UK settlements ban: How conspiracy theory accusing Burnham of courting ‘Islamist voters’ went global

Submitted by Peter Oborne on Thu, 09/17/2026 - 13:19 Right-wing UK politicians have claimed government's foreign policy shift on Israel is a ploy to shore up support among Muslims. Now Israeli and American politicians are amplifying the narrative

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham looks on during a bilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron at 10 Downing Street on 3 September 2026 in London (Leon Neal/Reuters)
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More than 1,000 Palestinians killed in less than three years in the occupied West Bank. Sixty-six communities erased in a programme of ethnic cleansing incited by senior Israeli ministers. The hope of a viable Palestinian state wrecked by the E1 settlement programme.

For years the British government responded to Israeli attacks on Palestinians with statements of condemnation and policies widely accused of being half-measures.

But earlier this month Ed Miliband, after just seven weeks as foreign secretary, tore up the script by announcing a trade ban on Israeli settlements.

To some observers, Miliband did not go far enough. The foreign secretary ruled out wider sanctions against Israel – even though many settler attacks on the West Bank are enabled and supported by the Israeli military.

Yet the sanctions are a major step towards bringing Britain into conformity with international law, in particular the momentous July 2024 International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that declared the Israeli occupation illegal.

The ICJ went further by placing member states under an obligation not to help Israel’s unlawful presence in occupied Palestinian territory, an order that for two years Prime Minister Keir Starmer ignored.

The Miliband announcement was therefore a landmark moment. It was also a major diplomatic coup which brought in 11 other middle-ranking countries, including France and Canada. It was arguably Britain’s first foreign policy success since Brexit.

Analysis: Ed Miliband is becoming the UK's most formidable foreign secretary in decades Read More »

Polls have since shown most of the British public, including a narrow majority of Conservative voters, supported Ed Miliband’s sanctions package.

You might have expected resounding applause from British media, and even grudging acceptance from the Conservative opposition.

Not so.

Miliband's announcement has been greeted with wave after wave of vitriol and mockery from Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform.

The right–wing press accounts for approximately 80 percent of British newspaper readers. These newspapers have responded with raw hostility to the Miliband measures.

A dividing line has therefore opened up in British politics.

On one side a Labour government under Andy Burnham which supports international law, opposes Israeli settlement expansion and appears to be aligned with public opinion.

On the other side the Tories and Reform.

While it is wrong to say that these two parties actually support settler violence, it is certainly accurate to state that they have stridently opposed any measures that would hinder it.

Fictitious narrative about British Muslims

It is noteworthy that Burnham and Miliband’s opponents tend not to attack the foreign secretary’s substantive measures.

Instead they resort to smears and conspiracy theories, accusing Burnham and Miliband of kowtowing to Islamist interests.

In their telling, Britain did not sanction Israeli settlements out of concern for the two-state solution and international law. Instead, they acted because of British Muslims and their niche sectarian obsessions.

Senior minister says UK will 'no longer' stand by while 'innocent children are killed in Gaza' Read More »

This fictitious narrative about Britain and its Muslim population has snowballed into a global phenomenon.

The Israeli government and the Trump administration have joined British right-wing politicians and media in presenting the Labour government as overtaken or heavily influenced by British Muslims, or Islamists (a label which is rarely defined).

The narrative that Islam threatens Britain and its democratic process has come to dominate British political debate, but is also heavily promoted by American and Israeli politicians.

It builds on a discourse about Muslims in politics which has grown particularly strong in Britain since the 2024 general election.

This is the argument that Muslim anti-establishment politicians, including independents and candidates for the left-wing Green Party, are “sectarian” entryists seeking to inject their narrow religious concerns and anti-Israel views into secular democratic politics – and that they are influencing a Labour government desperate for their support.

This discourse has gone global. Consider Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intervention last month, almost certainly motivated by anger at the Burnham government’s planned sanctions.

Netanyahu branded the UK the “Islamic Republic of Britain”, saying it could be the “first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon”.

Look past the fact that the Israeli premier, wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, has never been praised for his attention to detail (Britain is a monarchy, not a republic, and the first Islamic republic to have a nuclear weapon was Pakistan).

The effect of Netanyahu’s remarks was to suggest that Britain has become dominated by its Muslim population. This has become a popular argument in Israel.

"We will not be a trampled doormat of an antisemitic government, in a country conquered by radical Islam,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich proclaimed the night before Miliband announced the sanctions.

After Miliband’s announcement and Israel’s retaliation, which involved banning numerous British MPs from the country, the Israeli diaspora minister, Amichai Chikli, declared: “To the British people, let me be clear: we in Israel love you. And we are not remotely rattled by sanctions from your Foreign Secretary, whose name escapes me… We will stand together against the globalists and Islamists who seek to impose Sharia law on you.”

'United Islamic Kingdom'

This narrative has also become increasingly common in the US. “You didn't have crime in London. London was a very safe place, and now you have a different culture that has entered,” President Donald Trump opined the week before the sanctions announcement.

He lamented that “you have Sharia courts, and you have lots of other things taking place, and you have a mayor who's absolutely terrible” (Sadiq Khan, who is Muslim). There are no sharia courts in Britain, although there are sharia councils which have no legal standing.

