Ghastly terminology used in Australian elections rhetorically repurposed for the British voter: “Turning the Back Boats”, the “Rwanda Solution”.  Grisly figures such as Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Rishi Sunak, showing an atavistic indifference to human rights.  The cruelty and the cockups, the failures and the foul-ups.  Mock the judges, mock the courts.  Soil human dignity.

All this, to culminate in the end of the Rwanda Solution, declared by the new Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, as “dead and buried before it even started”.  Yet it was a sadistic policy of beastly proportion, offering no prospect of genuine discouragement or deterrence to new arrivals, stillborn in execution and engineered to indulge a nasty streak in the electorate.

In April 2022, the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced the Asylum Partnership Arrangement with Rwanda, ostensibly designed “to contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated and unlawful cross border migration by establishing a bilateral asylum partnership”.

Mysteriously, British officials suddenly found Rwanda an appropriate destination for processing asylum claims and resettling refugees, despite Kigali doing its bit to swell the ranks of potential refugees.  In June 2023, the UK Court of Appeal noted the risks presented to asylum seekers, notably from ill-treatment and torture, arguing that the British government would be in breach of the European Convention on Human rights in sending them into Kigali’s clutches.  In November that year, the Supreme Court reached the same conclusion.

These legal rulings did not deter the government of Rishi Sunak.  With lexical sophistry bordering on the criminal, the Safety of Rwanda bill was drafted to repudiate what the UK courts had found by denying officials and the judiciary any reference to the European Convention of Human Rights and the UK’s own Human Rights Act 1998 when considering asylum claims.

The bookkeeping aspect of the endeavour was also astonishing.  It envisaged the payment of some half a billion pounds to Kigali in exchange for asylum seekers.  The breakdown of costs, not to mention the very plan itself, beggared belief.  The Home Office would initially pay £370 million under the Economic Transformation and Integration Fund, followed by a further £20,000 for every relocated individual.  Once the risibly magic number of 300 people had been reached, a further £120 million would follow.

Operational costs for each individual kept in Rwanda would amount to £150,874 over the course of five years, ceasing in the event a person wished to leave Rwanda, in which case the Home Office would pay £10,000 to assist in the move.

With biting irony, the UK government had demonstrated to Rwanda that it could replace the supposedly vile market of people smuggling in Europe with a lucrative market effectively monetising asylum seekers and refugees in exchange of pledges of development.

By February 2024, according to the National Audit Office, the UK had paid £220 million to Rwanda, with a promise of another £50 million each year over three years.  It was a superb return for Kigali, given that no asylum seekers from the UK had set foot in the country.  When asked at the time why he was hungrily gobbling up the finance, Paul Kagame feigned serenity.  “It’s only going to be used if those people will come.  If they don’t come, we can return the money.”

With an airy contemptuousness, the Kagame government has refused to return any of the monies received in anticipation of the policy’s full execution.  Doris Uwicyeza Picard, the central figure coordinating the migration partnership with the UK, was blunt: “We are under no obligation to provide any refund.  We will remain in constant discussions.  However, it is understood that there is no obligation on either side to request or receive a refund.”

In another statement, this time from deputy spokesman for the Rwandan government, Alain Mukuralinda, the sentiment bordered on the philosophical: “The British decided to request cooperation for a long time, resulting in an agreement between the two countries that became a treaty.  Now, if you come and ask for cooperation and then withdraw, that’s your decision.”

In an official note from Kigali, the government haughtily declared that the partnership had been initiated by the UK to address irregular migration, “a problem of the UK, not Rwanda.”  Rwanda, for its part, had “fully upheld its side of the agreement, including with regard to finances”.  Redundantly, and incredulously, the note goes on to claim that Kigali remained “committed to finding solutions to the global migration crisis, including providing safety, dignity and opportunity to refugees and migrants who come to our country.”

The less than subtle message in all of this: Rwanda is ready to keep cashing in on Europe’s unwanted asylum seekers, whatever its own record and however successful the agreement is. Kagame has no doubt not lost interest in Denmark, that other affluent country keen on outsourcing its humanitarian obligations.  While Copenhagen abandoned its partnership with Rwanda in January 2023 regarding a similar arrangement to that reached with the UK, it is now showing renewed interest, notably after hosting a high-level conference on immigration.

In opening the conference on May 6, the Social Democratic Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, speaking in language that could just as easily have been associated with any far right nationalist front, decried the “de facto” collapse of the “current immigration and asylum system”.  Those in the Rwandan treasury will be rubbing their hands in anticipation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The highest court in the world put Israel on trial, accused of the ultimate crime against humanity.

Much has happened since that decision – and all of it is even more incriminating against Israel than the evidence considered by the World Court back in January.

Tens of thousands more Palestinian civilians are dead or missing, most likely under rubble. Gaza is now a wasteland, one that will take many decades to rebuild.

Till then, the population has nowhere to live, nor institutions such as hospitals, schools, universities and government offices to care for them, nor infrastructure like functioning electricity and sewage systems to rely on.

In violation of a second ICJ ruling, Israel has invaded and repeatedly bombed Rafah, a small “safe zone” into which Gaza’s population had been herded by Israel, supposedly for their own protection.

And Israel has intensified its blockade of aid, now to the point where there is famine across much of the enclave. Children, the sick and the vulnerable are dying in growing numbers from an entirely man-made catastrophe.

Presented with so much evidence, how is the World Court dealing with Israel’s genocide trial?

The answer: it is moving at a snail’s pace.

Most experts agree that the ICJ is unlikely to issue a definitive ruling for at least a year. Until then, it seems, the western powers will continue giving Israel a licence to shed far more of Gaza’s blood – that is, to continue much further on the trajectory of a plausible genocide.

At this rate, the court will determine conclusively whether Israel is guilty of genocide only when that genocide is all but finished.

Eyes tight shut

Back in the mid-1990s, the world was confronted by another genocide, in Rwanda.

Then, the West vowed that it and the legal institutions supposedly there to uphold international law and protect the weakest should never drag their feet again, permitting a crime of such monstrous proportions to unfold without hindrance.

But 30 years on, the West is not just dragging its feet in addressing the crimes against the people of Gaza. Washington and its closest allies, including Britain, are actively arming Israel’s slaughter, and assisting with its starvation of the population.

In ruling against Israel, the ICJ would, by implication, also be finding the sole global superpower and its allies guilty of complicity in genocide.

In the circumstances, the reasons for caution at the World Court, rather than urgency, are all too obvious.

The ICJ’s sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC), showed late last month that it too was in no hurry to stop the slaughter and mass starvation in Gaza.

Whereas the World Court judges the behaviour of states, the ICC judges the actions of individuals. It is empowered to identify and put on trial those who carry out crimes on behalf of the state.

In May, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, incensed western capitals by announcing that he was seeking an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.

All five were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In Netanyahu and Gallant’s case, that included the crime of exterminating Gaza’s Palestinians, using starvation as a “weapon of war”.

In truth, the ICC swung into action very late indeed – some eight months after Israel began its war crimes spree.

Nonetheless, Khan’s decision offered a brief moment of hope to Gaza’s bereaved, destitute and starving.

While the World Court’s lengthy genocide trial offers the prospect of a remedy potentially years away, arrest warrants from the ICC pose a far more direct and pressing threat to Israel.

Once signed, those warrants would obligate all parties to the Rome Statute, including Britain and other European states, to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should they step on their soil.

Israeli media have reported on panicked army commanders worried about carrying out orders in Gaza for fear they may be charged next with war crimes.

For a moment, it looked as though Israel might have to weigh whether it could afford to continue the slaughter of Palestinians.

Superpower bullying

But the ICC’s judges agreed to lift the sword from Netanyahu and Gallant’s necks – while leaving Gaza’s women and children, the sick and elderly, exposed once again to the full force of Israel’s bombs and starvation policy.

Rather than approving, as expected, the arrest of Netanyahu and his defence minister for war crimes, the ICC caved into pressure from the United States and Britain.

It revealed that it was willing to revisit the question of whether it had jurisdiction over Gaza – in other words, whether it had the authority to put Netanyahu and Gallant on trial for crimes against humanity.

It was an extraordinary moment – and one that confirmed quite how dishonest the West’s professions of humanitarianism are, and quite how feeble are supposedly independent institutions like the ICC and ICJ when they run up against Washington.

The question of jurisdiction in Gaza and the other occupied Palestinian territories was settled by the ICC long ago. Were that not the case, Khan would never have dared to request the arrest warrants in the first place.

Nonetheless, the ICC’s judges accepted submissions, secretly made by the outgoing British government, that question the legal body’s jurisdiction powers. The UK was undoubtedly waging this campaign of intimidation against the war crimes court in coordination with the US and Israel.

Neither have standing at the ICC because they have refused to ratify the war crimes statute that founded the court.

The UK’s move was a transparent delaying tactic, relying on a piece of standard Israeli sophistry: that the Oslo Accords, from 30 years ago, did not give Palestinians criminal jurisdiction over Israeli nationals, and therefore Palestine cannot delegate that power to the ICC.

The flaw in this argument is glaring. Israel violated the terms of the Oslo Accords decades ago and no longer considers itself bound by them. And yet it now insists – via Britain – that the Palestinians still be shackled by these obsolete documents.

Even more to the point, the Oslo Accords were long ago superseded by a new legal and diplomatic reality. In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to recognise Palestine as a state.

Three years later, Palestine was allowed to become a member of the ICC. After a long delay, the court finally ruled in 2021 that it had jurisdiction in Palestine.

Since then, and again at a snail’s pace, the ICC has been investigating Israeli war crimes, including atrocities against Palestinians and the building of armed, exclusively Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory, denying the Palestinians any chance to exercise their right to statehood.

In a properly functioning system of international law, arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Israel’s top brass would have been issued years ago, long before the current plausible genocide in Gaza.

Buying time

The question of jurisdiction is no longer a matter of legal debate. But revisiting it unnecessarily does buy time, time in which Israel can kill more Palestinians, level even more of Gaza, and starve more Palestinian children.

It is just such delays that lie at the heart of the matter. It is the endless deferments of accountability that directly enabled the current genocide in Gaza.

Israel’s cynical evasions in implementing the Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s led to a growing backlash from Palestinians, culminating in the eruption of a violent uprising in 2000.

The endless postponements by western powers, led by Washington, in recognising Palestinian statehood destroyed the credibility of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians’ government-in-waiting.

The obvious futility of the Oslo process drove many Palestinians into the arms of militant rival groups like Hamas that promised to let Palestinians take back control of their fate.

The reluctance in the West to put any kind of pressure on Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories gave Israeli leaders the confidence to tighten their stranglehold: through settlement building and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and a blockade that led to the isolation and immiseration of Gaza.

Inaction in addressing Gaza’s increasingly dire conditions motivated Hamas to smash apart the status quo, one that was quietly suffocating the Palestinian population there. Hamas did so by carrying out a surprise and bloody attack on Israel on 7 October.

And the West’s refusal to intervene after 7 October opened the door to Israel’s current slaughter in Gaza, an extermination campaign designed to drive the people of Gaza out of the enclave, becoming someone else’s – ideally Egypt’s – problem.

The World Court’s delay in ruling on genocide, and the ICC’s delay in issuing arrest warrants, presage yet more, unpredictable disasters down the road.

One certainty, however, is that, through more bloodletting, Israel will be entirely unable to realise its professed goal of “eliminating” Hamas.

The most Israel can achieve by inflicting mass death and destruction in Gaza is to prove to Palestinians that Hamas is right: that Israel is unwilling to allow any form of Palestinian statehood, and has been since it belligerently occupied the Palestinian territories 57 years ago – long before Hamas even existed.

In killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israel has served as Hamas’ biggest recruiting sergeant. More young Palestinian men in Gaza are throwing their lot in with armed resistance, if only to avenge the deaths of their loved ones.

Israel’s approach is obviously self-defeating – but only if the goal is truly to live in peace with their neighbours, and not to be engaged in permanent war with the region.

Abuse to continue

Responding to the ICC’s latest delay, Clive Baldwin, a legal adviser at Human Rights Watch, observed that the UK had to end its “double standards in victims’ access to justice”.

He added: “The next government will need to immediately decide if it supports the ICC’s essential role in bringing accountability and defending the rule of law for all.”

That next government is now led by Sir Keir Starmer, who won last week’s general election with a landslide of seats based on a paltry share of the votes.

Starmer benefited massively from a split in the right-wing vote. But a near-record low turn-out and a fall in votes for Labour compared to his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, hinted at the profound lack of enthusiasm both for Starmer and his evasive platform.

Throughout his election campaign, Starmer was keen to send signals to Washington and the establishment media that – in keeping with the outgoing Conservative government’s stalling tactics – he would buy time for Israel too.

He paid a price for that at the election: he alienated many party workers and lost seats to a handful pro-Palestine candidates running as independents, including Corbyn himself, on huge swings of the vote. Several senior Labour MPs also found themselves within a hair’s breadth of losing their seats.

That may explain why Labour officials lost no time emphasising that Starmer had called Netanyahu to talk tough with him and was distancing himself from the previous government’s efforts to openly run interference for the US and Israel at the ICC.

According to a report this week in the Guardian, Starmer is expected to drop the current move to stall at the ICC over issuing arrest warrants.

Important decisions remain, however. Will Labour quickly restore funding to Unrwa, the UN refugee agency that is best placed to tackle the Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza? And will it halt arms sales?

But most crucial of all, will it recognise Palestine, sending a signal both to the ICJ and ICC and to Israel that a ruling protecting the Palestinians from genocide will be enforced by a major western power and close ally of Washington’s?

No good signs

Back in January, days before the World Court announced it was plausible that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza, Starmer quietly tore up the Labour Party’s long-standing policy on recognising Palestine as a state.

More than 140 other countries have already recognised Palestine, including recently Spain, Ireland and Norway.

Instead, Starmer declared that Palestine could only come into being once Israel agreed to such recognition. In other words, Israel – the serial abuser – will be the one to decide whether it will ever end its serial abuse of the Palestinian people.

Starmer, let us note, made his name as a human rights lawyer.

Next, in the final stages of the election campaign, Starmer’s aides briefed The Times of London of a further obstacle in the way of recognition of Palestinian statehood.

The paper reported that Starmer would refuse to recognise a Palestinian state until he had received the blessing of the United States, reportedly to avoid the risk of a diplomatic falling out. Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state.

Such a delay would once again reassure Israel that it can do as it pleases to the Palestinians.

And as should be all too clear by now, buying time for Israel means allowing it to carry out a genocide in Gaza and intensify ethnic cleansing policies begun decades ago.

Tissue of lies

Starmer’s own political trajectory suggests an uncomfortable truth about international power politics. The closer western leaders move to power, the more pressure they feel to do Washington’s bidding – and that invariably means casting aside principle.

Devotion to Israel – and a willingness to abandon the Palestinians to the death camp Gaza has become – has been one of the major conditions of entry into the West’s power club.

During the election campaign, Starmer passed that test with flying colours. Which is why he – unlike his predecessor – received an easy ride from the British establishment, including its public relations arm, the corporate media.

Ultra-rich donors, including those with close ties to Israel, have been lining up to throw money at Starmer’s Labour party, at the same time as membership numbers have plummeted.

The reality is that we live in a world where the powerful pay lip service to human rights and international law, a world where they profess to aid the weak even as they assist in their slaughter.

Oppression flourishes, obscured by their empty promises and endless dithering.

For three decades, the West has advertised its benevolence and humanitarianism. It has launched invasions and waged wars supposedly to protect the weak and vulnerable – from Kosovo to Ukraine, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya. Democracy and women’s rights have supposedly been the West’s watchwords.

But in truth, as Gaza demonstrates only too clearly, those claims were a tissue of lies. It was always about treating the world as a giant chessboard, and one where Washington’s right to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” was the driving principle, not protection of the weak.

Talk of humanitarianism was there to obscure a deeper, more savage truth: might still makes right. And no one is stronger than the US and those it favours.

The Palestinians, unlike Israel, have no weight in the international system. They are denied an army, and have no warplanes. They are denied control over their borders and their airspace. They have no real economy or currency – they are entirely reliant on the goodwill of Israeli financial institutions. They have no freedom to move from their slivers of territory, their ghettoes, unless Israel first agrees.

They cannot even stop Israel from bulldozing their homes, or arresting their children in the middle of the night.

No one on the international stage, least of all governments in Washington and London, really needs to take account of Palestinian interests.

Abusing Palestinians comes at minimal political cost. Protecting them would offer few tangible political gains. Which is precisely why their abuse continues day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.

We live in a world of deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith. Britain’s new prime minister has shown he is already an arch-exponent of those dark political arts. Listen not to what he says, but watch closely what he actually does.

• First published in Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

As the night wore on, the laceration became a ballot massacre.  It was clear that most voters were less keen on Sir Keir Starmer’s dour Labour team, supposedly reformed and devoid of dangerous daring, as they were of voting against the Tories.  Any other option would do.

A whole brigade of senior Conservatives suffered a rout.  Commons leader Penny Mordaunt lost her seat, as did defence secretary Grant Shapps.  That manorial relic of Tory tradition and privilege, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, was also ousted from his seat.  The Liberal Democrats made huge inroads into traditional Conservative territory, winning seats held by two former prime ministers – David Cameron and Theresa May.

Recriminations, long readied in reserve, came out.  Former party chair, Sir Brandon Lewis, pointed the finger to his leader, Rishi Sunak, whose decision to call the election was considered monumentally ill-judged.  “I suspect right now that’s weighing on him very, very strongly … He will go down as the Conservative prime minister and leader who had the worst election result in over a century.”

Other Tories thought Sunak’s efforts to push the Conservatives further to the right to stem the leaching of votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK a serious error of judgment.  Former Tory universities minister Lord Jo Johnson, also famed for being the sibling of that buffoonish wrecker-in-chief Boris, called efforts to make the Conservatives “a Reform-lite kind of party” a “big mistake”.  Only a return to the “centre-ground of British politics” would spare them a lengthy spell in the wilderness.

The strafing of the more liberal Tory members does, however, place them in an unenviable position.   Are they to, as Lord Johnson suggests, alter course to “appeal to metropolitan, open-minded, liberal voters”?  Or should they, as Rees-Mogg insists, dig deeper into the soil of Conservative values, what he calls “core principles” that had been essentially pinched by Reform UK?  Amidst the debate, former lord chancellor Robert Buckland could not resist quipping that this Conservative “Armageddon” was “going to be like a group of bald men fighting over a comb.”

The most staggering feature of these elections, leaving aside the ritualistic savaging of the Tories, was the wholly lopsided nature of the share of votes relative to the winning of seats.  “This election,” the Electoral Reform Society solemnly declared, “saw Labour and the Conservatives receive their joint lowest vote share on record, with a combined 57.4%.”

That did not prevent the two major parties from snaring the lion’s share.  Labour received 33.7% of the vote yet obtained 63.2% (411 seats) of the 650 on offer, making it the most disproportionate on record.  The Tories, despite the bloodbath, could still count on 121 MPs with 23.7% of votes winning 18.6% of seats in the House of Commons.

The Lib Dems burgeoned in terms of representatives, gaining a record number of MPs (they now stand at 72), despite only having a vote share of 12.2%. It was a modest percentage hardly different from the 2019 election.

Reform UK, Farage’s rebranded party of Brexiteers, had every right to feel characteristically foiled by the first past the post system that is always defended by the party that wins majority, leaving smaller contenders to chew over its stunningly unrepresentative rationale.  Having netted a higher percentage than the Lib Dems at 14.3% (over 4 million votes), they had only five MPs to show for it.  “That is blatantly not a properly functioning democratic system – that is a flawed system,” a resentful Richard Tice of Reform remarked on BBC 4 Radio’s Today program.  “The demands for change will grow and grow.”

The Greens, similarly, received 6.7% of the vote (just under 2 million), but returned a mere four MPs to Westminster.  Despite this, the strategists will be seeing these wins, the most successful in their party’s history, as stunning, bettering the heroic if lonely exploits of Caroline Lucas.  Tellingly, the party pinched two seats off Labour, and one from the Conservative stable.

Given that Labour proved the largest beneficiary of a voting system that should only ever apply in a two-way contest and given the prospect of Reform and the Greens posing ever greater threats from either wing of politics, appetite for electoral reform is likely to be suppressed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Is it possible for an entire ‘mainstream’ media system – every newspaper, website, TV channel – to completely suppress one side of a crucial argument without anyone expressing outrage, or even noticing? Consider the following.

In February 2022, Nigel Farage, former and future leader of the Reform UK party, tweeted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was:

‘A consequence of EU and NATO expansion, which came to a head in 2014. It made no sense to poke the Russian bear with a stick.’

In a recent interview, the BBC reminded Farage of this comment. He responded:

‘Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man [Putin] a reason to his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again, and to go to war.

‘We’ve provoked this war – of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.’

The BBC quickly made this a major news story by publishing a front page, top headline piece by BBC journalist Becky Morton who cited, and repeated, high-level sources attacking Farage. Morton wrote:

‘Former Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who is not standing in the election, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Mr Farage was like a “pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar”.’

And:

‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was echoing Mr Putin’s “vile justification” for the war and Labour branded him “unfit” for any political office.’

Morton then repeated both criticisms:

‘Mr Wallace – who oversaw the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – said Mr Farage “is a bit like that pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar” and often presents “very simplistic answers” to complex problems.’

And:

‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was “echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine”.’

Morton piled on the pain:

‘Labour defence spokesman John Healey said Mr Farage’s comments made him “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone leading a serious party in Parliament”.

‘Former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson accused Mr Farage of “parroting the Kremlin Line” and “producing new excuses for the brutal, unprovoked attack”.’

Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson are all, of course, influential, high-profile figures; compiling their criticisms in this way sent a powerful message to BBC readers. Remarkably, one might think – given the BBC’s supposed devotion to presenting ‘both sides’ of an argument – Morton offered no source of any kind in support of Farage’s argument.

The BBC intensified its coverage by opening a ‘Live’ blog (reserved for top news stories, disasters and scandals) on the issue, titled:

‘Farage “won’t apologise” for Ukraine comments after Starmer and Sunak criticism’

The BBC reported:

‘Keir Starmer has called Nigel Farage’s comments on Ukraine “disgraceful” as Rishi Sunak says they play into Putin’s hands’

Again, nowhere in the ‘Live’ blog coverage did the BBC cite arguments in support of Farage’s argument. Is it because they don’t exist?

