Legal challenge to UK’s policy on arms sales to Israel continues despite partial ban announcement

Dan Sabbagh

A legal challenge to the Labour government’s arms to Israel policy is continuing despite David Lammy’s announcement of a partial suspension of weapons exports, though it is expected to refocus on the legality of continuing to allow the sale of components for F-35 fighters and the consistency of the government’s position.

Phillippa Kaufman KC, appearing for al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group, and the Global Legal Action Network, said at the high court the organisations wanted to proceed with a judicial review during a procedural hearing . She said they wanted “to bottom out” why the UK says it cannot exclude some F-35 components in jets which are sold to and used by Israel in its bombing campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

The lawyer also said that the campaign groups wanted to challenge the failure by the UK to determine whether the intense bombing in Gaza, which has contributed to the deaths of 40,786 Palestinians, was in breach of international humanitarian law because of the high proportion of civilian casualties.

Lammy had told MPs yesterday, Kaufman said, that “in many cases, it has not been possible to reach a determinative conclusion on allegations regarding Israel’s conduct of hostilities”. But she told the court on Tuesday morning that that represented “precisely the approach we submit is wrong in law”.

Instead, in suspending arms sales, Lammy argued yesterday that Israel could reasonably do much more to ensure lifesaving food and medical supplies reach civilians in Gaza and that the UK government was “deeply concerned by credible claims of mistreatment of detainees”.

Government guidelines prohibit arms exports to countries where there is a “clear risk” that international humanitarian law will be breached and war crimes committed. Revised submissions on behalf of al-Haq and GLAN are due to be made by the end of the month with proceedings continuing into the autumn.

Ayman Safadi, the Jordanian foreign minister, has welcomed the UK’s decision to stop some arms sales to Israel. He posted this on social media.

The Uk did right to suspend some arms exports licenses to Israel. We urge an expansion of this suspension and call on all countries to impose a complete arms embargo on Israel. Unless consequences are real, Netanyahu will not end his aggression on Gaza and the West Bank, and will not stop violating international law and threatening the security of the whole region.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning the prime minister’s spokesperson refused to accept that the decision to suspend some arms sales to Israel was going to damage diplomatic relations with the country. Asked about Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement this morning, the spokesperson would not engage with the claim that what the UK was doing was “shameful”. But he defended the decision and said the UK remained a “staunch ally” of Israel. He said:

As the foreign secretary, we have not taken this decision lightly, but we do take our duty to apply export licensing law seriously.

We remain a staunch ally of Israel. That’s why we took action in April to shoot down Iranian missiles aimed at Israel, preventing significant loss of life.

Our ambition is to see an end to this devastating conflict, and we are working extensively with international partners on progress towards a ceasefire deal on both sides.

The Department for Work and Pensions will change the way pension credit is administered to reduce the chances of eligible people not claiming it, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, told MPs today.

In a statement to MPs in July, Reeves announced that winter fuel payments for pensioners, which are worth up to £300, will be means-tested this year and only paid to people receiving pension credit (a benefit for poor pensioners). In response to claims that many pensioners will not be able to afford to heat their homes as a result, the government has launched a campaign to encourage take-up of pension credit. Only around two-thirds of people who are eligble claim the benefit (worth on average £3,900 a year), and as a result around 880,000 pensioner households are thought to be missing out.

In response to a question about the risk of vulnerable pensioners losing out this winter, Reeves told MPs today that the government was working with charities and local councils to ensure that people who are entitled to claim pension credit do claim it.

She went on:

The DWP will also bring together the administration of pension credit and housing benefits, so that pensioner households currently receiving housing benefit also receive any pension credit that they are entitled to – something that the previous government deferred for years despite knowing that the poorest pensioners were missing out.

In the Q&A with reporters at his Tory leadership campaign launch Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister, strongly condemned the government’s decision to suspend some arms sales to Israel. He said:

That is a remarkable decision and it will be a decision that has been heard not just in Washington and Tel Aviv but around the world because if we are not willing to stand by our allies when they are literally discovering the bodies of their murdered citizens, what is the point of an alliance?

As Patrick Butler reports, pride in Britain’s history has fallen sharply over the past decade as the country has become less nationalistic and jingoistic and more reflective about its place in the modern world, according to a report from the National Centre for Social Research.

Here is Patrick’s story.

And here is a chart from the report.

