radiofree.asia

Category: Opinion

  • The Spectator just committed the most disgusting hate crime against disabled people

    Disabled people are unfortunately pretty used to attacks by the British corporate media – trying to make us out to be fakers or using our fear for clicks. This has of course massively ramped up in the last few months in the run up to evil Liz Kendall and Rachel Reeves announcing plans to kill us off with Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefit cuts.

    But the Spectator may’ve just printed the most disgusting piece of disability hate speech yet.

    The Spectator: disgusting hate speech against neurodivergent people

    As pointed out by ADHD UK, the Spectator has jumped on the bandwagon of taking the piss out of people with ADHD, by claiming it’s not real and that those with it are only saying they have it to excuse bad behaviour. In the cartoon featured in this month’s issue, one man tells another, “so anyway, when I was diagnosed with ADHD it just explained everything”

    The man depicted in the cartoon? Adolf fucking Hitler:

    That’s right, the Spectator has taken the most evil man to ever live and shown him using having ADHD as an excuse for spreading hatred of marginalised people so he could imprison and murder millions of them.

    I can’t even explain how consumed with rage i was when I saw this. The fact that the week after the British government has just announced the harshest cuts to disabled people ever, one of the UK’s leading political magazines would publish a cartoon not only making fun of people who have ADHD because so many believe it’s not real, but to attribute it to fucking Hitler.

    I don’t need to remind you all of the opinion Hitler held of neurodivergent and disabled people, labelling them as “useless eaters” and turning the German public against those who require support to live, in order to gain support to sterilise, torture and eventually kill hundreds of thousands of us.

    In other news – Labour.

    In completely different, unrelated news, we have the “party of work” and its current campaign of saying those on disability benefits are “languishing” and “taking the mickey” whilst pushing the agenda of how good work is.

    I mean it could be worse, I suppose, they could’ve made a back-to-work campaign video showing a brick building with a black iron archway. Oh wait:

    All of this is of course happening whilst certain parts of Labour also push to legalise assisted dying, something they vehemently claim won’t affect disabled people. However, many in Labour want to open it up to those with “incurable illnesses” (disabilities). There’s also the fact that one of the many many amendments rejected was to not allow people to legally kill themselves if they feel like a burden, something Labour are actively doing with cuts and the rhetoric around disabled people.

    Make no mistake, it’s absolutely not a coincidence that this was published in the wake of Kendall’s budget cuts announcement, The media has for a long time been a government tool used to disparage disabled people and feed the hatred of “benefit’s scroungers” and fakers to the British public.

    If you look at the media’s ADHD hate campaign alongside the plans of successive governments, it’s clear that this has been a coordinated attack to ensure that the British public see those with ADHD as faking it for attention and benefits in order to scale back the support they can receive.

    A snowballing propaganda campaign

    Since 2023 outlets of all political affiliation regularly published articles claiming that there were too many people with ADHD, that people were only getting a diagnosis cos it was trendy, that people on TikTok were coaching others on how to say they had ADHD for benefits.

    The BBC even ran an episode of panorama where a man “proved” how easy it was to be diagnosed with ADHD, at a time when so many were struggling to get appointments and medication.

    This has snowballed throughout the past two years, building more distrust in the public about those who are faking it until they believed it enough that Kendall was able to announced her cuts. Whilst the link here might not be clear, when you look at how they want to make PIP harder to claim it is.

    Whilst those who cant feed themselves would still be able to claim, having to be reminded or using time-saving ways to feed yourself wont score enough points, Whilst not being able to wash or change your clothes will pass, again having to be reminded to change your clothes or that you haven’t showered in a while won’t.

    People with ADHD in particular struggle to remember to do basic tasks such as feeding or showering ourselves. These and many other things that won’t score enough points to claim show how much the PIP changes that will directly affect those with mental and neurodivergent conditions.

    The way the media has turned the public against disabled and neurodivergent people has more than paved the way for Labour to destroy their lives.

    The Spectator needs to be held accountable for its actions

    The thing that enrages me the most though, is that this was published THREE days ago, and not a single other media outlet or journalist has acknowledged that this cartoon exists, never mind the harm it causes.

    Not one single person from the left or right of the media has challenged the fact that a major political magazine depicted the most evil man in history using ADHD to excuse his crimes against humanity- and that says it all about the way the media views disabled people

    Despite what the government and media want us to think, we have a right to live our lives without these constant attacks and be respected.

    There is however something you can do about it.

    The corporate media’s own regulatory body IPSO might be (in my opinion) a two bit farce of an organisation built to protect the media over the public. However, we are within our rights to complain about this.

    I’ve had my battles with IPSO over the years who like to tell me that it’s perfectly fine to discriminate against a group of people and that inaccuracy is fine as long as it’s the writers opinion so here’s what I’ve reported them for.

    Accuracy: Hitler was never diagnosed with ADHD.

    Discrimination: the cartoon suggests people use their diagnosis to excuse bad behaviour.

    I more than expect that IPSO will find a way for the Spectator to wriggle out of this, but by using our voices to oppose this we show that disabled people will not allow the media to continue to portray us as liars or at worst evil to suit the governments agenda to kill us all.

    You can report the Spectator to IPSO here.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The Spectator just committed the most disgusting hate crime against disabled people

    Disabled people are unfortunately pretty used to attacks by the British corporate media – trying to make us out to be fakers or using our fear for clicks. This has of course massively ramped up in the last few months in the run up to evil Liz Kendall and Rachel Reeves announcing plans to kill us off with Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefit cuts.

    But the Spectator may’ve just printed the most disgusting piece of disability hate speech yet.

    The Spectator: disgusting hate speech against neurodivergent people

    As pointed out by ADHD UK, the Spectator has jumped on the bandwagon of taking the piss out of people with ADHD, by claiming it’s not real and that those with it are only saying they have it to excuse bad behaviour. In the cartoon featured in this month’s issue, one man tells another, “so anyway, when I was diagnosed with ADHD it just explained everything”

    The man depicted in the cartoon? Adolf fucking Hitler:

    That’s right, the Spectator has taken the most evil man to ever live and shown him using having ADHD as an excuse for spreading hatred of marginalised people so he could imprison and murder millions of them.

    I can’t even explain how consumed with rage i was when I saw this. The fact that the week after the British government has just announced the harshest cuts to disabled people ever, one of the UK’s leading political magazines would publish a cartoon not only making fun of people who have ADHD because so many believe it’s not real, but to attribute it to fucking Hitler.

    I don’t need to remind you all of the opinion Hitler held of neurodivergent and disabled people, labelling them as “useless eaters” and turning the German public against those who require support to live, in order to gain support to sterilise, torture and eventually kill hundreds of thousands of us.

    In other news – Labour.

    In completely different, unrelated news, we have the “party of work” and its current campaign of saying those on disability benefits are “languishing” and “taking the mickey” whilst pushing the agenda of how good work is.

    I mean it could be worse, I suppose, they could’ve made a back-to-work campaign video showing a brick building with a black iron archway. Oh wait:

    All of this is of course happening whilst certain parts of Labour also push to legalise assisted dying, something they vehemently claim won’t affect disabled people. However, many in Labour want to open it up to those with “incurable illnesses” (disabilities). There’s also the fact that one of the many many amendments rejected was to not allow people to legally kill themselves if they feel like a burden, something Labour are actively doing with cuts and the rhetoric around disabled people.

    Make no mistake, it’s absolutely not a coincidence that this was published in the wake of Kendall’s budget cuts announcement, The media has for a long time been a government tool used to disparage disabled people and feed the hatred of “benefit’s scroungers” and fakers to the British public.

    If you look at the media’s ADHD hate campaign alongside the plans of successive governments, it’s clear that this has been a coordinated attack to ensure that the British public see those with ADHD as faking it for attention and benefits in order to scale back the support they can receive.

    A snowballing propaganda campaign

    Since 2023 outlets of all political affiliation regularly published articles claiming that there were too many people with ADHD, that people were only getting a diagnosis cos it was trendy, that people on TikTok were coaching others on how to say they had ADHD for benefits.

    The BBC even ran an episode of panorama where a man “proved” how easy it was to be diagnosed with ADHD, at a time when so many were struggling to get appointments and medication.

    This has snowballed throughout the past two years, building more distrust in the public about those who are faking it until they believed it enough that Kendall was able to announced her cuts. Whilst the link here might not be clear, when you look at how they want to make PIP harder to claim it is.

    Whilst those who cant feed themselves would still be able to claim, having to be reminded or using time-saving ways to feed yourself wont score enough points, Whilst not being able to wash or change your clothes will pass, again having to be reminded to change your clothes or that you haven’t showered in a while won’t.

    People with ADHD in particular struggle to remember to do basic tasks such as feeding or showering ourselves. These and many other things that won’t score enough points to claim show how much the PIP changes that will directly affect those with mental and neurodivergent conditions.

    The way the media has turned the public against disabled and neurodivergent people has more than paved the way for Labour to destroy their lives.

    The Spectator needs to be held accountable for its actions

    The thing that enrages me the most though, is that this was published THREE days ago, and not a single other media outlet or journalist has acknowledged that this cartoon exists, never mind the harm it causes.

    Not one single person from the left or right of the media has challenged the fact that a major political magazine depicted the most evil man in history using ADHD to excuse his crimes against humanity- and that says it all about the way the media views disabled people

    Despite what the government and media want us to think, we have a right to live our lives without these constant attacks and be respected.

    There is however something you can do about it.

    The corporate media’s own regulatory body IPSO might be (in my opinion) a two bit farce of an organisation built to protect the media over the public. However, we are within our rights to complain about this.

    I’ve had my battles with IPSO over the years who like to tell me that it’s perfectly fine to discriminate against a group of people and that inaccuracy is fine as long as it’s the writers opinion so here’s what I’ve reported them for.

    Accuracy: Hitler was never diagnosed with ADHD.

    Discrimination: the cartoon suggests people use their diagnosis to excuse bad behaviour.

    I more than expect that IPSO will find a way for the Spectator to wriggle out of this, but by using our voices to oppose this we show that disabled people will not allow the media to continue to portray us as liars or at worst evil to suit the governments agenda to kill us all.

    You can report the Spectator to IPSO here.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • OPINION: Tibetans’ voices will be silenced if RFA, VOA are shut down

    BEIJING – The U.S. government’s announced plans to cut funding to international broadcasters Radio Free Asia and Voice of America have dealt a heavy blow to the hearts of countless Tibetans.

    For decades, the Tibetan language services of RFA and VOA have been lifelines for Tibetans behind China’s “Great Firewall” of censorship, connecting them to outside world.

    These two services have provided windows into the truth about Tibet for Tibetans in Tibet and in exile, while also offering critical resources to the international community.

    A studio clock is seen at RFA Tibetan service's production headquarters in Washington, March 24, 2025.
    A studio clock is seen at RFA Tibetan service’s production headquarters in Washington, March 24, 2025.
    (Charlie Dharapak/RFA)

    Over the years, their reporting has served as an indispensable source for the United Nations Human Rights Council, environmental organizations, human rights groups and Tibet experts around the world.

    Now, with the potential shutdown of these services, Tibet risks further marginalization in global conversations and the international community’s attention to the Tibetan people’s plight is likely to decline further.

    Suffocating restrictions

    Access to information in Tibetan regions has long been highly restricted.

    In 2000, the Chinese government launched the “Western Development Broadcasting Project” to saturate the region with official propaganda. It also constructed numerous high-powered jamming stations across the plateau to block international Tibetan-language broadcasts, including those from RFA and VOA — stations that are still in use today.

    By the 2020s, nationwide surveillance projects like “Skynet” and “Sharp Eyes” had deployed vast networks of cameras, facial recognition systems and AI-powered monitoring technologies to reinforce control over society — with Tibetan regions under particular scrutiny.

    By 2023, China had installed more than 500 million surveillance cameras nationwide. That same year, a Tibetan school in Lithang, Kham, was shut down after a teacher contacted relatives abroad via WeChat and used RFA Tibetan programming as classroom material.

    A surveillance camera is silhouetted behind a Chinese flag in Beijing, Nov. 3, 2022.
    A surveillance camera is silhouetted behind a Chinese flag in Beijing, Nov. 3, 2022.
    (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

    Even under this suffocating control, many Tibetans still risked everything to access forbidden broadcasts.

    Some climbed mountaintops in search of a clearer signal. Others listened alone, late at night, in monastery corners. Some were summoned, detained, or even sentenced — simply for trying to hear the truth about Tibet, or to receive rare updates from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

    And still, countless brave individuals find ways to get vital information out.

    In February 2024, China’s plan to build a hydropower dam in Dege, Kham, threatened to submerge six monasteries and surrounding villages. Local Tibetans protested and were met with arrests and beatings.

    It was RFA’s Tibetan service that first broke the news. The story drew international attention, and so far the project hasn’t proceeded.

    Tibetan monks and residents in Dege, Sichuan province, appeal to Chinese officials to stop a planned dam construction in these images from Feb. 20-22, 2024.
    Tibetan monks and residents in Dege, Sichuan province, appeal to Chinese officials to stop a planned dam construction in these images from Feb. 20-22, 2024.
    (Citizen video)

    Meanwhile, the Chinese government is rapidly expanding its global media influence.

    China Global Television Network, or CGTN, has established bureaus across North America, Europe and Africa to produce multilingual content and “tell China’s story well.”

    The China Daily collaborates with U.S. media outlets to publish full-page sponsored inserts. CGTN and Xinhua now release YouTube videos to counter international criticism of China’s record in Tibet and Xinjiang, where 12 million Uyghurs are being persecuted.

    In September 2024, China also launched a new “Tibet International Communication Center.” Its mission? To serve as “a global communication window for Tibet… in line with national strategic goals… building a more effective international media system related to Tibet,” and to “guide public opinion and conduct international public opinion struggles” on Tibet-related issues.

    This aggressive global information offensive — while Tibet remains sealed off domestically — shows a stark contrast between external expansion and internal suppression.

    Chinese media celebrates

    Yet at this critical moment, the United States has chosen to gut RFA and VOA, including their Tibetan-language services. This decision is deeply regrettable and will undermine the Tibetan cause.

    Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of China’s state-run Global Times, celebrated the news: “Voice of America is paralyzed! And the equally poisonous RFA is gone too. This is a great day… I hope this development is irreversible.”

    Hu’s reaction underscores how crucial these Tibetan voices are. While the United States claims to defend global information freedom, it has now ceded key ground in the contest of soft power and public diplomacy.

    The Tibetan services of RFA and VOA were among the most important elements of the United States’ global broadcasting system. Shutting them down has not only deprived Tibetans of a vital information source — it has weakened the U.S. presence on the global stage.

    Beijing-based Tibetan writer and poet Tsering Woeser poses for a photo in Beijing in 2010.
    Beijing-based Tibetan writer and poet Tsering Woeser poses for a photo in Beijing in 2010.
    (Tsering Woeser)

    Since 2006, I have written more than 900 articles for RFA’s Tibetan service. With the help of RFA’s senior broadcaster and translator Dolkar, whose accurate translations and eloquent Tibetan narration brought my words to life, my writing reached the ears and hearts of Tibetan listeners. Weekly broadcasts sustained not only my writing but also my reflections on Tibet’s fate.

    This commitment culminated in four books: “Hearing Tibet,” “These Years in Tibet” (co-authored with Wang Lixiong), “Behind the Blessed Land,” and “Tibet in the Year of the Pandemic.” These works trace Tibet’s past, present, and future — and they serve as a heartfelt response to the silence surrounding the people, their monasteries, their towns, and their history.

    Now, with fears of a potential closure of RFA’s Tibetan service, I feel a deep sorrow. I still believe that its voice will not vanish, and its influence will not disappear. It was once a bridge between Tibetans inside and outside the country, and it will continue to live on in memory.

    Tibetans need more access to the outside world. More truth. More diversity. More clarity.

    The Tibetan services of RFA and VOA were not just media — they were a cultural flame, a guardian of language, a lighthouse of thought.

    Even under the weight of surveillance, Tibetans inside Tibet still listen: To remember their past, to understand their present, and to imagine a future that’s their own.

    Shutting down these services is to sever the Tibetan people from their resonance, their reflection, and their hope.

    We must ask:

    When Tibetan children grow up hearing only a single narrative,

    When villagers and nomads can no longer receive truthful messages from afar,

    When monks are trapped in a web of data and ever-watching cameras—

    Who will tell them that their world is not only the one written by the Chinese government?

    Therefore, I appeal:

    Please do not silence Tibet.

    Please protect the last information channels for the Tibetan people.

    Let truth continue to reach the plateau.

    Let hope continue to cross borders.

    Tibetan voices must not be buried. Let all people of conscience stand together and keep the light of truth shining across the snowland.

    Tibetans have already lost too much — please, do not take away our last remaining voice.

    Tsering Woeser is a Tibetan writer and poet based in Beijing. The views expressed here are her own.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by commentator Tsering Woeser.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Fraud of Endless War

    There is not a single war or serious military confrontation since WWII involving the U.S. that needed to be fought. Every conflict where soldiers and civilians suffered death or injury was — and is in the case of the ongoing fighting — unnecessary. These battles for territory, control, resources, subjugation, spite, are the direct result of greed, hubris, racist arrogance, ideological fanaticism, sometimes just pure ego. Predictably, we hear high sounding rhetoric in every instance about spreading democracy, safeguarding freedom, responsibility to protect, defending our national interests, rules-based international order, yakkety yak blah blah blah. It’s all just spin to manufacture acquiescence and consent, to get us sheeple to stand down and let the warmongers and empire builders, the MIC and the war industry, have their way.

    Those in the peace movement know the specific details rendered with this next graphic well. People who are preoccupied with living life and overcoming its many obstacles might dismiss it as fake news. But very tragically, it’s entirely factual. The U.S. just can’t stop attacking others.

    There are three fundamental reasons why the U.S. is a belligerent, bullying aggressor, or as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously summed it up, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.”

    Thus there are three reasons we are perpetually at war. These are …

    Ideological Drivers of Endless War

    There has never been a shortage in recorded history of master race ideologies. We find them even enshrined in religious texts. The U.S. has its share of such doctrinal canons, each couched in marvelous language and noble-sounding rhetoric, promoted by a host of noted individuals and organizations, e.g. Paul Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Council on Foreign Relations, Project for the New American Century, all anointing the U.S. as the indispensable nation, the world’s rightful heir as the master overlord. There is no ambiguity or nuance here. America has formally declared itself as the supreme authority over the entire planet. The latest buzz phrase is “rules-based order”, which effectively means the U.S. will make the rules to establish the order in the world, everyone else will obey or face the consequences. Those consequences take the form of economic or military terrorism, buttressed by the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency and the awesome might of the largest military in the history of the world.

    Social and Political Control Drivers of Endless War

    Defending the homeland and war command our attention. They focus our energy, steel our resolve, unify us, add purpose and drama to otherwise mundane day-to-day life. They play on our most basic instincts for survival and protection of what’s dear to us. But on the flip side, they also shut down critical faculties, create a visceral bond with the worst aspects of human nature, and open the door for tyrannical control and elimination of basic freedoms and rights. War unites us alright — in fear, suffering, misery, deprivation, shame, anger, suspicion, hate, paranoia, dehumanization and death.

    Economic Drivers of Endless War

    There are huge fortunes to be made with war. Conquered nations can be plundered. At home, those who invest in war industries will see magnificent returns. The more war, the greater the profits. It’s no secret that military conflict is encouraged, in fact driven, by profiteers on Wall Street and from within the defense contractors themselves. There’s a rotating door between those who head up defense companies and those who sit at the seats of power shaping policy and making the decisions which countries will be demonized, intimidated and attacked. Our current economic/political model incentivizes an unruly, aggressive, confrontational foreign policy and generously rewards the creation of war zones and arenas of conflict.

    It is often said that the U.S. cannot be without an enemy. This is only partially accurate. More to the point, it is the military-industrial complex that can’t be without an enemy. NATO’s massive bureaucracy and whole reason for existing cannot be without an enemy. What’s the point of the enormously bloated U.S. military, with its 800+ overseas bases, its vast fleets of battle ships and submarines, its vast array of military satellites and surveillance centers, its psyops and special ops and secret ops, its carving up the entire world into combatant command zones if there isn’t an enemy? Here’s how the U.S. sees the world.

    Let’s bear in mind what all of this means by looking at the big picture.


    The entire Imperial Project — world rule by the U.S. as a self-declared hegemon — is at its core and at every layer anti-democratic. It replaces self-determination in the countries we dominate with our authoritarian control — a polite phrase for totalitarian subjugation — making it ironic and odiously cynical that the U.S. claims to spread democracy in the world, when it regularly overthrows democratically-elected governments, then replaces them with despots which do our bidding.

