four years earlier, Nandy had been the chair of a parliamentary group named Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East (LFPME).
Founded in 2009, LFPME aimed to further the Palestinian cause in Britain by pressing the UK government and Labour party to promote international law and human rights in the region.
Sixteen years on, Palestinians are facing what has been described as history’s most televised genocide, and LFPME is adrift.
The organisation even issued a recent statement praising Keir Starmer’s response to events in Gaza, apparently ignoring the Labour government’s ongoing role in Israel’s assault.
What happened?
Declassified spoke with former insiders and obtained internal documents which help to explain how LFPME was defanged after several years as an influential lobbying force in Westminster.
Though never well-resourced and always operating in a hostile political environment, LFPME’s operations seemingly contracted under Lisa Nandy’s stewardship – and never fully recovered.
She was simply “not arsed”, one insider said, and allowed the organisation to “wither and die”.
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Promising beginnings
LFPME was established amid Operation Cast Lead, the bombardment of Gaza in 2008-09 when Israel killed over 300 Palestinian children.
“We were involved in organising protests, emergency meetings in parliament, trying to get more people on board”, said Tom Charles, who volunteered with LFPME and sat on its executive board between 2008 and 2012.
The group also met with ministers and senior policy makers in Westminster to appraise them of the situation in Palestine and lobby them to take appropriate action.
“We’d do dinners and things like that, where MPs would take photos with the ambassador or photos at our events”, said Karl Hansen, another former member of LFPME’s executive committee who worked in the office of the group’s former chair Grahame Morris.
The MPs would then “send newsletters [to constituents] saying they’d been involved; they’d done this or done that. Obviously, it’s a bit cynical but that’s the way it works and that’s one of the reasons why we were able to lobby them effectively”.
‘And the Middle East’
There was nonetheless a tension between trying to maintain access to Labour’s top brass, which was broadly pro-Israel, and advocating strongly for Palestine within the party.
This was even apparent in the decision to tack “and the Middle East” onto the original name “Labour Friends of Palestine”.
“That was an attempt to appear moderate”, said Charles. “That’s the best way of putting it, I think. People weren’t too impressed with it but they said it’d open more doors”.
One internal email even noted “we are called LFPME because the Labour party (and No 10) insisted on it”.
But senior Labour officials were often dismissive.
In 2009, LFPME met with Britain’s then foreign secretary David Miliband, raising the issue of arms sales to Israel during Operation Cast Lead. “If we don’t sell them arms, someone else will”, they were told.
The organisation nonetheless received considerable support from Labour’s backbenches, with 98 MPs having signed up as supporters by April 2009 and the organisation becoming a strong lobbying force in Westminster over subsequent years.
One of its biggest successes, insiders said, was helping to secure a commitment to recognising a Palestinian state under former Labour party leader Ed Miliband.
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The chicken coup
Among the backbenchers who signed the Early Day Motion welcoming the launch of LFPME in 2009 was Jeremy Corbyn.
“Jeremy would be helpful – he’d come to the meetings and he’d ask me before what do we need to do, how can I help?”, recalled Charles.
Corbyn would go on to be elected as Labour party leader in 2015, causing one of the biggest upsets in British political history and returning Palestine as a focal issue in Westminster.
The Labour right began manoeuvring for his removal almost immediately.
In June 2016, shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn was sacked by Corbyn following reports he was planning an internal coup, and a mass resignation of shadow ministers followed.
LFPME’s then chair Grahame Morris backed Corbyn against the plotters. “I am solid as a rock for Jeremy Corbyn, a thoroughly decent and principled Leader. I respect our members’ mandate”, he wrote in June 2016.
But the organisation’s vice-chair, Lisa Nandy, was not so hospitable.
She put her weight behind the attempted coup, resigning as shadow energy secretary on 27 June 2016 before going on to co-chair Owen Smith’s unsuccessful campaign to oust Corbyn later the same year.
Chair Nandy
Lisa Nandy was elected chair of LFPME in December 2018, despite her role in attempting to remove the most pro-Palestine leader in the recent history of the Labour party.
This was, by all accounts, not a particularly auspicious time for LFPME.
Palestine had become a stick with which to beat Corbyn, and many of the MPs who would otherwise have been supportive of LFPME began to shy away from the issue.
“You’d see the kind of MPs in the centre or the right of the Labour party who were decent on Palestine… But a lot of those MPs once Corbyn won wanted nothing more to do with the issue – they wanted to use it as a stick to beat Corbyn with”, Karl Hansen said.
“It was no longer in their political interests to be perceived as pro-Palestine”, he continued.
Corbyn had also appointed pro-Palestine MPs to his shadow cabinet, meaning the staff in their offices would have less time to volunteer with LFPME, further diminishing the resources of the organisation.
But Nandy only aggravated this situation, according to Hansen.
“LFPME became a non-entity under Lisa Nandy’s watch and it hasn’t recovered because of that…. It was a small, dedicated team – so when they move on, and Lisa Nandy takes over, and she puts no effort into any of that work or bringing on new people or new volunteers or getting anyone to do anything, then that successfully empties out the organisation”, he said.
