“You’re joking. Not another one? Oh for God’s sake… I can’t stand this”.
Brenda, Bristol.
It’s another general election
Twenty points behind in the polls, an absolute drubbing at the local elections that were held just three weeks ago, and half of their candidates are yet to be selected. Don’t let anyone tell you that an expensive private education and a job with Goldman Sachs somehow makes Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak more intelligent than your average Joe Bloggs.
Sure, polls can narrow, and local election turnouts are usually considerably less than the turnout at a general election, but even the most ardent of Tory voter knows there is very little prospect of Britain voting for a man that can’t even announce a general election without it turning into a rain-drenched farce.
Unlike the previous two general elections, Keir Starmer will be the main beneficiary of a massive anti-Tory vote.
But this isn’t an election like we experienced in 2017 and 2019. This isn’t really a battle of red versus blue. This illusion of democracy is no more than a baton handover.
I supported and voted for Labour at the last two general elections. But the thought of supporting and voting for this grotesque variant of the Conservative Party leaves me feeling like a half-cut Speedo-clad Nigel Farage has just jumped in my bath and offered to scrub my back without using his hands.
Eating breakfast? You’re very welcome.
Who are the Tory enablers?
If I was to put a penny in a jar for each and every time a new New Labour patriot called me a “Tory enabler”, or told me I was gifting Sunak “another five years of Tory rule”, I would most probably have enough to fund Starmer’s ten pledges, six fixes, five missions and the utterly fraudulent Great British Energy facade, twice over, before the polls close on 4 July.
Let’s be honest, it takes some serious brass neck from these centre-right Starmer supporters to call us “Tory enablers” when they have opened their arms to three Tory MPs.
One sold-off the UK’s blood plasma supplier to an American private equity firm, another attacked footballers for supporting free school meals for hungry children, and the other voted to cut £20 a week from the pittance that is Universal Credit, yet it is *US* that are enabling another Tory government because we refuse to support these fucking Tory parasites?
Before the Canary saved me from the bloggers scrap heap I used to regularly remind people that they wouldn’t get the Tories out of power until they get the Tories out of the Labour Party.
And less than six weeks away from when Keir Starmer gets his chance to prove he will put the security of Israel before the needs of the British people, my reminder is as true today as it ever has been.
It isn’t compulsory to vote Labour or Conservative. We do have other choices — candidates with socialist values that stand against genocide. You don’t have to give your vote to Keir Starmer to stop the Tories. To stop the Tories, you need to stop Keir Starmer.
By the way, did you know Keir Starmer was the former Director for Public Prosecutions? Oh, and did you know his dad was a toolmaker?
Enter Collective… and some chap named Corbyn
One individual attempting to break the duopoly, some chap named Jeremy Corbyn, announced his candidacy for the Islington North constituency, this week.
Jeremy is supported by Collective — a mass movement that will eventually transform into a new political party, one that can take on both the Tory-Labour establishment and our rigged political system to restore democracy and hope for all.
Remember what hope used to feel like? That burning desire to build a Britain where opportunity is available for all? We didn’t need two flags behind us, or an expensive podium in front of us to show how much we cared about a just and decent society. Our patriotism was in our actions. We didn’t need to create division because our message of hope would go on to bring people together.
Jeremy isn’t the only independent candidate that will be standing on an anti-genocide platform. Andrew Feinstein, Claudia Webbe, Tasnime Akunjee, Tahir Mirza, Pamela Fitzpatrick, and many other first class candidates — all supported by Collective — will be taking the fight to the Tories, both red and blue.
Talking of genocide…
Apparently I should speak with Hamas to negotiate hostage releases
If the propagators of the Israeli state insist there are “no innocent Palestinians”, by their same logic there are no innocent Americans, no innocent Brits, and there are certainly no innocent Israelis.
Those are the rules, don’t blame me, I didn’t make them up. Although international law doesn’t look kindly upon the perpetrators of collective punishment, apparently.
These are the same dangerous genocidal maniacs that appear on my timeline underneath my posts telling me to “speak with Hamas”.
SPEAK WITH HAMAS? Do these deluded gaslighters with a thing for ethnic cleansing think I’ve got a direct line to Mr Qassam?
“Hi Al, it’s Rachael of the Swindon martyrs brigade here, you know, Corbynite leftist, lives near the magic roundabout? Home of Diana Dors? 10cc? Billie Piper?… Anyway, my friend @DavidBunchanumbers on X wants me to tell you to release the hostages. Are you down with that?”
Be in absolutely no doubt, Gaza will still haunt the conscience of the world long after the genocide comes to an end.
For seventy-six years Israel has been allowed to kill and maim under the Western colonialists shield of impunity. Until last Monday.
Gaza should be front and centre of your general election vote
In seeking an arrest warrant for the baby-killer-in-chief, Netanyahu, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has trampled upon the myth that Israel is beyond accountability. There has been no greater criminal in Israeli history than Benjamin Netanyahu and the chief prosecutor is absolutely correct in his decision to request a warrant for the butcher of Gaza.