    Just as tragically, the decision to be an empire, the entire program of global domination, mocks the idea of democracy in America itself. It was conceived of and initiated by a tiny minority of power-drunk, monomaniacal, avaricious psychopaths, supported by a ruling elite which sees conquest and plunder as just another day at the office. Put simply and directly: We as citizens never voted for any of this. And if we understood the true nature and agenda of the Imperial Project, we would without hesitation or equivocation entirely reject it and the misery and impoverishment it ultimately entails, both domestically and overseas.

    Right here at home, the Imperial Project by forcing its agenda on U.S. citizens, obliging us to underwrite it every single day of our lives with in-kind and out-of-pocket cash payments of our hard-earned dollars, coupled with the loss of freedom and opportunity, a complete silencing of the voice and priorities of everyday citizens, is at its core and at every layer anti-democratic, despotic, and exploitative. We as citizens have become an ATM machine for the warmongering lunatics trouncing other countries across the globe. We are indentured slaves to a militarized economy which requires war to function, frightened subjects of a regime that creates enemies everywhere, pawns of a power game and calculated strategy to set us against one another, a social-political climate intentionally engineered to maintain “total spectrum domination”, meaning totalitarian control even within our own borders.

    Maybe the idea of a benevolent, enlightened, inspired and visionary U.S. leading the world into a new age of affluence and harmony, guided by the best principles of democracy and driven by shared humanitarian values seems appealing. But it’s an illusion. It’s an illusion fostered by massive deceptions, propaganda, brainwashing, engineered for our compliance and complicity in the madness that has overtaken our governing institutions. Read the speeches of the mentors for this type of hyper-nationalistic insanity, the architects of the Third Reich, and see how closely they align with the promises of our current batch of make-America-great-again demagogues. Creepily, ‘Aryan super race’ and ‘American exceptionalism’ are bedfellows, the spawn of the same lunatic delusions. ‘Indispensable’ is nothing but code for ‘1000 year Reich’.

    Yes, that avuncular icon at the top, embraced, lauded, and emulated by the patronizers of a naive, trusting and gullible citizenry, is pointing at us, you and I, entreating us to be a part of a sinister plan to take over the world.

    We better make the right choice … while we still can make a choice.

    Time is running out.

  • Official Peace Dividend Project Website.
    • The post The Fraud of Endless War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chris Hedges: The last chapter of the Gaza Strip genocide

    Israel has begun the final stage of its genocide. The Palestinians will be forced to choose between death or deportation. There are no other options, writes Chris Hedges

    ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

    This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity.

    Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.

    The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas.

    The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties.

    The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.”

    The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.

    Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets.

    Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.

    Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.

    Since last Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, over 700 Palestinians have been killed, including 200 children. In one 24 hour period 400 Palestinians were killed.

    This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly 16 months of incessant attacks were awful.

    But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the 20th century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.

    October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalisation and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

    After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair.

    Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.

    “Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened:

    “The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again…Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.”

    The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18).

    Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.

    The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.

    The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the 16th day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the 13 km border between Gaza and Egypt.

    It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

    The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.

    Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.

    Israel refused to honour the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza

    Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.

    The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalised or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.

    Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.

    Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.

    That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved.

    It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilisation. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.

    Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Republicans are celebrating democracy’s collapse—and it might cost America everything

    We’ve been reporting from the US Capital over the past several weeks, hoping to document how Congress is responding to the authoritarian impulses of the Trump administration.  

    It has been fruitful, albeit chaotic. There have been colorful press conferences and illuminating back-and-forths with Republican legislators, but not in the way we expected.  

    Republicans, it seems, are happy to dispense with democracy, provided liberals go with it into the dustbin of history. In person they seem practically giddy, almost ebullient, and dangerously overconfident that abolishing liberalism is an end unto itself, regardless of the consequences.

    And that might be their downfall—and ours.

    DOGE caucus co-chairman Rep. Aaron Bean answers questions during a press conference in Washington, D.C., Feb. 24, 2025. (Pictured L-R) DOGE co-chair Rep. Pete Sessions, Rep. Beth Van Duyne, Rep. Aaron Bean, and Rep. Ralph Norman. Photo by Stephen Janis and Taya Graham

    During the press conferences we’ve attended, Republicans have reveled in massive federal job cuts and a possible tariff-induced recession. They’ve deflected serious concerns about data privacy and the dislocation of veterans from the federal workforce with puzzling confidence.

    They have expressed few doubts about a feckless billionaire delving into Social Security data and IRS records with little apparent oversight.

    Congressman Pete Sessions, co-chair of the Republican-led DOGE caucus, gave an elliptical answer on this very topic. When we asked if he could guarantee the safety of Americans’ personal information in light of reports that the DOGE team was underskilled and over-empowered, he deflected.

    “The IRS failed that test, and has failed it for many, many years,” he responded obliquely. 

    Even on topics like economic growth, high-profile Republicans have acted confident about usually touchy subjects, like a possible recession. Congressman Tim Burchett embraced a tariff-induced downturn, proclaiming with confidence on the Capitol steps that there would be temporary pain from the fallout over Trump’s tariff ballet, but it would be limited to the wealthy. 

    “There is going to be some pain, but it’s going to be very, very short term,” he said with confidence.

    Normally, all of these political third rails—a dour economy and massive federal job cuts—would be anathema to a party working to remain in power. Yet these controversial topics have been met with a collective shrug by MAGA apostles. 

    You could write off this behavior as the natural hubris of a newly elected majority. But that would be an understatement. Conservatives seemed buoyed by a different sort of political calculus—the kind that shrinks politics to a binary conception of power, us versus them, that is downright dangerous.

    That’s because Republicans seem certain their sole enemy—and ongoing biggest political challenge—is excising liberalism from its traditional bastions, like the federal government and academia; not improving, not reforming, or even meeting the challenges of a changing world, but vanquishing their Democratic rivals. They’re giddy that Democrats and liberals have been silenced, obliterated, or otherwise marginalized.  

    That’s one of the reasons they seem unconcerned that the cuts have been indiscriminate and unlawful. Purging appears to be a priority. Chaos, the primary effect.

    But all of this gloating ignores the reality of a world that is not so easily cowed. Conservatism may consider itself to be locked in an epic battle of left versus right, but the world is more complicated and nasty, and that might be a fatal miscalculation. The defeat of liberalism could be a pyrrhic conservative victory.

    Consider that while the Trump administration has withdrawn aid and drastically cut funding for research at American universities, China has committed to even more funding for research.

    As Trump has been deleting references to climate change and green energy, China is on the precipice of world domination in renewable energy. Sure, Republicans may wipe out the “Green New Scam,” as they call it. But how do we compete with China when cheaper and cleaner solar power drives an economy already constructed to overwhelm ours?

    Trump has slowed immigration to a trickle, even as our falling birthrate indicates we need more people. The downturn occurs as the conservative Cato Institute touts that immigrants consume fewer welfare benefits than native-born Americans and have also been a key factor in America’s recent economic growth. 

    If the game were simply between these two teams, liberals and MAGA, the victory could be resounding. Universities will falter, the federal workforce will dissolve, and the power base of liberalism will wither.

    But the world does not abide by this calculus. This will not be the win MAGA expects. The upcoming fight will, more accurately, be one of democracy versus autocracy, scientific truth versus disinformation, and a free market versus a command economy. Battles we might not be able to fight if the chaotic deconstruction of the federal government continues.

    These are the spoils Republicans seek. The rest of the world awaits a weakened nation courtesy of the Republican obsession with liberalism.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • The F-Word

    “Fascism” is the current malediction of the left media to evoke fear and loathing of Trump, Alternatives for Germany (AfD), and other right-wing movements. It’s a strongly charged term, but false and harmful.

    What we are witnessing now is not the rise of fascism but the fall of social democracy – very different. Social democracy arose in the late 19th Century as a defense against the growing socialist movement. It modified capitalism, softened it to ease mass poverty and improve the living conditions of the working class, not out of benevolence but to forestall uprisings. With the exception of the Russian Revolution, it was effective for over a century.

    But now the competition from new cheap-labor capitalist countries like China1and India is too intense. Our capitalists can’t afford to be generous anymore. So they are cracking down and cutting back on wages, benefits and social programs. The purpose of the current swing to the Right is to restore hardcore capitalism – the oppression and exploitation of workers.

    Social democracy still has supporters among capitalists whose businesses depend on consumer buying power. They control politicians in the Democratic Party and the moderate wing of the Republican Party. They are losing ground now.

    That doesn’t mean fascism is rising. Systemically seen, Trump and AfD are disruptors necessary to break the encrusted, self-serving rule of the “progressive” parties, which have shown themselves to be incapable of solving the social problems confronting us. These problems are created by capitalism and can’t be solved by any form of it. The duty of socialists is to present the Marxist solution, not to spread irrational fear. Our job now, as Lenin said, is to build the revolutionary party.

    Instead of fascism, we are entering the stage of dialectical swings between Right and Left, each increasing in momentum until they culminate in revolution. How long this current rightward phase will last will depend on how the material situation develops.

    Trump and AfD are strict conservatives who want to reduce taxes, keep poor immigrants out of the country, restore traditional values, and limit the role of government. That’s reason enough to oppose them. But they’re not fascists. Rather than limiting government, fascists impose an overwhelming government controlling every aspect of life through state violence.

    The checks and balances built into US Constitution prevent that kind of drastic, fundamental change. The Constitution would have to be annulled and the right to vote abolished. If either of these occur, the American people would arise in mass and restore democracy.

    The Constitution might be overthrown in the future by a military coup as a last-ditch effort to crush the working class and preserve capitalism, but we’re a long way from that. Using that term now will blur its meaning when we really need it. Fear-driven politics aren’t effective – they’re exhausting and paralyzing.

    This is not just a quibble over terminology. We have to recognize where we are now: the crumbling of social democracy and the reinstating of conservative capitalism. Labeling this fascism or claiming it might become fascism sometime in the future just creates fear and confusion when we need clear thinking instead of misleading exaggerations.

    ENDNOTE:

    The post The F-Word first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    China is indeed low wage, but consumer produce and products are also low cost. As to the assertion that China is capitalist read “China is Not Capitalist and it is Not Yet Communist” and “How Socialist Is the Communist Party of China?” — DV ed

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump-Witkoff: “We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.” #2

    This is a continuation of my article yesterday “Trump/Witkoff: ‘We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.‘”

    In order to keep that article brief, I didn’t there go into the lies about history that Trump/Witkoff expressed, which they got from their Zionist (racist-fascist-imperialist-pro-Jewish, or “nazi”-Jewish for short) friends and acquaintances, which includes many of Trump’s political megadonors to whom Trump owes his 2014 electoral victory, and so Trump/Witkoff share those mega-billionaires’ values, which are Biblical values and therefore support Israel against the Palestinians and so make impossible any successful negotiation by them of the disagreements between Israel and Palestine. This continuation of the article will deal specifically with those historical lies, which Trump/Witkoff believe to be truths and show no interest whatsoever in re-examining the falsehoods that they believe from the Bible and from Israeli propaganda:

    Today (March 23rd) Larry C. Johnson addressed those historical falsehoods that Trump/Witkoff and other Zionists think to be true, and here is the opening of that article, which does such a good job of pointing them out so that there’s no need for me to do so, and I shall therefore merely comment here about it, after presenting its opening:

    *****

    Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Steve Witkoff Reveals Surprising Ignorance

    23 March 2025 by Larry C. Johnson

    I have recorded a video for Counter Currents on Tucker’s blockbuster interview with Trump’s “peace” emissary, Steve Witkoff. My editor is in a different time zone, so it may not go up until Monday. However, I do have some comments about what we have learned about Mr. Witkoff. For starters, he comes across as a descent, honorable guy. And, I am sure he is a smart lawyer who knows the real estate business in New York City and is a strong supporter of Donald Trump.

    However, he revealed a surprising depth of ignorance about the situation in Gaza and the war in Ukraine. I was shocked. One of the first bombshells to drop was his confession that he has not met with or talked to anyone from Hamas. All of his “diplomacy” with the Palestinians is via a Qatari cutout. If you are not talking to both sides and trying to establish your credibility, you cannot be an honest broker.

    Witkoff also admits that he was shown a Zionist propaganda film about October 7, which he claims shows evidence of multiple rapes of Israeli women by Hamas. We know, thanks to Max Blumenthal and the folks at the GreyZone, that there is no evidence to support this claim. [Actually, Wikipedia’s article “Hamas baby beheading hoax” is far better-documented and more informative about that “hoax” Trump/Witkoff still don’t even know is a hoax, though Alice Speri of “The Intercept” had first raised serious doubts as to its veracity on 12 October 2023, the day after the Israeli lie was asserted by Netanyahu and seconded by Biden; so, is Tulsi Gabbard actually failing at her job of writing and presenting the Daily Intelligence Brief to President Trump? How could Trump/Witkoff NOT know it was a hoax?] Witkoff makes no effort to hide his disdain for Hamas and accuses them falsely of using children as suicide bombers. Let me remind you of my earlier article, The Hard Facts About Palestinian Terrorism Debunk the Western Narrative. Here are some key highlights:

    While Israel and the West repeatedly and incessantly insist that Hamas is nothing more than one of the most deadly, formidable terrorist groups in the world, the data collected and published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs debunks that narrative. The claim against Hamas is false. You don’t have to take my word for it, I am going to show you the data. The following tables and spreadsheets contain data collected by Israel between 27 September 2000 and 26 April 2024. [Israel continues to update the figures at the website linked above.]

    As an aside, Israel does not include the casualties suffered as a result of the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas. Israel calls it, Swords of Iron. In contrast to the meticulous list of the name of every dead Israeli and foreign victim, who allegedly died at the hands of Palestinians, the Swords of Iron data does not name the victims, especially the 40 children that Israeli officials insist were killed by Hamas. I find that curious, to say the least.

    *****

    Larry Johnson’s closing paragraph opens with “Steve Witkoff is an intelligent man and is capable of learning new facts. But I fear that he is blinded by his own Zionist prejudices and will convince Trump to continue to support Israel’s campaign of genocide.” But how can “an intelligent man” believe the garbage he does? Especially if “he is blinded by his own Zionist prejudices” — which he so obviously IS? He CERTAINLY is NOT a person who ought to be negotiating between Israel (which he loves) and Hamas (which he hates). He is CLEARLY an ADVOCATE for Israel, AGAINST Hamas.

    Not only is Witkoff obviously stupid, but so too is Trump, for hiring such people in the first place. Their level of intelligence is scandalously low. That is dangerous for America, and for the entire world. The billionaires’ corruption of the U.S. Government has reached  such a nadir, so that everyone has good and sound reason to be afraid. America’s billionaire-ocracy (or aristocracy) have handed the White House off from one corrupt fool, Biden, to another corrupt fool, Trump.

    The post Trump-Witkoff: “We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.” #2 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Crips Against Cuts mounted nationwide DWP protests – but they weren’t without incident

    Chronically ill and disabled activists and allies took to the streets on Saturday 22 March against the Labour Party’s planned brutal cuts to their benefits. Protesters mobilised across the country in 14 locations to call out the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) disgraceful move to slash social security for sick and disabled people to meet chancellor Rachel Reeves’ arbitrary self-imposed fiscal savings.

    The demonstrations kicked off the start of chronically ill and disabled resistance to the government’s dangerous austerity-driven punch downs on the community. However, the protests weren’t without issue or incident.

    Most alarmingly, protesters were met with violent physical hate crimes at one protest – showing the unsafe and hostile climate Labour’s plans and rhetoric has stoked.

    Crips Against Cuts: protests against the Labour-led DWP’s plans

    As the Canary previously reported, local disabled activists from the new decentralised grassroots group Crips Against Cuts coordinated the protests across the country. They held these in:

      • London
      • Birmingham
      • Sheffield
      • Leeds
      • Bournemouth
      • Exeter
      • Brighton
      • Bristol
      • Portsmouth
      • Edinburgh

    Crips against cuts protests planned for this weekend. Please follow the QR for details and please please please repost on your accounts 💜

    @crips-against-cuts.bsky.social

    [image or embed]

    — Just Em x (@agirlcalleddave.bsky.social) March 20, 2025 at 9:57 AM

    In London, a small group of protesters gathered at Southbank along the River Thames holding placards and giving powerful speeches against the cuts:

     

    View this post on Instagram

     

    A post shared by Samantha Baines👑 (@samanthabaines)

    One disabled protester called the corporate media’s recent attacks on Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claimants’ access to the Motability scheme out for what it is:

    Hands off my PIP, you traitorous arseholes. Great @crips-against-cuts.bsky.social rally. You’ve riled the disableds @teamlabouruk.bsky.social, we will fight your abominable cuts till we win, we will not vote for you again 🧑‍🦼👩🏽‍🦼‍➡🤬🤬🤬 #pip #disabilityrights #wheelchair

    [image or embed]

    — elbelbumble.bsky.social (@elbelbumble.bsky.social) March 22, 2025 at 9:28 PM

    Exeter activists held a die-in to represent the deaths of chronically ill and disabled people that Labour’s cuts will foment:

    #DisabledPeopleAgainstCuts #Exeter protest against cuts to disability benefit and personal independence payments today.

    I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the crowd’s reaction. I’ve been to a fair number of protests which are usually met with […]

    [Original post on social.coop]

    [image or embed]

    — Jules (@afewbugs.social.coop.ap.brid.gy) March 22, 2025 at 4:19 PM

    Sheffield drew a sizeable crowd with some poignant and on-point placards:

    This is what community looks like ✊🏻 Thanks for showing up Sheffield! Don’t forget to take action – write to your MP, and follow @crips-against-cuts.bsky.social on insta or bsky!

    [image or embed]

    — Miranda Debenham (@mdebenham1.bsky.social) March 22, 2025 at 9:15 PM

    Labour MPs didn’t have the balls to face protesters

    Protesters in Cambridge pitched up outside a local Jobcentre with a big banner. They followed this up by draping the banner over a local bridge in defiance against Labour’s plans:

    In Edinburgh, campaigners took their protest right to the constituency office front door of Labour Secretary of State for Scotland Ian Murray MP:

    #WelfareNotWarfare

    Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty Kicked Off DPAC local actions across the UK in Edinburgh, Scotland, with a lively protest outside Ian Murray MP Sec of State for Scotland

    Write up Edinburgh Reporter theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2025/03/prot…
    Photos with Alt text 📢⬇

    [image or embed]

    — Disabled People Against Cuts (@dis-ppl-protest.bsky.social) March 22, 2025 at 6:36 AM

    Local media site the Edinburgh Reporter was on the ground interviewing protesters who spelled out what the cuts would mean for them and their loved ones:

    Protesters outside the constituency office of @ianmurraymp.bsky.social were keen to tell him what they think of the UK Government’s plans to wipe £5billion off the benefits bill. He wasn’t there but we had asked him about the proposed cuts earlier…

    [image or embed]

    — The Edinburgh Reporter (@edinreporter.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 5:02 PM

    However, as the outlet noted, while Murray was in Edinburgh, he clearly didn’t have the balls to look his constituents in the face outside his office.

    Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer on the ground, but…

    Meanwhile, activists gathered together on College Green in Bristol to host speeches:

    As the Canary highlighted ahead of the protests, Bristol Central MP and Green Party leader Carla Denyer came out in support of chronically ill and disabled people fighting the cuts:

    Choosing to cut support for disabled people, knowing that many already live in poverty, and that being disabled means that life almost always COSTS MORE – that’s a political choice

    Pleased to join @crips-against-cuts.bsky.social in Bristol today, angry that it had to happen

    (📸 by Clare Reddington)

    [image or embed]

    — Carla Denyer (@carladenyer.bsky.social) March 22, 2025 at 6:02 PM

    Though, a word of caution might be warranted here. This is the same Denyer who also voted for Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill at second reading, alongside her Green Party colleagues.

    All 350 Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations (DDPOs) are against it due to the enormous risks it poses to chronically ill and disabled folks.

    So, while she may be an ally in opposing these cuts, protesters should be wary of thinking that she’s genuinely listening to the valid concerns and fears of our communities.

    Hate crimes: protesters attacked in Exeter

    The widespread protests show the depth of opposition to Labour’s callous plans from chronically ill and disabled people across the country.

    However, while these protests brought out the best of our communities, it also sadly drew in some of the worst. These were some of the very first protests chronically ill and disabled people have mounted against these cuts, but immediately they’ve exposed the disgusting ableist bigotry at the beating heart of Labour right Britain.

    In Exeter, this came to a head with some local residents committing violent hate crimes against the protesters. In one disturbing scene, a bigot threw a chair into the crowd:

    Another incident involved local people lobbing cap bombs at protesters:


    It’s clear who’s to blame for this despicable display of rancid ableist abuse: Labour and its client media cronies.