The group’s website, insiders said, was hardly ever updated, MPs stopped receiving regular briefings on Palestine, and ground was yielded to Britain’s pro-Israel lobby.
“So if you send a briefing paper out now to MPs from LFPME to encourage them to put in a member’s bill on this or that, they would just think ‘what is this organisation and why should I do as they say?’ And that all happened because Lisa Nandy sort of oversaw the managed decline of the organisation”, Hansen added.
Tom Charles argues that the Labour party was only briefly a useful vehicle for pro-Palestine advocacy. Left-wing voices within LFPME, he says, were snuffed out early on by centrists whose strategy was to cede ground to ideological opponents in a misguided effort to retain respectability and access to senior politicians.
“It’s the usual thing with Labour, you have people who pretend to be radical or interested in change, but it’s just a means to an end. I used to say to people it’s become the Palestine Friends of Labour, because they’re using the Palestinian cause to make Labour look better”, he said.
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‘Wither and die’
Veteran Palestinian British journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, who was uninvited from a LFPME event following pressure from the pro-Israel lobby, was even more scathing about the organisation.
“This is not the Labour Friends of Palestine, it’s the Labour Friends of Israel”, he told Electronic Intifada in 2016.
While vice-chair of LFPME, and shortly after backing the 2016 attempted coup against Corbyn, Lisa Nandy received a £5,000 donation from Sir Trevor Chinn.
Though a relatively small sum, it ought to have raised eyebrows given Chinn’s role as a pro-Israel lobbyist and funder of Labour Friends of Israel, LFPME’s opposite number in Westminster.
“I think, if Lisa Nandy was to do the job that she was appointed to do and advocate for the Palestinian cause inside parliament, then she wouldn’t be receiving donations from someone like Trevor Chinn or the pro-Israel lobby around the Labour party”, said Hansen.
“She accepted the job and it would’ve been immediately apparent that if she actually tried to do the job properly she would’ve burned those political bridges and she wouldn’t receive those donations and she would have put herself outside of the tent. So all of those incentives were there for Nandy to do absolutely nothing and let the organisation wither and die”, he continued.
Labour together
Another tent inhabited by Nandy at this time was Labour Together.
Launched in 2016 and the brainchild of Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s current chief of staff, Labour Together was a “think tank” whose aims were to “defeat Corbynism” and “win Labour back from the left”.
McSweeney drew on funding from Chinn and hedge fund manager Martin Taylor to plot his counterattack against the Labour left, with Nandy joining Labour MPs Jon Cruddas and Steve Reed on its board of directors.
Chinn’s motivation for funding Labour Together was closely linked to Corbyn’s position on Palestine. He “had great concerns about the election of an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state as Labour leader”, wrote Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick McGuire in their recent book Get In.
One of Labour Together’s first acts was to attempt to delegitimise independent media organisations which supported Corbyn, namely The Canary, by accusing them of “fake news” and promoting anti-Semitism.
“Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us”, McSweeney had told Labour Together MPs, according to a recent exposé in the Guardian.
The anti-Semitism scandal which surrounded the Labour party during Corbyn’s tenure was deeply damaging to the pro-Palestine movement – and Labour Together, with Nandy as director, played its part in stoking the fire.
Little surprise then, as Charles recalls, that “there was no real push-back [from LFPME] against the Corbyn assassination” or the decision to proscribe Hamas’ political wing as a terrorist organisation in 2021.
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With friends like these
Nandy stepped down as chair of LFPME in July 2020, shortly after coming third in Labour’s leadership election behind Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey.
During that campaign, Nandy dispensed with much of the pro-Palestine sentiment that had ostensibly animated her parliamentary career, such that she even received backing from the pro-Israel group Jewish Labour Movement.
At a hustings event supported by Labour Friends of Israel, Nandy proudly declared herself a “Zionist” – the ideological movement that founded the state of Israel in 1948 as Palestinians were violently driven from their land to create a majority Jewish state.
In 2023, Nandy abstained on the vote in parliament calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, claiming the Scottish National Party’s motion was too “vague”. Last year, she briefly carried water for Israel’s smear campaign against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA).
Nandy, the current culture secretary, is no longer listed as a supporter of LFPME, whose website appears stagnant even as the organisation seeks to restore some of its earlier strength.
The group does post sporadic “statements” on social media, and continues to engage with Labour MPs on Palestine, though the impact of these efforts appears marginal at best.
LFPME’S new co-chairs, MPs Sarah Owen and Andrew Pakes, issued a statement earlier this month praising Starmer’s government for putting “international law at the centre of its response” to the genocide and saying “Hamas… can play no role in the future of Gaza”.
The organisation also publicly welcomed one of Starmer’s recent statements on Gaza, even as the Labour government continues to provide military, intelligence, economic, and diplomatic support to Israel.
“You just wonder what’s going on there”, declared Hansen. “I mean, what the hell?”.
Lisa Nandy and LFPME were approached for comment.