In June 2022, Ramzy Baroud interviewed Noam Chomsky:

‘Chomsky told us that it “should be clear that the (Russian) invasion of Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He compared it to the US invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an example of “supreme international crime.” With this moral question settled, Chomsky believes that the main “background” of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream media coverage, is “NATO expansion.”

‘”This is not just my opinion,” said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of every high-level US official in the diplomatic services who has any familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s ambassador Jack Matlock, including the current director of the CIA; in fact, just everybody who knows anything has been warning Washington that it is reckless and provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear and explicit red lines. That goes way before (Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with him; (Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia cannot join NATO, this is the geostrategic heartland of Russia.”’

We know people are interested in Chomsky’s views on the Ukraine war because when we posted a comment from him on X it received 430,000 views and 7,000 likes (huge numbers by our standards).

In 2022, John Pilger commented:

‘The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

‘In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

‘In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.’

Pilger added:

‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” – except one.

‘When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.’

In May 2023, economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote:

‘Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

‘Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion.’ (Our emphasis)

Sachs has previously been presented as a credible source by the BBC on other issues. In 2007, Sachs gave five talks for the BBC’s Reith Lectures.

The New Yorker magazine described political scientist Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’. Mearsheimer commented:

‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

There are numerous other credible sources, including Benjamin Abelow, author of How The West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) and Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (Yale University Press, 2022). Journalist Ian Sinclair, author of The March That Shook Blair (Peace News, 2013), published a collection of material titled:

‘Testimony from US government and military officials, and other experts, on the role of NATO expansion in creating the conditions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine’

Sinclair cited, for example, current CIA Director William Burns:

‘Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-nineties, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst.’

And George F. Kennan, a leading US Cold War diplomat:

‘…something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’.

We can understand why the BBC might want to cite Sunak, Starmer, Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson, but we can’t understand why it would ignore the counterarguments and sources cited above.

It gets worse. A piece in the Daily Mail essentially repeated the BBC performance with endless vitriolic comments again cited from Sunak, Starmer, Cleverly, Healey, Robertson and several others. And again, no counterarguments.

A Reuter’s report quoted Sunak and Healey but no counterarguments.

ITV cited former prime minister Boris Johnson:

‘To try and spread the blame is morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies.’

No counterarguments were allowed, other than from Farage himself. At a recent rally, he held up a front-page headline from the i newspaper in 2016, which read, tragicomically:

‘Boris blames EU for war in Ukraine’

That about sums up the state of both Boris Johnson and UK politics generally.

The Telegraph cited Cleverly and other high-profile sources attacking Farage:

‘Tobias Ellwood, the former Tory defence minister, told The Telegraph: “Churchill will be turning in his grave. Putin, already enjoying how Farage is disrupting British politics, will be delighted to hear this talk of appeasement entering our election debate.”

‘Lord West of Spithead, the former chief of the naval staff, said: “Anyone who gives any seeming excuse to president Putin and his disgraceful attack … is standing into danger as regards their views on world affairs.” James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Just Farage echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

‘Liam Fox, the former Tory defence secretary, told The Telegraph: “The West did not ‘provoke this war’ in Ukraine and it is shocking that Nigel Farage should say so.”’ (Daily Telegraph, ‘Farage: West provoked Russia to attack Ukraine’, 22 June 2024)

Again, all alternative views were ignored as non-existent.

In the Independent, journalist Tom Watling packed his article with comments from Sunak, Starmer and Wallace. Again, no counterarguments were allowed.

The Guardian cited Sunak, Healey and Cleverly. Again, no counterarguments were included. (Peter Walker, ‘Nigel Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war’, The Guardian, 21 June 2024)

With such limited resources, it is difficult for us to wade through all mentions of this story, but we will stick our necks out and suggest that it is quite possible that no sources supporting Farage’s argument have been cited in any UK national newspaper.

By any rational accounting, this ‘mainstream’ coverage is actually a form of totalitarian propaganda. It has denied the British public the ability to even understand the criticisms. Most people reading these reports will simply not understand why Farage made the claim – it is a taboo subject in ‘mainstream’ coverage – and so they have no way of making sense of either his argument or the backlash. This is deep bias presented as ‘news’. It is fake news.

And this suppression of honest journalism in relation to one of the most dangerous and devastating wars of our time, in which our own country is deeply involved, is happening in the run up to what is supposed to be a democratic election.

None of the above is intended as a defence of Farage’s wider political stance. On the contrary, we agree with political journalist Peter Oborne:

‘Farage, a close ally of Donald Trump, who has supported Marine Le Pen in France and spoken at an AfD rally in Germany, fits naturally into the rancid politics of the far-right movements making ground across Europe and in the United States.’

Farage and his far-right views have been endlessly platformed by the BBC.

Needless to say, the Ukraine war is only one of many key issues that are off the agenda for our choice-as-no-choice political system. In a rare example of dissent, Owen Jones commented in the Guardian:

‘Is this a serious country or not? It is egregious enough that this general election campaign is so stripped of discussion about the defining issues facing us at home for the next half decade, whether that be public spending, the NHS or education. But it is especially shocking how quickly the butchery in Gaza – and the position of this imploding government and its successor – has been forgotten.’

Jones noted:

‘On Thursday night’s BBC Question Time leaders’ special, there was not a single question or answer on Gaza.

‘Seriously? Clearly this is an issue that matters to many Britons.’

Earlier this month, Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London commented:

‘The most astonishing thing about the UK election campaign is not what the leaders and parties are saying, but what they are NOT saying

‘It beggars belief that the #climate is simply not an issue and – as far as I have heard – has not been addressed by either leader

‘Just criminal’

It works like magic: two major political parties ostensibly representing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the political spectrum, but both actually serving the same establishment interests, naturally ignore issues that offend power. Establishment media can then also ignore these issues on the pretext that the party-political system covers the entire spectrum of thinkable thought, and that any ideas outside that ‘spectrum’ have no particular right to be heard at election time. Indeed, to venture beyond the carefully filtered bubble of party politics is seen as actually undemocratic. As one ITV journalist reported:

‘Outrage at Nigel Farage’s comments about the war in Ukraine has drawn criticism from all corners of British politics.’

Not quite. They drew criticism from the select few corners of British politics that are allowed to exist in our ‘managed democracy’.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

Is it possible for an entire ‘mainstream’ media system – every newspaper, website, TV channel – to completely suppress one side of a crucial argument without anyone expressing outrage, or even noticing? Consider the following.

In February 2022, Nigel Farage, former and future leader of the Reform UK party, tweeted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was:

‘A consequence of EU and NATO expansion, which came to a head in 2014. It made no sense to poke the Russian bear with a stick.’

In a recent interview, the BBC reminded Farage of this comment. He responded:

‘Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man [Putin] a reason to his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again, and to go to war.

‘We’ve provoked this war – of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.’

The BBC quickly made this a major news story by publishing a front page, top headline piece by BBC journalist Becky Morton who cited, and repeated, high-level sources attacking Farage. Morton wrote:

‘Former Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who is not standing in the election, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Mr Farage was like a “pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar”.’

And:

‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was echoing Mr Putin’s “vile justification” for the war and Labour branded him “unfit” for any political office.’

Morton then repeated both criticisms:

‘Mr Wallace – who oversaw the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – said Mr Farage “is a bit like that pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar” and often presents “very simplistic answers” to complex problems.’

And:

‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was “echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine”.’

Morton piled on the pain:

‘Labour defence spokesman John Healey said Mr Farage’s comments made him “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone leading a serious party in Parliament”.

‘Former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson accused Mr Farage of “parroting the Kremlin Line” and “producing new excuses for the brutal, unprovoked attack”.’

Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson are all, of course, influential, high-profile figures; compiling their criticisms in this way sent a powerful message to BBC readers. Remarkably, one might think – given the BBC’s supposed devotion to presenting ‘both sides’ of an argument – Morton offered no source of any kind in support of Farage’s argument.

The BBC intensified its coverage by opening a ‘Live’ blog (reserved for top news stories, disasters and scandals) on the issue, titled:

‘Farage “won’t apologise” for Ukraine comments after Starmer and Sunak criticism’

The BBC reported:

‘Keir Starmer has called Nigel Farage’s comments on Ukraine “disgraceful” as Rishi Sunak says they play into Putin’s hands’

Again, nowhere in the ‘Live’ blog coverage did the BBC cite arguments in support of Farage’s argument. Is it because they don’t exist?

In June 2022, Ramzy Baroud interviewed Noam Chomsky:

‘Chomsky told us that it “should be clear that the (Russian) invasion of Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He compared it to the US invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an example of “supreme international crime.” With this moral question settled, Chomsky believes that the main “background” of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream media coverage, is “NATO expansion.”

‘”This is not just my opinion,” said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of every high-level US official in the diplomatic services who has any familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s ambassador Jack Matlock, including the current director of the CIA; in fact, just everybody who knows anything has been warning Washington that it is reckless and provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear and explicit red lines. That goes way before (Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with him; (Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia cannot join NATO, this is the geostrategic heartland of Russia.”’

We know people are interested in Chomsky’s views on the Ukraine war because when we posted a comment from him on X it received 430,000 views and 7,000 likes (huge numbers by our standards).

In 2022, John Pilger commented:

‘The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

‘In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

‘In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.’

Pilger added:

‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” – except one.

‘When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.’

In May 2023, economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote:

‘Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

‘Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion.’ (Our emphasis)

Sachs has previously been presented as a credible source by the BBC on other issues. In 2007, Sachs gave five talks for the BBC’s Reith Lectures.

The New Yorker magazine described political scientist Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’. Mearsheimer commented:

‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

There are numerous other credible sources, including Benjamin Abelow, author of How The West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) and Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (Yale University Press, 2022). Journalist Ian Sinclair, author of The March That Shook Blair (Peace News, 2013), published a collection of material titled:

‘Testimony from US government and military officials, and other experts, on the role of NATO expansion in creating the conditions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine’

Sinclair cited, for example, current CIA Director William Burns:

‘Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-nineties, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst.’

And George F. Kennan, a leading US Cold War diplomat:

‘…something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’.

We can understand why the BBC might want to cite Sunak, Starmer, Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson, but we can’t understand why it would ignore the counterarguments and sources cited above.

It gets worse. A piece in the Daily Mail essentially repeated the BBC performance with endless vitriolic comments again cited from Sunak, Starmer, Cleverly, Healey, Robertson and several others. And again, no counterarguments.

A Reuter’s report quoted Sunak and Healey but no counterarguments.

ITV cited former prime minister Boris Johnson:

‘To try and spread the blame is morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies.’

No counterarguments were allowed, other than from Farage himself. At a recent rally, he held up a front-page headline from the i newspaper in 2016, which read, tragicomically:

‘Boris blames EU for war in Ukraine’

That about sums up the state of both Boris Johnson and UK politics generally.

The Telegraph cited Cleverly and other high-profile sources attacking Farage:

‘Tobias Ellwood, the former Tory defence minister, told The Telegraph: “Churchill will be turning in his grave. Putin, already enjoying how Farage is disrupting British politics, will be delighted to hear this talk of appeasement entering our election debate.”

‘Lord West of Spithead, the former chief of the naval staff, said: “Anyone who gives any seeming excuse to president Putin and his disgraceful attack … is standing into danger as regards their views on world affairs.” James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Just Farage echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

‘Liam Fox, the former Tory defence secretary, told The Telegraph: “The West did not ‘provoke this war’ in Ukraine and it is shocking that Nigel Farage should say so.”’ (Daily Telegraph, ‘Farage: West provoked Russia to attack Ukraine’, 22 June 2024)

Again, all alternative views were ignored as non-existent.

In the Independent, journalist Tom Watling packed his article with comments from Sunak, Starmer and Wallace. Again, no counterarguments were allowed.

The Guardian cited Sunak, Healey and Cleverly. Again, no counterarguments were included. (Peter Walker, ‘Nigel Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war’, The Guardian, 21 June 2024)

With such limited resources, it is difficult for us to wade through all mentions of this story, but we will stick our necks out and suggest that it is quite possible that no sources supporting Farage’s argument have been cited in any UK national newspaper.

By any rational accounting, this ‘mainstream’ coverage is actually a form of totalitarian propaganda. It has denied the British public the ability to even understand the criticisms. Most people reading these reports will simply not understand why Farage made the claim – it is a taboo subject in ‘mainstream’ coverage – and so they have no way of making sense of either his argument or the backlash. This is deep bias presented as ‘news’. It is fake news.

And this suppression of honest journalism in relation to one of the most dangerous and devastating wars of our time, in which our own country is deeply involved, is happening in the run up to what is supposed to be a democratic election.

None of the above is intended as a defence of Farage’s wider political stance. On the contrary, we agree with political journalist Peter Oborne:

‘Farage, a close ally of Donald Trump, who has supported Marine Le Pen in France and spoken at an AfD rally in Germany, fits naturally into the rancid politics of the far-right movements making ground across Europe and in the United States.’

Farage and his far-right views have been endlessly platformed by the BBC.

Needless to say, the Ukraine war is only one of many key issues that are off the agenda for our choice-as-no-choice political system. In a rare example of dissent, Owen Jones commented in the Guardian:

‘Is this a serious country or not? It is egregious enough that this general election campaign is so stripped of discussion about the defining issues facing us at home for the next half decade, whether that be public spending, the NHS or education. But it is especially shocking how quickly the butchery in Gaza – and the position of this imploding government and its successor – has been forgotten.’

Jones noted:

‘On Thursday night’s BBC Question Time leaders’ special, there was not a single question or answer on Gaza.

‘Seriously? Clearly this is an issue that matters to many Britons.’

Earlier this month, Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London commented:

‘The most astonishing thing about the UK election campaign is not what the leaders and parties are saying, but what they are NOT saying

‘It beggars belief that the #climate is simply not an issue and – as far as I have heard – has not been addressed by either leader

‘Just criminal’

It works like magic: two major political parties ostensibly representing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the political spectrum, but both actually serving the same establishment interests, naturally ignore issues that offend power. Establishment media can then also ignore these issues on the pretext that the party-political system covers the entire spectrum of thinkable thought, and that any ideas outside that ‘spectrum’ have no particular right to be heard at election time. Indeed, to venture beyond the carefully filtered bubble of party politics is seen as actually undemocratic. As one ITV journalist reported:

‘Outrage at Nigel Farage’s comments about the war in Ukraine has drawn criticism from all corners of British politics.’

Not quite. They drew criticism from the select few corners of British politics that are allowed to exist in our ‘managed democracy’.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

Anyone who denies this is extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing to watch at this point isn't being honest.

And I don't understand how Democrats and their pundits believe they can convince Americans it's not happening.

And he wants 4 more years:pic.twitter.com/j1jrzc34u8

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 13, 2024

And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

Antony Blinken: "We can never let the crimes Russia's committing become our new normal… bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal" pic.twitter.com/W2rBYE8CVk

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) November 15, 2023

We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

President Biden at White House Correspondents' Dinner: "Journalism is clearly not a crime."#WHCA #WHCD #nerdprom pic.twitter.com/MpEmg7trz2

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 28, 2024

We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

Compare Keir Starmer's statements on the siege of Gaza with his arguments at the International Court of Justice in 2014, where he argued that the Serb siege of Vukovar was a case of genocide.
A thread on Starmer, international law and Gaza. pic.twitter.com/lu0X6sgXfB

— Nicholas McGeehan (@NcGeehan) November 28, 2023

All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Before an audience at the MF Club Health and Wealth Summit at the Tiverton Hotel in March, Farage had words for his country’s voting system, one that notoriously remains stubbornly rooted to the “first past the post” model.  It was a system that had, in his view, eliminated any coherent distinction between the major parties.  They had become “big state, high tax social democrats”.

Farage took the budget as a salient illustration.  The leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, agreed “with virtually everything in the budget.  It would’ve made no difference if Rachel Reeves had delivered that budget instead of Jeremy Hunt.  They are all the same.”

Having been made leader of the populist Reform UK party for the next five years, Farage felt it was time to make another tilt.  On June 3, he announced that he would be standing in the July 4 election in the Essex constituency of Clacton, one that had conclusively voted to leave the European Union in 2016.  It is also the only constituency to have ever elected an MP from UKIP, Reform UK’s previous iteration.  The decision concluded a prolonged phase of indecision.  And it will terrify the Tory strategists.

The speech offered little by way of surprises.  The usual dark clouds were present.  The failure by both Labour and the Conservatives to halt the tide of immigration.  Rates of crushing taxation.  General ignorance of Britain’s finest achievements battling tyranny, including a lack of awareness about such glorious events as D-Day.  The poor state of public services, including the National Health Service.  A state of “moral decline”.  Rampant crime.  In the UK, one could “go shoplifting and nick up to 200 quid’s worth of kit before anyone is even going to prosecute you.”

From the view of the Conservatives, who already risk electoral annihilation at the polls, Reform UK was always going to be dangerous.  Roughly one in four voters who helped inflate Johnson’s numbers in 2019 are considering voting for it.  It explains various efforts by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, including his insensibly cruel Rwanda plan, to court a voting base that he hopes will return to the Tory fold.

Unfortunately for the PM, such efforts will hardly matter now that the real Nigel is running.  “The pint-loving populist offers a splash of colour in an otherwise grey campaign,” suggests Robert Ford in The Spectator.  “The result will be a constant background hum of populist criticism undermining Tory promises and reinforcing voters’ doubts.”

Veteran British commentator Andrew Marr relished the irony: here was the architect of the Brexit victory bringing calamity to the Conservatives.  Farage had effectively raised “the pirate flag of what he calls ‘a political revolt’ against the entire Westminster class; but in particular against the listing, drifting and battered galleon that is the Tory party.”

Leaving aside – and there is much on that score – the issue of Farage’s Little England image, his presence in the Commons would come with various promises that will rock Britain’s political establishment.  There is, for instance, the proposal for electoral reform, one long strangled and smothered in the cot by the main parties.  Finally, he insists, a proportional representation model of voting can be introduced that will make Westminster more representative.

He also proposes ridding Britain of the House of Lords in its current form, replacing it with what would essentially make it an elected chamber accountable to voters.  This “abomination” and “disgrace” of an institution had become the destination for shameless political hacks favoured by Labor and Tory prime ministers.  “It’s now made up of hundreds of mates of Tony Blair and David Cameron; they’re the same blooming people,” he rattled to the entrepreneurs at the Tiverton Hotel.  “They all live within the same three postcodes in West London.  They’re not representative of the country in any way at all.”

There is a case to be made for Farage to stay behind the throne of UK politics, influencing matters as sometimes befuddled kingmaker.  Even if he fails at this eighth attempt – and given current polling, Reform UK is not on course to win a single seat – there is every chance that he will have a direct say in the way the Conservatives approach matters while in opposition.  He might even play the role of a usurping Bolingbroke, taking over the leadership of a party he promises to inflict much harm upon next month.  Short of that, he can have first dibs at the selection of a far more reactionary leader from its thinned ranks. The Farage factor will again become hauntingly critical to the gloomy fate of British politics.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The PM’s speech rattled off the usual trimmings about a world dangerous and uncertain, as if various preceding eras were not.  With the lumpy historical discordance, he suggested that the world was “more dangerous than it has been since the end of the Cold War.”  Savage Russian President Vladimir Putin was one to blame for his “brutal war in Ukraine”.  Islamist extremism continued to bloody the map of the Middle East.  On the bookkeeping front, he claimed to have restored “economic stability,” a dagger remark to his predecessor, Liz Truss, who had a distinct talent for giving the economic books away.

The hordes of the Middle Kingdom and irregular migration also come in for a wet lettuce belting.  China was a country “looking to dominate the 21^st century by stealing a lead in technology and migration is being weaponised by hostile states to threaten the integrity of our bodies.”

As for the Labour Party, his opponents and contenders for government, no credible basis could be found.  He did not “know what they offer.  And in truth, I don’t think you know either.  And that’s because they have no plan.”  Sunak has a point, but wise oppositions hankering for government tend to release their program closer to the election date than their greener counterparts.

The conservative stable in Sunak’s party, and the commentary box, were making the obvious point: why now instead of waiting till later in the year?  If you are doing well in readjusting the direction of the economic ship, surely, it’s good to be reassured it’s heading the right direction and gloating about it to the voters before they cast the vote?  Such questions are pertinent, given that the UK economy emerged from the stifling chrysalis of recession in the first quarter with 0.6%, with an inflation rate of 2.3%, a touch above the 2% target set by the Bank of England.

Reactionary, brutal, and cruel, Sunak could also boast that the Rwanda legislation, intended as part of a vain effort to deter boat arrivals to UK shores, had at least passed, despite being widely condemned, and reviled, by the legal fraternity and activist groups.

Strategizing for incumbent governments facing cool slaughter by an unhappy electorate is never an easy call.  Isaac Levido, the shadowy Australian Conservative election strategist, plumped for some time later this year.  Liam Booth-Smith, Sunak’s Chief of Staff, aided by the views of deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, and political secretary James Forsyth, preferred the starter gun to go off earlier.  Best bring the cull on.

Commentary from various Conservatives tended towards Levido’s view.  One senior figure, speaking to the BBC, confounded “the assumption of the entire establishment, not to mention Tory MPs, that it would be autumn”.

The Spectator, Britain’s consistently conservative magazine, was certain about the implications of premature electioneering.  “Calling an early election is an admission of defeat – and that, on everything from public finances to public services, the worst is yet to come.”

Since the announcement, the Tories have been paternalistic in the hope that anyone will notice.  Fatherly suggestions have come in the form of proposed mandatory national service, a case of carrot, stick and tease to discipline and condition the youth of the country.  Were he to retain office, Sunak promises to reintroduce a measure that seems cumbersome and unconvincing.  These are his words at a campaign event at Buckinghamshire: “It is going to foster a culture of service which is going to be incredibly powerful for making our society more cohesive, and in a more uncertain and dangerous world it’s going to strengthen our country’s security and resilience.”

