We need to talk about Kemi's 'Proxy war'
On Sunday I had a road to Damascus moment. For best part of 18 months I, like many others, have been struggling to understand why our politicians have thrown their lot in so unquestionably behind what is clearly the murderous actions of an out of control state. Israel was quite clear from the outset on October 7th what it was going to do. But even as the bombs were falling I thought our politicians would have a twinge of conscience. Of course that was wishful thinking. Both parties are heavily funded by the Israel lobby and that alone could almost guarantee political procrastination and benign acquiescence.
But Sunday was a light bulb moment when everything began to make sense.
There’s a certain moment in politics when a politician, either through hubris or carelessness, reveals the ugly truths that are usually cloaked in diplomatic euphemisms.
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, just committed the cardinal sin of elite politics: in a chillingly casual remark, she told the truth. On Sky News Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, Badenoch revealed what many have long suspected but no one in power dare admit: Israel is "fighting a proxy war for the UK", just like Ukraine.
Let’s stop right there
This isn’t some throwaway soundbite. It wasn't a slip of the tongue. By likening Israel’s war in Gaza to Ukraine’s fight against Russia, framing both as proxy wars for the UK she accidentally told us what we should have known all along This is an unvarnished admission that strips away any pretence of humanitarian concern or conceptual defence of national sovereignty. This isn’t just a gaffe. It’s a confession.
The full report can be watched by clicking the link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLKiSyPcqFM
This isn't some fringe opinion. This is a senior politician - the leader of the opposition in Britain explicitly aligning the UK with Israel’s war on Gaza, not as a neutral ally, but as a hidden hand. In other words, the UK isn’t just watching genocide happen. It’s sponsoring it. She is admitting UK parliamentary complicity in war crimes. War crimes that as a former Minister in the Government she could very well be up to her neck in.
Badenoch’s comment rips off the moral mask of British foreign policy. For 18 months, successive governments have played their usual double game: mouthing vague concerns about civilian deaths in Gaza while shipping weapons, blocking ceasefires, and silencing domestic dissent. But Badenoch, not the sharpest tool in the box and drunk on her own ideological certainty, didn’t bother with the spin. She admitted that Israel is a proxy, just like Ukraine. Just like any other client state in the West’s imperial portfolio.
It is grotesquely inaccurate and ghoulish to frame this as moral equivalence. Ukraine is resisting an illegal invasion by a global superpower. Whether or not we are fighting a proxy war there or supporting David against Goliath is a moot point. Gaza on the other hand is being carpet-bombed using British made weapons in planes kept in the air by our supplies. Children are being killed on an industrial scale by one of the most powerful militaries in the world, with full UK and US support, in an open prison already suffocating under siege. Comparing the two is not only wrong, it’s obscene.
Badenoch is one of the Tory Party’s most ideologically hardline figures. From her cold colonial logic, this isn’t about morality. It’s about strategic utility. Israel is useful. Ukraine is useful. And if that usefulness comes at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, Palestinian, Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, it doesn’t matter. What matters to her is maintaining Britain’s relevance in a world where its actual power has faded, but its imperial instincts haven’t. That she is of Nigerian descent and pushes clearly Imperial racist narrative is an irony not lost here. Her self awareness must cry itself to sleep at night.
What she has done is offer up a revealing lens into British politics: these aren’t wars of principle, they’re strategic investments. In her worldview, Israel isn’t committing atrocities; it’s doing the UK's dirty work. It’s projecting Western military power in the Middle East just as Ukraine is on NATO’s eastern front. In her eyes these aren’t allies, they’re instruments of colonial influence.
It’s not the first time Britain has treated entire populations as expendable pawns in the great game of empire. From the Sykes-Picot Agreement to the arms deals with Saudi Arabia fuelling the destruction of Yemen, the UK has a long history of backing client states to enforce its geopolitical will, always at the expense of Black and brown bodies. What makes Badenoch’s remark so shocking isn’t that it reflects a new policy, but that it exposes the old one for what it truly is.