    That is, the vile rhetoric Labour ministers and the right-wing corporate media have been spouting, painting claimants as ‘scroungers’, ‘skivers’ and ‘fraudsters’ has already culminated in disgusting real-world consequences for chronically ill and disabled people.

    In short, it’s a shameful indictment that chronically ill and disabled people can’t go out and exercise their right to protest without threats to their person. Of course, this is one very visible,

    However, it’s characteristic of the types of discrimination and abuse chronically ill and disabled people experience every day. From outright verbal and physical bigotry, right through to ableist micro-aggressions, these all add up to a dangerous climate for chronically ill and disabled communities.

    Moreover, it’s the thin edge of the wedge of the state-sanctioned violence perpetrated against them through the systemically ableist DWP. Now, Labour is only amping up its war on chronically ill and disabled people with this fresh round of cuts. It will mean only more of this hostile environment.

    Where are our ‘allies’ on the Left?

    One thing that’s also immediately striking from the sparse photos and videos currently available is the scale of the protests.

    Unfortunately, this isn’t in an off-the-charts turnout kind of way. Instead, apart from the odd exception, the protests largely seem to have garnered modest crowds. Compare the numbers in these locations to nationwide demos in recent years – ongoing Palestine protests, workers’ strikes, climate emergency mobilisations, and for a nationwide call out, the protests on Saturday were pretty small.

    Of course, many chronically ill and disabled people couldn’t be there too (myself included thanks to a flare), so that’s another reason the turn out wasn’t huge. But that again begs the question – where were allies when we needed them?

    Non-disabled people, I’m looking at you. Come to the protests, de-centre yourself, and just listen, support, make noise alongside us.

    And chances are, many have a chronically ill or disabled family member or friend too – so where were they?

    Now, that’s not to take away from the brilliant people who did turn up, and the folks who poured their hearts into organising these demos in the short space of less than a week.

    However, what it is a reminder is how disability rights is still seen. That is, it’s the non-glamorous social justice sibling, way down the priority list. This isn’t anything new of course. And Crips Against Cuts managed to motivate more people at a local level than perhaps has been seen in some time over DWP welfare reforms.

    Historically, people just don’t turn up to support chronically ill and disabled protests. That should be a stain on the conscience of the left. Partly, this is a product of left-wing movements focusing on working people, as the Canary’s Steve Topple recently highlighted:

    When you centre working people as the priority (and let’s be real, based on the weighting of the line up, white people) and leave chronically ill, disabled, homeless, and non-working people – as well as minoritised women – as an after thought, you expose yourselves for the political games you are actually playing.

    People on the left regularly signal their intersectionality, but somehow chronic illness and disability are forgotten when it counts. Or worse still, tokenised as part of other campaigns, and deployed at and for their convenience.

    PCS union: handwringing DWP staff won’t strike for us

    And there is perhaps no clearer example of this than the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union.

    PCS national president Martin Cavanagh gave a speech at the Bristol demo:

    Throughout, he appealed to ‘class solidarity’ and argued that:

    Those who need support are somehow the problem. Those who need support are somehow the cause of all our ills in the UK. Well we all know that is a damn right lie. And every single one of us has a duty and responsibility to call it out.

    However, as always with the corporatist union handmaidens at the top, it has long been a case of “strike for me, but not for thee”. This was, after all, Cavanagh – the PCS’s DWP Group president – who despite all the platitudes over the years of solidarity with chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants, has mustered only hand-wringing defiance of his employer’s unconscionable welfare reforms and punitive sanction policies.

    Where was Cavanagh and his colleagues when DWP grim-reaper Iain Duncan Smith unleashed his devastating wave of welfare cuts?

    Where were they every IDS-reprising DWP boss since who’ve slashed benefits, and overseen the “systematic” and “grave” violation of disabled people’s human rights?

    Where were they when the Tory-led DWP presided over the deaths of tens of thousands of chronically ill and disabled claimants?

    The short answer is, the snivelling sell-out lot of them sure as hell weren’t striking. That’s reserved solely for their own work conditions. But then, it’s hard to imagine snobby middle class managers that populate the DWP and look down their noses all day at claimants sacrificing their job security. God forbid they’d be finding themselves signing onto the dole alongside us!

    Tokenised class solidarity

    Moreover, Cavanagh seemed to skip over the part where it’s DWP staff that he and his union represent who have enacted years of the department’s violence against chronically ill, disabled, and poor claimants. Instead, he sung the praises of the ‘good’ folks at the DWP, working day in, day out in public service:

    And comrades, what I find particularly disturbing, is that my background is DWP – clearly I’ve been evil in a previous life. But absolutely we understood and we knew back in the 1980s when I first started, that you absolutely on day one learned that anyone who came through that door, whether they were sick, had a disability, or just couldn’t find work, your job was to support them. Give them the financial leg up that they needed, when they needed it.

    And you were absolutely told that they shouldn’t leave that building until you’ve done everything you could to help them. And how quickly times changed.

    It’s almost chilling to see him convinced that the DWP is, or was ever anything other than the brutal arm of the state punching down on chronically ill, disabled, and poor people. His speech should be seen for what it is: a shallow effort to rehabilitate a department rife in ableism, classism, and rampant negligence.

    In short, Cavanagh and his union are the very epitome of tokenised class solidarity. Over a decade ago, his union abandoned claimants forced into ‘workfare’. This was the government’s policy forcing claimants into unpaid labour in order to claim benefits. Of course, little has changed today – Labour’s latest work requirements conditionality regime will usher in only more of the same.

    Now, does anyone really believe beyond Cavanagh’s warm words, that the PCS union isn’t going to throw chronically ill and disabled people under the bus once more?

    Working class solidarity is conditional when it comes to disability rights. And Cavanagh laundering the PCS union’s image at these protests should be ample evidence of that.

    Chronically ill people: an afterthought

    Moreover, the protests were also somewhat marred as much by who wasn’t included, as by who they did.

    Crucially, the precious few posts from these protests illustrated something important. This is how the lack of online live-stream, videos, and action left out a whole contingent of people the cuts will undoubtedly impact: chronically ill people.

    Many are bed-bound/house-bound or immuno-compromised and so unable to make it to in-person demos. So, making it so they can participate online – or view back speeches not in real-time is a key matter of accessibility.

    It speaks to a problematic persisting feature of the left’s protest spaces more generally. And notably, it unfortunately often extends to protests held by disabled groups. This is, the lack of inclusivity and accessibility for their chronically ill siblings-on-the sharp end of state violence.

    A movement that’s sorely needed all the same

    On the whole, the Crips Against Cuts protests were a welcome and vital show of chronically ill and disabled people’s collective resistance against the DWP. Its quick organisation and power to pull in activists nationwide is needed now more than ever. Credit where it’s due.

    However, the left more broadly need to take a good look in the mirror and reflect why so many failed to turn out to these protests. Moreover, the movement should be careful who it gets into bed with – because when push comes to shove, not everyone who proclaims to stand up for us really have our backs.

    Nonetheless, Crips is just getting started, and they’re sure to continue being a force for chronically ill and disabled people going forward.

    Featured image via screengrab

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Pro-Palestinian protesters challenge Peters at state of the nation speech

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Saige England in Christchurch

    Like a relentless ocean, wave after wave of pro-Palestinian pro-human rights protesters disrupted New Zealand deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters’ state of the nation speech at the Christchurch Town Hall yesterday.

    A clarion call to Trumpism and Australia’s One Nation Party, the speech was accompanied by the background music of about 250 protesters outside the Town Hall, chanting: “Complicity in genocide is a crime.”

    Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair John Minto described Peters’ attitude to Palestinians as “sickening”.

    Inside the James Hay Theatre, protester after protester stood and spoke loudly and clearly against the deputy Prime Minister’s failure to support those still dying in Gaza, and his failure to denounce the ongoing genocide.

    Ben Vorderegger was the first of nine protesters who appealed on behalf of people who have lost their voices in the dust of blood and bones, bombs and sniper guns.

    Before he and others were hauled out, they spoke for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza — women, men, doctors, aid workers, journalists, and children.

    Gazan health authorities have reported that the official death toll is now more than 50,000 — but that is the confirmed deaths with thousands more buried under the rubble.

    Real death toll
    The real death toll from the genocide in Gaza has been estimated by a reputed medical journal, The Lancet, at more than 63,000. A third of those are children. Each day more children are killed.

    One by one the protesters who challenged Peters were manhandled by security guards to a frenzied crowd screaming “out, out”.

    The deputy Prime Minister’s response was to deride and mock the conscientious objectors. He did not stop there. He lambasted the media.

    At this point, several members of his audience turned on me as a journalist and demanded my removal.

    Pro=Palestine protesters at the Christchurch Town Hall
    Pro=Palestine protesters at the Christchurch Town Hall yesterday to picket Foreign Minister Winston Peters at his state of the nation speech.Image: Saige England/APR

    This means that not only is the right to free speech at stake, the right or freedom to report is also being eroded. (I was later trespassed by security guards and police from the Town Hall although no reason was supplied for the ban).

    Inside the Christchurch Town Hall the call by Peters, who is also Foreign Minister, to “Make New Zealand Great Again” continued in the vein of a speech written by a MAGA leader.

    He whitewashed human rights, failed to address climate change, and demonstrated loathing for a media that has rarely challenged him.

    Ben Vorderegger was the first of nine protesters who appealed on behalf of Palestinans before being thrown out
    Ben Vorderegger in keffiyeh was the first of nine protesters who appealed on behalf of Palestinans before
    being thrown out of the Christchurch Town Hall meeting. Image: Saige England/APR

    Condemned movement
    Slamming the PSNA as “Marxist fascists” for calling out genocide, he condemned the movement for failing to talk with those who have a record of kowtowing to violent colonisation.

    This tactic is Colonial Invasion 101. It sees the invader rewarding and only dealing with those who sell out. This strategy demands that the colonised people should bow to the oppressor — an oppressor who threatens them with losing everything if they do not accept the scraps.

    Peters showed no support for the Treaty of Waitangi but rather, endorsed the government’s challenge to the founding document of the nation – Te Tiriti o Waitangi. In his dismissal of the founding and legally binding partnership, he repeated the “One Nation” catch-cry. Ad nauseum.

    Besides slamming Palestinians, the Scots (he managed to squeeze in a racist joke against Scottish people), and the woke, Peters’ speech promoted continued mining, showing some amnesia over the Pike River disaster. He did not reference the environment or climate change.

    After the speech, outside the Town Hall police donned black gloves — a sign they were prepared to use pepper-spray.

    PSNA co-chair John Minto described Peters’ failure to stand against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians as “bloody disgraceful”.

    The police arrested one protester, claiming he put his hand on a car transporting NZ First officials. A witness said this was not the case.

    PSNA co-chair John Minto (in hat behind fellow protester)
    PSNA co-chair John Minto (in hat behind fellow protester) . . . the failure of Foreign Minister Winston Peters to stand against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians is “bloody disgraceful”. Image; Saige England/APR

    Protester released
    The protester was later released without any charges being laid.

    A defiant New Zealand First MP Shane Jones marched out of the Town Hall after the event. He raised his arms defensively at protesters crying, “what if it was your grandchildren being slaughtered?”

    I was trespassed from the Christchurch Town Hall for re-entering the Town Hall for Winston Peters’ media conference. No reason was supplied by police or the Town Hall security personnel for that trespass order..

    "The words Winston is terrified to say . . . " poster
    “The words Winston is terrified to say . . . ” poster at the Christchurch pro-Palestinian protest. Image: Saige England/APR

    It is well known that Peters loathes the media — he said so enough times during his state of the nation speech.

    He referenced former US President Bill Clinton during his speech, an interesting reference given that Clinton did not receive the protection from the media that Peters has received.

    From the over zealous security personnel who manhandled and dragged out hecklers, to the banning of a journalist, to the arrest of someone for “touching a car” when witnesses report otherwise, the state of the nation speech held some uncomfortable echoes — the actions of a fascist dictatorship.

    Populist threats
    The atmosphere was reminiscent of a Jorg Haider press conference I attended many years ago in Vienna. That “rechtspopulist” Austrian politician had threatened journalists with defamation suits if they called him out on his support for Nazis.

    Yet he was on record for doing so.

    I was reminded of this yesterday when the audience called ‘out out’ at hecklers, and demanded the removal of this journalist. These New Zealand First supporters demand adoration for their leader or a media black-out.

    Perhaps they cannot be blamed given that the state of the nation speech could well have been written by US President Donald Trump or one of his minions.

    The protesters were courageous and conscientious in contrast to Peters, said PSNA’s John Minto.

    He likened Peters to Neville Chamberlain — Britain’s Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940. His name is synonymous with the policy of “appeasement” because he conceded territorial concessions to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, fruitlessly hoping to avoid war.

    “He has refused to condemn any of Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians, including the total humanitarian aid blockade of Gaza.”

    Refusal ‘unprecedented’
    “It’s unprecedented in New Zealand history that a government would refuse to condemn Israel breaking its ceasefire agreement and resuming industrial-scale slaughter of civilians,” Minto said.

    “That is what Israel is doing today in Gaza, with full backing from the White House.

    “Chamberlain went to meet Hitler in Munich in 1938 to whitewash Nazi Germany’s takeovers of its neighbours’ lands.

    “Peters has been in Washington to agree to US approval of the occupation of southern Syria, more attacks on Lebanon, resumption of the land grab genocide in Gaza and get a heads-up on US plans to ‘give’ the Occupied West Bank to Israel later this year.

    “If Peters disagrees with any of this, he’s had plenty of chances to say so.

    “New Zealanders are calling for sanctions on Israel but Mr Peters and the National-led government are looking the other way.”

    New Zealand First MP Shane Jones marched out of the Town Hall
    New Zealand First MP Shane Jones marched out of the Town Hall after the event, dismissing protesters crying, “what if it was your grandchildren being slaughtered?” Image: Saige England/APR

    Only staged questions
    The conscientious objectors who rise against the oppression of human rights are people Winston Peters regards as his enemies. He will only answer questions in a press conference staged for him.

    He warms to journalists who warm to him.

    The state of the nation speech in the Town Hall was familiar.

    Seeking to erase conscientiousness will not make New Zealand great, it will render this country very small, almost miniscule, like the people who are being destroyed for daring to demand their right to their own land.

    Saige England is a journalist and author, and a member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

    Part of the crowd at the state of the nation speech by Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters at the Christchurch Town Hall
    Part of the crowd at the state of the nation speech by Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters at the Christchurch Town Hall yesterday. Image: Saige England/APR

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: how are the lesser of two evils getting on?

    The question that asks if the Labour Party is just as cruel, callous and inhumane as the Tories is no longer up for debate. Just look at the news from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

    Labour: the lesser of two evils?

    If the hand-job under the table for Trump didn’t convince you, nor the removal of the winter fuel allowance from some of Britain’s poorest and most vulnerable pensioners, the continuing privatisation of your National Health Service, the open support for Neo-Nazis and terrorist states, *and* this new, most vile assault on sick and disabled people has still left you somewhat unsure, you’re best to stick to making shit TikTok videos and leave any attempt at resistance to the socialists.

    It wasn’t that long ago that these betrayed and humiliated Labour supporters insisted that they would happily take the lesser of two evils in the shape of Keir Starmer.

    How’s that working out for them? The lesser of evils is still evil, and is the lesser evil *really* any less evil than the egregious, contemptible, degenerate Tories that they replaced, not even not even nine months ago?

    The answer is a resounding no.

    It wasn’t that long ago that these deluded and desperate Labour supporters laughed in our faces when we told them that they needed to get the Tories out of the Labour Party to have even the slightest chance of getting the Tories out of power.

    How’s that working out for them? Foreign lobbyists are deeply invested in our democracy. Keir Starmer — THEIR prime minister — is itching for a scrap with a nuclear-armed superpower whilst whispering sweet nothings into the ear of the satsuma-coloured Washington neofascist.

    If it looks like a Tory, talks like a Tory and walks like a Tory there’s a fucking good chance Keir Starmer is no less a Tory than David Cameron and Michael Heseltine.

    Not the first time we’ve seen social murder

    If Labour’s utterly senseless cuts don’t kill you, Labour’s Assisted Dying Bill most probably will.

    This is hardly the first time the ruling classes have dabbled in a bit of social murder.

    The horrific Grenfell Tower inferno and the imposition of austerity under the Conservatives are just two recent examples of democide in the UK.

    If you look across the pond and cast your minds back to Trump’s first presidential term it can be easily argued that Trump and other Republican Party leaders are guilty of democide and wilful cruelty and indifference in terms of their response to the Covid pandemic which resulted in the loss of at least one million American lives.

    You see, it takes a disturbing, fucked up mindset to think a person with Multiple Sclerosis deserves a state attack on their dignity and independence.

    Disabled people have just been through fourteen catastrophic, democidal years under the Tories.

    Degenerative conditions such as MS and Parkinson’s were deemed by the DWP as conditions that a person was likely to recover from and be fit for work in the future. Perhaps the renowned miracle worker, Ian Duncan Smith, really was Jesus fucking Christ?

    The clue is in the word “degenerative”. Satanic cunt.

    The Tories’ incredible healing powers didn’t just stop at MS and Parkinson’s, far from.

    Shameful

    Declan, who is 19, permanently confined to a wheelchair, lives with Down’s Syndrome, cerebral palsy, a hole in his heart, and scoliosis of the spine, was told to attend the DWP Jobcentre with a sick note from his GP.

    One can only assume they were hoping he had made a full recovery?

    The Tories’ — already convinced they can cure MS, Parkinson’s, Down’s Syndrome, and Cerebral Palsy — went one step further and sent a letter to a woman in a coma, Sheila Holt, demanding she make an effort to find work.

    Do you get where I’m coming from here, Mr Starmer and Ms Kendall? Disabled people have had enough of this state barbarism to last us five fucking lifetimes.

    Some people with particularly short memories may need reminding of the fact that it wasn’t just Conservative Party governments that engaged in targeted attacks against the disabled people of Britain.

    Back in 2010, in the dying days of New Labour, version one, then-secretary of state for work and pensions Yvette Cooper set out plans to make the degrading Work Capability Assessment much harder to pass.

    We shouldn’t be surprised by Labour

    The plans included, and I quote:

    Docking points from amputees who can lift and carry with their stumps. Claimants with speech problems who can write a sign saying, for example, ‘The office is on fire!’ will score no points for speech, and deaf claimants who can read the sign will lose all their points for hearing.

    Meanwhile, for ‘health and safety reasons’ all points scored for problems with bending and kneeling are to be abolished and claimants who have difficulty walking can be assessed using imaginary wheelchairs.

    Carry things with their stumps? Imaginary fucking wheelchairs? This an insane level of vindictive hatred for sick and disabled people that ultimately paved the way for fourteen years of Conservative DWP misery.

    Cooper’s cruel and inhumane Work Capability Assessment was no better than what the Tories put me through.

    I remember when friends of New Labour, ATOS, did one of mine. The official health assessor was a literal chiropractor. He asked me to memorise four unique items, of which I did successfully, but what on earth has that got to do with osteoarthritis and the prospect of a double knee replacement?

    Cooper’s new way of doing things ended up with a terminally ill gentleman being classified as fit for work. The Citizens Advice Bureau found cases of people with advanced Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, severe mental illness and even a person awaiting open heart surgery all being told they were also well enough to get a job.

    So maybe we shouldn’t be quite so shocked by Labour’s gruesome and catastrophic assault on Britain’s sick and disabled people?

    ‘Responsible government’

    This is what they call “responsible government”. Targeting the most vulnerable with the least while offering concessions and favours to the elite with the most just isn’t the behaviour of a responsible government.

    We cannot allow the feckless scrounger narrative to rear its ugly head when there are 801 sitting parasites in the House of Lords and a further 600 plus servants of the dodgy and rich in the House of Commons that cost the public purse so much more than a person with no limbs or a single mum living with chronic pain and mental health struggles.

    Sick and disabled people aren’t an enemy of the British taxpayer. The unemployment rate for disabled people in the UK is just 5.6%. That’s lower than the overall unemployment rate in the EU.

    One report that I read indicated that a quarter of global tax dodging is enabled by the UK and British Overseas Territories. If you really want to track down your enemy you could do a whole lot worse than to start digging around here.

    Labour supporters should feel deeply ashamed by their government’s latest act of political violence against the sick and disabled people of Britain because this isn’t just a matter of government policy, but a whole new battle for survival.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Moldova Could Become a Powder Keg of the European Union

    In the last decade, there has been a growing concern about a democratic deficit in Europe, while the liberal mainstream has replaced all other forms of thinking from the socio-political landscape. Moldova — where pressure on the opposition and independent media increases every year, and the ruling party always has the last word on all political issues — is not an exception.