Cruising onto TikTok, a platform otherwise viewed with Sinophile suspicion, Sunak made the point that, in line with other nation states, “we will provide a stipend to help with living costs for those doing the military element alongside their training.”  Promises of sanctions for not following the program, were it to be introduced, are already being mooted by the likes of Tory Party deputy chairman James Daly.  “If you are fit and healthy and you are able to make a contribution to your wider community to do something for your area, I have faith that young people will take that opportunity.”

In a sign that this government is spluttering in its terminal doom, Home Secretary James Cleverly offered a less punitive view.  “There’s no one going to jail over this.”  Foreign Office minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan preferred to toss the matter over to the royal commission intended to investigate the details of the proposal were fines to apply to disobedient children unwilling to serve their country.  Defence personnel minister Andrew Morrison, within twenty-four hours of the election being called, walled off the possibility that “any form of national service” would be introduced.

For any government, confusion in the already scatty ranks spells death.  In the case of the Tories, a wheezing sense of entropy will continue to soften them for the chop.  While the losses may be checked come the date the votes are cast, the Tories are set for an all-country drubbing.  Were Sunak to offer a decent salvaging from the blood bath for his party, he might almost be forgiven.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

He misses the point as usual. The warrants have nothing to do with that. They are about bringing those wanted for the most grievous war crimes to justice.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak then said that the move was “deeply unhelpful”, adding: “There is no moral equivalence between a democratic state exercising its lawful right to self defence and the terrorist group Hamas.”

Even Biden was singing off the same hymn-sheet saying there is “no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas” and that what’s happening in Gaza is not genocide…. a hymn of praise for Israel almost.

Of course there is no moral equivalence. As the world has witnessed, Israel’s crimes are a thousand times greater than Hamas’s and are allowed to continue without let-up, courtesy of the US and UK who dutifully carry on supplying the ordnance and weaponry. It still hasn’t penetrated enough Washington and Whitehall skulls that it is the Palestinian resistance who are exercising their lawful right to self-defence – using “armed struggle” if necessary – against Israel’s illegal military occupation, brutal 17-year blockade and decades-long murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246).

Furthermore Hamas are just as legitimate as any Israeli administration having been democratically elected under the scrutiny of international observers, a result immediately rejected at the time by the UK, Israel and the US because it didn’t happen to suit their evil purpose in the Middle East.

And why are Hamas proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK? Only because a group of Israel’s pimps and stooges among Westminster’s political elite say so. It would be interesting to take a vote on what the people who put them there actually think, now they know the horrendous situation in Gaza and the West Bank and the long history leading up to it. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to proscribe Likud, Netyanyahu’s terrorist party?

Cameron also claims it’s a mistake to draw moral equivalence because Palestine is not regarded as a state. Again, he isn’t paying attention. 146 of the 193 UN member states recognise Palestine, including Ireland, Norway and Spain who announced recognition just a few days ago. 11 of these are EU states, so what is Cameron drivelling about?

Fortunately, a cross-party group of 105 MPs and Lords has called on the UK Government “to do all it can to support the International Criminal Court” after Prime Minister Sunak’s remark that its decision to seek arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders was “deeply unhelpful”. In a letter addressed to Foreign Secretary Cameron they say “there is mounting evidence that Israel has committed clear and obvious violations of international law in Gaza and we strongly believe that those responsible must be held to account”. They call on the Government “to take a clear stance against any attempts to intimidate an independent and impartial international court…. The Court, its Prosecutor, and all its staff must be free to pursue justice without fear or favour”.

One of the organisers, MP Richard Burgon, said: “At every stage, our Government has failed to fulfil its moral duty to do everything it can to help save lives and prevent suffering in Gaza. It must not fail again. It must back the ICC in ensuring that there is no impunity for war crimes and it must stand up to those seeking to impede justice.”

Almost straightaway Sunak, in a surprise move, called a general election for 4 July. This means that MPs immediately cease being MPs but ministers continue in office until a new government is formed. For the next 6 weeks, then, Sunak’s crew continue to rule without being accountable to the House of Commons and could do a lot of damage. So this is a doubly dangerous time for our nation.

Meanwhile Cameron and his ignorant friends seem to think the Gaza war only started as recently as October 7. He plays up the release of 134 Israeli hostages when, on October 6 Israel was holding 5,200 Palestinians captive, including at least 170 children, and since then has abducted some 7,350 more. Why do we never hear from Cameron about the Palestinian hostages/prisoners?

And how many Palestinians had Israel killed before October 7? Answer: 10,651 slaughtered by Israel in the 23 years up to Oct 7, including 2,270 children and 656 women (Israel’s B’Tselem figures). That’s 460 a year. In that period Israel was exterminating Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1.

Israel’s friends in the West like to think of Netanyahu as the leader of a Western style democracy that shares our values. Actually he’s the head of a nasty little ethnocracy with vicious apartheid policies and a 76-year record of terrorism, pursuing an extended military campaign aimed at occupying and annexing another people’s lands and resources, and showing no respect whatsoever for British values or international norms of behaviour.

So, putting aside for a moment our dislike of Hamas’s methods, shouldn’t we be asking our politicians to explain why exactly Hamas must be eliminated and the Palestinians’ homeland pulverised in the process, seeing as it is they who are under illegally military occupation and they who have the ultimate right of self-defence?

It’s easy to see where Cameron is coming from. After 3 months of genocide in Gaza, he denied Israel had broken international law. He also said it was “nonsense” to suggest that Israel intended to commit genocide. Asked if he thought Israel had a case to answer at the ICJ, he said: “No, I absolutely don’t. I think the South African action is wrong, I think it is unhelpful, I think it shouldn’t be happening…. I take the view that Israel is acting in self-defence after the appalling attack on October 7. But even if you take a different view to my view, to look at Israel, a democracy, a country with the rule of law, a country with armed forces that are committed to obeying the rule of law, to say that that country, that leadership, that armed forces, that they have intent to commit genocide, I think that is nonsense, I think that is wrong.”

So says this self-declared zionist and key stooge for Israel, one of many at Westminster who are desperate to maintain the shady US/UK-Israel alliance. Do Sunak, Cameron & co really want victory for the genocidists? It seems they do. Because they’ve pledged their undying adoration and support for that rotten apartheid regime and now the world has seen it for what it really is and their position is turning sour.

On the face of it the Hamas trio — Haniyeh, Sinwar and Dief — with competent legal representation seem likely to survive the legal process. And although many are questioning why arrest warrants are being considered for them at the same time as the mega-maniac Netanyahu there is reason to hope that, if they do come to trial, a lot of bad stuff about Israel, the US and the UK will come out. The world will then be much wiser and the ‘axis of evil’ behind it all will collapse under the weight of its own lunacy.

The UK general election will likely rid us of Sunak, Cameron and the rest of the Tory nitwits. But sitting in the waiting room is Labour’s Keir Starmer, another Israel stooge. Yes, the zionists have all angles covered.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

According to CPJ data, more journalists were killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel-Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year. The letter reflects CPJ’s wider calls for action by the international community published in December 2023, as well as in letters sent to U.S. President Joe Biden and Josep Borrell, the High Representative for the European Union on Foreign and Security Policy.

The unprecedented killing of so many journalists in so brief a period of time “has obvious and profound implications for the ability of the public, including the citizens of the Britain, to be informed about a conflict with local, regional, and global implications,” said Thursday’s letter. “We urge you to act immediately and decisively to ensure that all the parties respect the rights of journalists to report on the conflict.”

Read the full text of the letter below:

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The world is split between those who have crafted a self-serving global and regional order that guarantees them impunity whatever their crimes, and those who pay the price for that arrangement.

Now the long-time victims are fighting back at the so-called World Court.

Last week, each side presented its arguments for and against whether Israel has implemented a genocidal policy in Gaza over the past three months.

South Africa’s case should be open and shut. So far Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has damaged or destroyed more than 60 percent of the population’s homes. It has bombed the tiny “safe zones” to which it has ordered some two million Palestinians to flee. It has exposed them to starvation and lethal disease by cutting off aid and water.

Meanwhile, senior Israeli political and military officials have openly and repeatedly expressed genocidal intent, as South Africa’s submission so carefully documents.

Back in September, before Hamas’ break-out from the Gaza prison on 7 October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had shown the United Nations a map of his aspiration for what he termed “the New Middle East”. The Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank were gone, replaced by Israel.

Despite the mass of evidence against Israel, it could take years for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to reach a definitive verdict – by which time, if things carry on as they are, there may be no meaningful Palestinian population left to protect.

South Africa has therefore also urgently requested an interim order effectively requiring Israel to stop its attack.

Opposing corners

They are in opposite corners because each drew a different lesson from their respective traumatic historical legacies.

Israel raised its citizens to believe that Jews must join the racist, oppressor nations, adopting a “might makes right” approach to neighbouring states. A self-declared Jewish state sees the region as a zero-sum battleground in which domination and brutality win the day.

It was inevitable that Israel would eventually spawn, in Hamas and groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, armed opponents who view their conflict with Israel in a similar light.

South Africa, by contrast, has aspired to carry the mantel of “moral beacon” nation, that western states so readily ascribe to their top-dog, nuclear-armed Middle Eastern client state, Israel.

South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, famously observed in 1997: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Israel and apartheid South Africa were close diplomatic and military allies until apartheid’s fall 30 years ago. Mandela understood that the ideological foundations of Zionism and apartheid were built on a similar racial supremacist logic.

He was once cast as a terrorist villain for opposing South Africa’s apartheid rulers, much as Palestinian leaders are by Israel today.

Jackboot of colonialism

It should also not surprise us that lined up in Israel’s corner is most of the West – led by Washington and Germany, the country that instigated the Holocaust. Berlin asked last Friday to be considered a third party in Israel’s defence at The Hague.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s case is backed by much of what is called the “developing world”, which has long felt the jackboot of western colonialism – and racism – on its face.

Notably, Namibia was incensed by Germany’s support for Israel at the court, given that at the outset of the 20th century, the colonial German regime in south-west Africa herded many tens of thousands of Namibians into death camps, developing the blueprint for the genocide of Jews and Roma it would later refine in the Holocaust.

The Namibian president, Hage Geingob, stated: “Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.”

The panel of judges – 17 of them in total – do not exist in some rarified bubble of legal abstraction. Intense political pressures in this polarised fight will bear down on them.

As former UK ambassador Craig Murray, who attended the two days of hearings, observed: most of the judges looked as if they “really did not want to be in the court”.

‘Nobody will stop us’

The reality is that, whichever way the majority in the court swings in its decision, the crushing power of the West to get its way will shape what happens next.

If most of the judges find it plausible that there is a risk Israel is committing genocide and insist on some sort of interim ceasefire until it can make a definitive ruling, Washington will block enforcement through its veto at the UN Security Council.

Expect the US, as well as Europe, to work harder than ever to undermine international law and its supporting institutions. Imputations of antisemitism on the part of the judges who back South Africa’s case – and the states to which they belong – will be liberally spread around.

Already Israel has accused South Africa of a “blood libel”, suggesting its motives at the ICJ are driven by antisemitism. In his address to the court, Tal Becker of the Israeli foreign ministry argued that South Africa was acting as a legal surrogate for Hamas.

The US has implied much the same by calling South Africa’s meticulous amassing of evidence “meritless”.

On Saturday, in a speech littered with deceptions, Netanyahu vowed to ignore the court’s ruling if it was not to Israel’s liking. “Nobody will stop us – not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anybody else,” he said.

On the other hand, if the ICJ rules at this stage anything less than that there is a plausible case for genocide, Israel and the Biden administration will seize on the verdict to mischaracterise Israel’s assault on Gaza as receiving a clean bill of health from the World Court.

That will be a lie. The judges are being asked only to rule on the matter of genocide, the gravest of the crimes against humanity, where the evidential bar is set very high indeed.

In an international legal system in which nation-states are accorded far more rights than ordinary people, the priority is giving states the freedom to wage wars in which civilians are likely to pay the heaviest price. The gargantuan profits of the West’s military-industrial complex depend on this intentional lacuna in the so-called “rules of war”.

If the court finds – whether for political or legal reasons – that South Africa has failed to make a plausible case, it will not absolve Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Indisputably, it is carrying out both.

Foot dragging

Nonetheless, any reticence on the part of the ICJ will be duly noted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), its heavily compromised sister court. Its job is not to adjudicate between states like the World Court but to gather evidence for the prosecution of individuals who order or carry out war crimes.

It is currently gathering evidence to decide whether to investigate Israeli and Hamas officials over the events of the past three months.

But for years, the same court has been dragging its feet on prosecuting Israeli officials over war crimes that long predate the current assault on Gaza, such as Israel’s decades of building illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, and Israel’s 17-year siege of Gaza – the rarely mentioned context for Hamas’ break-out on 7 October.

The ICC similarly baulked at prosecuting US and British officials over the war crimes their states carried out in invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq.

That followed an intimidation campaign from Washington, which imposed sanctions on the court’s two most senior officials, including freezing their US assets, blocking their international financial transactions and denying them and their families entry to the US.

Terror campaign

Israel’s central argument against genocide last week was that it is defending itself after it was attacked on 7 October, and that the real genocide is being carried out by Hamas against Israel.

Such a claim should be roundly dismissed by the World Court. Israel has no right to defend its decades-long occupation and siege of Gaza, the background to the events of 7 October. And it cannot claim it is targeting a few thousand Hamas fighters when it is bombing, displacing and starving Gaza’s entire civilian population.

Even if Israel’s military campaign is not intended to wipe out the Palestinians of Gaza, as all statements by the Israeli cabinet and military officials indicate, it is nonetheless still directed primarily at civilians.

On the most charitable reading, given the facts, Palestinian civilians are being bombed and killed en masse to cause terror. They are being ethnically cleansed to depopulate Gaza. And they are being subjected to a horrifying form of collective punishment in Israel’s “complete siege” that denies them food, water and power – leading to starvation and exposure to lethal disease – to weaken their will to resist their occupation and seek liberation from absolute Israeli control.

If all of this is the only way Israel can “eradicate Hamas” – its stated goal – then it reveals something Israel and its western patrons would rather we all ignore: that Hamas is so deeply embedded in Gaza precisely because its implacable resistance looks like the only reasonable response to a Palestinian population ever more suffocated by the tightening chokehold of oppression Israel has inflicted on Gaza for decades.

Israel’s weeks of carpet bombing have left Gaza uninhabitable for the vast majority of the population, who have no homes to return to and little in the way of functioning infrastructure. Without massive and constant aid, which Israel is blocking, they will gradually die of dehydration, famine, cold and disease.

In these circumstances, Israel’s actual defence against genocide is an entirely conditional one: it is not committing genocide only if it has correctly estimated that sufficient pressure will mount on Egypt that it feels compelled – or bullied – into opening its border with Gaza and allowing the population to escape.

If Cairo refuses, and Israel does not change course, the people of Gaza are doomed. In a rightly ordered world, a claim of reckless indifference as to whether the Palestinians of Gaza die from conditions Israel has created should be no defence against genocide.

War business as usual

The difficulty for the World Court is that it is on trial as much as Israel – and will lose whichever way it rules. Legal facts and the court’s credibility are in direct conflict with western strategic priorities and war industry profits.

The risk is the judges may feel the safest course is to “split the difference”.

They may exonerate Israel of genocide based on a technicality, while insisting it do more of what it isn’t doing at all: protecting the “humanitarian needs” of Gaza’s people.

Israel dangled just such a technicality before the judges last week like a juicy carrot. Its lawyers argued that, because Israel had not responded to the genocide case made by South Africa at the time of its filing, there was no dispute between the two states. The World Court, Israel suggested, therefore lacked jurisdiction because its role is to settle such disputes.

If accepted, it would mean, as former ambassador Murray noted, that, absurdly, states could be exonerated of genocide simply by refusing to engage with their accusers.

Aeyal Gross, a professor of international law at Tel Aviv University, told the Haaretz newspaper he expected the court to reject any limitations on Israel’s military operations. It would focus instead on humanitarian measures to ease the plight of Gaza’s population.

He also noted that Israel would insist it was already complying – and carry on as before.

The one sticking point, Gross suggested, would be a demand from the World Court that Israel allow international investigators access to the enclave to assess whether war crimes had been committed.

It is precisely this kind of “war business as usual” that will discredit the court – and the international humanitarian law it is supposed to uphold.

Vacuum of leadership

As ever, it is not the West that the world can look to for meaningful leadership on the gravest crises it faces or for efforts to de-escalate conflict.

The only actors showing any inclination to put into practice the moral obligation that should fall to states to intervene to stop genocide are the “terrorists”.

Hezbollah in Lebanon is putting pressure on Israel by incrementally building a second front in the north, while the Houthis in Yemen are improvising their own form of economic sanctions on international shipping passing through the Red Sea.

The US and Britain responded at the weekend with air strikes on Yemen, turning up the heat even higher and threatening to tip the region into a wider war.

With its own investments in the Suez Canal threatened, China, unlike the West, seems desperate to cool things down. Beijing proposed this week an Israel-Palestine peace conference involving a much wider circle of states.

The goal is to loosen Washington’s malevolent stranglehold on pretend “peace-making” and bind all the parties to a commitment to create a Palestinian state.

The West’s narrative is that anyone outside its club – from South Africa and China to Hezbollah and the Houthis – is the enemy, threatening Washington’s “rules-based order”.

But it is that very order that looks increasingly self-serving and discredited – and the foundation for a genocide being inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza in broad daylight.

• First published in Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

On January 11, the UK government, in league with the United States with support from a number of other countries, attacked Houthi positions in Yemen.  The decision had been made without recourse to Parliament and justified by Article 51 of the UN Charter as “limited, necessary and proportionate in self-defence”.

In his statement on the attacks, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pointed to the Houthi’s role in staging “a series of dangerous and destabilising attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea, threatening UK and other international ships, causing major disruption to a vital trade route and driving up commodity prices.”  He made no mention of the Houthis’ own justification for the attacks as necessary measures to disrupt Israeli shipping and interests in response to their systematic, bloodcurdling razing of Gaza.

Lip service has been paid by the executive within the Westminster system to Parliament’s importance in deciding whether the country commits to military action or not.  The stark problem is that the action is always decided upon in advance, and no dissent among parliamentarians will necessarily sway the issue.  Motions can be proposed and rejected but remain non-binding on the executive emboldened by the prerogative.

The British decision to commit to the egregious invasion of Iraq in 2003 was already a foregone conclusion, despite preliminary debates in the House of Commons and huge public protests against the measure.  On March 18, 2011, the then British Prime Minister David Cameron informed the House of his intention to attack Libya, leading to a government motion on March 21 that the chamber “supports Her Majesty’s Government […] in the taking of all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian-protected measures.”

That same year, the then Coalition government in the UK acknowledged that a convention had crystallised in Parliament that the House of Commons should be availed of “an opportunity to debate the matter [of committing troops] and said that it proposed to observe that convention except when there was an emergency and such action would not be appropriate.”

The broadly worded nature of the caveats – in cases of emergency or when it would not be appropriate – have made something of a nonsense of the convention.  In April 2016, Secretary for Defence Michael Fallon made much of the “exception”, arguing that it was “important to ensure that this and future Governments can use their judgment about how best to protect the security and interests of the UK.”

Parliament, in short, should be put in its place when necessary.  Governments know best when it comes to matters of national security; parliamentarians less so.  “In observing the Convention,” Fallon goes on to explain, “we must ensure that the ability of our Armed Forces is to act quickly and decisively, and to maintain the security of their operations, is not compromised.”  In such cases, matters could be dealt with retrospectively, with the government of the day subsequently informing Parliament after the fact.

An example of this absurd policy was played out in the decision by the UK government in April 2018 to target chemical weapons facilities of Syria’s Assad regime.  Hiding behind the weasel word of humanitarianism, the explanation for avoiding Parliament was shoddy and leaden.  “It was necessary,” came the explanation from the PM’s office, “to strike with speed so we could allow our Armed Forces to act decisively, maintain the vital security of their operations, and protect the security and interests of the UK.”

The Yemen strikes eschew humanitarianism (the humanitarian justifications advanced by the Houthis in protecting Palestinian civilians has been rejected), but shipping interests.  The Armed forces minister, James Heappey, was satisfied that an exception to the convention in consulting Parliament had presented itself.  “The Prime Minister,” the minister parroted, “needs to make decisions such as these based on the military, strategic and operational requirements – that led to the timing.”

With the horse having bolted merrily out of the stable, Heappey remarked with all due condescension that Parliament would, in time, be able to respond to the decision to strike Yemen.  An “opportunity” would be made available “when Parliament returns for these things to be fully discussed and debated.”  The sheer redundancy of its role could thereby be affirmed.

Much agitated by this state of affairs, former shadow Chancellor John McDonnell opined that no military action should take place without Parliament’s approval.  “If we have learnt anything in recent years it’s that military intervention in the Middle East always has dangerous & often unforeseen consequences.  There is a risk of setting the region alight.”

Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesperson Layla Moran was of the view that Parliament should not be bypassed in matters of war, yet opting for the rather fatuous formula arising out of the 2011 convention.  “Rushi Sunak must announce a retrospective vote in the House of Commons on these strikes, and recall Parliament this weekend.”

The use of the royal prerogative in using military force remains one of those British perversions that makes for good common room conversation but offends the sensibilities of the democratically minded elector.  A far better practice would be to make the PM of the day accountable to that most essential body of all: Parliament.  That same principle would be extended to other constitutional monarchies, which are similarly weighed down by the all too liberal use of the prerogative when shedding blood.  If a country’s citizens are to go to war to kill and be killed, surely their elected representatives should have a say in that most vital of decisions?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

In a debate on Israel and Palestine in Parliament last week, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Affairs Leo Docherty got up and said:

There is no scenario in which Hamas can be allowed to control Gaza again. That is why we are not calling for a general ceasefire, which would allow Hamas to regroup and entrench their position. I am pleased to say that the government’s position is shared by the Opposition Front Bench. Instead, we are focused on urging respect for international law…

What a fatuous statement. If the UK government had any concern for international law Israel would not have been allowed to breach it continuous and with impunity for the last 75 years and the horrendous slaughter we’ve all been watching would never have happened.