The ICC is facing incredible pressure from the United States to drop the warrant request. They have bullied and threatened the court, not only ensuring the absolute death of the illusion of Western moral superiority, but equally ensuring the ICC simply cannot cave in to the American and Israeli threats and demands, because this will only result in the end of the very existence of international law itself.
Collective-backed independent candidates will put the Gaza genocide front and centre of their respective campaigns, and rightly so, because the Israeli monsters will continue to act with the full support of the pro-Israel lobby funded Labour and Conservative establishment cabals.
EDITORIAL:By Fred Wesley, editor-in-chief of The Fiji Times
So 40 Fiji members of Parliament voted in favour of the Special Committee on Emoluments Report on the review of MPs’ salaries, allowances and benefits in Parliament on Friday.
Now that’s not going down well with the masses, with many venting their frustrations on social media. From the outset, it appears there are many people frustrated by the turn of events in the august house.
Many also sent in letters to the editor expressing their disappointment. There was the odd one out though, reflecting on the need for a pay rise for parliamentarians. So in effect, we have both ends of the spectrum covered.
That’s democracy for you. People will have differing opinions on what constitutes the right action to take at this moment in our history.
Seven voted against the motion and five abstained.
There are differing opinions as well in the House.
The National Federation Party voted against the motion, pointing out their position was in accordance with the directive of the party.
Opposition leader Inia Seruiratu insisted government must be seen as an equal opportunity provider and an employer of choice.
In saying that, we reflect on a number of factors. They are intertwined with this change in financial status of our MPs.
There will be the line taken about the importance of the work and salary comparisons initially, the duration of their stint in Parliament, status and expectations from voters, and the argument about attracting and retaining professionals, against the impact this will have on our coffers, pinning down taxpayer dollars.
We have a scenario that isn’t a pleasant one at all. We have a competitive salary against timing, and expectations of a nation that isn’t well off at all.
We have a delicate situation. Sceptics will wonder about what is fair compensation against the financial strain this places on taxpayers.
Let’s face it. There are economic challenges, and this increase will no doubt be seen as an insensitive one.
For what it is worth, what we have now is a situation that raises the importance of transparency and public trust in government decisions.
There will be issues raised about the independence of the process, and references will no doubt be made back to earlier emolument committees, and the processes they followed.
There will be questions asked about the need for people independent of Parliament.
In saying that, we are reminded about the taxpayer having every right to hold our MPs up to scrutiny!
We again raise that delicate balance between effective governance and the concerns of the people!
Fred Wesley is editor-in-chief of The Fiji Times. Republished with permission.
The winning candidate, Salvador Illa of the PSC (Catalan branch of the PSOE), is hardly mentioned, because he does not seem to have won because of who he is, but because he is in charge of the state campaign to try to electorally defeat Catalan independence, a movement that has won every election since 2012 with an absolute majority.
And from ‘Catalan independence has lost!’ they want to conclude ‘Catalan independence is over!’, even though it is not clear that Illa will be able to form an anti-independence government (because he would need the participation of ERC, a pro-independence party). And ERC may rather support Puigdemont to form a pro-independence government or, if there is no agreement, we will go to new elections.
Catalonia’s elections: results don’t match the reality
The PSC (pro-Spanish social democrats) got 42 MPs, Junts (pro-independence social democrats and liberals) got 35 MPs, 20 for ERC (pro-independence social democrats), 15 for the PP (pro-Spanish right-wing), 11 for VOX (Spanishist extreme right), six for the Comunes (nationally undefined left), four for the CUP (pro-independence left) and two for Aliança Catalana (a new extreme right-wing pro-independence party, in line with what is happening in Europe, but contrary to the anti-fascist tradition of the pro-independence movement).
Despite the fact that an amnesty law is about to be passed to defuse the ‘lawfare’ (judicial dirty war) that Spanish nationalism has been using against Catalan independence, there has still been persecution in these elections.
Puigdemont has had to campaign from Northern Catalonia (currently in French territory), unable to tour Catalonia because he would have been arrested, and also unable to participate in televised debates. And despite this disadvantage (which in other countries would have annulled the elections due to the lack of equality between the contenders), Puigdemont’s result has been very acceptable: he has surpassed his previous result by 100,000 votes and has come within seven seats of the winner.
Pro-independence movement holding ground
The pro-independence movement as a whole has maintained the votes of the previous elections, but has lost 700,000 votes compared to 2017. This loss was mainly due to ERC, which had already been losing votes for some time and has now lost 170,000 votes compared to the previous elections, but 500,000 compared to 2017.
The electorate has punished the Catalan government of ERC for changing course, for wanting to stop the emancipation movement, for talking about postponing independence for more than 20 years, and for continually submitting to the designs of the Spanish government. This electoral setback has pushed the ERC leadership to resign and announce a process of self-criticism and redirection.
Therefore, anyone who wants to see in the loss of the absolute majority of the pro-independence movement that this movement is over will have difficulty understanding what is to come, because the yearning for freedom is still alive, and this has only been an electoral turbulence due to the difficulty of agreeing on how to manage Spanish hostility.
