On Tuesday night, a six-year-old girl called Marlin and her grandmother were finally able to make the journey from the Palestinian city of Rafah to Cairo in Egypt.

Marlin’s mother, Israa, is a postgraduate student at St Andrews University in Scotland. Before the war started, she was forced by Britain’s strict visa rules to make the toughest decision of her life – choosing to take the academic opportunity of a lifetime while leaving her daughter in the care of her mother in Gaza.

Israa could never have imagined that Marlin would spend four horrific months forced to see, hear, feel and smell Israel’s slaughter day and night. In Scotland, she has spent the same four months helplessly praying for her daughter’s survival.

While Marlin still isn’t back with her mum, she is now at least safe. Hundreds of thousands of children remain trapped in Gaza. More than ten thousand have been killed, out of a total death toll of 29,000, according to the Gazan health ministry.

The scale of this slaughter is materially possible only because Britain, the US and Germany continue to supply the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force with weapons and ammunition. And politically, Israel can only continue because these allies continue to give diplomatic cover to a mass murder that the International Court of Justice has concluded may plausibly be a genocide. For Israel, this is also a propaganda war, and in that, it’s relied heavily on its closest allies.

When, on Tuesday, the UK used its seat on the UN Security Council to abstain on a vote for a ceasefire, it provided cover for the US to veto the motion. British politicians may no longer hold the sway of their US or German equivalents due to post-imperial decline and growing post-Brexit irrelevance, but what they say still matters.

That’s why, when the SNP used one of its three opposition day debates a year to force the Commons to discuss what’s happening in Gaza and hold the government to account for its broadly pro-genocide position, the conclusions were going to matter. Not because motions on opposition day debates are binding on the government, but because the rest of the world sees them, and that can influence things.

Had the Commons backed the SNP’s motion, a full-throated call to “end to the collective punishment of the Palestinian people” and “press for a ceasefire now”, it would have been a meaningful statement for the world.

Even if the motion hadn’t passed, voters – the overwhelming majority of whom support such a ceasefire, according to a YouGov poll from December – would have had a chance to see where their MPs stood.

Reports before the vote suggested that as many as 100 Labour MPs, including two shadow cabinet ministers, were planning to rebel against their leader, Keir Starmer, who has been accused of excusing genocide but has in recent weeks seemingly begun to fear that cheerleading mass murder might not be so popular after all.

It looked set to be, as the Guardian later put it, the biggest political crisis of Starmer’s career.

And so, it has been widely reported, Starmer went to lobby the Speaker of the House, Lindsay Hoyle, to suggest he break with precedent and let a watered-down Labour motion be debated before the stronger SNP one. If the Labour motion passed, the SNP motion would not happen and there would be no chance for a mass Labour rebellion.

A party leader asking the speaker of the house to change the rules to help them out of a tough spot would normally be told where to go. But Starmer is alleged to have told Hoyle that choosing his motion was in the interests of MPs’ safety. That those who didn’t want to unequivocally call for an end to the mass-murder in Gaza might face violent reprisals from peace activists.

Hoyle agreed to let Labour hijack the SNP’s motion – despite the fact that Labour has more than six times as many annual debate days and hasn’t used any to focus on Gaza – which he later expressed regret over. But there are two pieces of context for his decision.

The first is the horrendous murder of two MPs in the past eight years: Labour’s Jo Cox by a far-right extremist and Conservative David Amess by an Islamic fundamentalist. It’s hard to see white-power racists being driven to violence by MPs’ failing to clearly call for a ceasefire. Muslim fundamentalists, perhaps.

But more fundamentally, Starmer was tapping into a broader sense, created by the government, that protests against the war in Gaza are dangerous, anti-British, and violent.

The Labour leader was suggesting that even allowing a motion on a ceasefire to be debated in the Commons would be an unwelcome threat – the kind of thing you bend procedure to avoid.

The French far right has in recent years developed a new term for its opponents: ‘Islamogauchists’, Islamoleftists. This effort to bind the deep Islamophobia of French society into a specific attack on the rising left is exactly what former home secretary Suella Braverman was trying to do when she denounced marches calling for peace in the Middle East as ‘hate marches’.

When Starmer and team more subtly peddled the idea that the SNP’s amendment calling for peace was in fact a risk to MPs’ safety, he was doing the same.

Hoyle allowed his ear and the rules to be bent. Labour’s amendment passed, but not before the Commons descended into chaos, with SNP and Tory MPs walking out in protest. At least 30 are reported to have since signed a letter of no-confidence in the speaker.

As a Scottish person, it was easy for me to watch this farce and conclude once more that I don’t want to be governed by this shitshow. I imagine millions in England felt the same, though without any obvious exit strategy.

More importantly, it meant that an opportunity for one of Israel’s few remaining friends to finally denounce it was lost because the man who is expected to be the UK’s next prime minister was scared it would make him look weak. For Palestinians, including the friends that Marlin left behind, that just means more death.