As a foreign office minister, Docherty should be aware that Hamas is the legitimate government in Gaza, having won the last election fair and square. Israel, the US and UK might not like the result but that’s beside the point. What Docherty and his colleagues are contemplating is coercive regime change, which is hardly in line with international law or Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Meanwhile, David Cameron, hurriedly parachuted in from outside Parliament as our new Foreign Secretary and breaching all democratic niceties, was telling everyone that there can be no resolution to the conflict in the Middle East if Hamas is still “armed to the teeth” and capable of attacking Israel. And he defended the UK’s decision to abstain on the UN vote for a Gaza ceasefire on the grounds that the UN was calling for an immediate armistice plus a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, and “those two things don’t go together… If you have an immediate ceasefire but Hamas [is] still armed to the teeth, launching rockets into Israel, wanting to repeat 7 October, you’ll never have a two-state solution.

“Long-term security I think requires there to be a state for Palestine as well,” he said, sounding wonderfully generous, adding that he did not agree with “disappointing” comments made by Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, on Wednesday 13 December that Tel Aviv would not back a two-state solution.

Had he been paying attention Cameron would know that the apartheid regime, from its very inception in 1948, has refused to contemplate the existence of a Palestinian state. That would thwart Israel’s ambition to establish sovereignty over the entire territory “from the river to the sea”, which is the express aim of Hotovely’s (and Netanyahu’s) vile party, Likud.

Britain, on the other hand, promised a Palestinian state back in 1915 but repeatedly reneged on it – in 1917, in 1923, in 1948 – and continues to sidestep the issue while forever prattling on about a two-state solution.

Cameron is also saying that Israel “must take stronger action to stop settler violence and hold the perpetrators accountable”. But his lordship should be telling Israel to do much more than that. To comply with international law Israel must remove its settlers and its thuggish military from the West Bank altogether, remembering that the West Bank includes East Jerusalem (and the Old City) and Gaza.

What needs eliminating is the threat posed by Israel

As I write, Cameron is changing tack slightly and now calling for a “sustainable” ceasefire because it has dawned on him that “too many civilians have been killed” by Israel. A joint article in the Sunday Times by him and German Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock comes amid growing pressure on Israel over its methods in the war on Gaza. It states: “We do not believe that calling right now for a general and immediate ceasefire, hoping it somehow becomes permanent, is the way forward. It ignores why Israel is forced to defend itself: Hamas barbarically attacked Israel and still fires rockets to kill Israeli citizens every day.”

The usual misinformation. They ignore why the Palestinians are compelled to defend themselves, i.e. the brutal and murderous decades-long illegal occupation by Israel using military force.

“Hamas must lay down its arms,” say Cameron and Baerbock. And in a tepid warning to Israel, the two foreign ministers say: “Israel has the right to defend itself but, in doing so, it must abide by international humanitarian law. Israel will not win this war if its operations destroy the prospect of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians. They have a right to eliminate the threat posed by Hamas.”

But do they really? Where in international law does it say that an illegal occupier (such as Israel) can claim self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it illegally occupies?

Under UN Resolution 37/43, however, the Palestinians, as victims of illegal military occupation, have an unquestionable right to eliminate the threat posed by Israel in their struggle for “liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle”.

Resolution 37/43 also condemns “the constant and deliberate violations of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, as well as the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East, which constitute an obstacle to the achievement of self-determination and independence by the Palestinian people and a threat to peace and stability in the region”.

The Palestinians’ right to armed struggle in self-defence is also confirmed in UN Resolution 3246, which calls for all States to recognise the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subject to colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation and to offer them moral, material and other forms of assistance in their struggle to exercise fully their inalienable right to self-determination and independence.

Resolution 3246 reaffirms the legitimacy of the peoples’ struggle for liberation from colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation by all available means, including armed struggle, and demands full respect for the basic human rights of all individuals detained or imprisoned as a result of their struggle for self-determination and independence, and strict respect for article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights under which no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

There’s no sign that Cameron and the rest of the UK government understand any of this.

And what right does the UK have to prevent Palestinians choosing their own government? None. The correct way to “eliminate the threat posed by Hamas” is to require Israel to end its occupation.

International law trampled to suit Israeli plans for domination

It is ludicrous to keep repeating that Israel must abide by international humanitarian law. Israel has no intention of doing so, and everyone knows it. Israel wants to dominate the Holy Land and has made that abundantly clear. Western governments and Western Christendom seem paralysed. The presumption must be that Biden and Cameron (both self-proclaimed Zionists, as were most of their predecessors) are overly sympathetic towards Israel and happy to trample international law to ensure the success of the apartheid regime’s criminal enterprise.

Many in the UK question why our parliamentarians are so concerned about the 1,200 Israeli dead following Hamas’s breakout attack and the 200-odd hostages when they couldn’t care less about the 10,651 Palestinians (including 656 women and 2,270 children) slaughtered by Israel in the 23 years before 7 October. Or the 7,200 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails, including 88 women and 250 children. Over 1,200 are held under “administrative detention” without charge or trial and denied due process.

An authority on international law, Dr Ralph Wilde, has produced a legal opinion on the Israeli occupation which might be helpful in putting an end to Cameron’s & co’s claptrap.

He points out that:

• There’s no valid basis in international law for the occupation and it is an unlawful use of force, an aggression, and a violation on the part of Israel against the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. And aggression is a crime on an individual level for senior Israeli leaders. “As a result, the occupation is existentially illegal and must end immediately.”
• What’s more, an end to the occupation cannot be delayed by Israel’s failure to agree to the adoption of a peace agreement or by the unreadiness of the Palestinian people, by ‘facts on the ground’, or by waiting for the approval of the UN, the Quartet, the White House, the British Foreign Office or anybody else. Every day the occupation continues is a breach of international law.
• Palestinian people are treated in international law as a collective entity with rights, notably the right of self-determination and the right to freely choose whether or not to enter into international agreements. Palestine is what’s called a Self-determination Unit. The territory it covers is everything that is ‘not Israel’, legally, and includes Al-Quds/Jerusalem in its entirety, the rest of the West Bank beyond East Jerusalem, and Gaza.
• Israel’s recognition and UN membership did not include sovereignty over any part of Al-Quds/Jerusalem. Palestinians also enjoy the right of external self-determination (i.e. freedom from external domination) which has been universally accepted and affirmed by states and UN institutions including the General Assembly, the Security Council, and the International Court of Justice.
• And Palestine is a state in the international law sense because (a) there’s a presumption in favour of statehood for people with a right of external self-determination; and (b) a large majority (138) of the world’s states collectively recognized Palestinian statehood when the UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to re-designate Palestine’s status from ‘non-member Entity’ to ‘non-member State’. This had the effect of establishing statehood.
• External self-determination is a right to be free of any external domination, including occupation or other forms of non-sovereign territorial control which prevent the full exercise of that right. Such domination must end so that this right can be exercised.
• The right operates and exists simply and exclusively by virtue of the Palestinian people being entitled to it. It is not something that depends on anyone else agreeing to it, such as Israel, the Quartet, the UN, other states, etc. It is a right; so there is no need for Palestinians to negotiate or compromise with Israelis as the price for ending their occupation.
• Israel’s exercising control over the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, preventing the Palestinian people from full and effective self-governance, has for decades been a fundamental impediment to the realization of the right of self-determination which the Palestinian people are entitled to enjoy under international law. And there was no actual or imminent armed attack that justified the occupation as a means of self-defence prior to 7 October.
• Furthermore, there is no right under international law to maintain the occupation pending a peace agreement, or for creating ‘facts on the ground’ that might give Israel advantages in relation to such an agreement, or as a means of coercing the Palestinian people into agreeing on a situation they would not accept otherwise.
• Implanting settlers in the hope of eventually acquiring territory is a violation of occupation law by Israel and a war crime on the part of the individuals involved. And it is a violation of Israel’s legal obligation to respect the sovereignty of another state and a violation of Israel’s legal obligation to respect the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people; also a violation of Israel’s obligations in the international law on the use of force. Ending these violations involves immediate removal of the settlers and the settlements from occupied land and an immediate end to Israel’s exercise of control, including its use of military force, over those areas of the West Bank.

Advice to Messrs Sunak, Cameron and Docherty is surely to first get on the right side of international law – and human decency – and recognise Palestinian statehood without any more foot-dragging. Furthermore, to join with other states and tell Israel, firmly, that all cooperation, collaboration and favoured nation privileges are cancelled until the apartheid regime ends its illegal occupation, removes its squatters, lifts its siege, ceases interference with free movement and fulfils its obligations under the UN Charter and resolutions. And completes a probationary period demonstrating good behaviour before being welcomed back into the community of nations.

Otherwise, what is international law worth? Our political leaders must realise that the British public don’t want a so-called ally that’s bent on genocide and the wholesale destruction of another people’s homeland and heritage, and is as hateful, racist and disrespectful of human rights and norms as Israel has been for as long as most of us can remember.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

In defiance of collective cabinet responsibility, Braverman roguishly challenged his wisdom, and that of the Metropolitan Police she was meant to control, in permitting pro-Palestinian protests to take place on Armistice Day.  Prior to that, she had also thrown some acid upon the issue of homelessness in Britain.  “The British people are compassionate.  We will always support those who are genuinely homeless.  But we cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice.”

In the end, Sunak went for the sacking option.  But it was what followed Braverman’s banishment, rather than her demise, that got tongues wagging and eyes popping.  Having been sighted at Downing Street, former Prime Minister David Cameron piqued the curiosity of a few press bloodhounds.  A Cabinet reshuffle was probably in order, but no one suggested that he was going to emerge as Foreign Secretary, replacing James Cleverly, who promptly took over at the Home Office.

Here was the individual who had presided over a period of savage austerity cuts, many initiated during the time the Tories found themselves in coalition with the Liberal Democrats after 2010.  Cameron was also instrumental in taking Britain to the 2016 Brexit referendum with brazen indifference to the consequences of leaving the European Union, losing it with an airy complacency, then leaving British politics so as not to be a distraction to his successor.  Seven years of chaos and four prime ministers followed.

In 2021, the oleaginous Cameron showed that he could emulate the ethically threadbare approach to politics and private interest so gleefully adopted by other Tory grandees.  His name will be forever paired with the failed finance company, Greensill Capital.  The company’s boss, the Australian banker Lex Greensill, was given office space in Downing Street during Cameron’s premiership, subsequently becoming Cameron’s confidante and employer.  The former PM had been a vigorous lobbyist for Greensill Capital’s business efforts, making £8.2 million in the process.  When it collapsed in March 2021, investors found that billions of dollars had vanished.

Cameron proved instrumental, if not a frightful nuisance, in lobbying senior civil servants to permit the supply chain company access to government-backed loans made through the Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF).  Using money obtained under the pandemic scheme (never ignore the personal and corporate riches a crisis can bring), Greensill would be able to increase its loans to such borrowers as GFG Alliance, controlled by the steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta.

Cameron’s efforts paid off: the British Business Bank (BBB) eventually authorised Greensill to lend a smaller amount of such taxpayer-backed funds under the CLBILS (Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme).  Unfortunately, Greensill proved gluttonous, evading the limitations imposed by the loan scheme and taking a particular shine to Gupta’s company group.  The threshold of loaning £50 million to any one single entity was contemptuously ignored: Gupta’s companies received as much as £400 million across eight loans.

In being questioned by parliamentarians, Cameron glowed with insincerity to the accusation that he had, as Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh put it, “demeaned” himself and his position “by WhatsApp-ing” his way around Whitehall.  The answer was very much in keeping with a political tradition celebrated by Tony Blair’s New Labour.  “I would never put forward something that I didn’t think was absolutely in the interests of the public good, and that’s what I thought I was doing for Greensill.”  Throwing in the idiot’s card, he professed ignorance to the company’s troubles when trying to lobby the government.  Besides, lobbying was “a necessary and healthy part of our democratic process”.

Labour strategists were shocked but delighted by Cameron’s return.  The party’s National Campaign Coordinator, Pat McFadden, suggested that the move could finally put to rest any suggestions that Sunak was a prime minister keen on “change”.  “A few weeks ago Rishi Sunak said David Cameron was part of a failed status quo, now he’s bringing him back as his life raft.”  And Cameron, for his part, had also sniped at Sunak for being short sighted in cancelling the Northern leg of the HS2 rail line between Birmingham and Manchester.

For those familiar with cricket – and how the English have historically played it – seasoned, long in the tooth veterans have been called upon to hold the fort in times of crisis.  Wobbly teams always return to weathered experience.  During the torrid tour of Australia over 1974-5, the battered tourists called upon the services of Colin Cowdrey who, despite not playing a Test for four years, was still considered one of the finest players of fast bowling in the country.  That did not prevent the Australian press deriding the English cricket team as “Dad’s Army,” a term given to the volunteers of the British Home Guard during the Second World War.  Cowdrey’s physical bravery against the Australian thunderbolts cast by Jeffrey Thompson and Dennis Lillee did not prevent a rout, but it was pugnaciously impressive.

Cameron, however, is no Cowdrey.  While the cricketer stood up against one of the most fearsome red ball attacks in history, Cameron created a mess he exited with craven swiftness.  His presence is unlikely to prevent a Tory defeat at the next election.  It may, in fact, make it worse.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

These occasions are never challenged, nor impugned.  The origins of the war that gave name to the occasion are simplified, if they are ever mentioned.  And never shall that injunction be violated.  That is certainly the view of Suella Braverman, the UK Home Secretary who must be increasingly getting under the skin of the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.

Being a cut and dried jingo, Braverman treats Armistice Day as the sort of occasion to be revered and kept in aspic.  No politics should ever enter unless she politicises it, nor criticism about war and its viciousness be permitted.  Peaceniks are especially reviled.  Remember debts and lost lives; never ask why those debts were incurred in the first place.

There is then a supreme irony in terms of Braverman’s views on peace protests that take place on Armistice Day, one which, by definition, involved the laying down of arms and the cessation of conflict.  But that is the lot of the war loving demagogue in search of votes: irony is rarely acknowledged.

In a throat grabbing exercise of some ferocity against the vast sea of protests against the Israel-Hamas War, Braverman took to The Times to attack marches running into the hundreds of thousands as an unquestioned “assertion of primacy by certain groups – particular Islamists”.  She was particularly beside herself that they should take place on, of all days, November 11.

For the Home Secretary, these were unquestionably “hate” marches that would be more commonly associated with the lusty sectarians of Northern Island.  Even worse were those selective senior officers in the Metropolitan Police picking favourites when it came to protests.  “Right-wing and nationalist protestors who engage in aggression are rightly met with a stern response yet pro-Palestinian mobs displaying almost identical behaviour are largely ignored, even when clearly breaking the law?”  By the time Braverman had finished her bulldozing, she had insulted the whole constituency of Northern Ireland, mocked those favouring the Palestinian cause for freedom, and lacerated the operational independence of London’s own police forces.

The sense about Braverman making her own unilateral dash in all of this was confirmed by a spokesperson for Sunak.  The article, we are told, was not “cleared” by Number 10 ahead of time.  Editorial suggestions made by the PM’s office were roundly ignored.  As for the Saturday protest, Sunak had met the Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley ahead of time to discuss security regarding the march.  Neither thought it problematic that it should take place, given that the protests would avoid the Whitehall area and stay away from The Cenotaph, where the customary, holy delusions were to take place.

Her views have certainly struck a satisfactory note for some, suggesting that such feigned outrage might have some political weight among the spectral majority populists always love screeching about.  “In her comments about the pro-Palestinian Armistice Day protests and the actions of the police, Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, was bravely stating what the majority of the country thinks,” wrote one reader of The Daily Telegraph.

The Daily Mail agreed, expressing fury at the “soft policing of these protests” packed with “snarling bigots” contemptuous of Britain’s glorious history of war.   Tory deputy chair Lee Anderson affirmed the position, claiming the Home Secretary was merely “guilty of saying what most of us are thinking”.

These were certainly not the views shared by a number of Conservatives. Lord Soames, for one, opined that, whether in agreement or not with the pro-Palestinian protests, they should go ahead.  “It’s nowhere near the Cenotaph.  It’s in the afternoon and most of these people, 90% of those people are not there to make trouble.”

Ex-cabinet minister Baroness Warsi firmly insisted that Braverman be sacked.  “She’d been briefed by the Met of what the route of the march was going to be, and the fact that they didn’t have concerns at this stage, she has now made this a live political issue because that’s the way she operates, right?”  As a result, patriots had turned into arsonists.  “They set this country alight, they pit community against community, they create these fires.  And that is not the job of a government.”

Dominic Grieve, who served as attorney general between 2010 and 2014, had one line of advice for Sunak: “The best thing the Prime Minister can do for us is to ensure that there is a new home secretary (before Sunday).”  That she remains in office suggests not just Sunak’s absence of backbone, but Braverman’s imminent bid for his job.  To now sack her would be something the newly minted martyr would be able to dine out on for months to come, all the time plotting for a Number 10 bid.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

These occasions are never challenged, nor impugned.  The origins of the war that gave name to the occasion are simplified, if they are ever mentioned.  And never shall that injunction be violated.  That is certainly the view of Suella Braverman, the UK Home Secretary who must be increasingly getting under the skin of the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.

Being a cut and dried jingo, Braverman treats Armistice Day as the sort of occasion to be revered and kept in aspic.  No politics should ever enter unless she politicises it, nor criticism about war and its viciousness be permitted.  Peaceniks are especially reviled.  Remember debts and lost lives; never ask why those debts were incurred in the first place.

There is then a supreme irony in terms of Braverman’s views on peace protests that take place on Armistice Day, one which, by definition, involved the laying down of arms and the cessation of conflict.  But that is the lot of the war loving demagogue in search of votes: irony is rarely acknowledged.

In a throat grabbing exercise of some ferocity against the vast sea of protests against the Israel-Hamas War, Braverman took to The Times to attack marches running into the hundreds of thousands as an unquestioned “assertion of primacy by certain groups – particular Islamists”.  She was particularly beside herself that they should take place on, of all days, November 11.

For the Home Secretary, these were unquestionably “hate” marches that would be more commonly associated with the lusty sectarians of Northern Island.  Even worse were those selective senior officers in the Metropolitan Police picking favourites when it came to protests.  “Right-wing and nationalist protestors who engage in aggression are rightly met with a stern response yet pro-Palestinian mobs displaying almost identical behaviour are largely ignored, even when clearly breaking the law?”  By the time Braverman had finished her bulldozing, she had insulted the whole constituency of Northern Ireland, mocked those favouring the Palestinian cause for freedom, and lacerated the operational independence of London’s own police forces.

The sense about Braverman making her own unilateral dash in all of this was confirmed by a spokesperson for Sunak.  The article, we are told, was not “cleared” by Number 10 ahead of time.  Editorial suggestions made by the PM’s office were roundly ignored.  As for the Saturday protest, Sunak had met the Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley ahead of time to discuss security regarding the march.  Neither thought it problematic that it should take place, given that the protests would avoid the Whitehall area and stay away from The Cenotaph, where the customary, holy delusions were to take place.

Her views have certainly struck a satisfactory note for some, suggesting that such feigned outrage might have some political weight among the spectral majority populists always love screeching about.  “In her comments about the pro-Palestinian Armistice Day protests and the actions of the police, Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, was bravely stating what the majority of the country thinks,” wrote one reader of The Daily Telegraph.

The Daily Mail agreed, expressing fury at the “soft policing of these protests” packed with “snarling bigots” contemptuous of Britain’s glorious history of war.   Tory deputy chair Lee Anderson affirmed the position, claiming the Home Secretary was merely “guilty of saying what most of us are thinking”.

These were certainly not the views shared by a number of Conservatives. Lord Soames, for one, opined that, whether in agreement or not with the pro-Palestinian protests, they should go ahead.  “It’s nowhere near the Cenotaph.  It’s in the afternoon and most of these people, 90% of those people are not there to make trouble.”

Ex-cabinet minister Baroness Warsi firmly insisted that Braverman be sacked.  “She’d been briefed by the Met of what the route of the march was going to be, and the fact that they didn’t have concerns at this stage, she has now made this a live political issue because that’s the way she operates, right?”  As a result, patriots had turned into arsonists.  “They set this country alight, they pit community against community, they create these fires.  And that is not the job of a government.”

Dominic Grieve, who served as attorney general between 2010 and 2014, had one line of advice for Sunak: “The best thing the Prime Minister can do for us is to ensure that there is a new home secretary (before Sunday).”  That she remains in office suggests not just Sunak’s absence of backbone, but Braverman’s imminent bid for his job.  To now sack her would be something the newly minted martyr would be able to dine out on for months to come, all the time plotting for a Number 10 bid.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Hasbara has become a dirty word, thanks to it’s dirt practitioners and the dirty job they are trained to do.

It’s Hebrew for Israel’s sophisticated public relations machinery that’s set up to cynically justify the Jewish entity’s crimes and to create for Israel a “brand image” completely at odds with the ugly truth.

Fiction and distortion are among hasbara’s standard propaganda tools used for spinning fairy tales and propagating disinformation. And it is very effective, up to a point. The reason why it will ultimately fail is that it has very poor material to work with. You cannot behave like psychopaths and disguise it forever. You cannot trample other peoples’ rights and freedoms, and destroy their property, and expect to be loved. You cannot keep your jackboot on your neighbour’s neck for 75 years and expect to call yourself civilised and in tune with Western values. You cannot steal his lands, water and livelihood at gunpoint and claim the moral high ground.

And you certainly cannot create a wholesome brand image from bullshit.

I wrote this 10 years ago, and nothing has changed, only got worse.

Israel’s book of lies

The great mystery is why Western politicians and media outlets, after 75 years of Israel’s existence, are still so ignorant about what’s been happening and the countless crimes committed in pursuit of Zionist ambitions.

Israel’s propagandists have a training manual that teaches the art of hasbara – the sugarcoating techniques and downright lying to persuade the gullible to swallow their poison.

Notice how everything Israelis dislike, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labelled “Iranian-backed” or “Hamas controlled”. They’d have us all believe we are in mortal danger from Iran and must huddle together in a collective act of aggression orchestrated by Tel Aviv, Washington and London.

The 116-page instruction manual, called the 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was produced by The Israel Project (TIP), which says it is “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace”. It was written specially for those “on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”.