    Since Maia Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) came to power in 2021, political pluralism and freedom of speech in the country have essentially ceased to exist. Against the backdrop of rapidly rising prices and poverty levels, the Moldovans began to hold mass protests demanding the government resignation. The authorities responded by shutting down a number of television channels and electronic media outlets under the pretext that they allegedly were spreading pro-Russian propaganda and provoking contradictions within the state. Later, a “hunt” for undesirable politicians and a fight against opposition parties began in the republic. Thus, in 2023, at the request of the government, Moldova’s Constitutional Court declared the Șor Party unconstitutional, and in May 2024, the country’s Justice Ministry asked a Chisinau court to place restrictions on political activities by the Chance Political Party.

    After the constitutional referendum was held on the same day as the presidential election in 2024, tensions within the country grew even deeper. Sandu was accused of intending to use the plebiscite to save her declining popularity amid the economic crisis and protests. According to the results of the referendum on EU membership, 50.35% supported the amendments; however, some opposition parties did not recognize the results of the vote. The dissatisfaction of Sandu’s opponents was also facilitated by the results of the presidential elections, which Party of Socialists of Moldova(PSRM) called dishonest and undemocratic, pointing to the unreasonable reduction of polling stations, blocking voters’ access to ballot drop boxes, as well as cases of falsification.

    Moldova is currently positioning itself as a democratic and liberal country. However, is this actually true? Numerous arrests of activists, the suspension of broadcasting of television channels as well as blocking of dozens of information sources that have opinions different from those of the government – does not all this indicate a complete elimination of freedom of speech and pluralism in the country? Moreover, the presence of a single “correct” opinion within the divided Moldovan society could lead to a situation where part of the population begins to turn towards a more extreme and radical opposition, prepared to engage in conflict with the current authorities. Thus, with its actions, Sandu’s team is paving the way for the emergence of far-right political parties in the country, similar to Alternative for Germany and Freedom Party of Austria. Increase in the number of such parties could lead to instability not only at the local level, but could also completely undermine the already fragile political situation within the EU. In this scenario, the prospects for cooperation between Europe and the United States would become even more dim.

    The post Moldova Could Become a Powder Keg of the European Union first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • An open letter to Labour from the Autistic brother of a severely disabled woman

    The following article is a comment piece from an anonymous reader

    An open letter to Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, and the Labour Party, from the Autistic brother of a severely disabled woman living in the north.

    Last night, on my bus home from a self-enforced jaunt out for St. Patrick’s Day I heard the word “mong” used as a casual insult for the first time in years.

    I am sure that this shortening of “mongoloid”, an archaic, mean-spirited (and racist) way of referring to Down’s Syndrome people is still often used as a casual insult here in the northwest, but I haven’t heard it recently.

    In normal circumstances, I would grit my teeth and bear the use of such a word by uninformed young people. Or maybe ask if they knew the origins of the word that they so readily use as an insult.

    In this instance, in the context of your recent political attack and scapegoating of those who are unable to work, I could not sit on my hands.

    I lashed out (rhetorically, and uncharacteristically), and let the person who casually used the slur know that my sibling is what would (far too frequently) be called a “mong” or a “retard”, and that I love them to bits. I also made it plain that I would defend my sister from imminent threats to her person should they occur. Your government, in its rhetoric, has made it such that people are quick to forget that people love, cherish, and are more than willing to protect disabled people.

    (If not to let someone willing to use such words that disabled people are not yet completely socially isolated).

    An ableist slur on the eve before DWP benefit cuts announcement

    I was confronted by other bus-goers, accused (ironically) of bullying, and remained seated/physically non-confrontational through the whole ordeal.

    The young man who used the word was defiant throughout the process, and I felt very much that I was the only one on the bus who saw an issue in the use of the word.

    I may have been the only person on the bus aware of the extent of your scapegoating of disabled people within the last two weeks. I may have been the only person on the bus aware of the alarmingly rapid rise in overtly fascist policies coming out of the USA (nice kowtowing, Keir).

    I may have seemed, in a contextual bubble, to be inappropriately lashing out at a young man and “language-policing” a word. The fact remains, however, that I heard an ableist slur for the first time in years on the eve of your assault on the funding of the disability arm of the welfare state.

    I am not able to work myself due to health issues (yes, including but not limited to anxiety, Wes). Several of my diagnoses were made by an NHS panel (ADHD, Asperger’s) when I was a child, before such diagnoses were as commonplace as they are now.

    I spent the best part of the 2010s working low-level customer service jobs. I can’t work now. My health issues are not imagined or “over-diagnosed”. If my sibling was not part of my life, I may well have felt ostracised to the point where I would not be able to speak out for the rights of the neurodiverse or disabled. However, the stakes are greater than my own wellbeing.

    Labour Party scapegoating disabled people: for shame

    That said, my sibling can not speak for themself and the Labour Party’s scapegoating of the neurodiverse pales in comparison to the Labour Party’s scapegoating of those who will never be medically fit to work.

    You’ve chosen the wrong easy target guys. Plenty of disabled people have loved ones who are willing to pick up the slack as best as they can, and in targeting the most vulnerable, you are also targeting those surrounding the most vulnerable.

    People like myself don’t want to be angry, or confrontational, or desperate, or backed into a corner. We’d love the opportunity to thrive. Making a political football of us will not achieve this.

    Us and our loved ones have far less economic leeway than those who could contribute massively via a wealth tax and higher marginal income tax.

    If you’re too politically cowardly to consider said taxes, please at least have the common decency not to target the disabled. The people affected by your recent decisions are already so fatigued.

    The Nazis rounded up the disabled first for a reason.

    Maybe I over-reacted last night. Maybe I’d had too much Guinness. Or maybe I was the only one on the bus who read the political room. We are not your scapegoat. Why on earth would you choose to victimise the vulnerable?

    I don’t leave my home much, and on a rare occasion where I did, I contended with outright ableism. My beautiful sibling aside, do you want to force me to go and contribute to this society that you’re creating to the detriment of my own health? Every time I see a doctor I ask for specialist (Autism, ADHD) mental health treatment that doesn’t exist.

    The way to defeat the far right electorally is not to co-opt their rhetoric and policy.

    For shame.

    A concerned citizen.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Gareth Southgate’s speech was just the tonic young men need in today’s world

    Gareth Southgate might not have had a series of dazzling victories or a collection of gleaming silver trophies to hold up to the skies.

    But one thing is for certain, he is one of the greatest managers that England has ever had, with his ability to unify and build a team environment that represented the very best of us as a country, during some of our hardest moments.

    Gareth Southgate’s timely speech calls out misogynistic men

    In the wake of Netflix’s hit show Adolescence, Gareth Southgate gave a profoundly timely speech which was centred around the themes of “toxic masculinity”, men’s addiction and exposure to porn, gambling and misogynistic content, and an increasing absence of father figures.

    He believes that this is having a hugely negative impact upon men who are desperately in need of role models to whom they can look up to and seek encouragement from.

    In charge of the England football team for eight years, Southgate led the Lions to two finals in both Euro 2020 and 2024, and oversaw a group of players who worked together, laughed together, and cried many tears together.

    Through it all, Southgate was a shoulder to cry on, a father figure and a football coach all in one, and someone that will be remembered for his patience, kindness and statesmanship.

    This level of empathy shone through during his speech and is something that is hugely lacking in today’s society.

    Sports can empower young men in a positive way

    Men are instead radicalised by callous people like Andrew Tate, who believe that an alpha male is someone that invests in crypto, treats women like property, possesses a six pack, and owns countless material items.

    This arguably only leads men to perceiving themselves as catastrophic failures, when really, they are just normal men who are trying to survive in a climate that deems them as weak if they don’t adhere to these warped standards that Tate sets out for them.

    Southgate on the other hand, offers something completely different, and suggests that participating in a hobby such as sports, is an avenue that is far more empowering than being glued to a phone that sits neatly in the palm of your hand like a parasitic leech.

    This poison, that has taken over society like a menacing and calculated criminal, is the smartphone, a device that young people are often taken prisoner of for fourteen hours a day, wreaking havoc on relationships, health, and wellbeing.

    With just one touch, men can access porn, obsessively game and gamble to their hearts content, getting into crippling debt, and as a result, feel completely cut off and alienated from the rest of the world.

    Perhaps the most heartbreaking element of his lecture was his focus upon young men who are suffering from poor mental health due to the Andrew Tate rhetoric that men should:

    not show emotion and never show weakness.

    As a result of this, more and more men are turning to their phone, rather than the people who really love and care about them such as their friends, family, teachers, bosses and coaches:

    Young men end up withdrawing, reluctant to talk, or express their emotions.

    Young men ‘fail to try, rather than try and fail’ due to Tate-like figures

    Southgate, a man who has been faced with multiple setbacks and failures in his life, suggests that failure is the only way young men ever learn to grow a sense of resilience and strength, and as a result, become better versions of themselves.

    In the lecture, he reflected on his crucial missed penalty at the Euros in 1996, and stated:

    That pain still haunts me today, and I guess it always will.

    Southgate said it was a “watershed moment” when he missed the goal, but ultimately this failure forced him to:

    dig deep, and revealed an inner belief and resilience I never knew existed.

    But he also added that currently young men fear failure because of how they will be viewed by society, and instead:

    fail to try, rather than try and fail.

    Firmly railing against Tate, and other figures like him, he said that:

    we have to show young men that character is more important than status.

    In this sense, Southgate offered words of solace for young men, who might not have missed a penalty, but will all, at some points have experienced failure and setbacks.

    He encouraged men to not just view success through the lens of social media which bombards men with unrealistic and harmful content of people lifting trophies, winning fights, or driving beaming Lamborghinis and Ferraris out of car showrooms, and instead wants them to see success as:

    how you respond in the hardest moments.

    Gareth Southgate’s speech: a tonic against toxic masculinity

    It’s no wonder therefore that young men feel lost, with more and more parents raising concerns about the fact that young men are clearly suffering and are:

    grappling with their masculinity and with their broader place in society.

    Speaking from his own experiences as England manager, he called on society to help create more leaders who can:

    set the right tone and to be the role models we want for our young men.

    To craft a society that is nurturing of young boys and men – often trapped in poverty or experiencing marginalisation – he proposed investing in schools, youth clubs, and family relationships that foster a true sense of connection and belonging.

    Social media feeds are not validating men and are only pushing them further towards extremism where influencers consistently bombard them with content that pushes a certain narrative of what masculinity really looks like, which is an extremely insular view.

    Southgate overall, makes a rallying call for there to be less monetisation of masculinity, less marketing figures, and less virulent algorithms.

    It is no wonder, that in an ever-growing capitalist world that pushes gym bodies, videos of cash being thrown around by influencers like confetti, that marginalised young men feel failed, worthless, and indifferent to the world.

    Instead of this, society should be striving towards a world where men feel valued beyond the realms of what capitalism constitutes as success and Southgate offers a welcome tonic to the current climate that we must listen to, before more young men are lost to dark voids that they can’t ever escape from.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Megan Miley

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Diet Offsets: Why Going Vegan Isn’t the Only Way to Fight Factory Farming

    diet offsets
    8 Mins Read

    Thom Norman, co-founder of NGO FarmKind, believes people going vegan may not be the best way to fight factory farming. His solution? Diet offsetting.

    Here’s a radical proposition: the best way to fight factory farming isn’t to go vegan.

    Is this some Joe Rogan-inspired bunk about how, actually, vegans kill more animals than meat-eaters? No, sorry Joe, you’re still wrong.

    Factory farming – how we produce 99% of the animals we raise in the US – is unarguably wrong: it’s destroying the planet, inflicting industrial-scale cruelty on animals, and risking human health through antibiotic resistance and zoonotic diseases. But for those of us who want to do something about it, we’re invariably told that step one is to stop eating animal products.

    Listen, I’m a vegan. I’ll be the first one to say: I wholeheartedly agree. Reducing or eliminating your meat consumption is an important way to fight factory farming. Being vegan is an important part of who I am and how I try to live out my compassion for animals. However, as a former meat-eater and a current proponent of the animal welfare movement, I will say that promoting veganism as the only way forward is actually hurting our cause. 

    That’s because changing your diet isn’t the only way to fight factory farming – and it might not even be the best way.

    Instead of beating themselves up for not quite being able to give up cheese (and then doing nothing about it), what if any omnivore could do just as much good to fight the factory farming system for about the same cost as a streaming service subscription?

    This isn’t theoretical. It costs the average omnivore just $23 a month to do as much good for animals as going entirely vegan. How? Because the most effective charities fighting factory farming have figured out how to create massive change for pennies on the dollar. Think of it as carbon offsets, but for animal welfare (let’s call it ‘diet offsetting’) – which is far more impactful than most people realise.

    What is diet offsetting?

    compassion in world farming
    Courtesy: Compassion in World Farming

    Diet offsetting is less complicated than it sounds: anyone can make a rough inventory of the animal products they eat and which animals those products come from. Then find charities working to improve those specific animals’ lives by tackling factory farming. Animal Charity Evaluators can help you identify the most effective charities that won’t waste your donations. Or, for an even simpler approach, you can use FarmKind’s offset calculator that handles the math and charity selection automatically, and lets you make a direct donation (100% of which goes directly to the chosen charities).

    In fact, I’d go as far as to say that for most people (and animals), diet offsetting is a better option than going vegan. Despite decades of campaigns like Meatless Mondays and Veganuary, only about 5% of US adults identify as vegetarian or vegan – a number that hasn’t budged since 2012. Underneath that headline number lies a revealing pattern: 84% of people who’ve tried a plant-based diet report having given up, most commonly within the first year.

    It would be an exaggeration to say that it’s impossible to persuade people to make dietary changes. Interventions based on appeals to preventing animal suffering have, at least a self-reported, impact on how much people eat animal products. Despite the fact that most of the discourse around animal agriculture focuses on environmental issues, it seems that, at least in the UK, the most prominent reason people go and stay vegan is animal welfare.

    The big problem is that, overall, trends are definitely in the wrong direction. Per capita meat consumption in the US, with a few blips along the way, climbed from about 113 kgs per person in 1971 to about 126 kgs by 2021. While the global average is tiny by comparison, 43 kgs per person, it has risen much more sharply over the same 50-year period (from 27 kgs).

    While some climate consolation can be taken from the fact that beef is no longer the most commonly eaten meat in the US, this has been a welfare disaster.

    This is because cheaper poultry has replaced beef. Relatively speaking, beef cows have far fewer bad lives than chickens, which are almost exclusively farmed in highly concentrated operations. It also takes far more individual chickens to feed people the same amount as a cow. So, we’ve swapped raising a smaller number of cows with higher welfare for raising billions of chickens in some of the worst conditions experienced by land animals on the planet.

    The evidence is clear: individual diet change is not delivering the kind of transformation we need to end the moral atrocity that is factory farming. On the contrary, things are getting worse.

    Stressing individual action holds movements back

    eu caged farming ban
    Courtesy: Getty Images via Canva

    But here’s the good news: while the strategy of individual dietary change has failed to deliver, a different approach has been quietly revolutionising how animals are treated in our food system. Strategic advocacy organisations have made huge gains here.

    Take The Humane League’s cage-free campaign as an example of what strategic advocacy can achieve. In just 15 years, it has convinced more than 2,400 companies – including corporate giants like Walmart, KFC, and Taco Bell – to commit to cage-free eggs. The result? The percentage of US hens living cage-free has skyrocketed from 4% to around 40%.

    Let that sink in: billions of chickens will no longer spend their lives confined in wire cages so small they can’t even spread their wings – spaces literally smaller than a sheet of printer paper. And here’s the kicker: achieving this transformation costs just 85 cents per chicken. This is what effective systemic change looks like.

    This is where the real opportunity lies: instead of the uphill battle trying to get people to cut back on their meat or go plant-based, we could channel that energy into supporting the organisations that are already transforming the system.

    Of course, some animal advocates bristle at this suggestion. I’ll admit, when my co-founder and I first had this idea, I had a moment of pause. There’s something that feels wrong about being able to simply write a check to absolve ourselves of responsibility. Shouldn’t we be asking people to engage more deeply with the ethics of their food choices, not less? After all, many activists believe that changing individual diets is the gateway to deeper engagement with animal welfare.

    But, historically, emphasis on individual action has often held movements back, not helped them.

    Consider this revealing parallel: in the early 2000s, one of the biggest promoters of the ‘carbon footprint’ – the idea that we should all obsessively measure and reduce our personal impact on global warming – was none other than oil giant BP. By shifting the conversation from corporate responsibility to consumer choice, BP masterfully deflected attention from the real drivers of climate change.

    The meat industry is playing from the same playbook. While we debate the ethics of holiday dinners, they’re spending millions lobbying against basic animal welfare laws, pushing through “ag-gag” legislation to criminalise whistleblowers, and running sophisticated PR campaigns that paint factory farms as idyllic family operations. They’ve even tried to make it illegal to call plant-based products “milk” or “meat” – not because consumers are confused, but to maintain their monopoly on how we think about food itself.

    This is why we need to shift our focus to systemic change. Instead of letting the industry keep us arguing about personal food choices, we should be supporting the organisations that are pushing for better regulations, fighting harmful agricultural subsidies, and holding these companies accountable for their practices.

    The best part about offsetting? People will actually do it

    amazon deforestation cattle
    Courtesy: Paralaxis/Shutterstock

    Some critics argue that pushing for incremental welfare improvements, like cage-free eggs, actually entrenches factory farming by making it seem more acceptable. They say we need to push for complete abolition, not small changes that might make people feel better about eating meat.

    This strategy inevitably draws criticism from abolitionists within the animal rights movement. They argue that pushing for incremental welfare improvements – like cage-free eggs – actually entrenches factory farming by making it more palatable to consumers. Better conditions, they say, just ease people’s consciences while leaving the fundamental system intact. We should be pushing for complete abolition, not compromises that might make people feel better about eating meat.

    But this argument ignores how successful social movements actually work. Take child labour: it wasn’t eliminated in the US overnight. The path to abolition began with seemingly modest reforms – limiting working hours, requiring breaks, and restricting the most dangerous jobs. Each small victory built momentum for bigger changes.

    Moreover, while we work towards evolving the food system away from cruel and destructive practices like factory farming, incremental changes make an immediate and meaningful difference for animals suffering right now. A hen who can spread her wings, scratch in the dirt, and dust bathe isn’t living in ideal conditions – but she’s significantly better off than one confined in a tiny cage. To dismiss these improvements as mere window dressing is to ignore the very real suffering we can prevent today.

    But, the strongest argument for offsetting is also the most simple: people will actually do it.

    For most of us, writing a check is a much easier ask than changing your entire diet – which means more people will actually help. The numbers bear this out: about 14% of Americans already donate to animal causes each year – almost three times as many people as identify as vegetarian or vegan. Imagine what organizations like The Humane League could achieve if we channelled more of our energy into funding their successful campaigns instead of arguing about personal food choices.

    Right now, billions of animals are suffering in factory farms while we debate what’s on our plates. The fastest path to ending their suffering isn’t waiting for everyone to go vegan – it’s empowering everyone who cares about animals to make a difference, whether they eat meat or not. The system won’t change because we all become perfect ethical consumers. It will change because we organised, funded, and fought for that change.

    Whether you’re reading this as a vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, omnivore, or total carnivore – remember, you don’t have to change your diet to make a difference in the systemic fight against factory farming (which hurts us all). Just make sure you’re putting your money where your mouth is.

    The post Diet Offsets: Why Going Vegan Isn’t the Only Way to Fight Factory Farming appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Diet Offsets: Why Going Vegan Isn’t the Only Way to Fight Factory Farming

    diet offsets
    8 Mins Read

    Thom Norman, co-founder of NGO FarmKind, believes people going vegan may not be the best way to fight factory farming. His solution? Diet offsetting.

    Here’s a radical proposition: the best way to fight factory farming isn’t to go vegan.

    Is this some Joe Rogan-inspired bunk about how, actually, vegans kill more animals than meat-eaters? No, sorry Joe, you’re still wrong.

    Factory farming – how we produce 99% of the animals we raise in the US – is unarguably wrong: it’s destroying the planet, inflicting industrial-scale cruelty on animals, and risking human health through antibiotic resistance and zoonotic diseases. But for those of us who want to do something about it, we’re invariably told that step one is to stop eating animal products.

    Listen, I’m a vegan. I’ll be the first one to say: I wholeheartedly agree. Reducing or eliminating your meat consumption is an important way to fight factory farming. Being vegan is an important part of who I am and how I try to live out my compassion for animals. However, as a former meat-eater and a current proponent of the animal welfare movement, I will say that promoting veganism as the only way forward is actually hurting our cause. 

    That’s because changing your diet isn’t the only way to fight factory farming – and it might not even be the best way.