So this electoral defeat, therefore, is not the defeat of those who are still at loggerheads with the state, but of the party that had relegated the struggle for independence to the management of domestic affairs.
Catalonia elections: the anger is rising
And stretching this feeling of anger, many voters do not forgive that, in general, all pro-independence parties did not dare to undertake independence in 2017 (for fear that Spain would provoke a bloodbath), nor that, having had 52% of the votes in the Catalan Parliament, they have been inhibited from moving towards independence.
Returning to the present, it remains to be seen who will end up forming a government in Catalonia, but even if the pro-independence parties are unable to do so, it will continue to advance because (unlike what they think in Madrid) the parties are not the driving force behind independence, but rather it is a transversal social movement born of a real and historically omnipresent yearning in Catalonia.
However, given that this struggle also needs institutional force, if the electoral penalty serves to break the deadlock and causes the movement to advance together, the road to independence will once again be inexorable.
The following article is a comment piece from the Peace and Justice Project
It’s confirmed! Jeremy Corbyn is standing as an independent candidate in Islington North at the general election on 4 July.
Jeremy has proudly represented his constituency for over 40 years and has built a reputation as a committed local member of parliament who stands up for democracy, equality, and peace.
In the past, Jeremy has been elected as a Labour MP on huge majorities. But this general election will be different. He is running as an independent candidate without major party support, so it is absolutely vital that we get organised and mobilise our movement to get him re-elected.
We believe that Jeremy will win, but it won’t be easy. That is why we’re asking for your help.
You can sign up here to help Corbyn win in Islington North.
Watch Corbyn’s video below, explaining what he stands for, and share the video widely:
But it’s not just Jeremy who is standing up against the political establishment and the despicable suffering inflicted on our country.
The Collective is a political grouping organising campaigns around the Peace and Justice Project’s 5 Demands to build a real alternative to the misery faced by millions.
The Collective includes Andrew Feinstein in Holborn and St Pancras, Pamela Fitzpatrick in Harrow West, and Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North.
With the Conservatives in government and Labour in opposition, it has become clear that neither has the policies or political will to bring about real change or an alternative to the misery faced by millions – but our movement does.
With Jeremy Corbyn and the Collective, we will build hope for the many.
“Only the struggle counts . . . death is nothing.” Éloi Machoro — “the Che Guevara of the Pacific” — said this shortly before he was gunned down by a French sniper on 12 January 1985.
Machoro, one of the leaders of the newly-formed FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) — today the main umbrella movement for New Caledonia’s indigenous Kanak people — slowly bled to death as the gendarmes moved in.
The assassination is an apt metaphor for what France is doing to the Kanak people of New Caledonia and has been doing to them for 150 years.
As the New Zealand and Australian media fussed and bothered over tourists stranded in New Caledonia over the past week, the Kanaks have been gripped in an existential struggle with a heavyweight European power determined to keep the archipelago firmly under the control of Paris. We need better, deeper reporting from our media — one that provides history and context.
According to René Guiart, a pro-independence writer, moments before the sniper’s bullets struck, Machoro had emerged from the farmhouse where he and his comrades were surrounded. I translate:
“I want to speak to the Sous-Prefet! [French administrator],” Machoro shouted. “You don’t have the right to arrest us. Do you hear? Call the Sous-Prefet!”
The answer came in two bullets. Once dead, Machoro’s comrades inside the house emerged to receive a beating from the gendarmes. Standing over Machoro’s body, a member of the elite mobile tactical unit said: “He wanted war, he got it!”
Weeks earlier, New Zealand journalist David Robie had photographed Machoro shortly before he smashed open a ballot box with an axe and burned the ballots inside. “It was,” says Robie, “symbolic of the contempt Kanaks had for what they saw as the French’s manipulated voting system.”
Every year on January 12, the anniversary of Machoro’s killing, people gather at his grave. Engraved in stone are the words: “On tue le révolutionnaire mais on ne tue pas ses idées.”You can kill the revolutionary but you can’t kill his ideas. Why don’t most Australians and New Zealanders even know his name?
Decades after his death and 17,000 km away, the French are at it again. Their National Assembly has shattered the peace this month with a unilateral move to change voting rights to enfranchise tens of thousands of more recent French settlers and put an end to both consensus building and the indigenous Kanak people’s struggle for self-determination and independence.
Thanks to French immigration policies, Kanaks now number about 40 percent of the registered voters. New Zealand and Australia look the other way — New Caledonia is France’s “zone of interest”.
But what’s not to like about extending voting rights? Shouldn’t all people who live in the territory enjoy voting rights?
“They have voting rights,” says David Robie, now editor of Asia Pacific Report, “back in France.” And France, not the Kanaks, control who can enter and stay in the territory.
Back in 1972, French Prime Minister Pierre Messmer argued in a since-leaked memo that if France wanted to maintain control, flooding the territory with white settlers was the only long-term solution to the independence issue.
Robie says the French machinations in Paris — changing the boundaries of citizenship and voting rights – and the ensuing violent reaction, is effectively a return to the 1980s — or worse.