In an interview on the Today programme this morning John Healey, the defence secretary, was asked if he regretted the fact that pride in Britain’s history has fallen, and if it was part of the government’s job to restore that pride. Healey replied:

Yes, and yes. Yes, I regret it. Yes, I think it is part of our government responsibility to help people see the things that we should all be proud of. It’s very hard not to feel proud of this country when you’re sitting in the basement of the military headquarters at the Ministry of Defense. It’s very hard not to feel pride, as I did when on Saturday morning at five o’clock I boarded a returning nuclear submarine in the mouth of the Clyde to talk to those submariners returning from patrol, 24/7, 365 days a year, helping keep us all safe.

David Evans has announced that he is going to step down as Labour’s general secretary at the party conference. He took on the job, which involves leading the organisational side of the Labour operation, in May 2020 after Keir Starmer became leader and wanted to install an ally in the post, and Evans played a signifcant part in enabling the party to go from hefty defeat to landslide victory over the course of a single parliament.

In a statement he said:

It has been the privilege of my life to be general secretary for the Labour party. It has always been my plan to serve for one general election, and take the organisation from shattering defeat to being a party of government.

Now both have been achieved, it is the right time both for me and the party for a new general secretary to take over.

A new general secretary being in post from the end of this year’s conference will give them the necessary time to lead the next chapter of change, taking over at the same early stage of the political cycle that I did.

Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister, is launching his campaign for the Tory leadership. There is a live feed here.

Tugendhat started by saying that he did not actually want the job, because he does not want to be leader of the opposition. He wants to be prime minister, he said.

He also said voters deserved to receive an apology from the Conservative party, because they should have had a serious government. He went on:

Politics is not a game, and we all know the cost when government isn’t sober and serious. We saw it in the lives lost in Afghanistan and then in that wasted chaos of that withdrawal. We saw it during Covid, not just in the lost years of education that cost so many or the opportunities missed, or even in the grief for lost loved ones or those left to cope alone, but through the disrespect.

Tugendhat said he watched the conduct of the last government “with a combination of depression and anger”. He said he saw “duty give way to ego”. He went on:

That’s why I’m standing before you today, because this country can change. We must change, and Britain deserves better, and we need a different government.

Most of the other five Tory leadership candidates have not criticised the record of the past government as directly as this.

The Conservative government’s decision not to set out spending plans for the coming years contributed to uncertainty about the public finances, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, has said. Case said this in a letter to Jeremy Hunt, the shadow chancellor, first leaked to the BBC. In its report on the story PM Media says:

Case said “sizeable in-year changes to spending plans in recent years” had been caused by the lack of a spending review “in the face of significant pressures which have materialised since budgets were set in 2021”.

That year saw the last spending review, in which the previous government set out its plans until 2024/25, but the Conservatives declined to set out further long-term plans before the election.

Since the election, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has accused her predecessor of leaving a £22bn “black hole” in this year’s spending plans, with departments overspending their budgets and ministers making unfunded commitments.

Case said: “The most effective way to transparently identify, quantify and address these pressures would have been to conduct a prompt spending review.”

He added that, “unlike previous years”, the new government “has set out to parliament the pressures that it is having to manage down and the actions it is taking to do so”.

Case’s letter comes in reply to allegations from Hunt disputing the £22bn figure and saying it was “deeply troubling” that Reeves’ claims appeared to contradict official spending estimates submitted to parliament after the election.

Case insisted that civil servants had acted “appropriately on the basis of decisions and assurances provided by ministers”.

He said the tight parliamentary timetable between the election and the delayed summer recess meant the government had had to submit the estimates prepared by its predecessor or face “cash shortages over the summer which would have disrupted the provision of public services”.

After the BBC reported this story, Hunt published the letter from Case on X.

He said:

If civil servants signed off estimates to parliament that they knew were false, it is a breach of the civil service code irrespective of any decision by the last government to hold a spending review.

But if those estimates were not false – and the Cabinet Secretary says accounting officers acted appropriately – then Labour’s claim of a £22 billion ‘black hole’ is exposed as bogus.

In reality it is a political device to justify tax rises – a political choice the Government made long before the election.

The Treasury has defended its decision to present estimates to parliament in July for 2024-25 public spending only days before saying the real public spending figures would be higher, arguing that it had to use the old figures so that a vote could take place to allow the money to be spent legally.