    Instead of beating themselves up for not quite being able to give up cheese (and then doing nothing about it), what if any omnivore could do just as much good to fight the factory farming system for about the same cost as a streaming service subscription?

    This isn’t theoretical. It costs the average omnivore just $23 a month to do as much good for animals as going entirely vegan. How? Because the most effective charities fighting factory farming have figured out how to create massive change for pennies on the dollar. Think of it as carbon offsets, but for animal welfare (let’s call it ‘diet offsetting’) – which is far more impactful than most people realise.

    What is diet offsetting?

    compassion in world farming
    Courtesy: Compassion in World Farming

    Diet offsetting is less complicated than it sounds: anyone can make a rough inventory of the animal products they eat and which animals those products come from. Then find charities working to improve those specific animals’ lives by tackling factory farming. Animal Charity Evaluators can help you identify the most effective charities that won’t waste your donations. Or, for an even simpler approach, you can use FarmKind’s offset calculator that handles the math and charity selection automatically, and lets you make a direct donation (100% of which goes directly to the chosen charities).

    In fact, I’d go as far as to say that for most people (and animals), diet offsetting is a better option than going vegan. Despite decades of campaigns like Meatless Mondays and Veganuary, only about 5% of US adults identify as vegetarian or vegan – a number that hasn’t budged since 2012. Underneath that headline number lies a revealing pattern: 84% of people who’ve tried a plant-based diet report having given up, most commonly within the first year.

    It would be an exaggeration to say that it’s impossible to persuade people to make dietary changes. Interventions based on appeals to preventing animal suffering have, at least a self-reported, impact on how much people eat animal products. Despite the fact that most of the discourse around animal agriculture focuses on environmental issues, it seems that, at least in the UK, the most prominent reason people go and stay vegan is animal welfare.

    The big problem is that, overall, trends are definitely in the wrong direction. Per capita meat consumption in the US, with a few blips along the way, climbed from about 113 kgs per person in 1971 to about 126 kgs by 2021. While the global average is tiny by comparison, 43 kgs per person, it has risen much more sharply over the same 50-year period (from 27 kgs).

    While some climate consolation can be taken from the fact that beef is no longer the most commonly eaten meat in the US, this has been a welfare disaster.

    This is because cheaper poultry has replaced beef. Relatively speaking, beef cows have far fewer bad lives than chickens, which are almost exclusively farmed in highly concentrated operations. It also takes far more individual chickens to feed people the same amount as a cow. So, we’ve swapped raising a smaller number of cows with higher welfare for raising billions of chickens in some of the worst conditions experienced by land animals on the planet.

    The evidence is clear: individual diet change is not delivering the kind of transformation we need to end the moral atrocity that is factory farming. On the contrary, things are getting worse.

    Stressing individual action holds movements back

    eu caged farming ban
    Courtesy: Getty Images via Canva

    But here’s the good news: while the strategy of individual dietary change has failed to deliver, a different approach has been quietly revolutionising how animals are treated in our food system. Strategic advocacy organisations have made huge gains here.

    Take The Humane League’s cage-free campaign as an example of what strategic advocacy can achieve. In just 15 years, it has convinced more than 2,400 companies – including corporate giants like Walmart, KFC, and Taco Bell – to commit to cage-free eggs. The result? The percentage of US hens living cage-free has skyrocketed from 4% to around 40%.

    Let that sink in: billions of chickens will no longer spend their lives confined in wire cages so small they can’t even spread their wings – spaces literally smaller than a sheet of printer paper. And here’s the kicker: achieving this transformation costs just 85 cents per chicken. This is what effective systemic change looks like.

    This is where the real opportunity lies: instead of the uphill battle trying to get people to cut back on their meat or go plant-based, we could channel that energy into supporting the organisations that are already transforming the system.

    Of course, some animal advocates bristle at this suggestion. I’ll admit, when my co-founder and I first had this idea, I had a moment of pause. There’s something that feels wrong about being able to simply write a check to absolve ourselves of responsibility. Shouldn’t we be asking people to engage more deeply with the ethics of their food choices, not less? After all, many activists believe that changing individual diets is the gateway to deeper engagement with animal welfare.

    But, historically, emphasis on individual action has often held movements back, not helped them.

    Consider this revealing parallel: in the early 2000s, one of the biggest promoters of the ‘carbon footprint’ – the idea that we should all obsessively measure and reduce our personal impact on global warming – was none other than oil giant BP. By shifting the conversation from corporate responsibility to consumer choice, BP masterfully deflected attention from the real drivers of climate change.

    The meat industry is playing from the same playbook. While we debate the ethics of holiday dinners, they’re spending millions lobbying against basic animal welfare laws, pushing through “ag-gag” legislation to criminalise whistleblowers, and running sophisticated PR campaigns that paint factory farms as idyllic family operations. They’ve even tried to make it illegal to call plant-based products “milk” or “meat” – not because consumers are confused, but to maintain their monopoly on how we think about food itself.

    This is why we need to shift our focus to systemic change. Instead of letting the industry keep us arguing about personal food choices, we should be supporting the organisations that are pushing for better regulations, fighting harmful agricultural subsidies, and holding these companies accountable for their practices.

    The best part about offsetting? People will actually do it

    amazon deforestation cattle
    Courtesy: Paralaxis/Shutterstock

    Some critics argue that pushing for incremental welfare improvements, like cage-free eggs, actually entrenches factory farming by making it seem more acceptable. They say we need to push for complete abolition, not small changes that might make people feel better about eating meat.

    This strategy inevitably draws criticism from abolitionists within the animal rights movement. They argue that pushing for incremental welfare improvements – like cage-free eggs – actually entrenches factory farming by making it more palatable to consumers. Better conditions, they say, just ease people’s consciences while leaving the fundamental system intact. We should be pushing for complete abolition, not compromises that might make people feel better about eating meat.

    But this argument ignores how successful social movements actually work. Take child labour: it wasn’t eliminated in the US overnight. The path to abolition began with seemingly modest reforms – limiting working hours, requiring breaks, and restricting the most dangerous jobs. Each small victory built momentum for bigger changes.

    Moreover, while we work towards evolving the food system away from cruel and destructive practices like factory farming, incremental changes make an immediate and meaningful difference for animals suffering right now. A hen who can spread her wings, scratch in the dirt, and dust bathe isn’t living in ideal conditions – but she’s significantly better off than one confined in a tiny cage. To dismiss these improvements as mere window dressing is to ignore the very real suffering we can prevent today.

    But, the strongest argument for offsetting is also the most simple: people will actually do it.

    For most of us, writing a check is a much easier ask than changing your entire diet – which means more people will actually help. The numbers bear this out: about 14% of Americans already donate to animal causes each year – almost three times as many people as identify as vegetarian or vegan. Imagine what organizations like The Humane League could achieve if we channelled more of our energy into funding their successful campaigns instead of arguing about personal food choices.

    Right now, billions of animals are suffering in factory farms while we debate what’s on our plates. The fastest path to ending their suffering isn’t waiting for everyone to go vegan – it’s empowering everyone who cares about animals to make a difference, whether they eat meat or not. The system won’t change because we all become perfect ethical consumers. It will change because we organised, funded, and fought for that change.

    Whether you’re reading this as a vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, omnivore, or total carnivore – remember, you don’t have to change your diet to make a difference in the systemic fight against factory farming (which hurts us all). Just make sure you’re putting your money where your mouth is.

    The post Diet Offsets: Why Going Vegan Isn’t the Only Way to Fight Factory Farming appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • It’s World Down’s Syndrome Day – but under Labour, there is nothing to celebrate for us and Betsy

    At the end of a week that saw our Labour Party government announce plans to strip some disabled people of Personal Independence Payment and entitlements under Universal Credit, we have World Down’s Syndrome Day on Friday 21 March. A day dedicated to celebrating the lives of people living with Down’s Syndrome; people like my daughter Betsy.

    As a disabled person myself I am scared about how I’m going to survive after the DWP reforms.

    But as the mother of a disabled child I am terrified. For her.

    What kind of world are disabled children growing up in?

    This is the world she is growing up into. In a country that punishes people for being disabled, forcing us into poverty. Any parent of a disabled child will tell you that their greatest fear is dying and leaving their vulnerable child without care and advocacy. That fear has never been so extreme as it is right now, because nobody else is going to advocate for her; write the letters; attend the meetings, and lodge the tribunals – alongside providing 24/7 care for her.

    Down’s Syndrome is a genetic condition caused by the body having an extra copy of chromosome 21. It expresses differently in every person, causing a wide range of health conditions and always comes with learning disability.

    My daughter is medically complex, with multiple serious health conditions that means she needs 1:1 care at all times. She frequently needs hospital treatment. Learning disability can be caused by many different factors, but in my daughter’s case, it is because she has Down’s Syndrome.

    She cannot advocate for herself. I am her voice.

    The UK is a country that does not have the infrastructure and funding in place to ensure that children with learning disabilities have access to the same rights as typical children. For my daughter’s entire life I have had to fight to get her the support she needs, in every arena. Education. Healthcare. Enrichment.

    Yet sometimes there is literally nothing in place to fight for, such is the black hole of support provided by our government.

    So to hear that, despite having education, health care, and social care systems that fail disabled children, they are expected to magically grow up to be able to work and support themselves is absurd. The government aren’t even giving children with SEND a fighting chance.

    The state is failing us at every turn

    To start at the beginning. Early intervention in nursery education for children with SEND is virtually non existent. Even for my daughter, who was born with a physically-evident disability, was denied extra help by our local government. So I fought. Wrote the complaint. Submitted an appeal.

    Then we reach school age. Hundreds of thousands of children with SEND cannot access mainstream education. It’s just not designed to meet the sensory and physical needs of many children. That would require huge investment from our government, which is clearly not forthcoming. To have the right to attend a specialist provision children need a Education Health and Care Plan. A legal document that gives a child the right to the support they need. Whether that be a member of staff with them at all times, Speech and Language Therapy, or anything else they need. Even getting an assessment for a child to have an EHCP is gold dust. Betsy was denied an assessment for her EHCP that she needed to access education. So I fought. Wrote the complaint. Submitted the appeal. Lodged the tribunal.

    Then, I think we all know how well the NHS is functioning right now.

    The NHS and social care

    For disabled children not having access to the healthcare they have a right to is another arena in which they are being failed. Children are stuck on two-year waiting lists for an assessment for Autism. My own daughter required urgent surgery, due to a breathing problem while she was sleeping. The waiting list was over six months. When I say ‘urgent’, I mean life-threatening. My daughter was denied referrals for Orthotics support with the excuse that it’s normal for children with Down’s Syndrome to have hypermobile ankles. Yes, so treat it with the correct insoles and support. I wrote the complaint. Made the phone calls. Got the appointment.

    If anyone has had to call 999 and have a trip to A&E you will know the trauma of that scenario under the current circumstances in the NHS. Which brings me on to social care.

    Families who have a disabled child face higher levels of poverty than those with typical children. More often than not, one parent has had to give up work to care for their child. Why? Because there is no social care service. Social care is broken. Even for the few children who qualify for a few hours, it’s virtually impossible to find a support worker. Another gift from Brexit. Carer’s Allowance for parents who have had to give up work, stands at £81.90 per week. Often for providing 24/7 care. That drop in income from parental loss of a salary affects disabled children drastically. There are no letters to write or complaints to lodge about this. This is the accepted normality for families like mine, from our government.

    Locked out even further by the Labour government

    So we have disabled children locked out of healthcare, education, and even opportunities to enrich their lives.

    I can count on one hand the amount of wheelchair swings there are in Northumberland. Changing Places facilities are few. Activities are often not inclusive. Community groups run by parent carers who volunteer their time, and what little energy we have, seek to create opportunities for children with SEND to experience childhood activities in an accessible format. The group I run is massively oversubscribed. Places on enrichment activities are in such demand. Children miss out on enrichment experiences due to their disability.

    Implementing the social model of disability is vital for children too.

    So yes, I am celebrating Betsy today on World Down’s Syndrome Day. I am celebrating her life, the amazing person she is: her resilience, her kindness, her creativity, and her very being.

    At the same time though, I am beyond angry at how this government have created a destructive narrative around her. That she won’t have worth if she can’t work. This, combined with the complete failure to have a working social model of disability support in place for children in the UK, paints a dark picture for her future.

    World Down’s Syndrome Day: give disabled children a chance

    On World Down’s Syndrome Day I call on our government to take a close look at the stark reality of life for disabled children in the UK and ask themselves, is this what you want to be your legacy? Exclusion. Sickness. Poverty.

    Give disabled children in the UK a fighting chance. After all, they have human rights. Don’t they?

    Featured image supplied

    By Rachel Curtis

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Want to support chronically ill and disabled people into work? Why not try listening to them.

    Peter had been an HGV driver for over 20 years. One day, Peter had a seizure. And – bang – just like that, Peter was medically unfit to drive a lorry. Imagine the shock.

    Like most people, Peter had financial commitments. There was no work he could get that paid anything like the same wages. The fact he’d paid his tax and paid his National Insurance all that time counted for nothing. He was skint.

    His debts built up. The stress of money worries, the health worries – he still really didn’t understand why he’d had a seizure – all overwhelmed him. Peter went into a desperate spiral of mental ill health. He started drinking heavily. His relationship broke up.

    Peter was referred to a mentoring course I funded as North of Tyne Mayor. He got one-to-one support from a counsellor. The first think they did was listen to him. Not fill in forms. Not assess him for ‘work capability’. Not tell him to buck his ideas up. Just listened to him, not as another client to be benignly steered to some work course, but as Peter. His worries. His regrets. How he saw his future. It gave him the head space to get his life back under control. We were patient. There was no deadline.

    ‘Disabled’ is not a one-size-fits-all category

    I met him a year later, and I’ve changed his name for this article. His confidence was rebuilt. He retrained in logistics. He’s got a new job and is back on his feet. He’s in a new relationship, and has a little baby. There was nothing about the person I sat and had a cup of coffee with that made me think he was different from anyone else. He was warm, thoughtful, and a good communicator. When life dealt him a blow, he stumbled. When he was offered a hand, he got back on his feet.

    I wonder if I hadn’t funded that course, whether Peter would now be another increment on the suicide statistics.

    We must see people as people. There’s nothing ideological about saying we should not leave people behind.

    By investing in Peter, he’s healthier, happier, in work, and paying taxes. It’s common sense to say that treating people with dignity produces better outcomes.

    We did it by listening to people. I’ve always believed that if you want good education policy, you should listen to teachers. If you want good health policy, listen to doctors. If you want to know how to speed up buses, listen to bus drivers.

    I did the same thing with our equalities assemblies. My remit was economic – how to grow the economy. I wasn’t in charge of running any public services. Still, we convened people from disabled groups, and listened to their actual problems. The real barriers they faced day-to-day. We improved the understanding of me and my team, that “disabled” is not a one-size-fits-all category.

    Labour now: no logic, nor morality

    All the talk of “savings” and “iron clad fiscal rules” is not just cruel, it’s illiterate. Seeing people as nothing more than economic work units assaults our common humanity and blinds us to common sense.

    The Film I, Daniel Blake sums it up perfectly. A skilled worker, with much to contribute, is crunched by the system and driven to an early grave. It’s set in Newcastle, and Dave Johns who played Daniel Blake was kind enough to do a fundraising gig for my election campaign.

    When that film came out, Labour MPs queued up to be seen with Ken Loach. When the Labour Party expelled him, they ran for cover.

    These people are now preparing to decimate the little remaining support that chronically ill and disabled people have. I was famously blocked from re-standing for Labour after talking to Ken Loach about his films at a cultural event about films. Neither logic nor morality seems to influence Labour policy any more.

    Treat people with dignity

    Hannah is a young woman I met. We worked directly with the charities and campaigning groups to co-design the courses I funded.

    The first thing Hannah told me was that she’s an autistic person. She did have a job, some years ago, but her line manager changed. Her new manager wasn’t sympathetic. In fact, she’d snapped at Hannah:

    Why can’t you be more like everybody else?

    Hannah lost her job there, and felt she would never be employed by anyone. Her confidence was rock bottom.

    Most work courses tell people how to put together a CV, and then make people apply for jobs for 35 hours a week. As someone who has employed a lot of people, I can tell you it just wastes everyone’s time.

    Employers don’t want to have to sift through applications where people are clearly not qualified. People looking for work can do without the constant rejection. Why make people jump through hoops just so angry people with no understanding of the subject can feel good that “lazy” people are getting punished. It’s straight out of a Dickens novel.

    Instead, Hannah got one-to-one support. Her coach found out what she liked and what she was good at. He got to see Hannah as a person. They worked together, and thought about what would be Hannah’s ideal job. It turned out that Hannah has an aptitude for images. So they actively approached companies that manage automatic number plate recognition systems, and got Hannah a job. When the computer can’t recognise the image, she corrects it.

    But it doesn’t end there. Her mentor still checks in on her. He got her employer to adjust the way they decide employee of the month so her work could be included. Hannah now has a permanent job, she’s earning decent money, paying tax, and feeling good about herself. I saw her again a few months later, and she’d won employee of the month.

    Treating people with dignity is economic common sense.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Jamie Driscoll

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The DWP just quietly released its most disgusting piece of ‘research’ yet

    The same day the Labour Party government launched its plans for a sweep of devastating welfare cuts, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) published a piece of research quantifying the cost of chronically ill and disabled people to society. Or, in effect, the Labour-led DWP was putting a price-tag on chronically ill and disabled people’s lives – just as it readies to strip some of their benefits, and drastically cut them for others.

    All aboard for the disabled people-are-benefit-scroungers-and-burdens-to-society government gravy train to wherever the fuck ministers want to make their killer corporate salaries next.

    DWP cuts: Kendall on a welfare spend warpath

    On Tuesday 18 March, DWP boss Liz Kendall laid out the government’s broad catalogue of plans to ‘reform’ disability and health-related income-based benefits. Broadly, the green paper made for a callous cocktail of catastrophic cuts and changes that will harm chronically ill and disabled claimants.

    Notably, the paper included a suite of regressive reforms to make it harder for people to claim disability benefits like Personal Independence Payment (PIP). As expected, the changes it’s proposing will target certain claimants in particular, namely young, neurodivergent, learning disabled, and those with mental health disorders. Alongside this, there’ll be cuts to out-of-work benefits like the LCWRA health-related component of Universal Credit. Once again, it additionally wants to make this harder to claim, and all as it ramps up reassessments and conditions for doing so.

    The government is now consulting on the majority of these plans until 30 June. You can respond to this here.

    In tandem with its wide-scale assault on chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants, it published a separate statistical report. And the intent was obvious – to vilify sick/disabled people further and back Kendall’s case for this cruel new wave of cuts.

    Chronically ill and disabled people: an economic burden

    In particular, the DWP publication looked at what it considered the “cost to the economy” of “ill health or disabilities” that stop working age people from being able to engage with employment. In short, that is, it was quantifying the economic expense of chronically ill and disabled people unable to work.

    It looked at a number of areas in which it determined they would lose the economy money, including:

    • Their so-called long-term or temporary “economic inactivity” and sickness absence meaning “lost production” for employers.
    • Care-giving responsibilities resulting in “lost production”.
    • Costs to the NHS.
    • Lost tax and National Insurance returns.
    • Social security benefits.

    The basic thrust for all was: chronically ill and disabled people unable to work cost the Treasury, the DWP, the taxpayer, and employers. It estimated all this on revenue loss for 2022.

    Firstly, apparently, through lost “output per worker” the 2.7 million chronically ill and disabled people outside the workforce lose the economy anywhere between £132bn to £188bn.

    Meanwhile, for sickness absence, it’s purportedly between £38bn and £56bn.

    Then, informal care supposedly accounts for somewhere in the region of £37bn.

    On top of this, the analysis says they rack up a £2bn cost to the NHS, and an expense of £57bn to the exchequer in lost tax and National Insurance.

    More disability benefit-bashing

    And it wasn’t going to leave DWP benefits out either, naturally. It put this between £36bn and £47bn.

    To calculate that, it added together the cost of claims for a number of disability and ill health-related benefits. However, the already shoddy research doesn’t even solely focus on benefits like PIP and the UC LCWRA. What it actually does is take a picture of ALL the benefits chronically ill and disabled people out of work are claiming. So, this includes social security like the UC basic rate, the UC housing element, and housing benefit.

    Setting aside for a moment that the housing-based benefits go into the pockets of landlords anyway, including income-based benefits might almost imply that only people in work should be entitled to them… We hear you, subsidise poverty-paying employers, but no income for the “workless” that those same profiteering pricks can’t squeeze for capital generation, amiright?

    Additionally, it seemed to forget throughout the whole analysis of course that chronically ill and disabled people not working ALSO spend this money in the ECONOMY. What’s more, as other analyses have shown, these DWP benefits are actually also good for the economy in terms of the wellbeing returns they bring.

