Labour Thought the NHS Would Stay Quiet on Palestine. They Were Wrong.

Labour's attempts to tie the IHRA definition of antisemitism to NHS employment agreements is getting a deserved pasting! Right, so you look at what the government’s doing to the NHS and you have to laugh, because if they were trying any harder to prove the Forde Report right they’d invoice themselves for the labour. They’ve decided the health service isn’t creaking because of understaffing or collapsing infrastructure — oh no, the real emergency is that too many nurses have opinions the government doesn’t approve of. So now the Department for Health and Social Care is rolling out a racism policy that somehow manages to mention antisemitism 28 times and Palestinians not once, while turning mandatory training into a political obedience test. Doctors in Unite have called it exactly what it is: a top-down attempt to hard-wire a hierarchy of racism into the NHS to silence Palestine solidarity. And once you see it, you realise the repression isn’t accidental — Labour have literally made it policy. Right, so Labour are taking a system that’s already buckling under pressure, a workforce that’s been brutalised for years, and instead of fixing anything, instead of dealing with pay, safety, retention or the collapsing estate, putting patients first like the staff in the NHS do, they’ve decided the real priority is to criminalise a colour scheme and turn a workplace code of conduct into a foreign-policy enforcement mechanism. And it only makes sense once you accept the central fact that Doctors in Unite are laying out in painful detail: that this isn’t about antisemitism in the NHS, it’s about shutting down Palestine solidarity among the one group of workers whose voices the government cannot afford to let the public hear. Because health workers describing what’s happening to hospitals in Gaza is one of the few things that cuts through the noise, and the government knows it.