Labour Members Want to Force a Gaza Vote at Andy Burnham's First Conference as Prime Minister
A group of Labour Party members is getting ready to push the issue of Gaza onto the agenda at Andy Burnham's first party conference as prime minister next month. They are sharing a ready-made proposal — a kind of template that local Labour groups can adopt — asking the government to call Israel's actions in Gaza a genocide (the deliberate destruction of a people) and to stop all arms sales to Israel.
The groups behind the effort include Momentum, Labour & Palestine, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Their proposal, now going around to local Labour parties, asks the government to accept a United Nations finding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. It also calls for "comprehensive sanctions" — penalties meant to pressure a country into changing its behaviour — including a ban on trade that helps Israel's military actions in Gaza or its presence in occupied Palestinian territories, which would cover trade with Israeli settlements. (The Guardian, 23 August 2026)
The groups say this is an early test of whether Burnham will keep his promise not to "stifle debate" in the party. Momentum is starting a petition aimed at both current and former Labour members and voters to build pressure before the Liverpool conference. The Palestine Coalition has also called a national march to the conference on 26 September 2026, starting at St George's Plateau at noon, under the banner "Tell Andy Burnham Stop Arming Israel." (CND UK / Palestine Coalition, 18 August 2026)
This is not the first time Labour members have pushed the issue. At the 2025 Labour conference, delegates voted against the wishes of the party leadership and backed an emergency proposal from Unite, one of the UK's largest unions, urging the government to "employ all means reasonably available to it to prevent the commission of genocide in Gaza" and to "fully suspend the arms trade with Israel and the UK-Israel trade and partnership agreement." (The Guardian, 29 September 2025) That vote came after party officials tried to block Palestine-related proposals; about 30 submitted by local parties were removed from the agenda. During the debate itself, no one besides the union delegates who proposed and seconded the motion was allowed to speak in support of it.
Burnham has changed the party's tone on Gaza since becoming leader. He apologised for how Labour handled the crisis under Keir Starmer, saying the party had "not got it right." Before becoming prime minister, he told The Guardian the UK was "too slow to call for a ceasefire" and that more needed to be done. But he did not use the word genocide, saying there was "increasing evidence" of war crimes while leaving that judgement to international courts. (The Guardian, 23 August 2026)
Several Labour MPs have told The Guardian they welcomed Burnham's apology but want him to go further and explicitly "acknowledge Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide." The gap between what those MPs want and what Burnham has said publicly is the opening the grassroots proposal aims to exploit.
On the government side, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has said ministers will announce a "comprehensive set of measures" against Israel after it moved forward with settlement plans in the occupied West Bank. That announcement came before but overlaps with the conference proposal's demand for sanctions covering settlement trade.
The pressure has been building for over a year. Momentum's recommended proposals for the 2024 conference cycle called for Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and for a full arms embargo until Israel complies with international law. (Momentum, 2024) By October 2025, Momentum's newsletter "The Organiser" called the conference vote a victory on genocide recognition, arms embargo, and further sanctions. (Momentum, October 2025) In June 2026, pro-Palestine activists told The Guardian they sensed a "sea change" in Labour's approach to Israel, with members pressing for a total ban on arms shipments. (The Guardian, 12 June 2026) The Palestine Solidarity Campaign protested outside Congress House in July to deliver the same demands directly to the newly elected leader. (PSC, 24 July 2026)
The broader question is how Burnham handles the tension between his promise to let members debate freely and the habit of party leaders of controlling what gets discussed. Liverpool will show whether that promise turns into real action, or whether Burnham's team falls back on the filtering seen in 2025. The proposal goes much further than what the government is currently doing — it ties genocide recognition to sanctions on settlement trade and a full arms embargo, while the government has so far only signalled measures linked to specific settlement expansion. Whether that gap narrows or widens next month will tell us a lot about how Burnham plans to manage his party's expectations on Israel and Palestine at a moment when those expectations are at their highest.