Randy Fine, a Republican congressman who strongly denounced Britain’s sanctions last week, labelled the country the “United Islamic Kingdom”.

'The Labour government’s foreign policy is now decided on what will best maintain/retrieve Muslim votes in Britain'

– Rupert Lowe MP, leader of Restore Britain

“Once you allow Muslims to become a meaningful percentage of your electorate,” Fine explained, “Muslims that aren’t from your country, that don’t share your values, that may have come in illegal ways and just came in on boats and just stormed the beaches, they aren't coming to be part of your country. They’re coming to take over your country.

“And what is clear is this is an effort to politically appeal to those voters who are obsessed with Israel.”

This Republican argument is a more fanciful version of the narrative of two of Britain’s major political parties in their attacks on Burnham’s government.

Badenoch accused Burnham of “throwing British interests under the bus to win back Islamist and far left activist votes”.

According to Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader: “Labour’s desperate bid to win back hard-left and Islamist voters is putting Britain’s Jews at risk with these wrong-headed sanctions.”

Meanwhile Rupert Lowe, a former Reform MP who now leads the anti-immigration Restore Britain, which aims to outflank Reform on the right, said: “The Labour government’s foreign policy is now decided on what will best maintain/retrieve Muslim votes in Britain.”

Multiple former Tory prime ministers have also waded in to attack Burnham.

Liz Truss, whose 2022 premiership lasted 44 days, labelled the government “an Islamist appeasing disgrace”.

Boris Johnson, writing in the Daily Mail, accused Burnham of “pursuing radical and sectarian policies”, claiming of the Labour Party: “They fear Islam, in the sense that they fear being seen – like Keir Starmer – to be too soft on Israel. Andy Burnham fears the finger-wagging reaction in the mosques and among the 57 Labour constituencies where there is a more than 15 per cent Muslim minority.”

'Attempts to claw back the Muslim vote'

The Daily Mail’s leader, the day after the sanctions announcement, argued that “the sanctions are entirely self-serving for the Labour Party as it attempts to claw back the Muslim bloc vote, which they largely lost over the conflicts in Gaza and Iran.”

Similar rhetoric could be found in the broadsheet papers. Writing for The Sunday Times last weekend, Matthew Syed lamented “the ever more visible pincer movement between left-wing progressives (who are not progressive at all) and Islamists, a coalition that poses a growing threat not just to Israel but to the West as a whole”.

Syed added that “Your Party, the British Greens, the Democratic Socialists, La France Insoumise, Die Linke and more have become the principal engine of Islamofascism.”

Allison Pearson in the Telegraph offered a strikingly different portrait of the situation to the one provided by YouGov’s nationwide polling: “Miliband’s plan did prove popular in some quarters,” she asserted. “The far-Left Gaza obsessives on the Labour benches, sporting their recreational Yasser Arafat tea-towels and panicking about losing Muslim votes to the Greens, lapped it up.”

One interpretation of Labour’s announcement on Israel is that it was a cynical ploy to defeat the Greens in next month’s by-election in Holborn and St Pancras.

This idea has been promoted by the commentator Andrew Neil, who argued that Miliband’s statement “was drafted more with Holborn & St Pancras in mind than with Haifa or Tel-Aviv.”

Sir Richard Dearlove, who as head of MI6 in the run-up to the Iraq war was responsible for claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, lent succour to this narrative, telling Times Radio that “there’s a very sensitive by-election gonna come up where the Greens who are gonna court this Islamist, pro-Hamas vote, you know, they need to be outflanked by Labour if Labour’s not gonna risk losing that by-election.”

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This argument implies that Burnham and Miliband performed the heroic diplomatic feat of convincing Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and French President Emmanuel Macron to significantly shift their foreign policies, in defiance of the US, on the basis of a local election in Holborn and St Pancras.

It is a telling indicator of how easily the right-wing British narrative is picked up abroad that Netanyahu’s spokesman began arguing last week that the sanctions were “about affecting most probably the electorate of Holborn and St Pancras”.

For much of the British right, meanwhile, criticism of Labour’s policies on Israel with reference to British Muslims and multiculturalism - comfortable political territory – apparently allows them to avoid serious engagement with the question of the illegal settlements.

The mainstream British right has placed itself in the position of defending not Israel but rather the Netanyahu government, with its agenda of settlement expansion and a prominent religious Zionist element.

This was starkly illustrated last week by a statement from British Jewish organisation Yachad. Yachad argued that “sanctions against Jewish terrorists, and not against the State of Israel, as British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced yesterday, are an inevitable consequence of the Jewish terror and the failures of the government and the security bodies that do not prevent them.”

The statement was signed by prominent figures including former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Dan Halutz, the former chief of staff of the Israeli military.

On the opposing side of the argument to Olmert and Halutz stand Badenoch, Farage and Lowe.

This is a precarious position for the British right.

British politics typically follows trends in the United States, where Trump’s Maga movement has split wide open over support for Netanyahu’s Israel.

Were Britain to follow suit, Badenoch, Farage and Lowe will find themselves dangerously exposed.

There are already signs of Tory disaffection: only about half a dozen Tory MPs were present to support Shadow Foreign Secretary Tom Tugendhat last week when he rose to respond in parliament to Miliband’s sanctions announcement.

UK Politics Imran Mulla News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19 Update Date Override 0