Jeremy Corbyn MP: speeches

Speeches

• 14 Sept 2026 · Israel and Palestine · Hansard source

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  The Minister has been very generous in giving way. In his discussions with the Government of Israel, has he ever raised the issue of Israel never defining what its borders actually are? That seems to me to be a fundamental problem in any discussions on this issue going forward.

• 14 Sept 2026 · Israel and Palestine · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to follow the speech from the hon. Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah), who has made a huge contribution to supporting the Palestinian people over many years in this House. This debate is obviously very welcome. I acknowledge that the Government’s statement last week on resetting policy is a very important and highly significant change in Government policy. While I welcome some aspects of it, I feel that it does not go far enough, and it is taking far too long to bring what was announced into operation. It is also very unclear what kind of ultimate sanctions there would be against Israel in the event of it evading the sanctions concerning Israeli settlements, and what military co-operation there will be with Israel in the future. These things must be clarified. I hope that when the Minister replies, we will learn a little more about the details of the policy, and in particular why the Government have given themselves so many months to bring it into operation. Succeeding generations will ask very serious questions of all of us politicians. Our children are taught in school the horrors of the Holocaust against the Jewish people, and of so many other genocides around the world. They are taught the way in which racism leads into that horrible scenario. They will ask why we were unable to do anything to prevent the massive loss of life in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli forces. As the hon. Member for Bradford West pointed out, 73,000 people have been killed in Gaza. Those millions of tonnes of rubble hide many more bodies. The Israel Defence Forces will cart some of the rubble away, so that it can become hardcore for buildings in Israel, but there will be bodies in that rubble. There will be human remains there and DNA evidence. We are seeing the most massive killing of innocent civilian life in Gaza, and we have not been able to stop it; it still carries on. There are many statistics that one could quote, but a simple one is this: it is estimated that there are 63 million tonnes of rubble in Gaza. There are 2 million people in Gaza. That is more than 30 tonnes of rubble per person. Almost every building has been damaged or destroyed. The destruction has moved on to the west bank, where settlers are destroying land, chopping down olive trees, polluting wells, driving people out of their homes, burning villages and driving people away. That is the sort of activity that the frontiersmen from Europe—the white people who invaded native American land in the wild west—undertook against Indian villagers. That is the equivalent of the horror that is going on there. Sometimes we seem to pretend that we can continue normal relations with Israel, but these are not random illegal acts, committed by people acting alone; these acts are condoned by the Government of Israel. The settlers are protected and armed by Israeli police and the IDF. It gets worse and worse. As many colleagues have pointed out, the idea of a contiguous Palestinian state disappears if E1 is settled in the way that the E1 plan proposes. That is not the end of it. Israeli forces are now occupying a very large part of southern Lebanon, and it looks to me as though they have every intention of remaining there. Israel is also taking part in the wholly illegal bombardment of Iran, alongside President Trump. Is it not time that we were a bit stronger and more assertive against these wholly illegal acts? The Government have made it very clear that they recognise international law and international legal instruments, and that they expect every other country to do the same. Good—that also applies to Israel. When the Foreign Secretary made his statement, very interestingly he acknowledged the role that public opinion in Britain has had in bringing about this change in policy. I have been on a very large number of marches about Palestine, and there are probably about a million people in Britain who have made their voices very clearly heard, either by attending a demonstration or sending letters, emails, petitions—all sorts of things. The marches are made up of large numbers of people, some of whom have never been involved in anything political at all before. They are a very wide range of people; they are Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist and humanist. It is very clear that we will not allow any of the marches to descend into any kind of racist hate speech. They are marches of support and solidarity with people who are victims of the most atrocious bombardment. I thank all those people who have come along and made their voices very well heard. It is important that the Government go a bit further on accepting the process of international law. I attended the ICJ hearing for the South African application. It was a deeply