Burnham is attacking local councils to defend Israel
JVL Introduction
As Tom Blackburn points out in this article in Tribune, the Labour Party has issued an extraordinary ultimatum, ordered its councillors to withdraw from any power-sharing deals with the Greens unless local Green parties renounce the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion passed at their national conference last month.
The effect could be to throw as many as 19 councils, including Sheffield and Warwick, into administrative chaos, imposing a purity test requiring Greens who wish to work with his party to drop any anti-Zionist commitments.
It looks like what it is, petty party manoeuvring. It sits uneasily – to put it charitably – with Burnham and Miliband’s recent moves to seize the moral high ground on the question of Palestine.
Cllr Angela Argenzio Leader of the Green Group on Sheffield Council and Liam Shrivastava Mayor of Lewisham have issued carefully worded rejoinders to the pressures Labour has put them under. These are posted below Blackburn’s analysis.
Both make it clear that they have the interests of their constituents at heart and that the blame for any disruption to what is best for them will be laid squarely at Labour’s door.
This article was originally published by Tribune on Fri 16 Oct 2026. Read the original here.
Burnham is attacking local councils to defend Israel
The Labour Party’s refusal to work with the Greens unless they renounce anti-Zionism exposes the hollowness of the Burnham project.
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I have written to the leader of Brighton City Council, Bella Sankey, to express my concern as a Jewish woman at the Labour Party’s attacks on the Green Party’s policy “Zionism is Racism”. While a member of neither party at present, I follow them closely, and have watched with dismay as Labour has abandoned so much of what has made it distinctive and enabled Britain to become a fairer country. As someone committed to anti-racism all my life, the Green Party’s Zionism policy adoption did initially give me pause, but on reflection I do believe it is factually correct. With an extensive knowledge of the history of antisemitism, Zionism, the Holocaust, and the Nakba, I am confident the world is watching a genocide of Palestinians taking place in Israel, and Western nations have been extremely reluctant to name it as such. While the early Jewish settlers in Palestine were sometimes cooperative with their Palestinian neighbours, as numbers grew – along with greed for land, water and other resources – the Palestinians were increasingly marginalised, deprived of those resources, and driven from the land. And today, we have the obscene spectacle of their olive harvests being deliberately destroyed in order to deprive them of a basic living. So while early Zionists were fleeing persecution of unimaginable cruelty, today’s counterparts are firmly in charge and greedy for territory at the expense of its rightful owners.
As my family tree shows, many members of my family were “disappeared” in the Holocaust, along with millions of other Jews, Roma, and disabled people – all considered “less than human” – “Untermenschen”. That the Israeli Right is prepared to perpetrate this on another, weaker people is beyond shameful. And a UK Labour Government that arrests and locks people up for holding a sign in protest against genocide will never erase the stain from its record.
I commend your stance on this matter . It is refreshing to see a party stand for truth.