London, United Kingdom – Protesters are planning to gather in support of Palestine Action at the first Labour Party conference Prime Minister Andy Burnham will preside over.
Sunday’s “mass, silent sign-holding vigil” in Liverpool, close to the conference centre, is in response to the proscription of Palestine Action as a “terrorist” group, said Defend Our Juries, a rights group that organises rallies calling for the government to drop the ban.
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Since it was outlawed in July 2025, a civil disobedience campaign has seen more than 3,600 people arrested for showing their support for the group, often while holding signs reading, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.
Organisers at Defend Our Juries expect further arrests, saying several hundred people are likely to attend.
The protest is designed as an “integrity test of the new leadership’s commitment to ending Britain’s complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing and war crimes”, they said.
Burnham faced further scrutiny on Friday as Declassified UK, an investigative outlet focused on foreign policy, reported that it had been denied media passes to cover the Labour conference, which runs from Sunday to Wednesday.
Where does Labour stand on Palestine?
Compared with his predecessors, Burnham has taken a stronger stance against illegal Israeli settlements and settler violence in the occupied West Bank, announcing sanctions earlier this month.
But rights groups and activists have called on Labour to suspend all arms sales to Israel in order to stop the bloodshed in Gaza and the West Bank.
They also want the UK to reverse the ban on Palestine Action, whose main target is Israel’s largest weapons maker, Elbit Systems.
“If [prime minister] Burnham means what he says, that he plans to end Britain’s complicity in Israel’s horrific crimes, then he would stop the arrests of people peacefully demonstrating against the genocide and the authoritarian attempts to crush its opponents,” Defend Our Juries said. “We urge PM Burnham to do the only sensible thing and lift the ban on Palestine Action, the very people in the UK actually trying to prevent British complicity in Israel’s war crimes.”
Labour’s past positions on Palestine
In recent years, the Labour Party has faced waves of criticism over its positions on Israel and Palestine.
“I think the interests of a Labour leader who wants to keep the Labour Party together, and keep a broad electoral bloc together too in a first-past-the-post system, is to try and defang this issue as much as possible,” Colm Murphy, a senior lecturer in British politics at Queen Mary University, told Al Jazeera.
He explained that “we’ve seen a series of gradual steps” on Palestine by party leaders, but the shift has been a “slow, painful evolution”.
“Recognition of the Palestinian state by [former Prime Minister Keir] Starmer was the culmination of a process really begun by Ed Miliband,” he said, referring to the current Foreign Secretary who was Labour’s leader from 2010 until 2015.
Starmer was prime minister when the UK proscribed Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act.
Days after Israel attacked Gaza following the Hamas attacks of October 2023, then-PM Starmer said Israel had the “right” to cut off the strip’s water supply, adding, “Obviously, everything should be done within international law.”
Although he later walked back his statement, for many, the damage was done.
“The legacy of Starmer is actually worsened by the fact that Burnham and Miliband were able to act, because it shows that they could act and they had the political will, they had the personal and public will, and they actually did do something,” said Joseph Willits, head of Parliamentary Affairs at the Council for Arab-British Understanding.
The new sanctions announced under Burnham’s Labour highlight the “inadequacies and the lack of will from the previous government”, he said.
Before Starmer, Jeremy Corbyn, a leftist and lifelong supporter of Palestinian rights, led Labour.
But his era was marred by allegations of anti-Semitism and in late 2019, he announced his resignation as the party’s head.
Under Miliband’s tenure, Labour’s stance on Palestine was supportive of a two-state solution and Palestinian statehood.
He has since reflected on how his Jewish mother, a Holocaust survivor, shaped the principles that have guided him.
The question remains whether Burnham’s Labour could reverse the ban on Palestine Action, especially after United States President Donald Trump recently outlawed the group.
“I think it’s too early to say,” Willits said. “If this is also a battle line with Trump and the Trump administration, do they pick that battle line or the others? Has he already picked other battle lines when it comes to Palestine and therefore does he just leave this one?”
Murphy said Burnham’s Labour may address issues around Palestine Action if they become “salient in British politics again”.
“I’m not so sure it will, but we shall see. A protest might raise the profile a bit.”
