Ed Miliband's conference speech does something more structurally interesting than apologising for Labour's past stance on Palestine. He is using the settlement sanctions — and the 12-country coalition that followed — as the founding case study for a new British foreign policy doctrine: middle-power coalition-building on progressive values, with or without the United States. The mechanics matter more than the rhetoric. Since becoming foreign secretary, Miliband has announced sweeping sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements, banning imports, disrupting British finance and construction supply lines to illegal settlements, and explicitly calling out ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and evidence of war crimes in Gaza. Twelve countries — including France and Canada — followed with their own sanctions. That sequence is the product Miliband is actually selling at conference. The speech's emotional core — 'we hear you, you were right' — is directed at the millions who protested and at Labour members who clashed with Keir Starmer's earlier equivocation. It is a retroactive validation designed to close a wound inside the party. But it also functions as a signal that the membership's pressure was a feature, not a bug, in forcing the policy shift that Miliband now claims as deliberate strategy. The foreign policy framework Miliband is constructing aligns closely with Canadian PM Mark Carney's recent Brussels speech arguing that middle powers must build alliances outside traditional US-anchored structures. Miliband's framing — 'doing what is right and galvanising others to act too' — positions Britain as a convener of like-minded democracies rather than a junior partner in a US-led order. The Israel-Palestine reset, in his telling, is the template for how this works in practice. There are real tensions beneath the rhetoric. Miliband's warm words about Palestinian solidarity will raise immediate questions about Palestine Action, whose members were arrested outside the conference hall. Praising protesters while the government maintains proscription of direct-action groups creates a credibility gap that opponents will exploit. The speech does not address this. The extractive dynamic here is subtle but real. The primary beneficiaries of this rhetorical shift are Labour's internal coalition — the speech heals a party wound and positions Burnham-era leadership as responsive to grassroots pressure. Whether the sanctions regime actually changes material conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is a separate question, and one the speech conspicuously does not answer with metrics or timelines. The 20-year question is whether 'progressive values-led coalition diplomacy' is a durable foreign policy architecture or a conference-friendly brand that collapses at first contact with hard trade-offs — the kind that emerge when sanctioning settlements collides with intelligence-sharing agreements, defence contracts, or US diplomatic pressure.