    Never mind in the first place that they deserve the financial support to live regardless.

    Overall then, it tallies these all up to say that chronically ill and disabled people out of work cost between £240-330bn in 2022. The bottom line then (because that’s all they seem to care about)? Chronically ill and disabled people are a burden to society.

    Expendable human capital is all we’ll ever be to the DWP

    As if all that weren’t utterly atrocious enough – the DWP only went and put a price on workers’ heads. For this, it introduced some nifty neolib chicanery titled ‘Gross Value Added (GVA)’ to work out each person’s “average (mean) value”. It described that this:

    can be thought of as the individual’s job contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

    Yes, you read that right. We’re all just expendable ‘human capital’ to these neoliberal narcissists in Lord Alli white collar. Worse still, here’s the quiet part out loud:

    The GVA output per worker was £68,818 for the UK in 2022. This analysis also estimated a GVA figure for disabled people that may be more appropriate to apply to individuals with known ill-health. The GVA for a disabled worker is estimated for this analysis through multiplying mean GVA for all workers, by the ratio of median hourly pay of disabled workers to mean hourly pay for all workers (excluding overtime). Using this, the estimated median annual GVA for a disabled person was £46,513 in 2022.

    That is, on some completely bullshit metrics you can’t convince me it didn’t dream up on the back of a fag packet, my chronically ill and disabled ass is worth less to the economy than a non-disabled worker’s. Could have probably saved the DWP some effort and told it that one if it’d asked. Hellooo, ardent anti-capitalist trying to capsize the corporate-captured charlatans at Whitehall, working for the Canary here.

    If DWP timing is everything…

    Then there’s the timing of the publication – the very day of the DWP’s green paper. Coincidence? About as much as these political pigs in shit schmoozing it up at an ex-Labour staffer’s lobby firm gala. Throw in BlackRock, a smattering of bankers and City billionaires, and we have ourselves the new, new Labour Party – and an apt comparison for how hella unlikely it is this wasn’t entirely intentional.

    It was only too deliberate. Both in Parliament and in the green paper, Kendall was banging on about the claim rates. She opined in the foreword how:

    One in every 10 working-age people in Britain is now claiming at least one type of health or disability benefit.

    And this quickly led on to a tirade tying in the cost to the Treasury, and the NHS:

    Total spending on incapacity and disability benefits for working-age adults has soared by £20 billion since the pandemic, an increase of almost two-thirds. In 5 years’ time, we expect to spend over £70 billion. That is more than a third of our current NHS budget and more than 3 times what we currently spend on policing and keeping our communities safe.

    Now, I’d almost bet my DWP PIP bottom daily living allowance dollar that Kendall has never delivered a disgusting diatribe with as much unconcealed zeal as she did with her new pet punching down on disabled people project to Parliament this week.

    At the end of the day though, the clear issue here is that it sounds a lot like she’s leaning into the research above. And that wouldn’t be at all surprising. The green paper itself is filled with a veritable manufactured outrage-fest of ableist, demonising tropes. These especially scapegoat chronically ill and disabled people unable to work.

    Nothing new then from this “taking the mickey” IDS clone in blood red new Labour ministerial garb.

    Nothing new under a Labour in bed with the Sun

    So there you have it. Chronically ill and disabled people unable to work are a drain on the economy. We’re skivers, burdens, “useless eaters”, blah blah blah, take your pick. There’s really no shortage of stigmatising synonyms the shitrag press like shameless Labour’s favourite new soapbox the Sun, won’t continue to churn out with giddy, grotesque glee, and immoral abandon. At the same time however, the DWP has estimated that we also have less economic value in the workplace than our non-disabled peers.

    Incidentally, the analysis didn’t think to look at the costs of removing society’s disabling barriers, and tackling rampant institutional ableism. But then why would it? Chronically ill and disabled people are worth a third less to the economy by its own cold-hard capitalist calculations.

    Therefore, if you’re wondering why the Labour Party government is pushing to force us into work by slashing and stripping away our benefits, but won’t put its money where its mouth is and actually implement genuine support for us to do so, look no further.

    And that’s before you even consider the costs that are truly on the line here. Namely how coercing chronically ill and disabled people into low-wage, inaccessible, and toxic work environments will come at an expense alright – and it’s their very lives. Far from the DWP-manufactured propaganda about work being good for people’s mental health, for many it will be anything but. For still yet more, it will be actively harmful and dangerous to their physical health as well.

    Even more disgusting in the context of the assisted dying bill

    It’s truly appalling that it even needs spelling out, but people’s value should never be tied to their ability to work.

    However, that’s precisely what the DWP is doing here. It ascribes a value based on the government’s fucked up framing of dignity as something people have by means of their function inside the exploitative capitalist extortion racket. Where have we heard that one before? (Clue: a certain fascistic ideological stain on the conscience of 20th century Europe). Now, in 21st century Britain, your worth is contingent on your financial contribution to society. Nothing changes.

    Kendall’s cuts are one thing, but this is all against the backdrop of Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill that’s making its way through Parliament as well. In this climate, the concerted attempt to paint chronically ill and disabled people as a burden should be seen for what it is. In short: a gross and hostile attack on our right to even exist.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Nuclear free Pacific – back to the future, Earthwise talks to David Robie

    Pacific Media Watch

    Earthwise presenters Lois and Martin Griffiths of Plains FM96.9 radio talk to Dr David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report, about heightened global fears of nuclear war as tensions have mounted since US President Donald Trump has returned to power.

    Dr Robie reminds us that New Zealanders once actively opposed nuclear testing in the Pacific.

    That spirit, that active opposition to nuclear testing, and to nuclear war must be revived.

    This is very timely as the Rainbow Warrior 3 is currently visiting the Marshall Islands this month to mark 40 years since the original RW took part in the relocation of Rongelap Islanders who suffered from US nuclear tests in the 1950s.

    After that humanitarian mission, the Rainbow Warrior was subsequently bombed by French secret agents in Auckland Harbour on 10 July 1985 shortly before it was due to sail to Moruroa Atoll to protest against nuclear testing.

    A new edition of Dr Robie’s book Eyes of Fire The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior will be released this July. The Eyes of Fire microsite is here.

    Lois opens up by saying: “I fear that we live in disturbing times. I fear the possibility of nuclear war, I always have.

    “I remember the Cuban missiles crisis, a scary time. I remember campaigns for nuclear disarmament. Hopes that the United Nations could lead to a world of peace and justice.

    “Yet today one hears from our media, for world leaders . . . ‘No, no no. There will always be tyrants who want to destroy us and our democratic allies . . . more and bigger, deadlier weapons are needed to protect us . . .”

    Listen to the programme . . .


    Nuclear free Pacific . . . back to the future.    Video/audio: Plains FM96.9

    Broadcast: Plains Radio FM96.9

    Interviewee: Dr David Robie, deputy chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and a semiretired professor of Pacific journalism. He founded the Pacific Media Centre.
    Interviewers: Lois and Martin Griffiths, Earthwise programme

    Date: 14 March 2025 (27min), broadcast March 17.

    Youtube: Café Pacific: https://www.youtube.com/@cafepacific2023

    https://plainsfm.org.nz/

    Café Pacific: https://davidrobie.nz/

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ‘Declare your city genocide free’ – lessons from NZ’s nuclear-free movement

    COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

    Today I attended a demonstration outside both Aotearoa New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Israeli Embassy in Wellington.

    The day before, the Israelis had blown apart 174 children in Gaza in a surprise attack that announced the next phase of the genocide.

    About 174 Wellingtonians turned up to a quickly-called protest: they are the best of us — the best of Wellington.

    In 2023, the City made me an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian for service across a number of fronts (water infrastructure, conservation, coastal resilience, community organising) but nothing I have done compares with the importance of standing up for the victims of US-Israeli violence.

    What more can we do?  And then it crossed my mind: “Declare Wellington Genocide Free”.  And if Wellington could, why not other cities?

    Wellington started nuclear-free drive
    The nuclear-free campaign, led by Wellington back in the 1980s, is a template worth reviving.

    Wellington became the first city in New Zealand — and the first capital in the world — to declare itself nuclear free in 1982.  It followed the excellent example of Missoula, Montana, USA, the first city in the world to do so, in 1978.

    These were tumultuous times. I vividly remember heading into Wellington harbour on a small yacht, part of a peace flotilla made up of kayakers, yachties and wind surfers that tried to stop the USS Texas from berthing. It won that battle that day but we won the war.

    This was the decade which saw the French government’s terrorist bomb attack on a Greenpeace ship in Auckland harbour to intimidate the anti-nuclear movement.

    Also, 2025 is the 40th anniversary of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and the death of Fernando Pereira. Little Island Press will be reissuing a new edition of my friend David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire later this year. It tells the incredible story of the final voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.

    "Eyes of Fire: the Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior"
    “Eyes of Fire: the Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior” . . . a new book on nuclear-free activism on its way. Image: Little Island Press

    Standing up to bullies
    Labour under David Lange successfully campaigned and won the 1984 elections on a nuclear-free platform which promised to ban nuclear ships from our waters.

    This was a time when we had a government that had the backbone to act independently of the US. Yes, we had a grumpy relationship with the Yanks for a while and we were booted out of ANZUS — surely a cause for celebration in contrast to today when our government is little more than a finger puppet for Team Genocide.

    In response to bullying from Australia and the US, David Lange said at the time:  “It is the price we are prepared to pay.”

    With Wellington in the lead, nuclear-free had moved over the course of a decade from a fringe peace movement to the mainstream and eventually to become government policy.

    The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987 was passed and remains a cornerstone of our foreign policy.

    New Zealand took a stand that showed strong opposition to out-of-control militarism, the risks of nuclear war, and strong support for the international movement to step back from nuclear weapons.

    It was a powerful statement of our independence as a nation and a rejection of foreign dominance. It also reduced the risk of contamination in case of a nuclear accident aboard a vessel (remember this was the same decade as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine).

    The nuclear-free campaign and Palestine
    Each of those points have similarities with the Palestinian cause today and should act as inspiration for cities to mobilise and build national solidarity with the Palestinians.

    To my knowledge, no city has ever successfully expelled an Israeli Embassy but Wellington could take a powerful first step by doing this, and declare the capital genocide-free.  We need to wake our country — and the Western world — out of the moral torpor it finds itself in; yawning its way through the monstrous crimes being perpetrated by our “friends and allies”.

    Shun Israel until it stops genocide
    No city should suffer the moral stain of hosting an embassy representing the racist, genocidal state of Israel.

    Wellington should lead the country to support South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), end all trade with Israel, and end all intelligence and military cooperation with Israel for the duration of its genocidal onslaught.  Other cities should follow suit.

    Declare your city Nuclear and Genocide Free.

    Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz and is a frequent contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Netanyahu commits a new ‘bloodbath in Gaza’ to save himself

    Asia Pacific Report

    At least 400 people have been killed after a surprise Israeli attack on Gaza in the early hours of Tuesday.

    The Israeli government vows to continue escalating these military attacks, claiming it is in response to Hamas’ refusal to extend the ceasefire, which has been in place since January 19.

    But is this the real reason for pre-dawn attack? Or is there a much more cynical explanation — one tied to the political fate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

    This week, New Zealand journalist Mohamed Hassan, host of the Middle East Eye’s weekly Big Picture podcast, speaks to Daniel Levy, the president of the US/Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator.


    Ceasefire broken: Netanyahu is exposed.   Video: Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • New Zealand and Gaza: Confronting and not confronting the unspeakable

    ANALYSIS: By Robert Patman

    New Zealand’s National-led coalition government’s policy on Gaza seems caught between a desire for a two-state diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and closer alignment with the US, which supports a Netanyahu government strongly opposed to a Palestinian state

    In the last 17 months, Gaza has been the scene of what Thomas Merton once called the unspeakable — human wrongdoing on a scale and a depth that seems to go beyond the capacity of words to adequately describe.

    The latest Gaza conflict began with a horrific Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 that prompted a relentless Israel ground and air offensive in Gaza with full financial, logistical and diplomatic backing from the Biden administration.

    During this period, around 50,000 people – 48,903 Palestinians and 1706 Israelis – have been reported killed in the Gaza conflict, according to the official figures of the Gaza Health Ministry, as well as 166 journalists and media workers, 120 academics,and more than 224 humanitarian aid workers.

    Moreover, a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, signed in mid-January, seems to be hanging by a thread.

    Israel has resumed its blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza and cut off electricity after Hamas rejected an Israeli proposal to extend phase 1 of the ceasefire deal (to release more Israeli hostages) without any commitment to implement phase 2 (that envisaged ending the conflict in Gaza and Israel withdrawing its troops from the territory).

    Hamas insists on negotiating phase 2 as signed by both parties in the January ceasefire agreement

    Over the weekend, Israel reportedly launched air-strikes in Gaza and the Trump administration unleashed a wave of attacks on Houthi rebel positions in Yemen after the Houthis warned Israel not to restart the war in Gaza.

    New Zealand and the Gaza conflict
    Although distant in geographic terms, the Gaza crisis represents a major moral and legal challenge to New Zealand’s self-image and its worldview based on the strengthening of an international rules-based order.

    New Zealand’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, emphasised partnership and cooperation between indigenous Māori and European settlers in nation-building.

    While the aspirations of the Treaty have yet to be fully realised, the credibility of its vision of reconciliation at home depends on New Zealand’s willingness to uphold respect for human rights and the rule of law in the international arena, particularly in states like Israel where tensions persist between the settler population and Palestinians in occupied territories like the West Bank.

    New Zealand’s declaratory stance towards Gaza
    In 2023 and 2024, New Zealand consistently backed calls in the UN General Assembly for humanitarian truces or ceasefires in Gaza. It also joined Australia and Canada in February and July last year to demand an end to hostilities.

    The New Zealand Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, told the General Assembly in April 2024 that the Security Council had failed in its responsibility “to maintain international peace and security”.

    He was right. The Biden administration used its UN Security Council veto four times to perpetuate this brutal onslaught in Gaza for nearly 15 months.

    In addition, Peters has repeatedly said there can be no military resolution of a political problem in Gaza that can only be resolved through affirming the Palestinian right to self-determination within the framework of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

    The limitations of New Zealand’s Gaza approach
    Despite considerable disagreement with Netanyahu’s policy of “mighty vengeance” in Gaza, the National-led coalition government had few qualms about sending a small Defence Force deployment to the Red Sea in January 2024 as part of a US-led coalition effort to counter Houthi rebel attacks on commercial shipping there.

    While such attacks are clearly illegal, they are basically part of the fallout from a prolonged international failure to stop the US-enabled carnage in Gaza.

    In particular, the NZDF’s Red Sea deployment did not sit comfortably with New Zealand’s acceptance in September 2024 of the ICJ’s ruling that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza) was “unlawful”.

    At the same time, the National-led coalition government’s silence on US President Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to “own” Gaza, displace two million Palestinian residents and make the territory the “Riviera” of the Middle East was deafening.

    Furthermore, while Wellington announced travel bans on violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank in February 2024, it has had little to say publicly about the Netanyahu government’s plans to annex the West Bank in 2025. Such a development would gravely undermine the two-state solution, violate international law, and further fuel regional tensions.

    New Zealand’s low-key policy
    On balance, the National-led coalition government’s policy towards Gaza appears to be ambivalent and lacking moral and legal clarity in a context in which war crimes have been regularly committed since October 7.

    Peters was absolutely correct to condemn the UNSC for failing to deliver the ceasefire that New Zealand and the overwhelming majority of states in the UN General Assembly had wanted from the first month of this crisis.

    But the New Zealand government has had no words of criticism for the US, which used its power of veto in the UNSC for more than a year to thwart the prospect of a ceasefire and provided blanket support for an Israeli military campaign that killed huge numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

    By cooperating with the Biden administration against Houthi rebels and adopting a quietly-quietly approach to Trump’s provocative comments on Gaza and his apparent willingness to do whatever it takes to help Israel “to get the job done’, New Zealand has revealed a selective approach to upholding international law and human rights in the desperate conditions facing Gaza

    Professor Robert G. Patman is an Inaugural Sesquicentennial Distinguished Chair and his research interests concern international relations, global security, US foreign policy, great powers, and the Horn of Africa. This article was first published by The Spinoff and is republished here with the author’s permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • OPINION: Vietnam ruling party chief To Lam is creating executive power

    Vietnamese leader To Lam recently spent a week in Indonesia and Singapore, where he celebrated the 70th and 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations, respectively, and elevated ties to “comprehensive strategic partnership,” Vietnam’s highest ranking.

    Such high-level visits are not unusual given Hanoi’s close ties with those fellow ASEAN countries. But what’s striking about this tour is that Lam, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), is playing the top diplomat role, normally the duty of the president or prime minister.

    By doing this, Lam has made clear that he sees the CPV’s most powerful post as having executive functions in the party-state never taken on by his predecessors, who were focused on policy and ideology.

    Indonesia's President Prabowo Subianto (R) shakes hands with Vietnam's Communist Party General Secretary To Lam after a press conference at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta on March 10, 2025.
    Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto (R) shakes hands with Vietnam’s Communist Party General Secretary To Lam after a press conference at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta on March 10, 2025.
    (Bay Ismoyo/AFP)

    Lam, as minister of public security, weaponized counter-corruption investigations to systematically remove rivals from the CPV Politburo from December 2022 to mid-2024, culminating in his election as president in May 2024.

    Following the death of the longtime CPV General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in July 2024, state President Lam was elevated to the top party spot.

    Some observers believe Lam tried to hold onto the presidency, but that was seen as an unacceptable accumulation of power that violated Vietnam’s norm of collective leadership.

    He relinquished the presidency and in October 2024, Luong Cuong was appointed to replace him.

    Cuong, who served as the Army’s top political commissar, was viewed as an institutional check on the growing clout of the Ministry of Public Security within the CPV’s senior ranks.

    Tightening his grip

    But Lam has clearly consolidated power since then.

    He has been able to install key allies in critically important positions.

    These include Luong Tam Quang who succeeded him as minister of public security, and another deputy, Nguyen Duy Ngoc from the Central Committee office.

    Le Minh Hung heads the VPV’s organization Commission, which makes him the de facto head of human resources for the party, a key position ahead of the next five-year party congress in January.

    Rounding out Lam’s inner circle are deputy prime minister Nguyen Hoa Binh; Do Van Chien, former head of the Supreme Court who heads the party’s mass mobilization arm, the Vietnam Fatherland Front; and foreign policy guru Le Hoai Trung, now Lam’s chief of staff.

    Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (L) and Vietnam's Communist Party General Secretary To Lam inspect the guard of honor, during a welcoming ceremony, on the day of their meeting, at the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, March 10, 2025.
    Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (L) and Vietnam’s Communist Party General Secretary To Lam inspect the guard of honor, during a welcoming ceremony, on the day of their meeting, at the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, March 10, 2025.
    (Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana/Reuters)

    Lam has put his loyalists on an expanded CPV Politburo, which at its nadir last year, due to forced retirements, had just 13 members. Ngoc was elevated to the Politburo in violation of party rules that require having served a full term on the Central Committee.

    Politburo expansion matters for another reason: The norm is that no more than 50% of the politburo gets replaced at a party congress. Expanding the top decision-making body gives Lam more maneuvering room to retire any remaining rivals.

    Reinforcing his power is his de facto control of the Ministry of Public Security through his protégé Luong Tam Quang. And his recent installation of former security deputy Ngoc as the head of the CPV’s Central Inspection Commission, the party corruption watchdog, has expanded his ability to weaponize counter-corruption investigations.

    In short, anyone within the Central Committee who poses a threat or presents a challenge to Lam ahead of the 14th Congress in January is likely to face legal jeopardy. Central Committee compliance at the party congress is expected to be high.

    RELATED STORIES

    Vietnam’s To Lam consolidates power through personnel changes at 10th Plenum

    To Lam shakes up Vietnam with a government restructuring plan

    EXPLAINED: Top leader To Lam plans to redraw Vietnam’s provincial lines

    Supreme confidence

    We have seen just how secure Lam is going into the Congress. Normally, decision-making and policy implementation crawls to a standstill in the year preceding a Congress.

    Yet, this year we have seen unprecedented policy implementation in the form of a major government restructuring that eliminated five government ministries, three state-level commissions, and cut over 100,000 public sector jobs.

    The reforms are impacting the provinces too, with a proposed consolidation of smaller provinces and the proposed elimination of all district level offices.

    Leaders rarely embark on such bold policies if their re-election is in doubt.

    Lam is very concerned about Vietnam falling into the middle income trap, and worries about bureaucratic inefficiency, and is acting with added urgency.

