MPs attack plan to block councils’ Israel boycott

LABOUR MPS have led a wide-ranging attack on the government’s plans to stop local councils and public bodies boycotting Israel.

They said guidelines unveiled by Cabinet Office Minister Matt Hancock last month, which leave authorities open to fines if they target Israel, were an attack on local democracy.

The MPs made their objections during a bad-tempered debate in Parliament’s Westminster Hall on Tuesday.

Led by Richard Burden, Labour MP for Birmingham Northfield, they complained that there had been no parliamentary scrutiny of the plan, and repeatedly attacked Mr Hancock for unveiling the details at a press conference with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a trip to the country, rather than in the Commons.

Mr Burden said: “It simply is not acceptable for councils, pension funds orotherpublicinstitutionstofeelthreatened away from acting in line with their best judgments, in line with their duties, as a result of innuendo broadcast by the Cabinet Office Minister at the Conservative Party conference — or indeed, broadcast more recently in Israel.”

Labour Friends of Palestine vice-chair AndySlaughtersaidtheplanwasatodds with the guidance on West Bank settlements provided by the Foreign Office.

He added: “Let us remember what we are talking about here: theft of land, occupation, colonisation, and the arbitrary detention of many thousands of Palestinians. Those are crimes in international law as great as anything that happened in South Africa.”

Clive Betts, MP for Sheffield South East, claimed it would harm community relations if his Muslim constituents, from a background of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Yemen, Somalia and Somaliland, “saw theircounciltaxbeingusedtobuygoods from the illegal Israeli settlements”.

Conservative Hendon MP Matthew Offord attacked the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and said the debate had “more to do with cheap political point-scoring than with the lives of individuals”.

Cabinet Office Secretary John Penrose said that while it was “clear that the settlements themselves are absolutely illegal… that does not necessarily mean that activities undertaken by firms that happen to be based there are themselves automatically illegal”.

He added: “Public policy that includes decisions on whether to impose government sanctions on other countries is a matter reserved for central government.”