July 1, 2025 - 1:00pm
Of all the facets emerging on the British Left, one of the most troubling is surely the emergence of the so-called “Gaza Independents”, and the shadow that they (and far-Left outfits with similar priorities, such as George Galloway’s Workers’ Party) cast on Labour.
Keir Starmer will be feeling the pressure. Last year, despite an historic landslide, several high-profile Labour MPs, including the current Health Secretary, almost lost their seats. Labour has for decades quietly banked the Muslim communal vote in many parts of the country, and the price may now be coming due.
The latest twist of the knife is a new demand from a cross-party coalition of MPs and peers, including 35 from his own party, calling for the Government to set up a “Gaza Family Scheme” to replicate the special arrangements made for Ukrainian and Hong Kong refugees.
It is, in many ways, a strange request. You would expect politicians so determined to hold Israel to account would know that there is nothing the hardliners in Jerusalem would like better than to diasporise Gazans in remote, developed nations.
Any case for such an arrangement also requires acknowledging that the reason there are no refugee camps in more obvious places, such as neighbouring territories, is because countries such as Egypt refuse point blank to let the Palestinians in (a double standard maintained by several Arab nations which formally condemn the alleged Israeli occupation of the lower Levant).
More than that, however, the proposition is fraught with political difficulty — especially for a government which has just made known its intention to try and persuade the public that it really is tough on immigration.
Most obviously, there’s a question of numbers. Ghassan Ghaben, spokesperson for Gaza Families Reunited, is quoted as arguing that there are “only a small number of Palestinians in the UK”, and fewer still with families in Gaza. The obvious implication is that the numbers would be small.
However, that is unlikely in practice, for as Ghaben is also quoted as saying, “family unity is an undeniable human right”. The supposed right to “family unity” (interpreted from the ECHR’s right to family life) is one of the biggest barriers to effective border control in general, and here it presents the obvious risk of a snowball effect.
Perhaps there would at first be relatively few claimants, all related to Britain’s small Palestinian population. Once here, however, they in turn would have the right to family unification — and would very obviously have a lot of family in Gaza.
A better idea of the real scale of this programme is likely found in the politicians’ own comparisons: over 150,000 Hong Kongers have resettled in the UK since their special visa pathway was set up in 2021, and over 200,000 Ukrainians since theirs was established a year later.
Neither of those groups had the energetic lobby the Palestinians, despite their small numbers, already enjoy in this country. With an estimated 1.6 million refugees in Gaza, the overall numbers could be far, far higher; the same pressures which might force Labour to open such a scheme would make it very hard to close it.
The Government recently drew the ire of the Lady Chief Justice for criticising an immigration tribunal’s decision to allow a Palestinian refugee to enter the country under the Ukrainian scheme. It would, in some ways, be the most Starmer-brained thing possible if he thought the solution to public anger about that was setting up a new one that ticked the right boxes.
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