TIP provides journalists, leaders and opinion-formers with “accurate information about Israel”. Its purpose is to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war by persuading international audiences to accept the Israeli narrative and agree that the regime’s crimes are necessary for Israel’s security and in line with “shared values” between Israel and the West. And because God gave them the keys to the Holy Land, their abominable behaviour is deserving of our support.

I suspect Messrs Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly, Keir Starmer and the rest of Israel’s stooges in Westminster carry this training manual in their pocket, which accounts for the claptrap they constantly spout and their inexplicable infatuation with the rogue state.

The manual teaches the propaganda tricks that Israel’s scribblers and drivelers use to try to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and its contempt for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweet.

They tell us, for example, how many rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel but never how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited kind) Israel’s US-taxpayer-funded F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats pour into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza.

And they are careful not to mention, for example, that Ben Gurion airport, which serves Tel Aviv, was formerly Lydda airport. Lydda was a major Arab town and communications hub during the British Mandate and designated Palestinian in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In July 1948 Israeli terrorists seized the town, shot it up and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported how the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque.

Out of a population of 19,000, only 1,052 were allowed to stay. Others who survived the killing spree were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat, leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way. Israel has no right to Lydda at all – they stole it in a terror raid, just like Najd/Sderot and hundreds of other Palestinian cities, towns and villages.

“Captain of Spin” returns

I’m horrified to see Mark Regev making a comeback to our screens and being interviewed by British media. Regev (real name Freiberg) is an ace propagandist, master of disinformation, whitewasher extraordinaire and personal adviser and spokesman for the apartheid regime’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

While he was ambassador to the UK one of his senior political officers, Shai Masot, plotted with stooges among British MPs and other maggots in the political woodwork to “take down” senior government figures, including Sir Alan Duncan at the Foreign Office. Masot’s hostile scheming was captured and revealed by an Al Jazeera undercover investigation and not, regrettably, by Britain’s own security services and press. “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed,” said the British government afterwards.

It should have resulted in Regev being kicked out, but he wasn’t.

Regev is quoted several times in the Global Language Dictionary in its attempts to justify Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, land-grabbing, cruelty and blatant disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions, and to make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of persuasive language. It also incites hatred, particularly towards Hamas and Iran, and is designed to hoodwink all us simple-minded Americans and Europeans into believing we actually share values with the racist regime, and therefore ought to support and forgive its abominable behaviour.

Readers are instructed to “clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas” and to drive a wedge between them. The manual features “Words that work” – that is to say, carefully constructed language to deflect criticism and reframe all issues and arguments in Israel’s favour. A statement at the very beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”

Here’s an example:

Israel made painful sacrifices and took a risk to give peace a chance. They voluntarily removed over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, abandoning homes, schools, businesses and places of worship in the hopes of renewing the peace process.

Despite making an overture for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel continues to face terrorist attacks, including rocket attacks and drive-by shootings of innocent Israelis. Israel knows that for a lasting peace, they must be free from terrorism and live with defensible borders.

Actually, Israel made no sacrifices at all – Gaza wasn’t theirs to keep and staying was unsustainable. Although they removed their settlers and troops, they continued to occupy Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters and control all entrances and exits, thus keeping the population bottled up and provoking acts of resistance that give Israel a bogus excuse to turn Gaza into a prison.

International law regards Israel as still the occupier.

The manual also serves as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers that Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks recruited to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet. It uses some of Regev’s words to provide disinformation essential to the hasbara programme. We’re told, for example, that the most effective way to build support for Israel is to talk about “working toward a lasting peace” that “respects the rights of everyone in the region”.

Here are a few more:

We welcome and we support international efforts to help the Palestinians. So, once again, the Palestinian people are not our enemy. On the contrary, we want peace with the Palestinians.

We’re interested in a historical reconciliation. Enough violence. Enough war. And we support international efforts to help the Palestinians both on the humanitarian level and to build a more successful democratic society. That’s in everyone’s interest.

The central lie, of course, is that Israel wants peace. It doesn’t. It never has. Peace simply does not suit Israel’s purpose, which is endless expansion and control. That is why Israel has never declared its borders, maintains its brutal military occupation and continues its programme of illegal squats, or so-called “settlements”, deep inside Palestinian territory, intending to create sufficient “facts on the ground” to ensure permanent occupation and annexation.

Q: Why did Israel use disproportionate force in Gaza?

A: The devastation in Gaza is heartbreaking. So much suffering that was so unnecessary. And none of it had to happen.

Israel left Gaza – uprooting 9,000 Israeli families, and turned it over, peacefully, to the Palestinians. They had every opportunity to succeed: support from the international community, financial aid from across the globe, and the aspirations of the people.

Israel gave up Gaza with every hope that this was the first step towards peace with the Palestinians, and all they got was rockets in return. Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands of rockets. Not monthly. Not weekly. Literally daily. Even since the fighting in Gaza stopped, more than 160 rockets been fired from Gaza towards Israel since Israel stopped fighting.

What would you have done – or wanted your government to do – if you and your family were under rocket attack every day? When will the terrorists in Gaza stop shooting rockets at Israeli civilians?

You and I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to live on land we’d stolen from the Palestinians at gunpoint.

It was the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Anan, that put four benchmarks on the table. And he said, speaking for the international community that

If Hamas reforms itself…

If Hamas recognises my country’s right to live in freedom…

If Hamas renounces terrorism against innocent civilians…

If Hamas supports international agreements that are being signed and agreed to concerning the peace process… then the door is open. But unfortunately – tragically – Hamas has failed to meet even one of those four benchmarks. And that’s why today Hamas is isolated internationally. Even the United Nations refuses to speak to Hamas.

Which of those benchmarks has Israel met, Mr Regev?

Iran must be demonised too, so Regev’s twisted wisdom is used again:

Israel is very concerned about the Iranian nuclear programme. And for good reason.

Iran’s president openly talks about wiping Israel off the map. We see them racing ahead on nuclear enrichment so they can have enough fissile material to build a bomb. We see them working on their ballistic missiles…. The Iranian nuclear programme is a threat, not just to my country, but to the entire region. And it’s incumbent upon us all to do what needs to be done to keep from proliferating.

But how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? And why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

As for “wiping Israel off the map”, accurate translations of that remark by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are: “This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” (The Guardian), or “This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history” (Middle East Media Research Institute). Ahmadinejad was actually repeating a statement once made by Ayatollah Khomeini.

And one more:

When asked a direct question, you don’t have to answer it directly. You are in control of what you say and how you say it. Remember, your goal in doing interviews is not only to answer questions—it is to bring persuadable members of the audience to Israel’s side in the conflict. Start by acknowledging their question and agreeing that both sides – Israelis and Palestinians – deserve a better future. Remind your audience that Israel wants peace. Then focus on shared values. Once you have done this you will have built enough support for you to say what Israel really wants: for the Palestinians to end the violence and the culture of hate so that fences and checkpoints are no longer needed and both sides can live in peace. And for Iran for Iran-backed terrorists in Gaza to stop shooting rockets into Israel so that both sides can have a better future.

A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick – that is just about the time the public will wake up and say “Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!

Why is all this elaborate lying and misquoting necessary? It’s the good old Mossad motto “By deception we shall do war”, ingrained in the Israeli mindset.

And I’m even more horrified to have just seen Trevor Phillips giving Tzipi Livni a platform. This vile woman, Israel’s former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror that brought death and destruction to Gaza’s civilians during the blitzkrieg known as Operation Cast Lead. Showing no remorse, and with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) on her hands and thousands more horribly maimed, Livni’s office issued a statement saying she was proud of it. Speaking later at a conference at Tel Aviv’s Institute for Security Studies, she said: “I would today take the same decisions.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

I never thought I’d live to see a British prime minister warmly embracing a war criminal and genocidal thug like Netanyahu, go swanning around a hotel (the King David) which was used as the Jerusalem headquarters of the British Mandate aúthority and blown up by Jewish terrorists in 1946, killing 91 and wounding 45, then tell Netanyahu: “We want you to win.”

Win what, exactly? And who’s “we”? Certainly not the man-in-the-street in Britain. No, it’ll be that band of brainwashed Ziofreaks in Westminster who have shamed us for over a century.

And they (the Ziofreaks, not “we”) want Israel to win its dirty 75-year campaign of terror, illegal military occupation, dispossession, annexation, ethnic cleansing and extreme cruelty against the harshly oppressed Palestinians who are trying to defend their homeland.

I was even more infuriated to see queues of lorries carrying desperately needed aid held up for days at Gaza’s Rafah crossing into Egypt by the Israelis’ refusal to let them enter the mangled hell-hole they’ve created in the packed enclave. I hear they even bombed the crossing to make sure nothing could move.

Bypass Israel if necessary and deliver aid by sea

If the UN and the high and mighty powers wanted to, they could bypass Israeli and Egyptian cruelty and bring aid to Gaza by sea. They should have done so as soon as Israel slapped its illegal blockade on Gaza in 2006 following Hamas’s inconvenient election win. As it is, unarmed privateers have been left to try to break the siege.

In February 2003 British surgeon David Halpin chartered a small Danish cargo vessel, MV Barbara, filled her with important humanitarian items and sailed from Torquay to Ashdod, a port on the Israeli coast close to Gaza where the cargo was transferred by road into Gaza without too much trouble.

In 2008 two humanitarian vessels actually got through to Gaza. Their success in breaking the siege, and their safe arrival and departure, was due to the intervention of the British Foreign Office. Before the peace activists set sail, they asked the British government “to ensure the freedom boats’ safe and uninterrupted passage to Gaza considering these are international waters and Palestinian territorial waters”. Any attempt to stop the boats would surely infringe the right to freedom of movement to and from Gaza, and seriously breach the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Israel is a party.

The minister in charge of Middle East affairs Kim Howells later admitted that “FCO officials spoke to Israeli officials in advance of the trip and Israel allowed the boats peacefully into Gaza.”

Nearly three years later, as Gaza Freedom Flotilla II prepared to sail, Israel was determined not to let the boats reach their destination because safe arrival would drive a coach and horses through Israel’s control-freakery. This prompted the following statement by flotilla organizers to the UN Human Rights Council:

“We are determined to sail to Gaza. Our cause is just and our means are transparent. To underline the fact that we do not present an imminent threat to Israel nor do we aim to contribute to a war effort against Israel, thus eliminating any claim by Israel to self-defense, we invite the HRC or any other UN or international agency to come on board and inspect our vessels at their point of departure, on the high seas, or on their arrival in the Gaza port. We will – and must – continue to sail until the illegal siege of Gaza is ended and Palestinians have the same human and national rights those of us sailing enjoy.” – Steering Committee of the International Coalition for Gaza Freedom Flotilla II.

In the end Flotilla II didn’t sail. In all, five shipments were reportedly allowed access prior to the 2008–09 Gaza War, but after that everything was blocked by Israel.

In May 2010 the Mavi Marmara took part in a flotilla of ships operated by activist groups from 37 countries with the intention of directly confronting the Israeli blockade. While en route and in international waters Israeli Naval Forces communicated to them that a naval blockade around the Gaza area was in force and ordered the ships to follow them to Ashdod port or be boarded. The ships declined and were boarded in international waters.

Reports from journalists on the Mavi Marmara and from the UN claimed that Israeli gunboats opened fire with live rounds before boarding the ship. Passengers tried to repell the boarding parties of  Israeli commandos, and in the violent clash that followed nine were killed and a tenth died four years later of his wounds. Several dozen more were injured, some seriously. Israel claimed 10 of its troops were injured, one seriously.

The UN’s official report found Israel’s blockade of Gaza to be legal, but other UN experts, reporting to the Human Rights Council, disagreed and found it was a violation of international law.

A UN fact-finding mission, investigating the assault on the Mavi Marmara, declared that “no case can be made for the legality of the interception” and they therefore found that the interception was illegal and constituted collective punishment of the people living in the Gaza Strip and thus to be illegal and contrary to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It could not even be justified even under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations [the right of self-defence].

The Centre for Constitutional Rights also concluded that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip was illegal under international law and amounted to collective punishment. “The flotilla did not seek to travel to Israel, let alone ‘attack’ Israel. Furthermore, the flotilla did not constitute an act which required an ‘urgent’ response, such that Israel had to launch a middle-of-the-night armed boarding… Israel could also have diplomatically engaged Turkey, arranged for a third party to verify there were no weapons onboard and then peacefully guided the vessel to Gaza.”

Craig Murray, an internationally recognized authority on these matters, was Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and responsible for giving political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He said that Israel had tried to justify previous fatal attacks on neutral civilian vessels on the High Seas in terms of enforcing an embargo under the legal cover given by the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea. “San Remo only applies to blockade in times of armed conflict. Israel is not currently engaged in an armed conflict, and presumably does not wish to be. San Remo does not confer any right to impose a permanent blockade outwith times of armed conflict, and in fact specifically excludes as illegal a general blockade on an entire population.”

At the same time UN Security Council resolution 1860 (2009) emphasised “the need to ensure sustained and regular flow of goods and people through the Gaza crossings” and called for “the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment”.

But when MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides put a question to the EU Commission this was their reply:

After the organisation of a flotilla heading to Gaza in May 2010, the Quartet, of which the EU is a member, stated that all those wishing to deliver goods to Gaza should do so through established channels, so that their cargo can be inspected and transferred via land crossings into Gaza. It also stated that there was no need for unnecessary confrontations and that all parties should act responsibly in meeting the needs of the people of Gaza….

The Commission stands by this line. A flotilla is not the appropriate response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza. At the same time, Israel must abide by international law when dealing with a possible flotilla. The EU continues to request the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, including the naval blockade.

It might have been scripted in Tel Aviv and not by anyone with Christian principles. The “established channel” for delivering goods to Gaza is of course the time-honoured route by sea, which is protected by maritime and international law and therefore entirely appropriate.

There’s nothing “provocative” about unarmed vessels with humanitarian cargoes using it. The organizers had offered their cargoes for inspection and verification by a trusted third party to allay Israel’s fears about weapon supplies. They should not have to deal with a belligerent regime that was (and still is) cruelly waging a starvation war on women and children. Anyone suggesting they must do so seeks to legitimize the blockade, which we all know to be illegal and a crime against humanity.

And where are the UN when a rogue nation – also a UN member – shows contempt for their maritime Convention?

By 2018 Her Majesty’s Government had abandoned all pretence of upholding the Law of the Seas or even pursuing its 2008 policy of intervening to obtain advance clearance from the Israeli authorities. The Foreign Office appeared to have joined the Zionist conspiracy to legitimise the Gaza blockade and support Israel’s control-freakery.

Lord Ahmad for the Government, answering a written question in the House of Lords, said: “Embassy officials discussed the travelling flotilla with the Israeli authorities on 6 June….. the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advises against all travel to Gaza including the waters off Gaza.”

The waters off Gaza are international waters where neutral civilian vessels are entitled to free passage under the UN Conventional on the Law of the Seas. Why shouldn’t unarmed aid boats be able sail there unmolested? Is the Law of the Seas now dead? Is Britain no longer committed to keeping the sea lanes open to innocent shipping? And why is the UN not upholdings its own Convention?

In particular, what happened to the diplomacy of 2008? Why didn’t our Government arrange advance clearance as before? Or were they, by any chance, colluding to thwart this mercy mission?

In reply to a question from myself, Alister Burt, minister for the Middle East at that time, said: “Delivery of aid should be co-ordinated with the UN and Israeli and Egyptian Governments. We expect Israel to show restraint and fully respect international law. If wrongdoing has taken place we expect those responsible to be held to account…. We remain deeply concerned about restrictions on movement and access in Gaza, and the impact that this is having on the humanitarian situation. We have frequent discussions with the Israeli Government about the need to ease restrictions on Gaza. We call on Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt to work together to ensure a durable solution for Gaza.”

As if Israel ever respected international law or had ever been held to account.

So here we have a horrific humanitarian crisis where the population of Gaza (nearly half of whom are children) are badly injured, starving and bombed out of their homes, with few if any public services still functioning and with aid waiting outside and prevented from entering by Israel.

This is an acid test for the United Nations and the international community who need to show their real worth and recover the respect they have carelessly lost over the years.

They are drinking in the Last Chance saloon and this is possibly their final opportunity to prove that the world has, after all, developed moral sensibilities and emerged from the caveman era. All it takes is a mercy flotilla of ships belonging to few UN member states, not privateers, to bring the Middle East issue to a head so the root causes can finally be dealt with in accordance with international law.

In short, the lives of 2.3 million innocent, incarcerated Gazan cannot be left in the hands of a psychopath like Netanyahu. Nor can the Israelis be allowed to dictate the wider future of the Holy Land they have defiled.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Government heads and opposition leaders alike across Western Europe and North America have been denouncing Hamas in withering terms and pledging unconditional support for Israel. The Biden administration issued a statement shortly following the attacks stating that the US “unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza.” The statement added that the US is “ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the Government and people of Israel.”

British prime minister Rishi Sunak declared: “There are not two sides to these events. There is no question of balance. … [Hamas’] barbaric acts are acts of evil.” The Guardian had reported earlier that he has pledged “to provide diplomatic, intelligence or security support to Israel.” British Home Secretary Suella Braverman went so far as to suggest that the police should arrest people for engaging in “provocative demonstrations” that could “cause distress to UK Jewish communities.” This reportedly could include something as simple as chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Never to be outdone, opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer pledged his support for Netanyahu’s move to prevent food, water or fuel to enter Gaza during an interview on London’s LBC radio.

The corporate-owned media have been acting in lockstep — demanding unwavering support of Israel, denouncing Hamas in the harshest terms and, above all, viciously dismissing any attempt to engage in what some outlets term “equivalence.” Even the most modest of attempts to add balance are fiercely denounced as “terrorist apologetics.”

But not all is as it seems. Independent journalists and activists have begun investigating and fact-checking some of the claims that are being repeated in corporate-owned media. And all turns out that many of the claims made about Saturday’s surprise Hamas incursion are misleading or, in some cases, even outright false. Recent changes made to the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), meanwhile, have led to a tsunami-like spread of unverified footage and made it increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction.

Undoubtedly the most damning accusation to be leveled against Hamas is the charge that some of its units that took part in the Saturday attack murdered 40 babies, some of whom were decapitated. This claim was quickly seized on by corporate media outlets as part of their outrage against Hamas. But increasing doubt began to surround the allegation as people looked for verification. Ultimately, it turned out that not even the Israeli military itself was willing to confirm the reports. Another claim that has been circling corporate media outlets and right-wing X accounts is the accusation that Hamas engaged in rape. But again, there has been no independent verification. By Wednesday at least one mainstream outlet had retracted the claim.

Some of the videos circulating on X is based on footage that is misrepresented or, in some cases, even of completely different conflicts in different countries. One video, for example, that was labeled “Hamas fires a salvo at Israel,” turned out to actually be footage of the conflict in Syria filmed three years earlier. One X user, far-right commentator and friend of Elon Musk, Ian Miles Cheong, posted a video with the caption: “Imagine if this was happening in our neighbourhood, to your family” that purported to depict Hamas militants killing Israeli citizens. It turned out that those in the video did not belong to Hamas but rather Israel’s own law enforcement. Other footage turned out to not even be depicting real life but rather the content of a video game. Labeled on X as “NEW VIDEO: Hamas fighters shooting down Israel war helicopter in Gaza,” it turned out to be taken from the 2013 open world tactical shooter simulation game Arma 3.

Far from representing some inventive first on the part of Israel, engaging in this kind of disinformation campaign is, in fact, a tried and trusted component of its military arsenal. And some of them come straight from the Israeli government itself. During the flair up of violence in May 2021 sparked by the Israeli raid of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, for example, an Israeli government spokesperson posted a video on X (then Twitter) purporting to depict explosions taking place in Gaza. It turned out that the footage was actually of rockets fired from Syria or Libya three years earlier. The Israeli government sometimes even enlists student groups as part of this propaganda effort. In July 2014, Electronic Intifada reported: “Israel student union sets up “war room” to sell Gaza massacre on Facebook”

Israel apologists will naturally claim that the Palestinian side engages in media manipulation as well. Though there have been some isolated examples of this (hardly surprising given the sheer number of social media users), it should be pointed out that Palestinians don’t have anywhere near the same kinds of resources that Israel does. After all, Israel is a regional superpower and the largest cumulative recipient of US aid since the end of World War II. And it has used these resources to engage in media manipulation operations even in third countries. In February of this year, for example, France24 reported: “An Israeli firm sought to influence more than 30 elections around the world for clients by hacking, sabotage and spreading disinformation, according to an undercover media investigation published Wednesday.”

In addition to outright distortion and lies, another tactic that Israel and its media allies have been employing is what some have termed “selective outrage.” For instance, in the case of rape, even if we imagine for a moment that accusations against Hamas on this charge are true, the corporate media proceeds as if this is something entirely unique to the Palestinian side of the conflict. Sexual violence against Palestinian women on the part of Israeli security forces and prison guards, however, is in fact well documented. Just last month reports emerged that Israeli soldiers in the occupied city of Al Khalil had forcibly stripped five women and paraded them naked before stealing their jewelry — all in front of their own children. A 2020 academic study exploring the experience of 20 female Palestinian prisoners in an Israeli jail found that all but one had “experienced some sort of unwanted verbal and nonverbal sexual comments or gestures, forced nudity, or forced touching by prison personnel.”

The most outrageous example of selective outrage, however, must be the killing of children. Again, even if we imagine for a moment that the accusations against Hamas are true, the Islamist group would be mere amateurs compared to the Israeli security forces when it comes to killing children. Israel’s record is far too extensive to list exhaustively here, but examples include Operation Protective Edge in 2014 during which Israeli forces murdered 495 children and Operation Cast Lead in 2008–9 during which they murdered 344 children. Israeli snipers, meanwhile, have shot dead in 2023 alone: two-year-old Mohammed al-Tamimi in June; three-year-old Muhammad Haitham al-Tamimi in June; 15-year-old Sadeel Naghniyeh in June; 14-year-old Qusai Radwan Yousef Waked in February; and 16-year-old Abdulrahman Hasan Ahmad Hardan in July. In January of this year, Israeli security forces and allied settler extremists managed to kill just under 40 Palestinian children in just one day.