    Vietnam's Communist Party General Secretary To Lam gestures during the autumn opening session at the the National Assembly in Hanoi on Oct. 21, 2024.
    Vietnam’s Communist Party General Secretary To Lam gestures during the autumn opening session at the the National Assembly in Hanoi on Oct. 21, 2024.
    (Nhac Nguyen/AFP)

    The general secretary is a very different figure than his predecessor.

    With the exception of a four year stint as chairman of the National Assembly, Trong’s six decade-long career was spent within the party, and almost all of that as a theoretician.

    As the party’s top ideologue, Trong’s job was to “set the line” for policy.

    Lam is doing something fundamentally different, turning the general secretary into an executive position.

    He’s not just setting the bookends in which policy can be deliberated, he’s proactively leading policy, formulation, and implementation.

    Lam may have been forced to cede the presidency last September, but there is no doubt that he is the top diplomat.

    State-led capitalism

    For eight years, Lam was the party’s top enforcer and defender of its monopoly of power, but he was no ideologue. Communism was simply a means to an end.

    There is a shrewd, ruthless pragmatism to Lam who sees CPV legitimacy coming from economic performance.

    Vietnam, under his tenure, is likely to remain every bit as authoritarian, but operate more in the mold of state-led capitalism.

    Lam has clearly looked to China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping for selective inspiration.

    At the 14th Congress, he may push again for the general secretary post and the presidency to be conjoined, as in China.

    Lam has systematically removed rival factions, and surrounded himself with a small core of empowered loyalists.

    But most of all, like Xi, he sees himself as the man of the moment, the only person capable of taking on needed structural reforms, while maintaining the party’s monopoly of power.

    And as Xi ran the tables at the 20th Congress in October 2022, Lam is poised to do the same at the CPV’s 14th.

    What could make this possible, is the way that Lam has reinvented the position of general secretary, assuming executive functions, in a way that none of his predecessors in the Doi Moi era have.

    Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by commentator Zachary Abuza.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • This DWP assault on disabled people isn’t what Labour is supposed to look like… is it?

    A little over a week ago — and unsurprisingly ignored by the British corporate media — the United Nations published a new report calling for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party government to take “corrective measures” to address the impact of the devastating cuts to Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) disability benefits introduced under Conservative governments.

    The recommendations, made by the UN’s committee on economic, social, and cultural rights, call for an increase in disability-related benefits, more commonly known as PIP and ESA, to allow disabled people to live adequately.

    The irony isn’t lost on me.

    Just as the UN calls for an increase in spending on Britain’s welfare system along comes Keir Starmer’s Labour to attack the very people the report calls to be protected by increased spending.

    DWP cuts to cover for the unwinnable war against Putin

    With an unwinnable war of distraction against Putin’s Russia looking increasingly unlikely to happen, Labour has officially declared a catastrophic war on sick and disabled people instead.

    Documents leaked to ITV suggest the Labour government plan to cut £6 billion from the welfare budget, with £5 billion coming from DWP PIP — money that is awarded to help with the additional cost of living with disabilities.

    I need to know, what the fuck actually happens to an MP when they enter parliament?

    Their promise of building a better tomorrow is left at the door, along with anything that resembles the intellectual ability to think for themselves.

    These detestable, Labour freeloaders make traffic wardens and speed camera cops look like loveable angels of the highways.

    Have any of the soulless carpetbaggers even thought about looking at the number of current job vacancies — 819,000 — and the number of healthy DWP jobseekers — 1.46 million — and then wondered what they plan to do with the disabled people that they will try and force into work with a combination of ‘anti-obesity’ pills, public shaming and cuts to disability benefits?

    How things have changed

    Cast your mind back to 2020. Covid arrived in the UK, millions of people were told to stay at home, and in many cases were forced to apply for DWP Universal Credit to help make ends meet.

    For some, it was the first time in their lives that they needed to claim some form of social security, and as pitiful as Universal Credit is, there’s no doubt that it’s better than a poke in the eye with a shitty stick when you’re wondering how you are going to afford to put some food on the table, wherever you sit upon the political spectrum.

    But most noticeably, the media and the political establishment came together to mute the entirely dishonest feckless scrounger narrative, almost.

    Suddenly, you could get a speedier advance on your Universal Credit claim. Universal Credit, and let’s not forget the furlough scheme, were shining examples of why the welfare state was so important to the British people.

    Now think about where we are today.

    The hostility towards disabled benefit claimants being promoted in the British media, and helped along by Labour politicians this past week has been as vile and hostile as anything I have seen over the past ten years. No doubt.

    The half-hearted, dim-witted attempt at compassion and understanding from just five years ago has gone, and once again, the hostile rhetoric has returned to haunt the millions of disabled people that feel utterly betrayed by Keir Starmer.

    Dignitas sponsoring the DWP?

    Labour think the answer to our apparent economic woes lies in penalising some of the most vulnerable people in Britain while the media get angry over Sky TV, iPhones, and single mums scrounging DWP benefits. We’re actually living through the Cameron years again.

    What next? Why don’t we just have Dignitas sponsor the DWP’s ‘economically inactive’ task force and be done with the fluffy bullshit about helping disabled people back into work?

    If you tell them you’re friendly with Liz Duncan Smith they might even throw in a free flight to Switzerland. One way, obviously.

    How do they sleep at night?

    I’ll tell you exactly how they sleep. Perfectly well, on a nice comfortable bed, with adequate warmth that is generously paid for from the public purse. That’s not all of them. Some of them hang upside down in their lairs all day because they cannot be exposed to sunlight.

    I’ve sat down over the last few days and looked at the “difficult decisions” that we need to make to ensure Zelenskyy can lose a war to Russia in a dignified manner, and I think we’re missing an obvious opportunity.

    Why force millions of disabled people to find nonexistent jobs AND send the neo-Nazis a shit tonne of bombs when we can send the Ukrainian comedy guy a shit tonne of disabled people, deemed surplus to requirements by the British Labour Party?

    Furthermore, why do we need to boost our own army numbers at home while there’s plenty of British pensioners that can earn back (some of) their winter fuel allowance with a bit of paratrooper duty and hand-to-hand combat with Putin’s highly trained killers, and keep warm at the same time?

    YOU try filling out a DWP Universal Credit claim

    I need to be careful here.

    I don’t want the editor thinking I’ve joined UKIP 2.0, but don’t let anyone tell you a bed-bound chronic pain sufferer can’t do their bit by volunteering to pull down lefty protestors from Big Ben, or better still, do some labouring on one of the many building sites that must be cropping up everywhere, what with the prime minister promising to get Britain building houses again…

    In a coma? Don’t let that hold you back. Members of the House of Lords have been getting away with it for centuries. If those brandy-drenched dossers can turn up half-dead for a twenty minute shift and pick up more than £300 for the inconvenience, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from finding ‘dignity in work’.

    Work sets you… okay I’ll stop now.

    I think it’s a weird coping mechanism. Labour turns out to be worse than the Tories, my little brain retreats in absolute horror, and all I’m left with is sarcasm.

    If the ridiculous right honestly believe a life on benefits is so bloody easy, why don’t they ditch their jobs and start filling out the forms to claim DWP Universal Credit? They can always volunteer if they want to contribute something positive, or give themselves a purpose to get up in the morning, right? They can start on my front garden first thing Monday morning, if it’s a pride thing.

    You should see the weeds that are growing, and I’m not talking about the laughably-illegal stuff that you can smell just about everywhere these days.

    I don’t smoke da reefa – however…

    I know that’s another conversation altogether, but why is it you can go to your doctor and get some seriously heavy duty opioids — I’m regularly offered oxycontin and morphine by my various GPs — for free if you qualify, but you can’t smoke a bit of self-purchased pain relieving wacky baccy without risking a criminal record? Isn’t that what’s known as “arse about tit”, or something?

    I don’t smoke weed, and I rarely take anything stronger than a paracetamol to manage osteoarthritis, a chronic pain syndrome called fibromyalgia, and a couple of other issues that deem me to be blue-badge-worthy.

    There’s also the fact that I don’t want to be having conversations with imaginary purple penguins whilst trying to lecture sizeable groups on the virtues of losing weight in a healthy and balanced way, if you know what I mean?

    But like most of you, I know more than one person that benefits from instant pain relief after they’ve had a smoke, so why not take it out of the hands of the dealers, who often sell harder substances, and make it as widely available as a pack of 16 Nurofen from your nearest Tesco Express?

    That would obviously require a tiny bit of progressive thinking, so you can bet your bottom dollar that Keir Starmer will reclassify cannabis as a Class A substance before you can say “a pack of king-size Rizla and just these eighteen bags of Haribo Tangfastics, please”, given half-the-chance.

    Labour’s new war on disabled people will go down as one of the darkest chapters of this deeply unpopular government’s one term in power.

    Labour’s assault on DWP claimants: its darkest hour yet

    We were ridiculed by the centrists for having the temerity to point out that Keir Starmer is a bit of a Tory. Perhaps they were right to laugh at us, because there’s no “bit of” about it. Keir Starmer is a one nation Tory, and a fucking nasty one at that.

    Taking money from pensioners? Looking for war with Russia? Slashing DWP disability money to pay for it? Kissing the saggy arse of a neofascist tangerine? Funded by foreign lobbyists? Supportive of genocidal regimes and their fugitive leaders?

    This really isn’t what a Labour government is supposed to look like. Is it?

    Finally, sharing independent left-wing media on every fucking platform known to humankind has never been so important.

    There’s a very good chance you are reading my weekly Canary column via the platform formally known as Twitter, or perhaps Facebook.

    While the battle with the establishment media will never end, the giants of social media have turned up and taken the narrative to a whole new, exceptionally dangerous level.

    Please do support the Canary, if you can. You will struggle to find better coverage of Labour’s war on the disabled people of Britain, because the Canary actively supports and employs disabled writers and journalists to bring you the news the corporate media prefers to gloss over.

    And they do a mighty fine job of it.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The week where Trump took a wrecking ball to the US economy – and global relations

    As Donald Trump and his tariffs trade war escalates, the stock markets have taken a massive hit, and many investors and economists fear that a recession is imminent as shockwaves continue to pound Wall Street.

    Given the huge hit to share prices earlier this week, in response to the tariffs, it appears that Justin Trudeau’s comment just last month about Trump’s tariffs being “very dumb” couldn’t ring truer.

    Trump tariffs: a week of chaos

    This week, Trump threatened that the tariffs could get more vicious for the rest of the world, as he proposed introducing a 200% tariff on EU wine and champagne. He took to Truth Social to express his thoughts on the EU’s retaliatory tariffs which he dubbed (in true Trumpian Language), “nasty”.

    His justification for this is that the claims that US trading partners have long taken advantage of the country, and that the tariffs will bring back jobs and help the economy to boom.

    However, the reality is that Trump’s tariffs will simply rip up the economy and destroy any hope of the US working with its trading partners, who have now become de facto enemies to Trump’s administration.

    The tariffs have already taken a big hit on Canada’s economy, as his steel and aluminium import ones came into effect on Wednesday. It has become evident that Trump wants to take a wrecking ball to not only the US economy, but the centuries-long global trade order shared with its allies.

    Not only has he placed tariffs on steel and aluminium but also proposed tariffs to come into effect from 2 April, which will have a devastating impact upon the car industry in Canada – potentially forcing businesses to shut.

    The incoming prime minister, successor of Trudeau, and ex-Bank of England boss Mark Carney called Trump’s tariffs an “attack on Canadian workers, families and businesses”.

    Carney also promised to continue to fight for the Canadian people against Trump’s devastating economic endeavours. He strongly stated that the US “will pay a financial price for this so big that it will be read about in history books for many years to come.”

    Voters are not happy

    The fraction and tension between Canada and the US is not only concerning Canadians, but voters too – who are deeply concerned about how they are going to be able to pay their bills, after their horrified reaction to tumbling stock markets which have taken hits to their shares, salaries, and older people’s pockets.

    In a recent poll conducted by Navigator Research, 37% of registered voters supported his plan, whilst 41% were opposed to it.

    Then, global stock markets fell sharply with the S&P 500 making a sharp downturn from its post-election gains. US retail services have warned that it is “highly likely” that the prices on the shelves will rise. This is due to the 25% duty that came into fruition on exports from Mexico to the US.

    This will be disappointing to Trump loyalists who thought their egg prices would reduce. During the election campaign die hard MAGA fans voted for Trump with the misguided and brainwashed belief that he was the answer to the economy.

    Even the Trump administration conceded that the tariffs will have implications on the US, as Howard Lutnick told CNBC that “there may well be short-term price movements”.

    Global discontent

    Not only have American voters expressed extreme discontent, but people across the world have begun to boycott US products, notably Elon Musk’s Tesla. People rushed to put signs up on their car bonnets with the phrase “I bought this car before I knew Elon was crazy”.

    Similarly in Canada, consumers have joined the fight against Trump’s tariffs through buying Canadian maple syrup instead of American, as they join the worldwide boycott against Uncle Sam. There has also been a surge in searches on Google titled “Boycott the USA”, which expresses just how discontented the rest of the world is with Trump’s disastrous presidency.

    Furthermore, in Europe and other countries websites and apps have been set up which display alternative products compared to US goods, such as “Buy European”, “European Alternatives”, and “Made in Canada”.

    Even Trump himself understands the fireball he has caused in the economy. When asked on Fox News about the possibility of a recession, he neither confirmed nor denied that one was potentially on the way, as he responded, “I hate to predict things”.

    His rather dizzying attitude to the economy, and policies that he initiates and then retracts, has had a jolting impact on the stock markets around the world, as economists are confused as to how to react to his erratic behaviour.

    Trump tariffs are playing with fire

    But Trump and his tariffs are evidently playing with people’s businesses and livelihoods and driving consumer confidence into the floor, as people continue to battle and grapple with the cost of living which feels never ending for many.

    Trump’s policies will only make this worse, and his classic excuse for when it all goes up in flames will be blaming the ‘deep state’ – but also Joe Biden, a former president who is no longer in charge of the US economy, yet who Trump loves to berate at any given chance.

    Professor Larry Sabato, who works at the University of Virginia and teaches politics, said in a response to his consistent blame game of Biden:

    Here’s another norm that Trump has exploded. Trump has no limits, and his base lets him get away with anything. So, expect it to continue.

    There will come a point, however, when Trump will have to face the consequences of his actions, and a point when he can no longer place the blame on Biden. He will eventually be forced to face the tune of the music within the American public, which at the moment, is very much one of discontent .

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Megan Miley

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • No apologies over fabricated terror plot from pollies or lobby groups

    COMMENTARY: By Greg Barns

    When it comes to antisemitism, politicians in Australia are often quick to jump on the claim without waiting for evidence.

    With notable and laudable exceptions like the Greens and independents such as Tasmanian federal MP Andrew Wilkie, it seems any allegation will do when it comes to the opportunity to imply Arab Australians, the Muslim community and Palestinian supporters are trying to destroy the lives of the Jewish community.

    A case in point. The discovery in January this year of a caravan found in Dural, New South Wales, filled with explosives and a note that referenced the Great Synagogue in Sydney led to a frenzy of clearly uninformed and dangerous rhetoric from politicians and the media about an imminent terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community.

    It was nothing of the sort as we now know with the revelation by police that this was a “fabricated terrorist plot”.

    As the ABC reported on March 10: “Police have said an explosives-laden caravan discovered in January at Dural in Sydney’s north-west was a ‘fake terrorism plot’ with ties to organised crime”, and that “the Australian Federal Police said they were confident this was a ‘fabricated terrorist plot’,” adding the belief was held “very early on after the caravan was located”.

    One would have thought the political and media class would know that it is critical in a society supposedly underpinned by the rule of law that police be allowed to get on with the job of investigating allegations without comment.

    Particularly so in the hot-house atmosphere that exists in this nation today.

    Opportunistic Dutton
    But not the ever opportunistic and divisive federal opposition leader Peter Dutton.

    After the Daily Telegraph reported the Dural caravan story on January 29,  Dutton was quick to say that this “was potentially the biggest terrorist attack in our country’s history”. To his credit, Prime Anthony Albanese said in response he does not “talk about operational matters for an ongoing investigation”.

    Dutton’s language was clearly designed to whip up fear and hysteria among the Jewish community and to demonise Palestinian supporters.

    He was not Robinson Crusoe sadly. New South Wales Premier Chris Minns told the media on January 29 that the Dural caravan discovery had the potential to have led to a “mass casualty event”.

    The Zionist Federation of Australia, an organisation that is an unwavering supporter of Israel despite the horror that nation has inflicted on Gaza, was even more overblown in its claims.

    It issued a statement that claimed: “This is undoubtedly the most severe threat to the Jewish community in Australia to date. The plot, if executed, would likely have resulted in the worst terrorist attack on Australian soil.”

    Note the word “undoubtedly”.

    Uncritical Israeli claims
    Then there was another uncritical Israel barracker, Sky News’ Sharri Markson, who claimed; “To think perpetrators would have potentially targeted a museum commemorating the Holocaust — a time when six million Jews were killed — is truly horrifying.”

    And naturally, Jilian Segal, the highly partisan so-called “Antisemitism Envoy” said the discovery of the caravan was a “chilling reminder that the same hatred that led to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust still exists today”.

    In short, the response to the Dural caravan incident was simply an exercise in jumping on the antisemitism issue without any regard to the consequences for our community, including the fear it spread among Jewish Australians and the further demonising of the Arab Australian community.

    No circumspection. No leadership. No insistence that the matter had not been investigated fully.

    As the only Jewish organisation that represents humanity, the Jewish Council of Australia, said in a statement from its director Sarah Schwartz on March 10 the “statement from the AFP [Australian Federal Police] should prompt reflection from every politician, journalist and community leader who has sought to manipulate and weaponise fears within the Jewish community.

    ‘Irresponsible and dangerous’
    “The attempt to link these events to the support of Palestinians — whether at protests, universities, conferences or writers’ festivals — has been irresponsible and dangerous.” Truth in spades.

    And ask yourself this question. Let’s say the Dural caravan contained notes about mosques and Arab Australian community centres. Would the media, politicians and others have whipped up the same level of hysteria and divisive rhetoric?

    The answer is no.

    One assumes Dutton, Segal, the Zionist Federation and others who frothed at the mouth in January will now offer a collective mea culpa. Sadly, they won’t because there will be no demands to do so.

    The damage to our legal system has been done because political opportunism and milking antisemitism for political ends comes first for those who should know better.

    Greg Barns SC is national criminal justice spokesperson for the Australian Lawyers Alliance. This article was first published by Pearls and Irritations social policy journal and is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • An open letter to my MP – begging him to oppose DWP benefits cuts

    If I’m honest, I’ve struggled to write a column this week. While our deepest fears were confirmed with Labour’s planned cuts to Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) disability benefits leaked, I felt like I didn’t have anything new to add to the conversation. After all it’s what I’ve been writing about for weeks and months. Whilst other journalists “waited to see” what would happen I wrote about Labour feeding the media clickbait, mine and other disabled people’s fears of being made to feel more like a burden, and was derided when I wrote that life under labour was already far worse than it was with the Tories.

    So now while (most of) the rest of the media have stopped pushing constant clickbait about scroungers, I’m out of words. I’m exhausted. But I’m not giving up. This week’s column is something a little different. As so many disabled people are emailing their MPs I wanted to share what I wrote to my MP Lewis Atkinson. If you would like to write to your own MP you can use this as a template.

    DWP cuts: the cruelest so far

    Dear Lewis,

    I am writing to you to share my deep concern about the reported DWP cuts to disability benefits that are coming.

    As a disability rights journalist, I am appalled that Labour are (reportedly) planning further cuts to disabled people’s vital benefits. I’m saddened that after years in opposition holding the Tories to account on disability benefits-related deaths, the Labour Party now want to push disabled people further into poverty, which could result in god knows how many more deaths.

    These DWP cuts are supposed to help disabled people into work, but in reality, they will do the opposite. DWP PIP is a vital benefit for many who do work already, it has nothing to do with unemployment. In fact many, including myself, rely on PIP so that we can work only the hours we need instead of making ourselves more ill.

    PIP is not ‘easy’ to get

    Despite what is often claimed by politicians and the media, DWP PIP is also not an easy to claim benefit, so it’s preposterous that the government seemingly want to make it harder to claim. The PIP form is 40 pages long, and requires the claimant to provide an extensive amount of evidence from medical professionals. You can’t just say you have mental health issues of ADHD like many pundits claim.

    Just 51% of all claims are successful and the DWP has spent a horrendous amount of taxpayer money fighting claimants – Big Issue reports that the government spent around £50 million last year alone on this.

    Whilst raising Universal Credit for those searching for work or in work is a good thing, balancing that by cutting benefits for those who can’t work is just cruel. How is that supposed to incentivise people in to work when they’ve already been deemed unfit for work by a system that is already inhumane to navigate?