And of course this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Badenoch’s mask-slipping moment came in the same week a member of the Irish rap group Kneecap was arrested for waving a flag at a gig, a move that should horrify anyone who believe in freedom of expression. Meanwhile, Jewish activists critical of Israel were refused a meeting with the Metropolitan Police and a women's football cup final between Clapton CFC and Dulwich Hamlets was stopped at Maidstone because both teams supporters refused to take down a ‘Give Genocide the red card’ banner and a Palestinian flag. The message is screaming and unmistakable: not only is Israel ‘fighting for us’ but the full apparatus of the state will come down like a ton of bricks on anyone, British, Palestinian, Irish, or Jewish, who dares challenge that narrative. And if we want to sleep peacefully in our beds at night, this is the very reason we should be challenging the narrative.
Stephen Kapos, Jewish holocaust survivor arrested for demonstrating, showing that the Police have no problem arresting Jewish pensioners if they dare to question the narrative. Freedom of speech my arse.
Badenoch may be in opposition but she is still an influential lawmaker. She was a Minister in Sunak’s Government, a man who thought nothing of bombing Yemen when his father in laws trade with Israel was threatened. She may not sit on the same benches as Starmer but they all sit in the same committees and make decisions together. This is UK foreign policy stripped bare. And it is ugly. Underneath the manufactured culture wars and union jack cosplay lies the same old doctrine: white-majority countries get to set the rules, and everyone else either plays along or pays the price. Gaza’s rubble is just another battlefield in Britain’s ghost war to keep its empire alive by other means.
And of course this isn’t just a foreign policy scandal. It’s a domestic one too. All the pieces firmly slot into place. It explains why peaceful protests are being criminalised. Because if Israel is 'fighting for Britain', then by Badenoch’s logic, and by extension Parliamentary logic, protesting against Israel is protesting against Britain. This is Orwellian. It’s how they justify arresting schoolchildren for chanting ‘Free Palestine’ or threaten to ban demonstrations by framing them as hate speech. This is how they can justify arresting holocaust survivors protesting state sponsored murder on an industrial scale and call them antisemites. This is why pro-Palestinian voices are being purged from academia and media, and why the government is fanning culture war flames about ‘extremist marches’. It’s how they label legitimate dissent as extremism. If Israel is ‘fighting for us’, then dissent isn’t just unwelcome, by this definition it is it’s treasonous. What's next - are we gearing up for involvement in a war with Iran? After all, if Israel is our proxy then we must surely be aware of its intentions there. If Kemi says Britain is at war, by proxy or otherwise, then who exactly is it at war with? Because what we are seeing through the news blackouts and the Governmental bullshit is a lot of dead children. What you are saying is that everyone who refuses to salute our complicity in war crimes becomes an enemy within. Well fuck you Kemi and fuck the blood stained F35 you flew in on.
Just in case anyone is interested, there's a link here for the form to inform the International Criminal Court of war crimes or complicity in war crimes. If your view as a lawmaker in a country that supplies arms to a country indicted by the ICC as committing war crimes considers the deaths of innocent women and children as not a genocide and in our national interest, I believe you've earned your day in court at the Hague. There are many other British lawmakers on both sides of the floor and in the other house who should be joining you https://otplink.icc-cpi.int/
Badenoch didn’t make a mistake in her interview with Trevor Phillips. She revealed the strategy and it doesn't matter that she is in opposition because she isn't opposing the genocide, she is denying it. She said the quiet part out loud. And now that it’s out, we have a responsibility to say the loud part louder:
NOT IN OUR NAME!
The world has gone mad. If you enjoyed reading this, please feel free to look at the rest of the blogs on www.TetleysTLDR.com. They're free to view, there's no paywall, they aren't monetised and I won't ask you to buy me a coffee. Also please free to share anything you find of interest, we only get the message out if people are aware of it. Just a leftie, standing in front of another leftie, asking to be read. All the best, Tetley