The violence of the 1980s, which included massacres, led to the Matignon Accords of 1988 and the Nouméa Accords of 1998 which restricted the voting to only those who had lived in Kanaky prior to 1998 and their descendents. Pro-independence supporters include many young whites who see their future in the Pacific, not as a white settler colonial outpost of France.
Most whites, however, fear and oppose independence and the loss of privileges it would bring.
After decades of calm and progress, albeit modest, things started to change from 2020 onwards. It was clear to Robie and others that French calculations now saw New Caledonia as too important to lose; it is a kind of giant aircraft carrier in the Pacific from which to project French power. It is also home to the world’s third-largest nickel reserves.
How have the Kanaks benefitted from being a French colony? Kanaks were given citizenship in their own country only after WWII, a century after Paris imposed French rule. According to historian David Chappell:
“In practice, French colonisation was one of the most extreme cases of native denigration, incarceration and dispossession in Oceania. A frontier of cattle ranches, convict camps, mines and coffee farms moved across the main island of Grande Terre, conquering indigenous resisters and confining them to reserves that amounted to less than 10 percent of the land.”
It was a pattern of behaviour similar to France’s colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Little wonder the people of Niger have recently become the latest to expel them.
Deprived of education — the first Kanak to qualify for university entrance was in the 1960s — socially and economically marginalised, subjected to what historians describe as among the most brutal colonial overlordships in the Pacific, the Kanaks have fought to maintain their languages, their cultures and their identities whilst the whites enjoy some of the highest standards of living in the world.
“There was no consultation — except with the anti-independence groups. Any new constitutional arrangement needs to be based around consensus. France has now polarised the situation so much that it will be virtually impossible to get consensus.”
Author Dr David Robie . . . warned for years that France is pushing New Caledonia down a slippery slope. Image: Alyson Young/PMC
Macron also pushed ahead with a 2021 referendum on independence versus remaining a French territory. This was in the face of pleas from the Kanak community to hold off until the covid pandemic that had killed thousands of Kanaks had passed and the traditional mourning period was over.
Having created the problem with actions like the disputed referendum and the current law changes, Macron now condemns today’s violence in New Caledonia. Éloi Machoro rebukes him from the grave: “Where is the violence, with us or with them?” he asked weeks before his killing. “The aim of the [law changes] is to destroy the Kanak people in their own country.” That was 1985; as the French say: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same thing.
Kanaky and Palestine . . . “the same struggle” against settler colonialism. Image: Solidarity/APR
Young people are at the forefront of opposing Paris’s latest machinations. Hundreds have been arrested. Several killed. The White City, as Nouméa is called by the marginalised Melanesians, is lit by arson fires each night. Thousands of French security forces have been rushed in.
Leaders who have had nothing to do with the violence have been arrested; an old colonial manoeuvre.
“What happened was clearly avoidable,” Robie says “ The thing that really stands out for me is: what happens now? It is going to be really extremely difficult to rebuild trust — and trust is needed to move forward. There has to be a consensus otherwise the only option is civil war.”
Nadia Abu-Shanab, an activist and member of the Wellington Palestinian community, sees familiar behaviour and extends her solidarity to the people of Kanaky.
“We Palestinians know what it is for people to choose to ignore the context that leads to our struggle. Indigenous and native people have always been right to challenge colonisation. We are fighting for a world free from the racism and the theft of resources and land that have hurt and harmed too many indigenous peoples and our planet.”
Eugene Doyle is a Wellington-based writer and community activist who publishes the Solidaritywebsite. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at Solidarity under the title “The French are at it again: New Caledonia is kicking off”. For more about Éloi Machoro, read Dr David Robie’s 1985 piece “Éloi Machoro knew his days were numbered”.
Is it just me or is it not more than a little odd that coverage of current events in New Caledonia/Kanaky is dominated by the inconvenience of tourists and rescue flights out of the Pacific paradise.
That the events are described as “disruption” or “riots” without any real reference to the cause of the actions causing inconvenience. The reason is the armed enforcement of “order” is flown into this Oceanic place from Europe.
I guess when you live in a place called “New Zealand” in preference to “Aotearoa” you see these things through fellow colonialist eyes. Especially if you are part of the dominant colonial class.
How different it looks if you are part of an indigenous people in Oceania — part of that “Indigenous Ocean” as Damon Salesa’s recent award-winning book describes it. The Kanaks are the indigenous Melanesian inhabitants of New Caledonia.
The indigenous movement in Kanaky is engaged in a fight against the political structures imposed on them by France.
Obviously there are those indigenous people who benefit from colonial rule, and those who feel powerless to change it. But increasingly there are those who choose to resist.
Are they disrupters or are they resisting the massive disruption which France has imposed on them?
People who have a lot of resources or power or freedom to express their culture and belonging tend not to “riot”. They don’t need to.
Not simply holiday destinations
The countries of Oceania are not simply holiday destinations, they are not just sources of people or resource exploitation until the natural resources or labour they have are exhausted or no longer needed.
They are not “empty” places to trial bombs. They are not “strategic” assets in a global military chess game.
Each place, and the ocean of which they are part have their own integrity, authenticity, and rights, tangata, whenua and moana. That is only hard to understand if you insist on retaining as your only lens that of the telescope of a 17th or 18th century European sea captain.