    Stark figures

    What is equally worrying to me is the claim that the DWP plans to freeze the rate of PIP so that it doesn’t rise with inflation, this is despite disabled people already being in deep poverty. There are many, many stats around disability and poverty but here are just a few:

    • Disabled people have on average 44% less disposable income annually than non-disabled people.
    • 34% of disabled people are in the lowest category for household income, compared to 13% of non-disabled people.
    • 55% of disabled adults said they were struggling to afford energy bills.
    • 41% of disabled people couldn’t afford to heat their homes.
    • 31% of disabled people said they had less money to spend on food.
    • 36% of disabled people are struggling with their rent of mortgage.
    • Trussell Trust estimated in 2023 that 75% of people accessing their food banks had at least one disabled person in their household.

    As you well know, our area the North East is a hugely deprived area, with 25% living in poverty, but you may not know that the North East also has the highest rate of disabled people in the whole country. 21.2% of people in the North East are disabled, while 7.8% of households in the North East have two or more disabled people in them. I surely don’t need to impress on you how much further this would plunge our region into poverty and make it even harder for our people to live.

    Dodgy stats

    A key statistic that the DWP use to support all of this cruelty is that 200,000 people in the Low Capability for Work Related Activity Universal Credit group said that they would like to work. However, this isn’t the whole picture.

    That figure was taken from just 5% answering that they would like to work tomorrow if given the right support. The second half of that sentence is crucial, as at the moment, disabled people do not have enough support. Pumping money into work coaches wont stand for anything when the waiting list for Access to Work grows and grows.

    There’s also another part to that stat that is ignored. If 5% said they could work with the right support, then 95% said no, they couldn’t. The 200,000 figure has been scaled up to be representative of the number of claimants. So if we do that for how many said no, we’re looking at around 3.8 million who the government know couldn’t work and are still planning on cutting the benefits for.

    DWP cuts must not go ahead

    I also know that you are on the Assisted Dying Bill Committee, whilst the committee maintains that disabled people are not in danger of being subjected to assisted dying, many disabled people are still concerned – especially due to the amendments that are being denied. Whilst there has still not been an expansion for incurable conditions, people will be allowed if they feel like a burden. I honestly do not see how disabled people would not feel like burdens when this government consistently makes us out to be them.

    I would finally like to invite you to a meeting held by the Coalition Against Benefit Cuts in Parliament next week. The meeting is on 17 March 4-6pm, at the Thatcher Room in Portcullis House.

    I urge you to stand against these reported changes, for the good of all disabled people – but especially for those in your constituency who would struggle to live if these DWP cuts came in.

    Rachel Charlton-Dailey

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Marshall Islands: How the Rongelap evacuation changed the course of history

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Giff Johnson, editor of the Marshall Islands Journal and RNZ Pacific correspondent in Majuro

    The late Member of Parliament Jeton Anjain and the people of the nuclear test-affected Rongelap Atoll changed the course of the history of the Marshall Islands by using Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship to evacuate their radioactive home islands 40 years ago.

    They did this by taking control of their own destiny after decades of being at the mercy of the United States nuclear testing programme and its aftermath.

    In 1954, the US tested the Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, spewing high-level radioactive fallout on unsuspecting Rongelap Islanders nearby.

    For years after the Bravo test, decisions by US government doctors and scientists caused Rongelap Islanders to be continuously exposed to additional radiation.

    Marshall Islands traditional and government leaders joined Greenpeace representatives in Majuro
    Marshall Islands traditional and government leaders joined Greenpeace representatives in showing off tapa banners with the words “Justice for Marshall Islands” during the dockside welcome ceremony earlier this week in Majuro. Image: Giff Johnson/RNZ Pacific

    The 40th anniversary of the dramatic evacuation of Rongelap Atoll in 1985 by the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior — a few weeks before French secret agents bombed the ship in Auckland harbour — was spotlighted this week in Majuro with the arrival of Greenpeace’s flagship Rainbow Warrior III to a warm welcome combining top national government leaders, the Rongelap Atoll Local Government and the Rongelap community.

    “We were displaced, our lives were disrupted, and our voices ignored,” said MP Hilton Kendall, who represents Rongelap in the Marshall Islands Parliament, at the welcome ceremony in Majuro earlier in the week.

    “In our darkest time, Greenpeace stood with us.”

    ‘Evacuated people to safety’
    He said the Rainbow Warrior “evacuated the people to safety” in 1985.

    Greenpeace would “forever be remembered by the people of Rongelap,” he added.

    In 1984, Jeton Anjain — like most Rongelap people who were living on the nuclear test-affected atoll — knew that Rongelap was unsafe for continued habitation.

    The Able U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, pictured July 1, 1946. [U.S. National Archives]
    The Able US nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 July 1946. Image: US National Archives

    There was not a single scientist or medical doctor among their community although Jeton was a trained dentist, and they mainly depended on US Department of Energy-provided doctors and scientists for health care and environmental advice.

    They were always told not to worry and that everything was fine.

    But it wasn’t, as the countless thyroid tumors, cancers, miscarriages and surgeries confirmed.

    Crew of the Rainbow Warrior and other Greenpeace officials were welcomed to the Marshall Islands during a dockside ceremony in Majuro to mark the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Rongelap Atoll. Photo: Giff Johnson.
    Crew of the Rainbow Warrior and other Greenpeace officials — including two crew members from the original Rainbow Warrior, Bunny McDiarmid and Henk Hazen, from Aotearoa New Zealand – were welcomed to the Marshall Islands during a dockside ceremony in Majuro to mark the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Rongelap Atoll. Image: Giff Johnson/RNZ Pacific

    As the desire of Rongelap people to evacuate their homeland intensified in 1984, unbeknown to them Greenpeace was hatching a plan to dispatch the Rainbow Warrior on a Pacific voyage the following year to turn a spotlight on the nuclear test legacy in the Marshall Islands and the ongoing French nuclear testing at Moruroa in French Polynesia.

    A Rainbow Warrior question
    As I had friends in the Greenpeace organisation, I was contacted early on in its planning process with the question: How could a visit by the Rainbow Warrior be of use to the Marshall Islands?

    Jeton and I were good friends by 1984, and had worked together on advocacy for Rongelap since the late 1970s. I informed him that Greenpeace was planning a visit and without hesitation he asked me if the ship could facilitate the evacuation of Rongelap.

    At this time, Jeton had already initiated discussions with Kwajalein traditional leaders to locate an island that they could settle in that atoll.

    I conveyed Jeton’s interest in the visit to Greenpeace, and a Greenpeace International board member, the late Steve Sawyer, who coordinated the Pacific voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, arranged a meeting for the three of us in Seattle to discuss ideas.

    Jeton and I flew to Seattle and met Steve. After the usual preliminaries, Jeton asked Steve if the Rainbow Warrior could assist Rongelap to evacuate their community to Mejatto Island in Kwajalein Atoll, a distance of about 250 km.

    Steve responded in classic Greenpeace campaign thinking, which is what Greenpeace has proved effective in doing over many decades. He said words to the effect that the Rainbow Warrior could aid a “symbolic evacuation” by taking a small group of islanders from Rongelap to Majuro or Ebeye and holding a media conference publicising their plight with ongoing radiation exposure.

    “No,” said Jeton firmly. He wasn’t talking about a “symbolic” evacuation. He told Steve: “We want to evacuate Rongelap, the entire community and the housing, too.”

    Steve Sawyer taken aback
    Steve was taken aback by what Jeton wanted. Steve simply hadn’t considered the idea of evacuating the entire community.

    But we could see him mulling over this new idea and within minutes, as his mind clicked through the significant logistics hurdles for evacuation of the community — including that it would take three-to-four trips by the Rainbow Warrior between Rongelap and Mejatto to accomplish it — Steve said it was possible.

    And from that meeting, planning for the 1985 Marshall Islands visit began in earnest.

    I offer this background because when the evacuation began in early May 1985, various officials from the United States government sharply criticised Rongelap people for evacuating their atoll, saying there was no radiological hazard to justify the move and that they were being manipulated by Greenpeace for its own anti-nuclear agenda.

    Women from the nuclear test-affected Rongelap Atoll greeted the Rainbow Warrior
    Women from the nuclear test-affected Rongelap Atoll greeted the Rainbow Warrior and its crew with songs and dances this week as part of celebrating the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Rongelap Atoll in 1985 by the Rainbow Warrior. Image: Giff Johnson/RNZ Pacific

    This condescending American government response suggested Rongelap people did not have the brain power to make important decisions for themselves.

    But it also showed the US government’s lack of understanding of the gravity of the situation in which Rongelap Islanders lived day in and day out in a highly radioactive environment.

    The Bravo hydrogen bomb test blasted Rongelap and nearby islands with snow-like radioactive fallout on 1 March 1954. The 82 Rongelap people were first evacuated to the US Navy base at Kwajalein for emergency medical treatment and the start of long-term studies by US government doctors.

    No radiological cleanup
    A few months later, they were resettled on Ejit Island in Majuro, the capital atoll, until 1957 when, with no radiological cleanup conducted, the US government said it was safe to return to Rongelap and moved the people back.

    “Even though the radioactive contamination of Rongelap Island is considered perfectly safe for human habitation, the levels of activity are higher than those found in other inhabited locations in the world,” said a Brookhaven National Laboratory report commenting on the return of Rongelap Islanders to their contaminated islands in 1957.

    It then stated plainly why the people were moved back: “The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.”

    And for 28 years, Rongelap people lived in one of the world’s most radioactive environments, consuming radioactivity through the food chain and by living an island life.

    Proving the US narrative of safety to be false, the 1985 evacuation forced the US Congress to respond by funding new radiological studies of Rongelap.

    Thanks to the determination of the soft-spoken but persistent leadership of Jeton, he ensured that a scientist chosen by Rongelap would be included in the study. And the new study did indeed identify health hazards, particularly for children, of living on Rongelap.

    The US Congress responded by appropriating US$45 million to a Rongelap Resettlement Trust Fund.

    Subsistence atoll life
    All of this was important — it both showed that islanders with a PhD in subsistence atoll life understood more about their situation than the US government’s university educated PhDs and medical doctors who showed up from time-to-time to study them, provide medical treatment, and tell them everything was fine on their atoll, and it produced a $45 million fund from the US government.

    However, this is only a fraction of the story about why the Rongelap evacuation in 1985 forever changed the US narrative and control of its nuclear test legacy in this country.

    On arrival in Majuro March 11, the crew of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior III vessel were serenaded by the Rongelap community to mark the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Rongelap Islanders from their nuclear test-affected islands. Photo: Giff Johnson.
    The crew of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior III vessel were serenaded by the Rongelap community to mark the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Rongelap Islanders from their nuclear test-affected islands this week in Majuro. Image: Giff Johnson/RNZ Pacific

    Rongelap is the most affected population from the US hydrogen bomb testing programme in the 1950s.

    By living on Rongelap, the community confirmed the US government’s narrative that all was good and the nuclear test legacy was largely a relic of the past.

    The 1985 evacuation was a demonstration of the Rongelap community exerting control over their life after 31 years of dictates by US government doctors, scientists and officials.

    It was difficult building a new community on Mejatto Island, which was uninhabited and barren in 1985. Make no mistake, Rongelap people living on Mejatto suffered hardship and privation, especially in the first years after the 1985 resettlement.

    Nuclear legacy history
    Their perseverance, however, defined the larger ramification of the move to Mejatto: It changed the course of nuclear legacy history by people taking control of their future that forced a response from the US government to the benefit of the Rongelap community.

    Forty years later, the displacement of Rongelap Islanders on Mejatto and in other locations, unable to return to nuclear test contaminated Rongelap Atoll demonstrates clearly that the US nuclear testing legacy remains unresolved — unfinished business that is in need of a long-term, fair and just response from the US government.

    The Rainbow Warrior will be in Majuro until next week when it will depart for Mejatto Island to mark the 40th anniversary of the resettlement, and then voyage to other nuclear test-affected atolls around the Marshall Islands.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Gavin Ellis: Canadian billionaire must explain his designs on NZME – now

    COMMENTARY: By Gavin Ellis

    New Zealand-based Canadian billionaire James Grenon owes the people of this country an immediate explanation of his intentions regarding media conglomerate NZME. This cannot wait until a shareholders’ meeting at the end of April.

    Is his investment in the owner of The New Zealand Herald and NewstalkZB nothing more than a money-making venture to realise the value of its real estate marketing subsidiary? Has he no more interest than putting his share of the proceeds from spinning off OneRoof into a concealed safe in his $15 million Takapuna mansion?

    Or does he intent to leverage his 9.6 percent holding and the support of other investors to take over the board (if not the company) in order to dictate the editorial direction of the country’s largest newspaper and its number one commercial radio station?

    Grenon has said little beyond the barest of announcements that have been released by the New Zealand Stock Exchange. While he must exercise care to avoid triggering statutory takeover obligations, he cannot simply treat NZME as another of the private equity projects that have made him very wealthy. He is dealing with an entity whose influence and obligations extend far beyond the crude world of finance.

    While I do not presume for one moment that he reads this column each week, let me suspend disbelief for a moment and speak directly to him.

    Come clean and tell the people of New Zealand what you are doing and, more importantly, why.

    Over the past week there has been considerable speculation over the answers to those questions. Much of it has drawn on what little we know of James Grenon. And it is precious little beyond two facts.

    Backed right-wing Centrist
    The first is that he put money behind the launch of a right-wing New Zealand news aggregation website, The Centrist, although he apparently no longer has a financial interest in it.

    The second fact is that he provided financial support for conservative activists taking legal action against New Zealand media.

    When I contacted a well-connected friend in Canada to ask about Grenon the response was short: “Never heard of him . . . and there aren’t that many Canadian billionaires.”

    In short, the man who potentially may hold sway over the board of one of our biggest media companies has a very low profile indeed. That is a luxury to which he can no longer lay claim.

    It may be that his interest is, after all, a financial one based on his undoubted investment skills. He may see a lucrative opportunity in OneRoof. After all, Fairfax’s public listing and subsequent sale of its Australian equivalent, Domain, provided not only a useful cash boost for shareholders but the creation of a stand-alone entity that now has a market cap of about $A2.8 billion.

    Perhaps he wants a board cleanout to guarantee a OneRoof float.

    If so, say so.

    Similar transactions
    Although spinning off OneRoof could have dire consequences for the viability of what would be left of NZME, that is a decision no different to similar transactions made by many companies in the financial interests of shareholders.

    There is a world of difference, however, between seizing an investment opportunity and seeking to secure influence by dictating the editorial direction of a significant portion of our news media.

    If the speculation is correct — and the billionaire is seeking to steer NZME on an editorial course to the right — New Zealand has a problem.

    Communications minister Paul Goldsmith gave a lamely neoliberal response reported by Stuff last week: He was “happy to take some advice” on the development, but NZME was a “private company” and ultimately it was up to its shareholders to determine how it operated.

    Let me repeat my earlier point: NZME is an entity whose influence and obligations extend far beyond the crude world of finance (and the outworn concept that the market can rule). Its stewardship of the vehicles at the forefront of news dissemination and opinion formation means it must meet higher obligation than what we expect of an ordinary “private company”.

    The most fundamental of those obligations is the independence of editorial decision-making and direction.

    I became editor of The New Zealand Herald shortly after Wilson & Horton was sold to Irish businessman Tony O’Reilly. On my appointment the then chief executive of O’Reilly’s Independent News & Media, Liam Healy, said the board had only one editorial requirement of me: That I would not advocate the use of violence as a legitimate means to a political end.

    Only direction echoed Mandela
    Coming from a man who had witnessed the effects of such violence in Northern Ireland, I had no difficulty in acceding to his request. And throughout my entire editorship, the only “request” made of me by O’Reilly himself was that I would support the distribution of generic Aids drugs in Africa. It followed a meeting he had had with Nelson Mandela. I had no other direction from the board.

    Yes, I had to bat away requests by management personnel (who should have known better) to “do this” or “not do that” but, without exception, the attempts were commercially driven — they did not want to upset advertisers. There was never a political or ideological motive behind them. Nor were such requests limited to me.

    I doubt there is an editor in the country who has not had a manager asking for something to please an advertiser. Disappointment hasn’t deterred their trying.

    In this column last week, I wrote of the dangers of a rich owner (in that case Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos) dictating editorial policy. The dangers if James Grenon has similar intentions would be even greater, given NZME’s share of the news market.

    The journalists’ union, E tu, has already concluded that the Canadian’s intention is to gain right-wing influence. Its director, Michael Wood, issued a statement in which he said: “The idea that a shadowy cabal, backed by extreme wealth, is planning to take over such an important institution in our democratic fabric should be of concern to all New Zealanders.”

    He called on the current NZME board to re-affirm a commitment to editorial independence.

    Michael Wood reflects the fears that are rightly held by NZME’s journalists. They, too, will doubtless be looking for assurances of editorial independence.

    ‘Cast-iron’ guarantees?
    Such assurances are vital, but those journalists should look back to some “cast-iron” guarantees given by other rich new owners if they are to avoid history repeating itself.

    I investigated such guarantees in a book I wrote titled Trust Ownership and the Future of News: Media Moguls and White Knights. In it I noted that 20 years before Rupert Murdoch purchased The Times of London, there was a warning that the newspaper’s editor “far from having his independence guaranteed, is on paper entirely in the hands of the Chief Proprietors who are specifically empowered by the Articles of Association to control editorial policy”, although there was provision for a “committee of notables” to veto the transfer of shares into undesirable hands.

    To satisfy the British government, Murdoch gave guarantees of editorial independence and a “court of appeal” role for independent directors. Neither proved worth the paper they were written on.

    In contrast, the constitution of the company that owns The Economist does not permit any individual or organisation to gain a majority shareholding. The editor exercises independent editorial control and is appointed by trustees, who are independent of commercial, political and proprietorial influences.

    There are no such protections in the constitution, board charter, or code of conduct and ethics governing NZME. And it is doubtful that any cast-iron guarantees could be inserted in advance of the company’s annual general meeting.

    If James Grenon does, in fact, have designs on the editorial direction of NZME, it is difficult to see how he might be prevented from achieving his aim.

    Statutory guarantees would be unprecedented and, in any case, sit well outside the mindset of a coalition government that has shown no inclination to intervene in a deteriorating media market. Nonetheless, Minister Goldsmith would be well advised to address the issue with a good deal more urgency.

    He might, at the very least, press the Canadian billionaire on his intentions.

    And if the coalition thinks a swing to the right in our news media would be no bad thing, it should be very careful what it wishes for.

    If the Canadian’s intentions are as Michael Wood suspects, perhaps the only hope will lie with those shareholders who see that it will be in their own financial interests to ensure that, in aggregate, NZME’s news assets continue to steer a (relatively) middle course. For proof, they need look only at the declining subscriber base of The Washington Post.

    Postscipt
    On Wednesday, The New Zealand Herald stated James Grenon had provided further detail, of his intentions. It is clear that he does, in fact, intend to play a role in the editorial side of NZME.

    Just how hands-on he would be remains to be seen. However, he told the Herald that, if successful in making it on to the NZME board, he expected an editorial board would be established “with representation from both sides of the spectrum”.

    On the surface that looks reassuring but editorial boards elsewhere have also been used to serve the ends of a proprietor while giving the appearance of independence.

    And just what role would an editorial board play? Would it determine the editorial direction that an editor would have to slavishly follow? Or would it be a shield protecting the editor’s independence?

    Only time will tell.

    Devil in the detail
    Media Insider columnist Shayne Currie, writing in the Weekend Herald, stated that “the Herald’s dominance has come through once again in quarterly Nielsen readership results . . . ” That is perfectly true: The newspaper’s average issue readership is more than four times that of its closest competitor.

    What the Insider did not say was that the Herald’s readership had declined by 32,000 over the past year — from 531,000 to 499,000 — and by 14,000 since the last quarterly survey.

    The Waikato Times, The Post and the Otago Daily Times were relatively stable while The Press was down 11,000 year-on-year but only 1000 since the last survey.

    In the weekend market, the Sunday Star Times was down 1000 readers year-on-year to stand at 180,000 and up slightly on the last survey. The Herald on Sunday was down 6000 year-on-year to sit at 302,000.

    There was a little good news in the weekly magazine market. The New Zealand Listener has gained 5000 readers year-on-year and now has a readership of 207,000. In the monthly market, Mindfood increased its readership by 15,000 over the same period and now sits at 222,000.

    The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly continues to dominate the women’s magazine market. It was slightly up on the last survey but well down year-on-year, dropping from 458,000 to 408,000. Woman’s Day had an even greater annual decline, falling from 380,000 to 317,000.

    Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. This article was published first on his Knightly Views website on 11 March 2025 and is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.