Great Britain’s renewable energy auction has secured enough new clean electricity projects to power 11m UK homes after the Labour government made record funding available to suppliers, Jillian Ambrose reports.

The news release about the announcement from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is here. And you can find the full list of contracts awarded here.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli PM, has posted a thread on social media describing the British government’s decision to suspend some arms sales to Israel as “shameful”.

Days after Hamas executed six Israeli hostages, the UK government suspended thirty arms licenses to Israel.

This shameful decision will not change Israel’s determination to defeat Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that savagely murdered 1200 people on October 7, including 14 British citizens.

Hamas is still holding over 100 hostages, including 5 British citizens. Instead of standing with Israel, a fellow democracy defending itself against barbarism, Britain’s misguided decision will only embolden Hamas.

Israel is pursuing a just war with just means, taking unprecedented measures to keep civilians out of harm’s way and comporting fully with international law.

Just as Britain’s heroic stand against the Nazis is seen today as having been vital in defending our common civilization, so too will history judge Israel’s stand against Hamas and Iran’s axis of terror.

With or without British arms, Israel will win this war and secure our common future.

Good morning. The Hamas massacre of Israelis on 7 October last year, and Israel’s brutal war in Gaza that has been going on ever since, has had very little impact on the internal politics of the Conservative party, but it has caused endless problems for Labour. Keir Starmer’s initial response, including an interview in which he seemed to say Israel had the right to cut off water supplies to Gaza as part of its retaliation (it took him a while to clarify that that was not what he meant) horrified pro-Palestinian voters, and Labour lost one byelection, and at least four seats at the general election, as a direct result of the backlash in Muslim communities that had previously been solidly Labour.

Now Labour is in office it is in a position to make policy on the Israel/Gaza conflict, and yesterday David Lammy, the foreign secretary, announced that some arms sales to Israel are being suspended.

But if Lammy, Keir Starmer and other Labour ministers thought that this relatively modest rebuke to Israel would go down well in the UK, today they are learning that that has not been the case. Pro-Israeli opinion is outraged, and pro-Palestinian campaigners are saying that Lammy should have gone very much further.

Here are some of the developments overnight and this morning.

• Boris Johnson, the former Tory prime minister, has accused Labour of “abandoning Israel” and suggested they want Hamas to win the war. He posted this on X.

Hamas is still holding many innocent Jewish hostages while Israel tries to prevent a repeat of the 7th October massacre. Why are Lammy and Starmer abandoning Israel? Do they want Hamas to win?

• The UK’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvi, has said the announcement “feeds the falsehood that Israel is in breach of international humanitarian law” and said the timing of the move “beggars belief”. He posted this on X.

It beggars belief that the British government, a close strategic ally of Israel, has announced a partial suspension of arms licences, at a time when Israel is fighting a war for its very survival on seven fronts forced upon it on the 7th October, and at the very moment when six hostages murdered in cold blood by cruel terrorists were being buried by their families. As Israel faces down the threat of Iran and its proxies, not just to its own people, but to all of us in the democratic west; this announcement feeds the falsehood that Israel is in breach of International Humanitarian Law, when in fact it is going to extraordinary lengths to uphold it. Sadly, this announcement will serve to encourage our shared enemies. It will not help to secure the release of the remaining 101 hostages, nor contribute to the peaceful future we wish and pray for, for all people in the region and beyond. Britain and Israel have so much to gain by standing together against our common enemies for the sake of a safer world. Surely that must be the way forward.

• John Healey, the defence secretary, has said that the UK’s support for Israel’s right to self-defence remains “unshakeable” despite the announcement. He told Times Radio:

As I said to the defence minister Yoav Gallant yesterday when I spoke to him before the announcement, we have a duty to follow the law, but this does not alter our unshakable commitment to support Israel’s right to self-defence and to the defence of Israel if it comes under direct attack again, just as UK jets back in April helped intercept Iranian drones and missiles that were targeted directly at Israeli civilians.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.

10.30am: Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister, launches his bid for the Conservative leadership.

11.30am: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, takes questions in the Commons.

Afternoon: Shona Robison, finance secretary in the Scottish governments, makes a statement to MSPs about spending cuts.

4pm: The six Tory leadership candidates – Tugendhat, Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly, Priti Patel and Mel Stride – address Tory MPs on after another in a private hustings meeting at Westminster.

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