The natural alliance and concern we have from these islands, is hardly with the colonial power of France, notwithstanding the apparent keenness of successive recent governments to cuddle up to Nato.
A clue — we are not part of the “North Atlantic”.
We have our own colonial history, far from pristine or admirable in many respects. But we are at the same time fortunate to have a framework in Te Tiriti which provides a base for working together from that history towards a better future.
Those who would debunk that framework or seek to amend it to more clearly favour the colonial classes might think about where that option leads.
And when we see or are inconvenienced by independence or other indigenous rights activism in Oceania we might do well to neither sit on the fence nor join the side which likes to pretend such places are rightfully controlled by France (or the United States, or Australia or New Zealand).
Rob Campbell is chancellor of Auckland University of Technology (AUT), chair of Ara Ake, chair of NZ Rural Land and former chair of Te Whatu Ora. This article was first published by The New Zealand Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Today in “that bump under the rug? Oh it’s just important disabled news don’t look at that”, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has announced they are launching an inquiry on the DWP.
The failing department is being investigated due to its the inhumane ways they treat disabled people who claim benefits. This will include the link between vulnerable people losing benefits and their deaths.
The EHRC will examine whether DWP ministers and the policies they were responsible for not only failed to protect disabled people including those with learning disabilities and mental illnesses – but actively harmed them and contributed to their deaths.
Strongest possible action against the DWP?
The inquiry will focus on benefits assessments and how health decisions are made to award or deny disabled people benefits such as Personal Independence Payment (PIP) as well as the Work Capability Assessment that are used to force disabled unemployed people into work – or worse deny them benefits that allow them to live.
The chair of the EHRC, Kishwer Faulkner said:
We are extremely worried about the treatment of some disabled benefits claimants by the DWP. We suspect the department may have broken equality law. We have decided we need to take the strongest possible action and that’s why we’ve launched this investigation.
Whilst past and current ministers and senior officials will be called to explain themselves, there’s of course a catch. The scope of the inquiry is only from 2021 to now.
Biggest offenders let off the hook
This means that although Mel Stride will have to answer for his crimes, Therese Coffey’s inhumanity will be limited to just the last year of her stint. This means she still won’t have to reveal the true scale of benefits deaths that she refused to disclose under the loophole of it being the previous minister Amber Rudd’s investigation.
Chloe Smith who was in the role for just seven weeks during the Liz Truss fever dream of 2022 will have to report to the inquiry. Yet Iain Duncan Smith who was responsible for the cruellest policies from 2010-2016 will get off scot-free.
The investigation won’t include the deaths of claimants such as Errol Graham who starved to death in 2018 after his payments were stopped or Michael O’Sullivan who died by suicide after being declared fit for work.
DWP want to add more disabled deaths to the list
And while all this happens the DWP are pushing on with their plans to “reform welfare” which will, you’ve guessed it, kill more disabled people.
Following on from announcing that we can no longer trust doctors to give out fit notes and the ludicrous idea to give disabled people vouchers instead of benefits, wet wipe Mel Stride was at a Jobcentre this week.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t signing on.
Instead he was there to announce that businesses should employ unemployed people. Yes really. He announced that the DWP will be utilising AI to deny benefit claimants instead of just people. That people will be sent to work “Bootcamps” to force people back into work.
He laughably claimed that the plan will show “Fairness for those who can’t work and are in the most need of the state’s help.”
However, he forgets to include that the DWP, who are already responsible for until deaths, will be the ones deciding who can and can’t work. It’s understandable then that the government are trying to downplay this damning inquiry, and what’s the best way to distract attention
Today? Finally???
It’s a funny old game being a political journalist.
You’re usually always acutely aware that time is of the essence, but today there’s an impending sense that my story is going to become irrelevant as soon as I’ve written it. The reason? Well social media is abuzz with rumours that the general election may finally be called today.
When I last checked we’d reached fever pitch as someone had spotted Rishi’s usually buttons illiterate chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith wearing a tie – this MUST mean he’s preparing to solemnly stand in front of cameras!! Commentators speculated.
No such thing as chance
It feels like no coincidence that the prime minister may finally be giving the people what they’re crying out for on the same day that an inquiry is launched into the treatment of the very people his government have spent decades demonising and killing.
If the announcement does come this week we must do everything we can to hold the Tories – and the next government – to account. We can’t let this DWP inquiry and the treatment of disabled people be brushed under the rug.
I’m supposed to be writing about something completely different right now, but as I was working on that I got some news that made my blood curdle. The DWP has stopped my PIP (Personal Independence Payment).
An expected DWP PIP review
On 5 April, I received a text from the DWP saying the review into my PIP claim had opened. Even though the review period is four years and it’d only been two since my last review, I had been expecting this. They said the forms would be with me in two weeks.
As a disabled person who has spent the last 20 years in the DWP system, this news filled me with dread. Once again I would have to dredge up the worst and most traumatic parts of my life, for someone who doesn’t know me or my conditions to decide if I was worthy of support.