To be absolutely clear, accusations against Hamas should not be automatically dismissed as Israeli disinformation. And certainly, no rape or murder on the part of Israeli forces would excuse a rape or murder by a member of Hamas. But at the same time, we must consistently stress that Israel and its minions in the corporate-owned press are adept at spreading false information against the Palestinian side and notorious for engaging in flagrant selective outrage to make Israel out as the sole victim of the conflict. As they continue to manufacture consent for what is shaping up to be an all-out war against Gaza, a heavy burden falls on independent media to call out these duplicitous actions and shameless double standards.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Bolton.

In a surprise move Hamas launched a massive rocket attack on 6 October on various Israeli targets in the illegally blockaded Gaza Strip and made incursions through the border wire into nearby Israeli communities such as Sderot.

Warmonger Binyamin Netanyahu’s response, blurting out “we are at war”, would have been faintly amusing if the situation wasn’t so sickening. And once again we’re treated to the spectacle of senior figures here in our midst desperately defending Israel’s illegal occupation and racist terror.

• UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: “Shocked by this morning’s attacks by Hamas terrorists… Israel has an absolute right to defend itself.”
• UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly: “The UK will always support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
• UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer: “No justification for this act of terror… perpetrated by those who seek to undermine any chance for future peace in the region.”
• Head of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen said the attack was “terrorism in its most despicable form… Israel has the right to defend itself against such heinous attacks”.

What lame-brains. They should be supporting Palestine at least as avidly, and for the same reasons, as they (purportedly) support Ukraine!

And excuse me, since when did the aggressor, Israel, which has maintained a murderous and illegal military occupation of the Palestinians’ homeland since 1948 and a cruel blockade on Gaza since 2006 (all condemned by multiple UN resolutions), have a right to defend itself against legitimate Palestinian resistance?

Let’s get this clear: the occupied and mercilessly oppressed Palestinians are not the terrorists. The apartheid Israeli regime, its brutal occupation forces and its squatter/settler stormtroopers are – and they’re regarded as war criminals by international law.

As for Starmer’s remark, the UK government, which created this mess back in 1917, still refuses to this day to recognise the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and statehood – although 138 of the world’s other states have done so. Until the UK and US fall into line and simple justice is established, what makes Starmer think there’s the slightest chance of peace?

Many would be cheering at the news of Hamas’s counterattack if it wasn’t for the innocent lives lost. But someone is bound to ask just how innocent do Israelis think they are, given the anguish, humiliation and evil they’ve heaped upon their Palestinian neighbours for seven decades?

And I’ve just watched Biden making his speech on the subject, laced with unbelievable ignorance and bias and without a care for what his Israeli friends have been doing to Palestinian civilians and families, and the countless ones they’ve abducted, tortured and imprisoned without trial, over the last decades.

Meanwhile, for the sake of balance, what are Hamas saying? They continue to insist that resistance is the only option for ending Israel’s occupation. In a press statement issued on 6 October, the 50th anniversary of the October 1973 war (aka the Yom Kippur war), Hamas called on all states and parties embracing peoples’ rights to freedom to support the Palestinian people in their struggle to defend themselves, restore their rights, and liberate their homeland.

For them the October war remains an inspiration. Hamas reminds us how the Egyptian and Syrian armies unified under one command and scored an historic victory against the Israeli occupation army. Unfortunately, that victory was short lived. When ceasefires were eventually signed Egypt and Syria were able to recover some of the territory lost to Israel in 1948, 1956 and 1967 but it made little or no difference to the Palestinians’ desperate plight.

The commander-in-chief of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif, has also made a statement listing the Israeli occupier’s many ongoing crimes as justification for the attack, pointing out that they had previously warned Israel and appealed to world leaders to work on putting an end to Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, their holy sites and homeland, and to put pressure on the Israeli occupation to abide by international law and UN resolutions.

But Israel has instead intensified its crimes, crossing all red lines, particularly in regard to occupied Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque – the Muslims’ third holiest site.

Deif emphasises that the military operation is against the Israeli occupation and in response to Israel’s never-ending crimes against the Palestinian people and their religion.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Audaciously, and with grinding ignorance, she persists in her rather grisly attempts to kill the central assumptions of international refugee protection, flawed as they might be, elevating the role of the sovereign state to that of tormenter and high judge. In doing so Braverman shows herself to believe in the ultimate prerogative of the state to be decisively cruel rather than consistently humane. The result is a tyrant’s feast, bound to make a good impression in every country keen to seal off their borders from those seeking sanctuary.

In her speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Braverman came up with a novel reading on how the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 has been applied of late. In her mind, there had been “an interpretive shift” towards generosity in awarding refugee status when, conspicuously, the opposite is true. She was particularly irked by those irritating judges who had endorsed “something more akin to a definition of ‘discrimination’”. All in all, “uncontrolled and illegal migration” posed “an existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the West.”

Lip service is paid to the rights of asylum seekers, though not much. She shows a keen fondness for the term “illegal migrants” such as those who made their way to the Italian island of Lampedusa, proceeding to sleep on the streets, pilfer food and clash with police. “Where individuals are being persecuted, it is right we offer sanctuary,” she conceded. “But we will not be able to sustain an asylum system if in effect, simply being gay, or a woman, or fearful of discrimination in your own country of origin, is sufficient to qualify for protection.”

Trust Braverman to turn universal human rights into a matter of gender or sexual politics. She further teases out the battle lines by attacking the “misguided dogma of multiculturalism” that “makes no demands of the incomer to integrate”. Such a failure had happened because “it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.”

A quick read of the definition of “refugee” in the Convention stipulates a number of considerations: “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particularly social group or political opinion”; that the person is outside their country of nationality and unwilling to “avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”

In 2022, a mere 1.5% of the 74,751 asylum claims lodged in the UK cited sexual orientation in their applications. The countries most prominently featured as points of origin for the applicants were Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria. It remains unclear how many were accepted as a direct result of mentioning sexual orientation, but these numbers hardly constitute a radical shift.

The UNHCR was unimpressed by the Home Secretary’s AEI show, though hampered by the language of moderation. “The need is not for reform, or more restrictive interpretation, but for stronger and more consistent application of the convention and its underlying principle of responsibility-sharing.” The body suggested that expediting the backlog of asylum claims in the UK might be one way of approaching it, something Braverman has failed, rather spectacularly, to do.

The Refugee Convention has provided fine sport for abuse and blackening for over two decades, its critics always bleating about the fact that the circumstances of its remit had changed. A list of Australian Prime Ministers (John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abott, just to name a few) would surely have to top the league, always taking issue with a document regarded as creaky and unfit to deal with the arrival of “unlawful non-citizens”. From the implementation of the Pacific Solution to the creation of such odious categories as Temporary Protection Visas, the protective principles of the Convention became effigies to a system that was being forcibly retired.

In Britain, New Labour’s Tony Blair, always emphasising the New over Labour, never tired of haranguing his party, and constituents, about the reforms he was making to a number of policy platforms, with processing refugees being foremost among them. During his election drive in 2001, Blair claimed that, “The UK is taking the lead in arguing for reform, not of the convention’s values, but of how it operates.” At the time, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, Nick Hardwick, gasped. “The Geneva Convention on Refugees has saved millions of lives worldwide.”

Blair’s Home Secretary, Jack Straw, had already set the mould for Braverman in his promise in 2000 to initiate a “complete revision” of the Refugee Convention, one that would see “a two-tier system to cut the flow of asylum seekers” coming into the UK.

At home, Braverman has made a royal mess of things. Keeping up with an obsession nurtured by the Johnson government, she has persisted in trying to outsource and defer the responsibility for processing asylum claims to third countries. The favourite choice remains distant Rwanda, a country unfathomably praised for its outstanding “modernising” credentials.

While the government scored a legal victory in the High Court in December 2022, which saw nothing questionable about undertakings made by Kigali in the Memorandum of Understanding and Notes Verbales (NV) about how asylum claims would be processed, the Court of Appeal thought otherwise. On June 29 this year, a majority of the Court decided to give Rwanda’s human rights record a stern, rough comb over, finding it wanting on the prohibition against torture outlined in Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, felt that “there were substantial grounds for thinking that asylum seekers sent to Rwanda under the MEDP [Migration and Economic Development Partnership]” at the date the decisions were made by the secretary in July 2022 “faced real risks of article 3 [European Convention on Human Rights] mistreatment.” Such a conclusion was inevitable after consulting “the historical record described by the UNHCR, the significant concerns of the UNHCR itself, and the factual realities of the current asylum process itself.”

Lord Justice Underhill underlined the lower court’s own admission that the Rwandan government was “intolerant of dissent; that there are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech; and that political opponents have been detained in unofficial detention centres and have been subjected to torture and Article 3 ill-treatment short of torture.”

As a result, Braverman finds herself at sea, struggling to find a port, or centre, to park her own, brittle dogmas. In July, she told the House of Commons that she disagreed “fundamentally” with the view of the court “that Rwanda is not a safe place for refugees”. She went on to say that her government took their “international obligations very seriously and we are satisfied that the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill comply with the refugee convention. The fundamental principle remains, however, that those in need of protection should claim asylum at the earliest opportunity and in the first safe country they reach.”

And that, ultimately, is the rub: domestic politics vaulted by individual ambition. When considering the stuffing in such speeches, the international audience is less important than those listening at home. Braverman is likely to have her eyes on the prime ministerial prize, having failed to secure the Conservative leadership last summer. A troubled Tory MP, speaking to the BBC on condition of anonymity, had some advice for UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: best get rid of the Home Secretary as soon as possible lest it “reflects poorly on him”. It’s a bit late for that.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Boris Johnson

Not that Johnson was exactly thrilled with the decision. The findings of the House of Commons Privileges Committee in what is known as the Partygate Report were damning. Released on June 15, 2023, the 30,000-word document details the numerous instances the then Prime Minister systematically undermined the very same pandemic regulations that his own government had implemented, only to then consistently mislead and deceive, most notably the Commons itself. In “deliberately misleading the House Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt. The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the Prime Minister, the most senior member of the government.”

The nature of that misleading conduct centred on Johnson’s refusal to double-check advice given to him by, for instance, Jack Doyle, his former press secretary, over a number of gatherings on whether they were compliant with COVID-19 rules and guidance. Johnson’s Principal Private Secretary, Martin Reynolds, had also pressed Johnson on the issue as to whether the guidance “had been followed at all times”, notably on the December 18, 2020 gathering. He wondered “whether it was realistic to argue that all Guidance had been followed at all times, given the nature of the working environment in No. 10. He agreed to delete the reference to Guidance.”

The report had to be rewritten at short notice to take into account Johnson’s abrupt resignation. Had he remained, the Committee members would have recommended a 90-day suspension for, among other things, the former PM’s deliberate misleading of the House, members of the Committee, and being “complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of” its members. Instead, it concluded that Johnson should be deprived of his Member’s pass.

The Committee took umbrage at Johnson’s attack upon its members, which he condemned as undemocratic, a kangaroo court, and executioners of a witch hunt. “We consider,” states the report, “that these statements are completely unacceptable. In our view this conduct, together with the egregious breach of confidentiality, is a serious further contempt”.

His overall contemptuous attitude to the inquiry was also conveyed by his effort “to re-write the meaning of the [pandemic] rules and guidance to fit his own evidence”. One example was the “assertion that ‘imperfect’ social distancing was perfectly acceptable when there were no mitigations in place rather than cancelling a gathering or holding it online, and his assertion that a leaving gathering or a gathering to boost morale was a lawful reason to hold a gathering.”

Johnson’s base of supporters is a shrinking one; but from pandemonium land some continue to express their support. Nigel Adams, MP for Selby and Ainsty, wished to no longer occupy his position in the Commons. Then came former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, who initially claimed she was going to “immediately” step down, only to then do a bit of fence sitting. Bruised in not getting her promised peerage from Johnson, she is seeking answers from the House of Lords appointment committee. She has also warned that any Tory MP who would side with the findings of the report “will be held to account by members of the public. Deselections may follow. It’s serious.”

Brendan Clarke-Smith, MP for Bassetlaw, was similarly “appalled” by the “spiteful, vindictive and overreaching conclusions of the report.” He promised to “be speaking against them both publicly and in the House”. The comically anachronistic Tory Man of the Nineteenth Century, Jacob Rees-Mogg, found himself in agreement, observing that Parliament, when standing “upon its dignity […] often ends up looking foolish. The Privileges Committee report is a case in point.”

Many of the supporters can be said to be part of the scandalous “Honours List” that Johnson drew up on grounds of gratitude, a veritable Who’s Who of fans and flunkeys that was, for the most part, approved by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. One was the 29-year-old Charlotte Tranter Owen, who has become the youngest life peer in British history. Her less than distinguished journey from York University graduate to a life peer took a mere six unremarkable years.

While some Tories have been desperate to jettison the Johnson link, many were complicit in stacking the compendium of deception. As Peter Oborne explains, the Tory party saw Johnson as an election winner. For three years, they were “thus prepared to put up with his false claims. Ministers and MPs appeared happy to repeat claims on radio and television, in print, and inside the Commons chamber.”

Sunak is, therefore, in more than a spot of bother, not least because Johnson will be holding fort as a newly appointed columnist at the Daily Mail. His plight is made worse given his struggling efforts to keep the party together before potential electoral oblivion. Johnson, with his poison pen tirades, is unlikely to help.

A final note on the whole Boris Bonanza is also worth reiterating. For Oborne, “Johnson will be remembered by history as the most immoral, dishonest and morally squalid of all British premiers.” This is going a bit far; it was a certain Tony Blair who, playing the role of sidekick to US President George W. Bush, embarked upon an illegal war that led to the destruction of Iraq and a good portion of the Middle East. His conduct, both directly or otherwise, in the confection, and intentional misreading of intelligence material elevating Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the level of globally dangerous despot, must surely be seen as squalid as any. Along the way, he corrupted public life and politicised institutions. And yet he moves and speaks, to this day, with impunity – the one who got away.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Boris Johnson

Not that Johnson was exactly thrilled with the decision. The findings of the House of Commons Privileges Committee in what is known as the Partygate Report were damning. Released on June 15, 2023, the 30,000-word document details the numerous instances the then Prime Minister systematically undermined the very same pandemic regulations that his own government had implemented, only to then consistently mislead and deceive, most notably the Commons itself. In “deliberately misleading the House Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt. The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the Prime Minister, the most senior member of the government.”

The nature of that misleading conduct centred on Johnson’s refusal to double-check advice given to him by, for instance, Jack Doyle, his former press secretary, over a number of gatherings on whether they were compliant with COVID-19 rules and guidance. Johnson’s Principal Private Secretary, Martin Reynolds, had also pressed Johnson on the issue as to whether the guidance “had been followed at all times”, notably on the December 18, 2020 gathering. He wondered “whether it was realistic to argue that all Guidance had been followed at all times, given the nature of the working environment in No. 10. He agreed to delete the reference to Guidance.”

The report had to be rewritten at short notice to take into account Johnson’s abrupt resignation. Had he remained, the Committee members would have recommended a 90-day suspension for, among other things, the former PM’s deliberate misleading of the House, members of the Committee, and being “complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of” its members. Instead, it concluded that Johnson should be deprived of his Member’s pass.

The Committee took umbrage at Johnson’s attack upon its members, which he condemned as undemocratic, a kangaroo court, and executioners of a witch hunt. “We consider,” states the report, “that these statements are completely unacceptable. In our view this conduct, together with the egregious breach of confidentiality, is a serious further contempt”.

His overall contemptuous attitude to the inquiry was also conveyed by his effort “to re-write the meaning of the [pandemic] rules and guidance to fit his own evidence”. One example was the “assertion that ‘imperfect’ social distancing was perfectly acceptable when there were no mitigations in place rather than cancelling a gathering or holding it online, and his assertion that a leaving gathering or a gathering to boost morale was a lawful reason to hold a gathering.”

Johnson’s base of supporters is a shrinking one; but from pandemonium land some continue to express their support. Nigel Adams, MP for Selby and Ainsty, wished to no longer occupy his position in the Commons. Then came former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, who initially claimed she was going to “immediately” step down, only to then do a bit of fence sitting. Bruised in not getting her promised peerage from Johnson, she is seeking answers from the House of Lords appointment committee. She has also warned that any Tory MP who would side with the findings of the report “will be held to account by members of the public. Deselections may follow. It’s serious.”

Brendan Clarke-Smith, MP for Bassetlaw, was similarly “appalled” by the “spiteful, vindictive and overreaching conclusions of the report.” He promised to “be speaking against them both publicly and in the House”. The comically anachronistic Tory Man of the Nineteenth Century, Jacob Rees-Mogg, found himself in agreement, observing that Parliament, when standing “upon its dignity […] often ends up looking foolish. The Privileges Committee report is a case in point.”

Many of the supporters can be said to be part of the scandalous “Honours List” that Johnson drew up on grounds of gratitude, a veritable Who’s Who of fans and flunkeys that was, for the most part, approved by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. One was the 29-year-old Charlotte Tranter Owen, who has become the youngest life peer in British history. Her less than distinguished journey from York University graduate to a life peer took a mere six unremarkable years.

While some Tories have been desperate to jettison the Johnson link, many were complicit in stacking the compendium of deception. As Peter Oborne explains, the Tory party saw Johnson as an election winner. For three years, they were “thus prepared to put up with his false claims. Ministers and MPs appeared happy to repeat claims on radio and television, in print, and inside the Commons chamber.”

Sunak is, therefore, in more than a spot of bother, not least because Johnson will be holding fort as a newly appointed columnist at the Daily Mail. His plight is made worse given his struggling efforts to keep the party together before potential electoral oblivion. Johnson, with his poison pen tirades, is unlikely to help.

A final note on the whole Boris Bonanza is also worth reiterating. For Oborne, “Johnson will be remembered by history as the most immoral, dishonest and morally squalid of all British premiers.” This is going a bit far; it was a certain Tony Blair who, playing the role of sidekick to US President George W. Bush, embarked upon an illegal war that led to the destruction of Iraq and a good portion of the Middle East. His conduct, both directly or otherwise, in the confection, and intentional misreading of intelligence material elevating Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the level of globally dangerous despot, must surely be seen as squalid as any. Along the way, he corrupted public life and politicised institutions. And yet he moves and speaks, to this day, with impunity – the one who got away.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The APPG’s report urged the U.K. government to treat the case of Lai, a British citizen and founder of Hong Kong’s now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, as a political priority and to consider his detention arbitrary. The group found the U.K. government’s response to Lai’s case has been “minimal, arguably negligent.”

CPJ was among the groups that submitted evidence to the APPG inquiry.

“British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his government must heed the newly released All-Party Parliamentary Group report, which calls on them to pressure for publisher Jimmy Lai’s release,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “It is time for Sunak to say enough is enough. In five months, Lai will be tried under Hong Kong’s national security law, which could see him spend the rest of his life in jail. Will the British PM end his deafening silence?”

Lai has been behind bars since December 2020. He is serving a sentence of five years and nine months on fraud charges and is awaiting trial on national security charges, due to start in September, which could imprison him for life. 

The APPG on Hong Kong is an informal cross-party group in the U.K. Parliament, started in November 2019.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

A best-case scenario in which the United Kingdom fully transitions to renewable energy with no nuclear generation would save more than £100 billion—over $124 million—toward achieving net-zero by 2050 and produce 20% fewer carbon emissions, an analysis published this week concludes.

The report—entitled 100% Renewable Energy for the United Kingdom—was authored by Philipp Diesing, Dmitrii Bogdanov, Rasul Satymov, Michael Child, and Christian Breyer of LUT University in Lappeenranta, Finland. The publication compares a set of potential scenarios with the U.K. government's current net-zero pathway, which includes nuclear power and fossil fuel carbon capture and storage. The report was released ahead of a Saturday seminar hosted in London and online by 100% Renewable U.K.

"While the effects of the climate emergency can be observed more and more clearly through increasingly frequent extreme weather events and other climate change impacts, there is still a lack of dedicated countermeasures by decision-makers," a summary of the report states. "The government of the United Kingdom... has self-committed to climate neutrality in 2050, but without initiating the essential steps and without eliminating fossil fuel-based technologies and high-risk nuclear power."

"The U.K. does, however, benefit from the availability of renewable energy resources, namely onshore and offshore wind, which are considered the best in Europe," the publication continues. "Based on this background, this study presents several energy system transition pathways to 100% renewable energy in 2050 in high-spatial and temporal resolution, by describing the energy system of the U.K. in full detail from the starting point of today in five-year time steps until 2050."

The study's authors modeled four scenarios:

• The "Best Policy Scenario" (BPS) shows a 100% renewable energy system by 2050, with offshore wind as the main resource, limiting onshore wind and solar photovoltaics according to available land area;
• The "Inter-Annual Storage Scenario" adds to the BPS the required inter-annual storage needed to provide good levels of insurance against the possibilities of low-wind years;
• The "BPS Plus Scenario" tested the limits of higher land area availability for onshore wind and solar photovoltaics, and includes some renewable electricity-based e-fuel imports; and
• The "Current Policy Scenario" adopts the U.K. government's strategy for net-zero as published in 2020.

"The benefits of a fully renewable energy system in achieving net-zero are clear," 100% Renewable U.K. director David Toke, who supervised the new report, said in a statement. "Far from simply keeping the lights on, they ensure secure and reliable energy for the U.K., with huge economic savings compared to other options and incredible job creation opportunities."

"The implications of this report are huge," he added. "All public and enforced consumer spending on new nuclear power and carbon capture and storage should be scrapped and instead funding should be put into renewable energy, energy efficiency, and storage capacity."

The new report comes as Extinction Rebellion U.K. and dozens of other groups prepare for a four-day demonstration in London beginning Friday to demand an end to new fossil fuel projects and citizens' assemblies to discuss solutions to the climate emergency.

It also comes as ministers in the Conservative government of U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are considering a revamp of the bidding process for new renewables projects in an effort to create more green jobs. Opportunities in the low-carbon job sector have shrunk significantly since then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, also a Conservative, eliminated what he reportedly called "green crap" policies in 2012.

Like the United States and other nations, the U.K. continues to develop fossil fuel projects despite the climate emergency. Climate campaigners warn that the country's entire carbon budget could be blown on just one oil and gas project: Rosebank, the North Sea's largest undeveloped oilfield, has the estimated potential to produce half a billion total barrels of oil.