moving experience to sit there in the Peace Palace in the Hague—a beautiful, stunning building—listening to the South African application. My mind went back to the apartheid years—all the demonstrations to try to bring about an end to apartheid, and the bravery and all the suffering of the South African people in trying to throw off the yoke of apartheid. I thought, “How brave of South Africa to present that case.” What was their reward? Extra tariffs and tax by President Trump. Later, I was in South Africa with my good friend Dr Mustafa Barghouti, addressing a meeting in Cape Town about Palestine. At the meeting was an elderly man who had been part of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. He had been very badly beaten by the South African army and police force while he was campaigning to end apartheid in his country. He got up and said that the treatment of the people of Palestine is far worse than anything that happened to the black community in South Africa. There was not carpet-bombing of cities and villages there, of the sort that the Israeli forces are carrying out. If we respect international law, then arrest warrants issued by the ICC for a number of individuals in the Israeli Government must be enforced, should those individuals show up in this country. As my hon. Friends the Members for Blackburn (Mr Hussain) and for Birmingham Perry Barr (Ayoub Khan) pointed out, if the ICJ considers that acts of genocide could be committed—that is its opinion, and it is a very important opinion—then anyone who provides arms to Israel and provides support for acts of genocide becomes complicit in genocide. I hope that the Government understand the dangers of all that. I hope that we will be very assertive about what the settlers and settlements are doing, and that we will impose real sanctions against Israel. We must recognise that although the Israeli body politic, including all the major parties, essentially supports the strategy pursued by Netanyahu—perhaps in mildly different forms, but fundamentally they are of the same mind—there are people in Israel who absolutely oppose what their Government are doing and absolutely detest the way in which the Palestinian people are being treated. Are we to be silent bystanders while these ghastly acts of genocide go on—as people are denied food and decent medical facilities? As other Members have pointed out, Britain’s role in all this is not one of a recent arriviste on the scene. We have been involved since the 19th century in the issue of settlements, and in preventing the Palestinian people from asserting their statehood. We were obviously involved in the Balfour declaration and the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. For historical reasons, moral reasons and reasons of courage, we should be far clearer about our role in all this. We must bring peace and justice to all the peoples of the region and oppose racism in absolutely any form in society, in this country or anywhere else. I am conscious that other colleagues wish to speak, so the last thing I will say is this. I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill calling for a public inquiry into Britain’s policy in Gaza, like the Franks report into previous conflicts and Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into Britain’s policy on Iraq, because we need to know what was going on in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, and what was happening at RAF Akrotiri and in other places. When it became clear that the Bill would not make any progress in the House, Professor Neve Gordon, Dr Shahd Hammouri and I put together a tribunal. We held a Gaza inquiry over two days in Church House Westminster, and we heard from 29 expert witnesses. It was a deeply moving occasion. We listened to young people from Gaza explain what their life had been like. We listened to medical practitioners talk about the horror of doing everything they had been taught that they could not do: they had inflicted pain on people to try to prevent further pain, and had amputated the limbs of children without anaesthetic, antiseptic or even water. After all their heroic work, they would think that, only a few kilometres away from where they were operating in ghastly conditions under a piece of canvas, there was food, water, electricity, medicine and antiseptic—everything that was needed—but it was deliberately denied to the Palestinian people by the IDF. Aid workers have been killed. As was said earlier, the limited aid that gets in is deliberately designed to prevent a sustainable way of life in Gaza. Some foodstuffs can be imported, but potato tubers and seeds, which could be used to develop agriculture for the future, cannot. Our Gaza inquiry pointed out the depravity of what was going on. I thank everyone who took part in it, but I want a proper public inquiry, so that we know what those surveillance flights were doing. The former Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, said that there are things going on at RAF Akrotiri that he was not able to talk about. It is time that somebody talked about what is going on there, because we need to know the truth. The truth will help set us free. I believe that the truth will help bring about what is essential: peace and justice for the people of Palestine.

