Why Using Parliament to Police MPs’ Opinions is More Dangerous Than the Opinions Themselves

Let us be clear at the outset about what this article is not. It is not a defence of Zarah Sultana’s views. Her statement that “Zionism is one of the greatest threats to humanity” is analytically indefensible. Zionism is a broad political movement encompassing positions ranging from liberal democratic to nationalist. Declaring it one of humanity’s greatest threats is not an argument, it is a slogan, and a lazy one. Her follow-up post, “they love killing kids”, is cruder still. It reduces a complex military conflict to a tribal smear, and it does so in a political climate already corroded by bad-faith rhetoric.

None of that, however, is the point. The point that tends to get lost whenever someone unpopular says something unpleasant is that the mechanism now being used against Sultana is more dangerous than the posts themselves. A complaint has been submitted to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, reported by the Telegraph on March 14th, alleging that the posts constitute “a modern iteration of the medieval blood libel” and breach the MPs’ code of conduct. If that complaint proceeds to a full investigation, the long-held principle that elected representatives cannot be called to account before a parliamentary watchdog for their political opinions will be broken. Parliament’s own procedural guidance states that the Commissioner is “in general expressly prevented” from investigating a member’s views or opinions, including those expressed on social media. The code of conduct “for the most part applies to members’ discharge of their parliamentary duties” and does not extend to activities unrelated to parliamentary proceedings. Tweeting a political opinion about an overseas conflict, however inflammatory, is not a parliamentary duty. It is the private expression of a political view. Those two things have, until now, been regarded as categorically different.

If the complaint is admitted, that boundary will have shifted. Without a vote or a debate, the scope of parliamentary oversight will have expanded to include what MPs post on social media about live geopolitical conflicts. That is a significant constitutional change, and it is happening with almost no public discussion of the principle involved.

The complaint rests heavily on the claim that “they love killing kids”, posted beneath a news report of dead children, constitutes a modern iteration of the medieval blood libel. This argument deserves scrutiny. The blood libel was a specific, invented false accusation: that Jews engaged in the ritual murder of Christian children to use their blood in religious ceremonies. It was a fabrication with no grounding in reported events, designed to incite persecution, and it led to massacres and expulsions across centuries. Sultana’s post, whatever its faults, is not that. It was posted directly beneath a news report stating that four children were among six people killed in an Israeli attack on a Lebanese town. Whether one accepts that framing, disputes the figures, or believes the military operation was justified, the post was a reaction to a reported event, not a fabricated accusation invented to justify persecution. Collapsing that distinction is rhetorical and not analytical, and it is exactly the kind of escalation that parliamentary standards processes should not be permitted to ratify.

The second post: “Zionism is one of the greatest threats to humanity” is not a statement about a specific military action. It is a sweeping ideological claim about a movement that most British Jews consider integral to their identity. The complaint notes that since the majority of British Jews identify as Zionists, the statement effectively declares those Jews to be a threat to humanity. That reading has real force, and the post does not exist in isolation. Sultana has described Your Party as “the only anti-Zionist party in the UK” and has called Zionism “a racist supremacist ideology” at public events. Even Jeremy Corbyn, her erstwhile political partner, noted in 2018 that the word “Zionism” had been “increasingly hijacked by antisemites as code for Jews”. Yet the appropriate response to speech that conflates a people with an ideology is more speech: challenge, debate, rebuttal and political opposition. There are Jewish MPs, Jewish journalists and Jewish voters who can and do contest Sultana’s framing with considerable force. The political process is more than capable of handling this. It does not require a parliamentary watchdog to rule on the permissible range of opinions about Zionism.

I freely admit that Sultana is not a natural free speech advocate. She has supported deplatforming voices she disagrees with and co-leads a party in explicit opposition to liberal freedoms. She would likely not extend the same defence to her political opponents. None of that matters. The principle does not depend on the virtue of its beneficiary. If we only defend the free speech of people we agree with, we do not actually believe in free speech. The liberal tradition holds that the state’s coercive mechanisms should not be used to adjudicate between competing political opinions, however much those opinions horrify us.

The right response to Sultana’s posts is scrutiny, challenge and the kind of forensic public argument that exposes weak thinking for what it is. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has a proper role in British democracy: investigating corruption, expenses abuse, conflicts of interest and harassment. Deciding which political opinions about live foreign policy conflicts are permissible for elected representatives to hold is not that role. The Commissioner’s own rules say as much.

Daniel Lü was kicked out of Warwick Business School after proposing a civil rights organisation as a business project. He is a member of the ACLU and the Free Speech Union. He is currently a student at New York University.