Earlier this week, Germany drew applause—and some criticism—from climate campaigners as its last three nuclear power plants were permanently shut down.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

CPJ recommended that APPG members send an urgent appeal to the Hong Kong government to request the release of Jimmy Lai and other imprisoned journalists and seek British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s immediate action to secure Lai’s release.

Lai, a British citizen and the founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy Hong Kong newspaper, Apple Daily, has been behind bars since December 2020. He is serving a sentence of five years and nine months on fraud charges and is awaiting trial on national security charges, due to start in September 2023, which could jail him for life. 

The APPG on Hong Kong is a cross-party group with no official Parliament status formed in November 2019 in response to the political and social crisis in Hong Kong. The APPG’s inquiry is often used to advise the government.

Read the complete inquiry submission here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The UK Illegal Migration Bill is fabulously own-goaled, bankrupt and unprincipled. For one thing, it certainly is a labour of love in terms of the illegal, as the title suggests. In time, the courts may well also find fault with this ghastly bit of proposed legislation, which has already sailed through two readings in the Commons and resting in the Committee stage.

On Good Morning Britain, Home Secretary Suella Braverman had to concede she was running “novel arguments” about dealing with such irregular migration, not making mention of Australia’s own novel experiment which did, and still continues, to besmirch and taint international refugee law.

In her statement on whether the bill would be consistent with the European Convention of Human Rights, enshrined by the UK Human Rights Act, Braverman was brazen to the point of being quixotic: “I am unable to make a statement that, in my view, the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill are compatible with the Convention rights, but the Government nevertheless wishes the House to proceed with the Bill.”

The long title of the bill does not even bother to conceal its purposes. It makes “provision for and in connection with the removal from the United Kingdom of persons who have entered or arrived in breach of immigration control”. It furnishes a detention regime, deals with unaccompanied children, makes some remarks about “victims of slavery or human trafficking” and, more to the point makes “provision about the inadmissibility of certain protection and certain human rights claims relating to immigration”.

The central purpose of the bill is to destroy the very basis of seeking asylum in Britain, along with the process that accompanies it. Much of this is inspired by the fact that the United Kingdom does not do the business of processing asylums particularly well. Glorious Britannia now receives fewer applications for asylum than Germany, France or Spain. Despite having fewer numbers, its backlog remains heftier than any of those three states.

The proposed instrument essentially declares illegal in advance any unauthorised arrival, an absurd proposition given that most asylum seekers arriving by boat will not, obviously, have the paperwork handy. (This is a nice trick borrowed from Fortress Australia.) Those seeking asylum by boat will be automatically detained for 28 days. During this time, those detained will be unable to make a legal challenge nor seek bail. After the expiration of time, a claim for bail can be made, or the Home Secretary can release them.

In truth, the authorities can refuse to process the claim, thereby deferring responsibility to some other source or agency. Dark, gloomy detention centres are promised, as are third countries such as Rwanda or a return across the English Channel back to France or another European state. Then comes the issue of return to the country of origin, a state of affairs in gross breach of the non-refoulement obligation of international refugee law. It is fantastically crude, a declaration of savage intent.

Even with these provisions, chaos is likely to ensue, given that the options are, as Ian Dunt points out, essentially off the table. The Rwandan solution has so far failed to materialise, bogged down in litigation. Were there to be any sent, these would amount to a few hundred at best and hardly arrest the tide of boat arrivals. The UK has also failed to secure return agreements with other European states. The most likely scenario: a large, incarcerated, miserable population housed in a burgeoning concentration camp system, a nodding acknowledgement to Australia’s own version used in the Pacific on Manus Island and Nauru.

Even some conservative voices have expressed worry about the nature of it. Former Tory PM Theresa May has questioned the breakneck speed with which the Bill is being debated, wondering if Sunak and company are acting in undue haste to supersede fresh and as yet untested legislation. “I am concerned that the government have acted on Albania and the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, when neither has been in place long enough to be able to assess their impact. I do not expect government to introduce legislation to supersede legislation recently made, the impact of which is not yet known.”

Sadly, the entire issue of discussing the critical aspects of the bill were lost in the media firestorm caused by an innocuous tweet from England’s football darling and veteran commentator Gary Lineker. “There is no huge influx,” went the tweet. “We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”

According to the BBC, fast becoming a fiefdom of Tory regulation, he was. Suspension from the Match of the Day followed. Within a few days, a humiliated management had to concede defeat and accept his return to the program. Solidarity for Lineker had been vast and vocal, though much of it seemed to be focused on his shabby treatment rather than the asylum seeker issue. In terms of defeating this bill, such debates will do little to box the demons that are about to be unleashed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The checklist of imminent failure for this security pact between the United States, the UK and Australia is impressive and comically grotesque. In terms of the nuclear-powered submarine component, there are issues of expertise, infrastructure, hurdles of technology transfer, the hobbling feature of domestic politics, and national considerations. There are also matters of irresponsible costs, of the exhaustion of public money best spent elsewhere.

To put it bluntly, Australia and all its resources spanning across a number of industries will be co-opted in this enterprise against a phantom enemy, subjugating an already subordinate state to the US war-making enterprise.

All of this was laid bare at San Diego’s Point Loma Naval Base on March 13, where the US imperium, backed up by a number of lickspittles from Australia and the United Kingdom, betrayed the cause of peace and announced to the world that war with China was not only a possibility but distinctly probable.

Central to the project is a staggering outlay of A$368 billion for up to thirteen vessels over three decades. Canberra will purchase at least three US-manufactured nuclear submarines while contributing “significant additional resources” to US shipyards. (Bully for the US builders.) Given that the United States is unable to make up its own inventory of Virginia class nuclear submarines at this stage, the purchase will be second hand, a point which is bound to niggle members of Congress. Two more vessels are also being thrown in as a possibility, should the “need” arise.

During this time, design and construction will take place on a new submarine dubbed the SSN-AUKUS, exploiting the work already undertaken by the UK on replacing the Astute-class submarines. It will be, according to the White House, “based upon the United Kingdom’s next generation SSN design while incorporating cutting edge US submarine technologies, and will be built and deployed by both Australia and the United Kingdom.”

This point was also reiterated by the UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. “The Royal Navy will operate the same submarines as the Australian Navy and we’ll share components and parts with the US Navy.” Five of these are intended for the Royal Australian Navy by the middle of the 2050s, with one submarine being produced every two years from the early 2040s.

The speech by the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was more than a touch embarrassing. It certainly did its bit to bury conventional understandings of sovereignty. “This will be an Australian sovereign capability, commanded by the Royal Australian Navy and sustained by Australians in Australian shipyards, with construction to begin within the decade.” The lexically challenged are truly in charge.

And what about the submarine personnel themselves? Australian submariners as yet unacquainted with nuclear technology would be trained in the US. “I am proud to confirm that they are in the top 30 per cent of their class.” Can the Australians do a bit better than that?

The US President could only express satisfaction at such displays of unflagging, wobbly free obedience. “Today, as we stand at the inflection point of history, where the hard work of announcing deterrence and enhancing stability is going to reflect peace and stability for decades to come, the United States can ask for no better partners in the Indo-Pacific where so much of our shared future will be written.”

As the White House statement promises, visits by US nuclear submarines to Australia will begin this year, with Australian personnel joining US crews for “training and development”. The UK will take its turn at the start of 2026.

Australia promises to become even busier on that front, with a US-UK rotational presence commencing in 2027 which will be named the “Submarine Rotational Force-West” (SRF-West). One UK Astute class submarine, and as many as four Virginia class submarines will find themselves at HMAS Stirling near Perth.

The effusive punditry on the Australian morning proved indigestible. For those inclined towards peace, this must have seemed like a chance to initiate a few citizen arrests. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who also holds the defence portfolio, was a quivering sight. He remarked about the scale of the enterprise, justifying it against “the biggest conventional military build-up” in the region – those sneaky authoritarians in Beijing again – in an environment hostile to the “international rules-based order”. Failure to do so would see Australia “condemned”. (No mention here that the US military budget remains the largest on the planet.)

As for the issue of budgetary costs, Marles bizarrely and brazenly suggested that these would be “neutral” in the context of defence, despite the likelihood that cuts will have to be made, and various policy priorities jettisoned.

For morning viewers already fearing for their lives, there was a beaming South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas thrilled that his state would eventually be producing the SSN-AUKUS at the as yet non-existent Submarine Construction Yard in Adelaide. The fact that his state has neither the resources, infrastructure nor the personnel for such a task, was hardly reason to spoil the flag fluttering show. “There are smiles all around,” he beamed to the hosts of the ABC Breakfast show.

US commentators, notably Charles Edel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, emphasised that Australian defence was being vastly improved, or “augmented”, along with its military industrial base. Blame China, suggested Edel, for exploiting a “permissive security environment” and exciting such urges on the part of the three countries. The US Ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, even thought that this colossal waste of resources would add to the quotient of regional prosperity.

The opposite is very much the case: a profligate exercise that serves to turn Australia into a multi-generational garrison state at the beckon call of Washington’s war machine that will host, at stages, nuclear weapons. The latter aspect is bound to fly in the face of the Treaty of Rarotonga, otherwise known as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. But the Alice in Wonderland quality to the AUKUS agreement is bound to paper over that inconvenience. For a warring peace is exactly what awaits.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Since that disproportionately violent event, more public relations than sense, three other objects have also been destroyed. “We’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason,” the general said cryptically in remarks made on February 12. The briefing came in the aftermath of the downing of an octagonal-shaped object over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border.

Cultures of paranoia and suspicion approach such statements the way crops take to manure. The line between extraterrestrial fantasies and human-made balloons can become grainy. Tinfoil hats become charged; fear finds a funnel to travel through. The suggestion from the general that “the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out” signalled an avalanche of speculation. This was given further impetus by VanHerck’s assertion that he “hadn’t ruled out anything” to a question on whether aliens featured in the mix. “At this point, we continue to assess every threat or potential threat unknown that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it.”

On February 13, the White House was left to deal with the excitement caused by the Pentagon’s speculations. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was given the bucket to dampen the enthusiasm. “I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no sign, again no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.”

John Kirby, coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council in the White House, was also adamant in his briefing: “I don’t think the American people need to worry about aliens with respect to these crafts, period.” Hardly reassuring to those glued to such reports as that from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021, which refused to rule out the possibility that 144 unidentified aerial phenomena might have extraterrestrial provenance.

The bafflement over these objects has added some zest to the already exaggerated China threat. It is a throwback to the Cold War, which was characterised by ill-educated second guesses about performance, capability, and awareness about an inscrutable enemy. Foes, drunk with threat inflation, jousted in the dark and groped in the wilderness, finding a mirage of reality.

With the latest belligerent undertakings by the US government, an escalation is being encouraged by the hawks in Congress. Kirby, wishing to add a sting to the China effort, told the press that Biden, on coming to office, directed the US intelligence community to conduct a broad assessment of Chinese intelligence capabilities. “We know that these [Chinese] surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners.”

This is hardly a unilateral game. Having accused Beijing of such airborne surveillance present and past, the Biden administration is now facing accusations of its own. According to the PRC, the US has conducted its own exercises in flying high-altitude balloons in its airspace – no fewer than 10 times last year. To that can be added hundreds of reconnaissance missions. “It’s very common that the US intrudes [into] others’ airspace,” remarked Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin, citing 657 sorties made by Washington in 2022 and 64 aircraft flights in January “over the South China Sea alone”.

Kirby was cocksure in denying such claims, even those alleged missions that might apply to Taiwan or the South China Sea. “There is [sic] no US surveillance aircraft over Chinese – in Chinese airspace.”

The Balloon Affair has also tickled the interest of Washington’s allies. Object fever is catching. The United Kingdom, that reliably unquestioning transatlantic appendage of US power, is hopping on the bandwagon. The country’s transport minister, Richard Holden, did not even care to cite any evidence of “Chinese spy balloons” making their way through British airspace. What mattered was that it was “possible” and “that there will be people from the Chinese government trying to act as a hostile state.”

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace further suggested, with forced graveness, that, “The UK and her allies will review what these aerospace intrusions mean for our security. This development is another sign of how the global threat picture is changing for the worse.” Blame it on those objects.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also reminded the good people of Britain that the country is ever vigilant to any incursions from hot air objects or anything similar to them. “We have something called the quick reaction alert force which involves Typhoon planes, which are kept on 24/7 readiness to police our airspace, which is incredibly important.”

Tobias Ellwood, Conservative chairman of the Commons defence select committee, swallowed the suggestion that those sneaky Orientals were “exploiting the West’s weakness” with their mysterious aerial instruments. At least there was no mention of aliens, but that is increasingly becoming a distinction without a difference.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

With organizers saying it's entirely within the power of the United Kingdom's Conservative government to ensure public sector employees are paid fairly, roughly half a million workers walked out on Wednesday in the country's largest coordinated strike in more than a decade.

About 300,000 of the striking employees are educators, and they were joined by civil servants, railroad workers, university professors, London bus drivers, museum workers, and border officials, among others, with 59% of Britons telling YouGov in a recent poll that they supported the walkout.

The strong support comes even as an estimated 85% of schools across the U.K. were closed on Wednesday. Students and parents stood on picket lines alongside teachers, whose wages have not kept up with inflation and who are struggling to teach in schools where per-pupil spending for the 2024-25 school year is now expected to be 3% lower than it was in 2010.

"It's partly about pay, which has been reduced by 11% over the last 10 years," Jon Voake, a drama teacher in South Gloucestershire, toldThe Guardian. "But it's also about how our workload's going up. We're all working with bigger groups. Children's education is going to suffer and enough is enough."

In the most economically deprived parts of the country, the National Education Union said, teachers' pay has gone down by more than 20% since 2010 as the rate of inflation in the U.K. stands at 10.5%—"the highest among the G7 group of advanced economies," according toAl Jazeera.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) says that the average public sector worker in the U.K. now has $250 less per month than they did in 2010, accounting for inflation. A graph the organization shared on social media as the workers walked out showed that teachers' real compensation is now far lower than the range among other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

A 5% pay raise offered to public sector workers last year is actually a 7% pay cut when accounting for soaring inflation, union leaders say.

The walkout comes a day after members of Parliament passed an anti-strike law that would enforce "minimum service levels" in a railroad sector and emergency services, threatening workers with termination if they take part in a work stoppage. The bill still needs to pass in the House of Lords before becoming law. The TUC has said it could take the government to court over the proposal, which TUC assistant general secretary Kate Bell told The Guardian is "unnecessary, unfair, and almost certainly illegal."

Ambulance drivers and nurses are reportedly planning to stage a work stoppage in the coming days.

Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told public health workers on Monday, "I would love, nothing more would give me more pleasure than, to wave a magic wand and have all of you paid lots more"—but organizers and labor advocates on Wednesday said Sunak's government simply needs to change its tax policies to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis.

"We just need a fair taxation system," John McDonnell, a Labour MP former shadow chancellor of the exchequer, told The Guardian, calling on the Tories to tax capital gains at the same level of income to pay for raises. "The issue at the moment is that we seem to have a government that is redistributing wealth upwards."

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union, toldThe Guardian that the Tories have claimed it would cost £29 billion ($35 billion) to give raises to public sectors, while the actual amount is about £10 billion ($12 billion).

"And £10 billion in an economy like ours can easily be found," said Serwotka.

Mick Lynch, secretary general of the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers, rallied thousands of teachers outside Downing Street in London.

"We are the working class, and we are back," said Lynch. "We are here, we are demanding change, we refuse to be bought, and we are going to win for our people on our terms."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Nurses at 55 National Health Service facilities across England launched a two-day strike on Wednesday after the United Kingdom's right-wing government, led by Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, refused to open formal negotiations over pay and patient safety.

Royal College of Nursing (RCN) general secretary Pat Cullen called the 12-hour work stoppages on Wednesday and Thursday—which come after nurses at dozens of NHS facilities in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland participated in the union's first-ever national strike in December—"a modest escalation before a sharp increase in under three weeks from now." There is a strike fund, and picket line locations can be found here.

The nearly 500,000-strong nurses' union announced earlier this week that if progress is not made by the end of January, members at 85 NHS facilities in England and Wales will walk off the job again on February 6 and February 7. RCN members in Northern Ireland are not slated to join next month's walkout. In Scotland, strike action remains paused amid ongoing negotiations.

"Rather than negotiate, Rishi Sunak has chosen strike action again."

"It is with a heavy heart that nursing staff are striking this week and again in three weeks," Cullen said Monday. "Rather than negotiate, Rishi Sunak has chosen strike action again."

On Wednesday, the registered nurse and union leader added: "People aren't dying because nurses are striking. Nurses are striking because people are dying. That is how severe things are in the NHS and it is time the prime minister led a fight for its future."

"Today's record number of unfilled nurse jobs cannot be left to get worse," said Cullen. "Pay nursing staff fairly to turn this around and give the public the care they deserve."

A 2021 study commissioned by the RCN found that in real terms, the salaries of experienced U.K. nurses have fallen by 20% due to successive below-inflation pay bumps since 2010. The current dispute is fueled by discontent over a proposed 4-5% raise, which fails to keep pace with the soaring cost of living, up by 10.5% in 2022. RCN is seeking a 5% raise above inflation.

According to the RCN, "Low pay is pushing nursing staff out of the profession and contributing to record vacancies."

Because there are "tens of thousands of unfilled jobs," Cullen said, "patient care is suffering like never before."

As the union pointed out, the upcoming February strike dates coincide with the tenth anniversary of the final report of the Robert Francis inquiry, which documented the relationship between inadequate nurse staffing levels and higher mortality rates.

"Pay nursing staff fairly to turn this around and give the public the care they deserve."

If the U.K. government invested in better pay for nurses, it "would recoup 81% of the initial outlay in terms of higher tax receipts and savings on future recruitment and retention costs," the RCN noted, citing London Economics researchers.

"My olive branch to government—asking them to meet me halfway and begin negotiations—is still there," said Cullen. "They should grab it."

Also on Wednesday, the GMB union announced that 10,000 ambulance workers in the U.K. plan to strike on February 6, February 20, March 6, and March 20.

"Ambulance workers are angry. In their own words, 'They are done,'" said GMB national secretary Rachel Harrison. "Our message to the government is clear—talk pay now."

February 6 is set to become the first time in history that nurses and paramedics strike on the same day.

The past year has seen a surge in labor unrest across the U.K., with teachers in England and Wales voting Monday afternoon to strike on February 1, the same day 100,000 other public sector workers were already scheduled to walk off the job to demand improved pay and benefits.

The Tories further angered organized labor this week by advancing a bill that threatens to take away the right of nurses, ambulance workers, teachers, firefighters, rail workers, and others to strike.

Progressive critics argue that the Tories' proposal to fire striking public sector workers who refuse to comply with a mandatory return-to-work notice amounts to a "pay cut and forced labor bill" and would constitute a "gross violation of international law."

During a recent speech inveighing against the anti-strike legislation, left-wing Labour Party MP Zarah Sultana said that the bill is about "shifting the balance of power: weakening the power of workers and making it easier for bosses to exploit them and for the government to ignore them."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Lawmakers from the United Kingdom's Conservative Party advanced anti-strike legislation on Monday night despite the objections of tens of thousands of petitioners and thousands of demonstrators outside, but economic justice advocates made clear that the fight for fundamental workers' rights is far from over.

"After last night, the choice is clear," the Enough Is Enough campaign against neoliberalism tweeted Tuesday morning. "You're either with nurses, teachers, firefighters, and frontline workers. Or you're with the Tory government. It's time for everyone to pick a side."

Thousands of trade unionists and progressive activists gathered in London on Monday night to protest the Tories' so-called Strikes Bill as it was being read for a second time in the Palace of Westminster.

"This bill is really about... weakening the power of workers."

If finalized, the legislation would allow right-wing British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's administration to impose undisclosed "minimum service regulations" to force striking nurses, teachers, firefighters, rail staff, and others back to work. If they refuse, workers can be terminated, even during a labor stoppage to prevent pay cuts, and the union can be sued into bankruptcy.

The anti-democratic proposal comes amid a surge in labor unrest across the U.K., with teachers in England and Wales voting Monday afternoon to strike on February 1, the same day 100,000 other public sector workers were already scheduled to walk off the job to demand better pay and benefits.

Monday night's rally, which began at 6:00 pm local time, featured several speakers. Those who took the stage include Mick Lynch, the popular Rail, Maritime, and Transport union leader behind Britain's recent rail strikes; Communication Workers Union general secretary Dave Ward; Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union; Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack; Jordan Rivera from National Health Service Workers Say No!; Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress; and left-wing Labour Party MP Zarah Sultana.

"Make no mistake," Nowak told the crowd. "This bill is a fundamental attack on the right to strike that will force workers across the public sector to cross picket lines or face the sack."

Public and Commercial Services Union organizer Clare Keenan described the bill as an "attack on my human rights and those of my fellow workers."

"You can't make people go to work five days a week and hav[e] to use food banks and remov[e] their ability to protest," said Keenan. "It's just a hurdle that they're putting in the way to stop workers from taking industrial action."

Inside the House of Commons, meanwhile, Sultana delivered a fiery speech outlining why she voted against the Tories' anti-strike legislation.

"There was a brief period in the pandemic, where we all recognized who keeps our country running. And it wasn't the city bankers, hot-shot lawyers, or big business executives," said Sultana. "It was the people who drive our buses, who sweep our streets, who post our mail, it's people who teach our kids, and nurse us back to health."

"Briefly, even the members opposite thanked them," Sultana said, referring to Conservative MPs. "They called them 'key workers' and 'heroes,' and clapped for them with the cameras rolling."

"But as key workers knew, clapping doesn't pay the bills, and with a decade of falling wages, they couldn't go on," Sultana continued. "As the cost of living has soared, workers are saying, 'enough is enough,' and they are demanding a better deal."

"Of course, the government's line has changed," said Sultana. "Members opposite are now calling workers 'greedy,' saying they are 'selfish.' They've started pitting workers against each other, saying that railway workers couldn't get a pay rise if nurses weren't, but that nurses weren't allowed a pay rise either."