• 14 Sept 2026 · Israel and Palestine · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way; he is generous with his time. Is he aware that both the Prime Minister and the alternative Prime Minister in Israel have both said, in terms, that they do not accept the idea of the entity of a Palestinian state?

• 14 Sept 2026 · Israel and Palestine · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is making a very strong point about the lack of food security for the Palestinian people in Gaza. Does she recognise that Israel now occupies around 70% of Gaza, so the population is restricted to 30% of the area? Some years ago, there was a huge move to make Gaza once again a major food-growing area, which traditionally it always had been. Does she think that should be part of the development process again?

• 8 Sept 2026 · Israel and Palestine · Hansard source

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  Will the Foreign Secretary recognise that the hundreds of thousands of us who have marched and met in support of the Palestinian people, be they Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist, have done so out of a motivation to bring about justice and peace for the people of Palestine? Will he specifically call on Israel to withdraw in totality from Gaza—not just the 70% it occupies now, but the remaining part that it is bombarding? If military sanctions are to mean anything, surely that must include an end to the sharing of surveillance information by the RAF overflying Gaza, the use of RAF Akrotiri and Israel’s ability to manufacture weapons at Elbit Systems factories in this country. If we are serious about ending a military occupation, then we have to play a full part in achieving it.

• 16 Jul 2026 · Sir David Amess Summer Adjournment · Hansard source

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  When the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) introduced the debate, he quite rightly drew attention to the huge work done by our constituency and parliamentary staff. It is right that we should thank them on this occasion and also thank all the parliamentary staff for what they do. I thank those in my local authority for what they do, in particular the street cleaners who cleaned up after the largest ever football celebration in Britain when Arsenal won the league. I am sure everybody will cheer that straight away—no. [ Laughter. ] I also want to put on record my thanks to two of the Members’ Tea Room staff who are retiring today, Godfrey Asare and Margaret Labulo, who have done fantastic work providing God knows how many cups of coffee and tea for all of us over many years. They deserve our thanks. I want to refer to a number of things very briefly. Yesterday was the Prime Minister’s last Question Time. He gave a characterisation of the Labour party he inherited when he became the leader that I profoundly disagree with and is completely wrong. The Labour party was not financially in any great problem when I ceased to be the leader; in fact, it had very large capital and cash assets at that time. Secondly, to call the party “morally bankrupt” and claim that it had been found to be “institutionally antisemitic” is completely wrong and will not be found anywhere in the Equality and Human Rights Commission report. I invite the Prime Minister to correct the record; I am sure he would wish it to be accurate. Many things will face the new Prime Minister when he comes into office. I hope he will fundamentally change our policy on Gaza and Palestine and on Iran and Lebanon, and at the very least cease military support and security co-operation with Israel. I also hope he will support my private Member’s Bill calling for a public inquiry into Gaza, in the same way that Sir John Chilcot undertook a public inquiry into the policy on Iraq. My constituency, like many others, has a large number of leasehold properties, often fairly newly built and many of them covered with unsafe cladding that needs to be removed. I am pleased that the Government have made some funding available to remediate unsafe cladding. That is good, but why are the developers not being given that bill? Why are they not the ones who are forced to pay for what they knew to be unsafe cladding when they put it in? I hope we can do something for the residents in Drayton Park, Highbury Square and former stadium buildings in my constituency, because they have suffered very high insurance costs and are unable to sell or move, simply because something was badly built and they were unaware of that when they bought the place. I wish to raise two other issues. I have a constituent, who I would rather not name because I think he deserves privacy, who suffers from advanced motor neurone disease. He is in a very bad way. He is getting nursing care from the local health service, and that is good. I have written several times to the Home Office asking that his family in Nigeria be allowed to visit. It has consistently refused to allow him to be visited by his son or any other member of his family. I appeal to the Home Office—I am sure the Leader of the House will pass this on, and I will follow up with another letter: please show some humanity for this man towards the end of his life, and let him at least have the opportunity to see the rest of his family before he passes on from a most terrible condition. The shop Fish & Cook on Blackstock Road is closing. I ask that this successful small business is not allowed to be turned into a 24-hour gaming place and that we are given the powers to stop this kind of thing happening on our high streets around this country.

• 13 Jul 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill · Hansard source

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  The media, Reform and all on the far right in Britain have created the most horrible and dangerous atmosphere in this country against refugees, migrants and minorities. They have promoted racism, and that racism has played out in the violence on the streets, the violence against mosques, the violence against synagogues, and the violence against any minority group within our society. They should think very carefully about what they say and how they depict asylum seekers and refugees. When I listen to the rhetoric in the media and follow it in some of the papers, it seems to me that they have taken leave of all aspects of humanity. The hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) said that he had been over to northern France to examine what was going on there. I have been over to northern France as well—I have been over to Calais and talked to people living in tents, and they are desperate. They are desperate people who once worked for the British Army in Afghanistan. They are desperate people who were bombed in Iraq or in Syria. They are desperate people trying to find somewhere in this world to survive, and what they find is hostility, danger and abuse. Nobody in their right mind would get into one of those dinghies and cross the channel unless they were utterly desperate to do so, so can we not just have a sense of humanity about this and have an international, Europe-wide approach to the issues faced by people who are desperate? Thousands have died crossing the Mediterranean, and hundreds have died crossing the channel. The historians of the next century will say of this century, “What were the politicians of Europe doing while all these people were drowning because they were trying to get to a place of safety?” Can we not instead accept the importance of international institutions and the value of the European convention on human rights, which protects all of our human rights, and try to have a humane system of doing things? In the last minute I have for my speech, I want to draw attention to the amendment I have tabled, endorsed by Members of the independent alliance group, which concerns the Afghan resettlement schemes. The people of Afghanistan have suffered grievously from the war. In August 2021, the Taliban took over in Kabul; the UK created resettlement schemes, and then dropped them all. Now, we have the horrible situation in which, although many Afghan families who have come to Britain as part of those schemes were told that the rest of their family could come, there are many dependants stuck in Afghanistan who can have no place here. The Government, through the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office, guaranteed that right of family reunion and guaranteed that extended family members could come here. When the Minister for Border Security and Asylum responds to the debate, I hope he will remember the words of the Afghan International Council in the United Kingdom, who said that “many Afghan families continue to endure the pain of prolonged separation”—

• 9 Jul 2026 · NATO Summit · Hansard source

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  According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global arms expenditure has now reached $2.8 trillion, with the USA, Europe, Russia and China spending the largest amounts. At any time during the NATO summit was there any strategic discussion about the way the world is spiralling out of control, with massive levels of expenditure on armaments, increasing wars, cuts in overseas aid by almost every country, and attacks on welfare budgets in every country as well? We are becoming a world that is increasingly at war, with increasing poverty at home. I realise that none of these issues is simple, but surely there needs to be some strategic look at what we are doing, or is the history of the 21st century going to be how we allowed the world to burn and spiral into war while increasing poverty at home in every country?

