The admission that the U.K. government has provided aid to a proscribed terrorist group, while arresting citizens for the support of an anti-genocide group similarly proscribed is the height of hypocrisy.
HTS Rebels coordinating at Hama in 2024. (Voice of America/ Wikimedia Commons/ Public domain)
By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk
The outgoing Head of MI6 Richard Moore has formally admitted in a public speech in Istanbul that MI6 has been cooperating with HTS [Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham] in Syria – a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act — for years. He said: 
The government is arresting little old ladies for holding signs supporting one proscribed organisation, Palestine Action, while it admits it has been actively supporting another proscribed organisation. HTS was proscribed as a division of Al Qaeda, as shown on the government website:
As I learnt while in Lebanon, the British support for HTS included intelligence support, training and weapons, based at secret U.K. bases in the Bekaa valley, including inside the Rayak airbase.
It also included support via an NGO named Inter-Mediate, run by current British National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, who is Tony Blair’s old Downing Street Chief of Staff.
In the U.K. neither the government nor the security services stand above the law. The fact that neither Moore nor Powell nor any of those on the ground directly involved in actively and substantively supporting HTS — a proscribed organisation — has been arrested, while people are arrested for holding a placard supporting Palestine Action because it is a proscribed organisation, is the very definition of arbitrary and oppressive government.
The impartial rule of law in the U.K. has collapsed completely. All of this was material support to a proscribed organisation.
Meanwhile we have Starmer’s hollow gesture of recognising Palestine. This is designed to placate those in the Labour Party who are horrified by the Genocide in Gaza. As it is accompanied by zero intention to limit or even acknowledge the Genocide, it is the very definition of a useless gesture.
Palestine Action Protest, London, Saturday Sept. 6, 2025. (Indigonolan/ Flickr/ CC BY 4.0)
Palestine was already recognised by three quarters of the nations of the world. What Starmer believes he has furthered is a Bantustan state, hopelessly divided between an obliterated Gaza, small and isolated remnants of the West Bank and what remains of East Jerusalem. That these fissiparous remnants could ever constitute a viable state is plainly impossible — which is the idea.
Furthermore, Starmer attacks the very definition of a state by insisting that the Palestinians can be told who they must have to rule them. The notion that the traitor Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority would ever be chosen by the Palestinian people is utter nonsense.
Furthermore, Macron and Starmer have both specified that a Palestinian state must be disarmed, have no armed forces, and lie prey to the genocidal state next door at all times. The Saudi/French plan even states that Israel should have vetting control over the appointment of individual Palestinian police officers!
The only virtue to this act of recognition is that it will make it more difficult politically for the U.K. not to react with the first genuine sanctions against Israel once Israel formally annexes Gaza or the West Bank. It is thus a very minor political improvement.
With the British government already having repudiated the U.N. Commission of Inquiry’s finding of Genocide, the attack on Gaza in full flow, and the Global Sumud Flotilla very likely to be met by Israel with deadly force, Starmer is, as usual, completely out of touch with public opinion if he believes he has reduced political pressure over his complicity in Genocide.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
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and while there are no university or school buildings left the vile Starmer “demands ‘overhaul’ of Palestinian education as condition for statehood”.
None left in Gaza.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_and_colleges_in_Palestine
Nobody can deny that Israel practices state-sponsored terrorism so any contact at all with their government qualifies as “rank hypocrisy.”