Will war in the Middle East cast a shadow over a Starmer government?

Airstrikes in Yemen and conflict in Gaza inflame the same issues as the Iraq war, Labour’s most painful wound

The shadow cabinet is more deeply divided than it appears. Labour is still subject to less media scrutiny than the Conservatives, despite the widespread assumption that Keir Starmer will become prime minister this year.

Most Labour MPs are also more disciplined than most Tory MPs because they can feel election victory within their grasp, whereas the Tories are either fed up or have given up, and so are happier to be rude about each other in private and in public.

As ever in politics, Labour’s divisions are a mixture of the personal and the ideological, and foreign policy is one of the hidden fractures threatening the foundations of an incoming government.

That is why the airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen are potentially more of a problem for Starmer than for Rishi Sunak. They are a risk for the prime minister, because he could find himself drawn deeper into an unpopular conflict in an election year. But they could be a bigger risk for the Labour leader, who has offered his unequivocal support for the strikes, not wanting to appear soft on national security.

For Labour, however, more than for the Conservatives, military action in Yemen, which is being linked on today’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations with the conflict in Gaza, reopens all the old wounds of the Iraq war.

All the same issues have been reignited: military intervention in the Middle East; the confrontation with anti-Western Islamist ideology; and the Israel-Palestine question. The same bundle of nerves that convulsed the Labour Party and caused it to cast aside its most successful leader in history. It was not the Iraq war itself that forced Tony Blair out in the end. Indeed, he won a third election handsomely in 2005, two years after the invasion. But the party’s neutralist reflexes were making it harder to manage. What eventually got Blair out was his refusal to call for a ceasefire when Israel retaliated with disproportionate force to a Hezbollah attack from Lebanon in 2006.

The party had tolerated the Iraq war – even Clare Short, the international development secretary, defended it. One of the arguments that Blair deployed for joining the US invasion was that it would give Britain leverage with the Americans to put pressure on the Israelis to negotiate with the Palestinians. It did, and George Bush published a “road map” towards a two-state agreement – but nothing came of it, and Blair’s refusal to condemn Israel in 2006 was the stretch that broke the elastic. “All right, all right, I’m going,” Blair said (I paraphrase), and nine months later he was gone.

There was an aftershock of that trauma in October, when Starmer refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Ten shadow ministers resigned from their posts – “Jobs they ain’t,” I remember Neil Kinnock snarling when one of his frontbenchers had the audacity to think their status mattered. Only one of them, Jess Phillips, attended shadow cabinet, but the revolt was significant because it was the visible part of the iceberg of discontent below the surface.

There are several members of the shadow cabinet who are unhappy with Starmer’s position on Gaza, despite its modulation under cover of the US and British governments’ shift to calling for a “sustainable ceasefire”. That is still “not a ceasefire” as far as they are concerned.

The same set of shadow ministers is sceptical about airstrikes against the Houthis. They share the view expressed by some of the banners on today’s pro-Palestine march: “End the bombing of Gaza and Yemen.” The two theatres of conflict are not the same, but they are connected. The UK is not bombing Hamas, so stopping the bombing of Gaza requires persuading the Israeli government, whereas bombing Houthi launchers was a UK government decision, in concert with the US.

But they are connected because the Houthis are attacking Red Sea shipping as a way of attacking Israel indirectly, and of identifying themselves with the Palestinian cause, which is popular throughout the Muslim world.

That cause is popular in the Labour Party too, and although reservations about airstrikes in Yemen are expressed in terms of “not wanting to be dragged into another war in the Middle East”, there is a simple equation between support for the Palestinians and opposition to airstrikes a thousand miles away.

That is not to say that Starmer has a problem with his divided party yet. But it is a fissure that could open up in government – assuming, as seems likely, that both Gaza and the Red Sea will still be conflict zones by then.

Nor is Starmer like Blair, whose jaw-jutting refusal to compromise finally provoked his party to revolt. Starmer’s conversion to liberal interventionism is so recent that it is easier to imagine him taking a Wilsonian middle path in office. As a new MP in 2015, he voted against airstrikes on Isis in Iraq. This is possibly a better guide to his true instincts than his leadership election platform of promising a Prevention of Military Intervention Act.

But if Starmer takes power at the end of this year, he will start with a party already divided and the Middle East already in turmoil, whereas it took years, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for Blair to hit trouble.

If this is a year of a Labour government, it is worth asking more probing questions about what kind of government it might be.