One of Starmer’s key early moves was to signal his approval for the Spy Cops Bill, a move to grant undercover agents immunity from prosecution after a series of scandals involving police spies who had targeted left-wing protest groups. Starmer wanted to send a clear message to the functionaries of Britain’s security apparatus: unlike his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, he had more sympathy for the spies than for the victims of their predatory conduct.

Starmer’s contempt for human rights law became most apparent when Israel launched its genocidal onslaught against the people of Gaza from October 2023. When the campaign of mass killing was in its first week, the Labour leader notoriously claimed that Israel had the right to cut off supplies of power and water for Palestinian civilians. As someone with Starmer’s professional background will have understood very well, this was a clear endorsement of war crimes.

After facing a political backlash, Starmer insulted everyone’s intelligence by pretending that he had misunderstood the question. If that was really the case, he would have taken the opportunity to condemn Israel’s targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure over and over again as the horror show unfolded in full sight of the world. Instead, he continued to support the attack on Gaza while vilifying those who were determined to oppose it.

By the time Starmer became Britain’s prime minister in July 2024, Israel was on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Again, Starmer’s experience as a lawyer will have meant that he understood the significance of this development very well. While the ICJ judges had not ruled definitively that Israel was guilty of genocide, they would never have allowed the South African case to go ahead if there was no way of making a serious argument in support of the charges.

Starmer himself had a passing involvement in the trials arising from the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Those trials showed that it can be difficult to prove genocidal intent against a state or its leaders. But there was no question that Serb nationalist forces were guilty of major war crimes in Bosnia — the only matter in dispute was whether they provably crossed the legal threshold to qualify as acts of genocide. If there had been no credible evidence that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza, the case against it would have fallen at the first hurdle.

The ICJ also ordered Israel to carry out a set of provisional measures while the case was ongoing. The court required the Israeli government to prevent genocide and to ensure an adequate supply of humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza. Israel blatantly defied the ICJ’s instructions from the very first day and has continued to do so right up to the present.

Before the end of 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) had also issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Having signed up to the treaty that established the ICC, Britain is obliged to execute its warrants. For a man supposedly committed to human rights law, there could hardly have been a more serious matter to deal with: not only was Israel facing charges of genocide, but its leader was now a wanted fugitive, accused of the gravest crimes.

Starmer responded to the ICC arrest warrants in the same way he had responded to the genocide case at the ICJ — by pretending not to notice. There was a sort of gruesome consistency to the behavior of the Trump administration, which launched a Mafia-style campaign of intimidation against the ICC judges to punish them for seeking to hold Netanyahu accountable. Starmer merely carried on with his support for Israel as if he was unaware of the court’s existence.

In May 2025, lawyers for the British government tried to refute a case brought by human rights organizations over the supply of British-made components for Israeli warplanes. They submitted a document that dismissed all the proof of Israeli war crimes with an insouciant wave of the hand: “No evidence has been seen that Israel is deliberately targeting civilian women or children. There is also evidence of Israel making efforts to limit incidental harm to civilians.”

Starmer’s backing for Israeli atrocities also prompted him to launch an attack on democratic rights in Britain. The ban on the direct action protest group Palestine Action is the most alarming manifestation of that multipronged campaign. Last year, the Labour government placed Palestine Action, which has never killed anyone nor attempted to do so, in the same legal category as ISIS and Boko Haram.

The British authorities now consider support for the group to be an act of terrorism, even if that means simply holding a sign that reads “I support Palestine Action.” The Labour peer Peter Hain, who served as a minister under Tony Blair, denounced the ban:

We are seeing retired magistrates, retired and serving doctors and all sorts of people being arrested and now effectively being equated with terrorists such as al-Qaida, which is absolutely wrong . . . . The approach to Palestine Action is contrary to every form of peaceful protest in British history, whether that’s the Chartists and suffragettes or anti-apartheid and anti-fascist protesters.

By the end of 2025, the number of “terrorism-related arrests” in Britain had soared by 660 percent compared to the previous year. The vast majority of those arrests — 86 percent — were related to Palestine Action.

The typical profile of a British “terrorist” is now a woman in her late fifties holding a placard at a peaceful demonstration. That sums up Starmer’s legacy in a single sentence. Of course, the way that states define terrorism has always been tendentious and self-serving. But even by those low standards, this is a world-historic farce that would be laughable were it not so sinister.

As Starmer leaves office, his government has set plans in motion to restrict the right to a trial by jury. That would have alarming implications for the trials of climate protesters who have usually found juries to be far more sympathetic to their arguments than judges. He also launched a push to undermine the European Convention on Human Rights in tandem with the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen.

A self-styled human rights lawyer who takes a chisel to the basic architecture of human rights while endorsing war crimes and presenting jury trials as an unaffordable luxury — only in the mind of Keir Starmer could that formula make sense. Fortunately that mind will no longer be at the helm of the British state. Unfortunately the Westminster political class is full of ambitious drones who fully share Starmer’s disdain for the rights he has trampled on.