On 20 April I attempted to contact the PIP helpline because the form hadn’t turned up, but I was cut off after 45 minutes. I’d spent the day before across the media analysing the prime minister’s speech in which he declared unemployed disabled people the enemy.
Finally, on 25 April the forms turned up, with the deadline of 4 May. Allowing postage time that gave me just five days to complete the form – which was 40 pages long and required such information as whether I was incontinent. The day before this, a UN report on the government found them to have dangerously failed disabled people.
I sent the forms back on 30 April and heard nothing.
Writing on DWP chaos is my job
Whilst I waited the Tories unveiled their plans to “reform” the very benefit I was applying for.
They said that the financial assistance I and so many rely on (because life is so much more damn expensive as a disabled person) wasn’t practical. Instead, they proposed a system where people are given vouchers. This would work alongside disabled people being required to invoice their expenses to the DWP and have them paid back.
And I gladly ripped their plans to shreds. How are we supposed to wait for something to be paid back when we don’t have the money in the first place? Will our energy suppliers or housing take vouchers? All the while I pushed the nervous thoughts to the back of my mind about the fact that I could lose the benefit that enables me to live my life.
My own terrifying chaos
Then finally on Tuesday 21 May I received word. My PIP was being taken away, because apparently, I hadn’t returned the form in time.
I rang the helpline and waited over half an hour whilst trying not to cry. When I finally got through I tried to explain the situation to the advisor.
“Do you have proof of postage?”
“No, it was a free post envelope, your envelope”.
I was put on hold again, and when she came back she informed me a case manager would call me back. A little while later he did, and informed me my form hadn’t been received until 17 May – almost three weeks after I sent it. He told me that because the case had already been closed they’d have to submit a “mandatory consideration”, an appeal of sorts for them to reopen the case.
To be clear this isn’t to decide whether they should award me the benefit. No, it’s to decide whether they’ll even look at the forms. The actual assessment could take over a year, as the current wait time is 59 weeks.
My DWP PIP entitlement, lost – and countless other people’s too
There’s no way of knowing whether this was the fault of the failing postal service or that the DWP simply hadn’t read it. I suspect a combination of both. Either way due to government error, I now will be without a vital benefit for around two months.
And I’m not the only one this has happened to.
When I shared my frustrations on Twitter I received dozens of replies and DMs from people all having the same or worse experiences. Forms being sent out past the deadline to return them, returned forms lost, benefits stopped because the DWP sent the forms to the wrong address, the list goes on and disabled people suffer because of the government’s incompetence.
You have to laugh then (if I don’t I’ll cry) at the fact that the DWP is proposing an elaborate system where they reckon they’ll process thousands of expenses claims a month when they can’t even open the post they already get.
I see every day the cruelty that the DWP and this government subject disabled people to. However, I was truly lost for words that they so casually would just cut my benefits off, all because of their own error.
The Tories are doing everything they can to blame disabled people for the state of public services, but you only have to look at the state of the DWP to see who’s really harming this country.
14 years of a revolving door of ministers, slashed budgets, and carving off services to their mates has left the DWP on its knees. And disabled people are paying the price.
The following article is a comment piece from Palestine Action
On Tuesday 21 May, secretary of state James Cleverly will present former Labour MP John Woodcock (otherwise known as Lord Walney)’s 240-page review on disruptive protest to the House of Commons. The report’s release, initially set to be on Wednesday 15 May (Nakba Day) was delayed, after Palestine Action’s lawyers pointed out Woodcock’s failure to meet his legal obligations as an independent advisor to the government.
Namely, he did not consult Palestine Action and the other groups mentioned in his report on its contents, nor provided the opportunity to ask for clarifications or a right to reply.
Woodcock: avoiding accountability via parliament
Cleverly will now lay the document before MPs following the ‘Motion for Unopposed Return’ procedure, under the pretext that it was written by an independent advisor.
This enables the report to be published as a House of Commons paper, which means it comes with the protection of parliamentary privilege — a form of legal immunity that prevents any group named in the report from claiming defamation.
By publishing the review in this manner, Cleverly and Woodcock are using procedure in a deliberate attempt to avoid accountability – described by Shami Chakrabarti in a recent news article published by the Guardian as an ‘abuse of parliamentary privilege.’
John Woodcock, the so-called independent advisor responsible for writing the report, claimed to apply an “objective standard” throughout — though it was only in October 2023 that he referred to Palestine Action in a tweet as “Hamas’s little helpers.”
Far from impartial
This assertion of impartiality seems even more dubious, when one considers his ties to the arms industry and long-standing connections with the Israel lobby group “Labour Friends of Israel” — where he acted as chair of the organisation from July 2011 to January 2013. He also makes frequent visits to Israel, with his most recent trip taking place between 2-7 January 2024. Described as a “solidarity visit,” Woodcock’s flights and accommodation were paid for by the European Leadership Network (ElNet UK) – all amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Currently, Woodcock is advisor to the “Purpose Business Coalition”.
One of its clients is Leonardo UK, which has worked with the Purpose Coalition since March 2022. Palestine Action identifies Leonardo UK as an arms company that is facilitating Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.