• 9 Jul 2026 · NATO Summit · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. [ Interruption. ]

• 9 Jul 2026 · Israeli Settlements: Trade Ban · Hansard source

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  I welcome this debate and say a huge thank you to the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) for securing it, for what she said and for the enormous amount of work she has done for the Palestinian people since she was elected two years ago. It is much appreciated across the whole country. The issue is basically one of international law. The ICJ landmark advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 says that states must not recognise, aid or assist the unlawful situation arising from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. The ICJ made it clear that all states have an obligation to “abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel concerning the Occupied Palestinian Territory or parts thereof which may entrench its unlawful presence in the territory”. Furthermore, the ICJ calls on states to “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”. It could not be clearer, so why, as a country, do we still support Israel diplomatically in many ways? Why do we still provide weapons and security information to Israel, which have been used in the destruction of Gaza and other places? I would like to know exactly what information is passed on, given the increasing military presence of Israel in the west bank in support of the settlers. I have many good friends in the west bank and Gaza, one of whom is Mustafa Barghouti, the president of the Palestine National Initiative. He frequently sends me messages describing what has happened in the past 24 hours. The messages he sends are heartbreaking. I would like to share with the House the message he sent yesterday. He pointed out that the US is now building its embassy in Jerusalem on land that it has been given by the state of Israel for $1. The land itself was stolen from Palestinians by using the absentee owner law that Israel created for the occupied territories. It is not Israel’s land to give to the United States for a dollar; it is Palestinian land that should belong to the Palestinian people. I will give the House an example of the day-to-day horror story of the behaviour of the settlers, strongly supported by the state of Israel, the IDF and the Israeli police. A school in Masafer Yatta was told that it had 14 days to vacate the building and disappear, because it was going to be demolished to make way for yet another settlement that had been “authorised” by the state of Israel. We see the destruction of ordinary life all across the west bank. I have visited Gaza, the west bank and Israel many times. I have seen the horror story of what the occupation does; I have seen the theft of land, the destruction of water systems and the inability for anyone to get around in a normal way. Surely to goodness the very least we can do is support what has been said today, end all trade whatsoever that helps to support the illegal occupation of the west bank and show our solidarity with the people of Palestine.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Human Rights in Kashmir · Hansard source

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  Thank you for calling me in this debate, Mrs Harris. I will be very brief because others wish to speak. I put on record my thanks to the hon. Members for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) and for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) for the huge work they have consistently done on the issue of Kashmir. The hon. Member for Bradford East chairs the all-party parliamentary group on Kashmir, which has made a huge difference and meant that the issue has been properly debated in Parliament. The contribution of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) brought together the whole issue, which is fundamentally that the way Kashmir was treated at the time of Indian independence is an overhanging colonial responsibility for Britain that has never been resolved. The matter was referred to the United Nations in 1948 and that is where it still is. At some point, it will have to be returned to, and there will have to be a recognition that this is an international issue that requires an international solution. The immediate crisis is, in a sense, symptomatic of the partition of Kashmir, with the line of control between Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir. The situation in Azad Kashmir at the moment is frankly terrible. I have constituents who have family there or who are there at the moment. The information getting back to us is that there are shortages of just about everything. There is an inability to move about and there are very high prices for food. There are also irrational detentions of people for taking part in protests and the general suppression of any civil and political activity. That is what happens when the economy spirals out of control and people cannot eat or feed their children properly. Something has to be done. At the very least, one would hope that the British Government—I look forward to the Minister’s response—will put whatever pressure it can on the administration in Azad Kashmir and be firmly in touch with the Pakistani Government through the high commission here to ensure that there is a lifting of the sanctions, a return of universal access to the internet, free movement around Azad Kashmir and a preparedness to engage to bring about long-term peace and stability within the region. Too many people are suffering, there is too much tension, and too much abuse of power is taking place at this very moment.

• 6 Jul 2026 · National Security (State Threats) Bill · Hansard source

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  I am pleased that the Minister is accepting the amendments. This will hopefully give some comfort to journalists in every war zone who are in incredibly precarious situations, where somebody usually accuses them of being terrorists for what they are reporting. The number of journalists killed around the world is rising year on year, so what practical support will the Government be able to give to the journalists or journalists’ unions that face these very real threats?