Three Quarters of Voters Say UK Should Ban Arms Sales to Israel
New Byline polling finds support for Israel's actions is diminishing among British voters in the wake of the Israeli attack on aid workers in Gaza this week
Three quarters of Brits want the UK Government to impose a ban on all arms sales to Israel, new polling commissioned by Byline Times suggests, with broader support for the country’s actions in Gaza continuing to decline.
In the wake of Israel’s strike this week on a Gaza aid convoy, which killed seven aid workers including three Brits, pollsters We Think asked whether voters would back the imposition of an arms embargo on the country, by the UK.
Seventy-five per cent of those surveyed said they would support a ban on arms sales to Israel, with supporters of all major political parties backing a ban.
This is an increase in support for a ban of seven points from when We Think posed the same question last week, prior to the attack.
The poll also found that sympathy for Israel among British voters has decreased over recent months.
Asked this week whether they felt more support for Israel or Palestine in the conflict, just 13% of those surveyed picked Israel, compared to 32% who picked Palestine.
This is a significant shift from when we first asked this question at the end of October last year. Back then, those surveyed said they were slightly more likely to say they felt more sympathy towards Israel than Palestine, by 20% to 18%.
The findings come as the Government and opposition Labour party come under growing pressure to back an arms embargo.
In a statement this week, the Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the party would back a ban on arms sales to Israel, if UK Government legal advice suggested there was a risk that Israel is breaching international law in Gaza.
However, the UK Government is continuing to resist calls to either cease arms sales, or to publish the advice they have received on the issue.
This week civil servants in the Department for Business and Trade threatened to “cease work immediately” due to fears that they could be breaking the law by continuing to allow arms sales to the country.
Just One-in-Four Voters Back Rishi Sunak’s Threat to Quit ECHR
The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak this week threatened to quit the ECHR, saying that he would take Britain out of what he described as the “foreign court” if it stood in the way of his plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
“I do believe that border security and making sure that we can control illegal migration is more important than membership of a foreign court”, he told the Sun newspaper.
However, our polling suggests that just one-in-four (26%) voters would back leaving the European Court of Human Rights.
By contrast, 43% of those surveyed by pollsters We Think said that they would support remaining within the international court’s jurisdiction.
A further third (32%) of voters said they don’t know what they thought about the issue either way.
Conservative MPs have been piling pressure on the Prime Minister to back quitting the ECHR in the party’s upcoming general election manifesto, with some commentators even suggesting that the party could promise to hold a referendum on the issue.
However, unlike Brexit which ultimately gathered support from a majority of voters, the issue of Britain’s membership of the ECHR appears to be only a minority concern.
Even among Conservative supporters, support for quitting the court is still not a majority proposition, the poll suggests, with just 46% of those surveyed agreeing that the UK should leave.
Sunak has previously dampened down expectations of ever quitting the ECHR, with the Rwandan Government hinting last December that the country would pull out of their deportation agreement with the UK if they quit the ECHR.
However, Rwandan officials appeared to back away from this suggestion this week following Sunak’s latest intervention, saying that the UK’s membership of the court was a matter for Sunak’s Government.
Despite Sunak’s threat to leave the ECHR, the Prime Minister continues to insist that he believes doing so won’t be necessary, saying this week that the Government’s Rwanda scheme is “in compliance” with all international conventions the UK is already signed up to.
However, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled last year that the Government’s plan would not be in compliance with international law, due to their assessment that Rwanda is not a safe country.
The Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner last month savaged what it described as the “dangerous” Rwanda scheme, which it singled out as an example of states “dismantling collective human rights safeguards [and] eroding legal and democratic checks that protect all our rights”.
Human rights groups have also criticised plans to deport people to the country, where political opponents of the country’s dictator Paul Kagame continue to be targeted by the regime.
However, last month a Conservative peer defended the scheme, saying that the country was indeed a “perfectly safe country” as long as you “don’t oppose the Government”.