The weapons manufacturer has been a key focus of the group’s direct-action campaign to shut Elbit down and all its affiliates, with sites across the country repeatedly targeted — from activists occupying one of Leonardo’s factories in Edinburgh, to spray painting the London HQ.
The PDC website was promptly removed, alongside a page on Leonardo and the Purpose Coalition, over the weekend after Woodcock was questioned on it. At the PDC’s launch event on 18 July 2023 in Parliament, which was “powered by Leonardo UK”, Woodcock said the following [emphasis added]:
Russia’s war on Ukraine has caused a seismic shift in the world. It has highlighted the crucial nature of defence in upholding our values and the need for a vibrant, well-regulated defence industry. The best defence companies have always acted with high ethical standards but their central role in helping the Ukrainian people to defend their sovereignty, and the significant investment they make in the communities where they operate, is rightly prompting ESG investors to look again at the sector.
That is why I am proud to launch the Purpose Defence Coalition, part of the wider Purpose Coalition, to bring together the defence sector’s most innovative leaders and businesses to share best practice and develop policy solutions.
Of course, we have the excellent Nadia Whittome, Debbie Abrahams, Emma Lewell-Buck, and future prime minister (in my opinion) Zarah Sultana.
But someone else who regularly shows the Tories up is shadow minister for disabled people Vicky Foxcroft. Her previous includes asking why she had no counterpart when Rishi first downgraded the ministerial role in 2022 and her excellent work on holding the DWP to account over the WCA debacle.
Vicky Foxcroft, living legend
This week Vicky provided one of my favourite moments of the week and it only goes to show not only how incompetent the DWP are but that they truly can’t see how ridiculously bad they are at this.
During the Access to Work debate in the Commons, Vicky asked minister Mims Davies about the backlog, and quoted some damning stats:
On 1 January 2024, there were 24,874 people awaiting an Access to Work decision, on 1 February, 26,924, on 1 March, 29,871 and on 1 April, 32,445. Every month, the figure keeps increasing, so since the beginning of 2024 the Access to Work backlog has risen by more than 7,500. Does the Minister really think this is supporting more disabled people back into work.
Mims’ response was truly outstanding:
If we are trading figures, at the close of business on 7 May 2024, there were 36,721 applications awaiting decision.
What basically happened was the shadow minister went “Access to Work is a bit shit” and the minister replied “Actually you’re wrong, it’s even shitter than you thought”.
I find it truly outstanding that the Tories are so out of touch that they see any high number as a brag. There was no effort to apologise for an increase of 4,000 in the space of a month or promises to do better. Of course there wasn’t, because they don’t actually care.
The week in wet wipe
Meanwhile the wet wipe of state for the DWP Mel Stride was bragging about ONS employment figures and how they were “helping” (forcing) disabled people into work. He slathered on Twitter:
We are leaving no stone unturned to get people back to work, rolling out the most radical changes to welfare in a generation
He then proceeded to bang on about how they were helping one million people find and stay in work, “stemming the flow” of over 400,000 people getting the highest rate of incapacity benefits, and overhauling fit notes.
What that actually means
In case you need a Tory bullshit translator, what it actually means is they’re powering on with their mission to kill disabled people.
Forcing one million people back into work whether they can work or not, with no support. Denying 400,000 people who can’t work the benefits they need and not trusting doctors to treat their own patients.
One vital thing to mention here is the language being used. As with ‘sicknote culture” the Tories are deliberately using phased-out terms because they know these are the ones their core voters will still know.
Incapacity Benefit hasn’t existed since 2013, but using that term appeals much more to people who think we spend all our benefits on booze and iPhones than ‘Employment and Support Allowance’.
And finally…
I’m so sorry to bring this to your attention but I’ve been thinking of little else since the local elections. Here for your viewing pleasure is the wet wipe himself making the best possible gaff on live TV. #GennyErecs
I started campaigning for the NHS just under a decade ago. I was working as a junior doctor in London; austerity cuts from the Conservative Party government were having an impact on patient services and, even back then, many NHS staff could see that things were going to get a lot worse.
As cuts were made our workload grew, and it became harder to give our patients the time they needed, we lost key members of staff within the mental health teams in which I was working, and all of this had a direct impact on patients.
A mental health service needs allied health professionals with a wealth of experience in different areas. If you cut things back to the bare bones, as the Conservatives did, what you ultimately cut back on is decent patient care.
Now, in 2024, 14 long years since the Conservatives came to power, things are much worse.
The NHS: undermined in various ways
The NHS has been undermined in various ways. Staff have been significantly underpaid for many years, the service has not received enough investment, and in England alone the NHS now has an unmet repair bill of almost £12bn.
This isn’t just a repair bill for minor things like peeling paint or replacing furniture. A recent report judged that £2.4bn of the repairs are “high risk”, and unless they’re done soon, could spell disaster for NHS patients and the staff who care for them.
In the past few months alone, a ceiling has fallen on a patient, and a lift has plummeted several floors with a surgeon inside, injuring his leg.