"And now they've stooped to this: An anti-worker bill that threatens the civil liberties of us all," she added. "This new law would see key workers like nurses, railway workers, firefighters, and teachers fired for going on strike. From clapping nurses, they're sacking nurses."

According to Sultana: "They say it's about safety, but that word isn't mentioned even once in the pages of this bill. They say it's about bringing us in line with other European nations, but Britain already has some of the most restrictive anti-union laws in the Western world. And no matter what they say, it's definitely not about resolving current disputes; it's only inflaming tensions and making negotiations harder."

"What this bill is really about," she argued, "is shifting the balance of power: weakening the power of workers and making it easier for bosses to exploit them and for the government to ignore them."

On social media, Sultana slammed Tory MPs for "disgracefully" backing the bill but stressed that "the fight isn't over."

"Let's now build a movement to defend the right to strike and build a Britan fit for workers," she wrote, linking to an Enough Is Enough petition that has been signed by more than 160,000 people.

The Tories' anti-strike bill is not yet law. It remains at the committee stage in the House of Commons, where it must be passed for a third time. If that happens, the House of Lords must approve the legislation on three separate occasions as well before it becomes law.

"The right to strike is the vanguard of democracy and freedom."

Sunak's attempt to curtail the right to strike has been widely condemned. According to King's College, London law professor Ewan McGaughey, the legislation is best characterized as a "pay cut and forced labor bill" and would constitute a "gross violation of international law."

"The right to fair pay and collective action are inalienable rights, enshrined in the Universal Declaration that followed the Second World War, and the International Bill of Rights of 1966," McGaughey wrote Monday. "These rights exist because workers, faced with authoritarian employers and governments, could always do one thing: they could just say 'No. If they don't pay, we won't work.'"

McGaughey continued: "Strikes brought down the Kaiser. Strikes forced the Empire to quit India. Strikes opened the Iron Curtain. Strikes finished Apartheid in South Africa. The right to strike is the vanguard of democracy and freedom, and whether they have the self-awareness or not, Sunak and [Business Secretary Grant] Shapps are treading blindly down the road to tyranny, like Viktor Orbán's Hungary, or Vladimir Putin's Russia."

"What should the government do to stop the strikes?" McGaughey asked. "First, it should not cut public workers' pay: an inflation-protected pay rise would cost just £10 billion, after tax and National Insurance receipts, on the government's own figures. This money can come from taxing Shell, BP, and big fossil fuel polluters whose excess profits have inflated bills and prices. Second, it should rebuild fair pay scales through sector-wide, good faith collective bargaining, and the right of workers to elect at least a third to half of directors on their enterprise board. Third, it should repeal the anti-strike laws, and enshrine a positive right to take collective action, including in solidarity, against reckless management shut downs."

Speaking in the House of Commons on Monday night, Labour Party deputy leader Angela Rayner gave voters a reason to show up for the next election, vowing to repeal the Tories' anti-strike bill, which she dubbed the "sacking nurses bill" and called one of the most "indefensible and foolish pieces of legislation to come before this House in modern times."

Sultana, for her part, delivered "a message to those watching at home who aren't sure about the strikes."

"If your pay is too low and your bills are too high, if you're struggling to make ends meet, if you can't get a doctor's appointment, you're not alone," said the lawmaker. "But the problem isn't striking workers. Your problem isn't migrants, refugees, or trans people either, or whoever the right-wing press is scapegoating today. Your problem is this Tory government and their 13 years of disastrous rule and the rigged economy that they've built."

"Because alongside record numbers of food banks, Britain has a record number of billionaires, record profits for big business, and record wealth for the top 1%," Sultana noted. "So let's bring together everyone who's had enough, and from the picket line to Parliament, let's fight for a better deal."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Last month, the United Nation’s environment agency issued arguably its starkest warning yet about the climate crisis. The failure by governments around the world to cut carbon emissions means there is ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’. Limiting the rise of global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels was the international agreement at COP21, the UN Climate Summit in Paris in 2015.

Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said:

‘We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.’

Professor David King, a former UK chief scientific adviser, responded:

‘The [UNEP] report is a dire warning to all countries – none of whom are doing anywhere near enough to manage the climate emergency.’

Scientists are now admitting more often that they are ‘scared’ about the climate crisis. Record high temperatures this summer in the UK alone prompted Professor Hannah Cloke, from Reading University, to say:

‘This sort of thing is really scary. It’s just one statistic amongst an avalanche of extreme weather events that used to be known as “natural disasters”.’

This language was echoed by Professor Dame Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey. Temperatures in the Antarctic of 40C above the seasonal norm have been measured, and 30C above in the Arctic.

Francis was alarmed most of all by a recent report warning that if the 1.5C threshold were exceeded, now regarded as almost inevitable, it ‘could trigger multiple climate tipping points: abrupt, irreversible and with dangerous impacts.’

She said:

‘It’s really scary. It seems some of [these trends] are already under way.’

Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, wrote that humanity has:

‘to accept that we are going to crash through the 1.5C climate breakdown guardrail, so that we are forced to face the brutal reality of desperately challenging climate conditions in the decades to come. This means facing the fact that we have no choice but to adapt rapidly to a very different world, one that our grandparents would struggle to recognise.’

He added:

‘Only if Cop acknowledges that 1.5C is now lost, and that dangerous, all-pervasive climate breakdown is unavoidable, will corporations and governments no longer have anywhere to hide, and no safety net that they can use as an excuse to do little or nothing.’

However, he added a vital, hopeful perspective:

‘The failure of the Cop process to avert the arrival of Hothouse Earth conditions doesn’t mean that it’s all over, that the battle is lost. Far from it. Above and beyond 1.5C, each and every 0.1C rise in global average temperature that we can forestall becomes critical; every ton of carbon dioxide or methane we can prevent being emitted becomes a vital win.’

Some scientists have now resorted to direct action, for which they have been arrested. NASA climate scientist Peter Kalman explained his motivation when locking himself to the doors of a terminal for private jets:

‘We say: this is our Earth; this is not the rich people’s Earth. This is for all of us. This is for future generations. This is for all of the other species that live on this planet, too.’

UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warned at the start of COP27, the UN climate summit taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, that the world is:

‘on the highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.’

He added:

‘We are in the fight for our lives – and we are losing.’

The war in Ukraine cannot be used as an excuse to delay the urgent transformation of society that is required:

‘It is the defining issue of our age. It is the central challenge of our century. It is unacceptable, outrageous and self-defeating to put it on the backburner.’

Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego, president of Colombia, began his COP27 speech with a warning about the risk of ‘the extinction of humankind’.

He added:

‘It is time for humanity, not for markets. The markets have produced this crisis, it will never get us out of it.’

He specifically called out the fossil fuel industry for their climate crimes.

Meanwhile, BP has just reported a huge profit due to high oil and gas prices exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. The fossil fuel giant made £7.1 billion for the period from July to September, more than double the profit over the same three months last year. As we discussed in a recent media alert, BP is making large sums of money from oil in ‘liberated’ Iraq where the company is causing extensive human and environmental damage.

Likewise, Shell announced a massive profit of £8.2 billion for the same period, its second highest quarterly profit on record. Reuters reported that the combined quarterly profits of four of the largest global oil companies was almost £50 billion.

These eye-watering sums, in the face of climate breakdown, are both outrageous and immoral. And they just skim the surface. But it’s much, much worse even than this.

Aaron Theirry, co-founder of Scientists for Extinction Rebellion, recently pointed out that:

‘The world’s largest oil and gas companies are set to invest $930 billion over this decade in new fossil fuel projects. Whilst the largest investment banks such as J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, etc. have continued to pour hundreds of billions into the sector since the Paris agreement.’

He added:

‘It was recently calculated that fossil fuel companies already own seven times more reserves than can be burned if we are to stay below 1.5C of global warming – yet they continue to explore for more, with government backing! Mark Camanale, CEO of Carbon Tracker points out that if we look at current investment strategies then “we are heading way beyond 3C degrees“. In other words, the global political and financial elites are still marching us towards catastrophe.’

Even the establishment Economist magazine has been blunt, with a recent editorial in a special issue on the climate crisis warning that:

‘The world is missing its lofty climate targets. Time for some realism. Global warming cannot be limited to 1.5°C.’

The Economist explained:

‘An emissions pathway with a 50/50 chance of meeting the 1.5°C goal was only just credible at the time of Paris. Seven intervening years of rising emissions mean such pathways are now firmly in the realm of the incredible. The collapse of civilisation might bring it about; so might a comet strike or some other highly unlikely and horrific natural perturbation. Emissions-reduction policies will not, however bravely intended.’

The article continued:

‘Most in the field know this to be true; those who do not, should. Very few say it in public, or on the record.’

Although the Economist would likely never point to capitalism as the root of the crisis, others do. Media analyst and political writer Alan MacLeod tweeted:

‘It’s capitalism or the planet. It really is that simple.’

Climate Activists Are ‘Truthsayers’

In a recent interview with Aaron Bastani of Novara Media, wildlife television presenter and conservationist Chris Packham made highly articulate comments about the climate crisis, grassroots protest and the destructive nature of the private media. It is well worth quoting him at length. As Bastani noted, Packham is a genuine national treasure, highly regarded by much of the British public for his knowledge and passion about the natural world and the environment, and for his keen ability to communicate these issues effectively.

Bastani asked him:

‘Do you think politics in this country is capable of addressing the climate crisis?’

Packham answered:

‘No. No, I think the people will have to force our politicians to address it. That’s why I continue to support those activists [referring to Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil] who are making a noise about this, and trying to bring it to the forefront of public attention, and express and articulate the urgency [of the situation] that we now find ourselves in.

‘It’s not only that I don’t trust them [politicians], it’s that even if they were trustworthy people, I don’t think the system’s there to make it work.’

Packham highlighted the acceleration of the climate crisis and the lack of response from political leaders to tackle it:

‘As every day goes by, we do more and more damage. My concern is, of course, that we go beyond the point where we can adapt and recover. And as someone who is aware of that damage within the environment – I’m not an economist or social scientist – but, within the environment, what I read coming from the scientists says that the time to act is now. It’s not something that we should wait any longer for. And it’s that lack of urgency that we see in our global elected representatives, and the enormous inertia when it comes to the transformative changes that we need to make, that are scary.’

He then expressed his strong support for climate activists:

‘That’s why people are glueing themselves to bridges. That’s why people are glueing themselves to Van Goghs and chucking mashed potato and tomato soup over it. They’re scared. They’re terrified out of their wits – because they’ve read the writing on the wall, and they understand that we need to address it, and implement the whole plethora of means that we have at our disposal to restore, recover and repair. And there’s a lot of work there that we could be getting on with. I’m not saying we have all the answers. But we’ve got way more than enough to get started.’

Of course, much of the so-called ‘mainstream’ media vilifies climate activists which then provokes anger towards them by some members of the public:

‘And then, what happens to those people? Well, they’re demonised by the billionaire press – again. And we have members of the public dragging them off of the street, beating them up, almost, dragging them off the street. When, really, all they’ve done is display their fear. I think when it comes to these sorts of protests, we should think far more about what motivates these people than the way that they choose to manifest their protest. Yes, it’s inconvenient. But why are they doing it?’

Packham’s support for Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil is not without reservation; but only in the sense of encouraging them to be even more effective:

‘In a time when it’s so difficult to get “news” to the masses, they’re doing everything in their power to do that. And, yes, sometimes they could be a bit more imaginative and, yes, sometimes their ideas overstay their welcome. I’ve said that to them; I’ll say it now. You know, there’s only so many times you can throw soup on a painting to get news because that’s the way that the media works. But, as long as they keep up that imagination, as long as they keep finding ways of peacefully, non-violently demonstrating, and keeping that at the forefront of people’s minds, then they will be making progress. But what they’re up against is people turning them into villains. They’re not; they’re truthsayers. They’re the canaries in the coal mine. We should be listening to these people, and many of them are extremely articulate and they know what motivates them.’

When ‘Opposition’ Is Complicity

Following the interview, Bastani used Twitter to highlight the glaring contrast between Packham’s cogent remarks on climate activism and the disparaging comments by establishment stooge, Sir Keir Starmer. Bastani presented a clip of Starmer, the supposed ‘Leader of the Opposition’, addressing Just Stop Oil as though he were a fossil-fuel-friendly government minister:

‘Get up, go home. I’m opposed to what you’re doing. It’s not the way to deal with the climate crisis. And that’s why we’ve wanted longer sentences for those that are glueing themselves and stuck on roads.’

As Bastani observed:

‘It’s not pretty but relentlessly keeping climate crisis at the top of news agenda is absolutely “effective”. Politicians only address things regarded as salient by electorate. Otherwise you just get words.’

Last year, Starmer blanked a young activist, a Labour Party member, when asked about supporting the Green New Deal. In the viral video clip from Brighton, where the Labour annual conference was taking place, Starmer pointedly ignored the young woman who had politely approached him. It was excruciating to see Starmer’s desperation to avoid answering her.

Alex Nunns, author of The Candidate – Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path To Power and former Corbyn speechwriter, tweeted ‘A short video about fraud’ showing Starmer’s transition from a supposed supported of climate activism in 2019 when he had said:

‘Climate change is the issue of our time, and as the Extinction Rebellion protest showed us this week, the next generation are not going to forgive us if we don’t take action. There’s been lots of talk. Now we need action.’

Three years later, you see an authoritarian, right-wing politician calling for longer sentences for climate activists. Fraud, indeed.

But this is symptomatic of Starmer’s disreputable bid to shake off any links with Labour under Corbyn, ditching the pledges he made, and now presenting himself as an establishment safe pair of hands of whom the billionaire press need not be afraid.

To what extent can Starmer be trusted to tackle the state-corporate establishment on climate? As we noted in a recent media alert addressing the mass media’s omerta towards Al Jazeera’s Labour Files, dissent in Starmer’s Labour is being crushed.

This even extends to purging Labour of left-wing candidates in the party’s selection process for parliamentary elections. Angus Satow, head of communications at Momentum, the grassroots left-wing movement made up of members of the Labour Party, highlighted on Twitter how Starmer’s Labour have been blocking council leaders, other senior council figures and even ex-Labour MPs if they have been deemed insufficiently loyal to the Labour right-wing:

‘They’re stitching it up’.

The Labour selection strategy for candidates is blatant:

‘They block all left-wingers from the start, and ensure any candidate offered to members is “friendly”.

‘This is no democratic choice at all.’

The Labour process relies on something they call ‘due diligence’. Satow explained:

‘A “dossier” is compiled of “concerning evidence” which has “come to light in the course of routine due diligence” checks on social media.

He added:

‘There are some truly laughable examples of what this evidence consists of.

– Once having liked a Caroline Lucas tweet

– Liking a tweet by Nicola Sturgeon about testing negative for covid’

But, worse:

‘Equally, there are some truly disturbing examples of “evidence” which is grounds for blocking:

– having mentioned Palestinian refugees (a blatant act of anti-Palestinian racism)

– Liking a tweet calling on Labour to be bolder in its economic policy

– a “history of protest”’

Some readers may recall the appalling revelation in Al Jazeera’s Labour Files that ‘Palestine’ was used as a search term by Labour HQ to root out members whom they might deem as ‘antisemitic’. Meanwhile, the party exhibits a ‘hierarchy of racism’ characterised by Islamophobia and anti-Black racism.

Satow observed:

‘All this is the polar opposite of what Starmer promised in 2020.

‘The media shouldn’t have any hesitation in saying this: Starmer lied to get elected.

‘He did so because this strategy is wholly out of touch with the mood in the Party and the country.’

Satow concluded:

‘So in sum:

* promises broken

* rights of trade unions disregarded

* local members & parties disrespected

* failing on anti-racism

* anti-democratic stitch-ups

This is Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.’

As if all this was not sufficient to discredit Starmer, Peter Oborne, former Telegraph chief political commentator, pointed to:

‘The conspiracy of lies about Corbyn that unites Sunak and Starmer’.

At Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons on 2 November, Rishi Sunak:

‘resorted to smear and fabrication about Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 Labour Party general election manifesto, saying: “Let us remember that national security agenda: abolishing our armed forces, scrapping the nuclear deterrent, withdrawing from Nato, voting against every single anti-terror law we tried, and befriending Hamas and Hezbollah. He [Starmer] may want to forget about it, but we will remind him of it every week, because it is the Conservative government who will keep this country safe.”’

Oborne observed:

‘Yet Labour’s 2019 manifesto proposed none of these things.

‘Sunak must surely have known all this was untrue. As chief secretary of the Treasury, he played a prominent role in the 2019 election and must have been familiar with the contents of the Labour manifesto. To knowingly utter an untruth is to lie.’

The following day, Corbyn responded in the Commons, saying that the prime minister had given ‘a wholly inaccurate representation’ of the 2019 Labour manifesto, and suggested that the prime minister should correct the record. This has yet to happen.

Oborne then pointed to Starmer’s disgraceful silence:

‘When Sunak unloaded his barrage of fabrication and smear, I am puzzled that Starmer did not correct him. As one of Corbyn’s most senior lieutenants during that campaign, he must have known every word of that manifesto.

‘This means that when Sunak spewed out his falsehoods, Starmer was in a position to point out that he was wrong. He could have quietly noted that there was no Labour plan to scrap the nuclear deterrent, abolish the armed forces, withdraw from Nato etc. He could have demanded an apology.’

Oborne added:

‘Yet he chose not to stand up for his former political colleague. I assume this was a political – and not an ethical – decision.’

He concluded:

‘Starmer has chosen not to define his leadership of the Labour Party in opposition to the Tories. He defines himself against his predecessor, Corbyn, even if that means entering into a conspiracy of deceit with the man who ought to be his real opponent – Rishi Sunak.’

Can anyone seriously believe that Sir Keir Starmer, a dissembling establishment politician, will actually take the necessary radical steps to address the climate crisis?

‘Eco-Zealots’ And ‘Sociopaths’ Who Want To Save Your Life

Starmer might as well declare that he stands foursquare behind the billionaire-owned, extreme right-wing press who have vilified climate activists as ‘eco-zealots’ and ‘eco-mobs’ (Daily Mail); ‘sociopaths with sickening levels of entitlement and self-importance’, a ‘lunatic fringe’, ‘criminal cult’, ‘extremists’ (The Sun); and ‘eco bullies who inflict misery on epic scale’ (Daily Express).

Daily Telegraph columnist and assistant editor Michael Deacon published an article under the headline: “Just Stop Oil are no longer simply activists – they’re a cult.” Another Telegraph comment piece, from the notorious climate sceptic Ross Clark, was titled: ‘Will the environmental extremists of Just Stop Oil slowly morph into terrorists?’

As we said earlier, Chris Packham correctly describes climate activists as truthsayers who are doing what they can, not just to raise the climate alarm, but to demand that government treats the climate emergency as an emergency. Just Stop Oil is adamant they will not stop until the government halts all new oil and gas licences and projects.

Extinction Rebellion, too, is standing firm in the face of media demonisation:

‘Do radical protests turn the public away from a cause? No, despite what people say on social media.

‘Do radical protests bring attention to that cause? Absolutely.’

Indeed, an opinion poll published last month showed that two-thirds of the British population supports peaceful direct action in support of the environment. In any case, as the independent journalist and political writer Jonathan Cook noted recently:

‘criticism of the protests has missed the point. The activists aren’t trying to win elections – they are not engaged in a popularity contest.

‘Their goal is to disrupt narratives and mobilise resistance. That requires building consciousness among those parts of the populace more receptive to their message, swelling the ranks of activists prepared to take part in civil disobedience, and making life ever harder for things to continue as normal.’

The ‘MSM’ may actually sit up and take more notice now that journalists have been arrested as they try to report on climate protests. Charlotte Lynch, a journalist with LBC, tweeted on 9 November:

‘Yesterday I was arrested by @HertsPolice whilst covering a protest on the M25. I showed my press card, and I was handcuffed almost immediately. My phone was snatched out of my hand. I was searched twice, held in a cell for 5 hours, and I wasn’t questioned whilst in custody.’

Jun Pang, policy and campaigns officer at Liberty, said the arrests were ‘being enabled and encouraged by the government’s dangerous assault on protest rights’.

Jane Merrick, policy editor at the i newspaper and former political editor of The Independent on Sunday, tweeted:

‘This is extraordinary and deeply worrying. The plea “can I show you my press card?” – which would have avoided this – is just ignored. Police should not be arresting journalists in this country.’

As an important corollary, let us not forget that the journalist and Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange has been effectively held prisoner since 2012 – first when seeking political asylum in London’s Ecuador embassy and then, after being abducted by the police in 2019, in Belmarsh high-security prison – for publishing evidence of US war crimes. Shamefully, ‘mainstream’ journalists have largely washed their hands of him.

Political analyst Nafez Ahmed noted last month that ‘Britain is sleepwalking into societal collapse’. He warned:

‘Over the coming months, we are going to witness an acceleration of interconnected political, social and economic crises which strike at the heart of Britain’s social fabric, and strain critical institutions and services – energy, transport, housing, food, health, criminal justice, policing and beyond.’

Ahmed continued:

‘the next Labour Government is going to inherit a bigger and more intractable crisis than the 2008 crash – a comprehensive crisis in which every sector of British society experiences a breakdown, with a destructive impact on the lives of citizens. This is why it is a form of societal collapse.’

Given Labour’s ditching of pledges under Starmer as the party shifts ever further towards the right, there is little prospect any time soon of averting this collapse.

Meanwhile, the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg rightly labelled COP27 a ‘scam’ that is ‘failing’ humanity by not leading to ‘major changes’. Instead, it is a high-profile, attention-seeking gathering for people in positions of power for ‘greenwashing, lying and cheating.’

She provided a defiantly hopeful note:

‘I’m convinced that when we are enough people to push for change, then change will come and we will never give up. We will never stop fighting for the living world. And it will never be too late to save as much as we can possibly save.’

She concluded:

‘About a month ago, on the global climate strike, hundreds of thousands of people climate striked across the planet. We are still here, and we are not planning on going anywhere. Young people all over the world are stepping up, and showing that our leaders messed with the wrong generation.’

As history has revealed time and time again, real change comes from below. The same will be true if we are to mitigate the worst effects of climate breakdown and societal collapse.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.