There have been reports of thousands of vermin infestations within NHS buildings – cockroaches, wasps, rats, and lice in hospitals. Is this what the public deserves when they pay their taxes?
However, the problems don’t stop with the buildings.
The government is breaking all our health service’s core principles
Millions are on NHS waiting lists, unable to access the treatment they need, with far-reaching consequences. If you’re unwell and you can’t get care, your symptoms may worsen, and your need for medication might increase. You might not be able to work anymore, your mental health may suffer, your personal relationships may deteriorate.
Health does not sit in isolation; peoples’ illnesses impact every area of their lives, and waiting is not just an inconvenience. Put bluntly, it can be the difference between life and death.
The NHS has several clear core principles – they are even featured on the government’s own website. They stipulate that the care provided will be ‘comprehensive, equal, and available to all’.
Yet the government is breaking these principles now.
Care is no longer comprehensive for many people, the provision of services across the country is patchy, and there are instances where patients are now charged within the NHS too.
What’s more, this government has enabled the infiltration of privatisation into the NHS. There are now thousands of outsourced NHS services, many of which are run by private companies. There is no evidence that privatisation benefits the NHS, and patients have not been consulted on the legislation that has made privatisation possible, and yet politicians have got away with doing all this.
Labour will not be the change we need to see
It would be incredible to think that if the Conservatives were voted out at the next general election, things would improve, but I’m worried about Labour Party proposals for the NHS too.
Wes Streeting, shadow health and social care secretary is enthusiastic about the involvement of private companies in the NHS and the proposals don’t seem to include enough support for NHS staff either.
Doctors, nurses, and every worker in the NHS has been treated appallingly for many years. The pressure on the workforce has been relentless, and they are scapegoated in the press for many problems that they have not caused.
It’s often difficult for doctors and nurses to speak up safely when problems arise, and their pay has fallen far below countries which are comparable on economic terms. We’re facing a significant brain drain as professionals, understandably, leave the NHS for countries where they’ll be better supported.
We all deserve so much better than this, and it is possible to change things, so it’s time to get much louder, and fight for the NHS together.
The fight for the NHS must go up a gear
I’m the Canary’s newest columnist, and I’ll be updating you with NHS news, calling attention to important developments, and explaining why we can, and should, rebuild the NHS.
We don’t need more empty promises from politicians, or any more half-baked or unambitious plans either. The NHS was built 75 years ago after the second world war, when the country was financially broken, and millions had endured immeasurable trauma.
If it was possible then, it’s possible now. We need hopeful, transformative policies for the NHS and the first step towards those is through raising public awareness of what’s going on.
The British media — fervently committed to talking about anything other than Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza — have spent much of the past week trying to present Keir Starmer’s SIXTEENTH Labour Party relaunch as a leadership-defining moment for the amoral leader of the opposition.
Starmer’s insidious relationship with the right-wing billionaire corporate media becomes more apparent as the days and weeks pass.
But yes, SIXTEEN relaunches. Just imagine having to sit through sixteen of those with the ham-faced hypocrite Starmer droning on.
16 relaunches in, and ham-faced Starmer still isn’t the messiah
Let me jog your memory with just a small selection of the focus-group-created slogans we have seen during these frequent relaunch events:
Under New Management.
A New Chapter for Britain.
Secure, Protect, Rebuild.
Security, Prosperity, Respect.
Build a Better Britain.
We’ve had 10 pledges, five missions, six fixes, four years of lies and deceit that gives the Johnsonite Tories a run for their money, three Tory MPs that now feel at home in the Labour Party, Lord only knows how many major U-turns, at least 13 of his shadow cabinet taking donations from the pro-Israel lobby – yet they want us to believe Keir Starmer is the new Messiah rather than a duplicitous bore with the charm of an untreated dental abscess?
I bet you didn’t know his dad was a toolmaker.
The deceit and the duplicity of Starmer and his Tory-lite Labour Party is quite staggering. Never before has a political party made this many commitments just to tear them to shreds at the first sign of a sympathetic audience with the unscrupulous elite.
Labour is now an entirely unsupportable entity for the left. It thrives on nepotism and cronyism, and is institutionally racist, no different to the divisive and hateful Conservative governments of the past fourteen miserable years.
Keir Starmer did manage to uphold one of his promises — just the one — when he said he was going to change Labour, because Labour is now a party that is reliably obedient to power.
The elite switching from Tory to Labour
The immoral wealth of the elite has switched from the Conservatives to Labour in the blink of an eye.
What the hell is the point in power without principles? When your decisions are influenced not by the needs of the nation, but the greed of your super rich donors?
I will keep repeating this until I’m blue in the face. Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, the likely next prime minister and secretary of state for health and social care, both receive vast sums of cash from donors with private healthcare interests.
If you think the next Labour government is going to ride to the rescue of the NHS there’s probably very little hope for you, in all truths.
Your NHS will not be safe under a Labour government led by an indolent Keir Starmer and advised by wholly discredited stains upon the fabric of humanity, such as Epstein Mandelson and Baghdad Blair.
The Labour Party is back in the establishment fold, freed from the politics of hope, and Keir Starmer has secured his place as the first ever leader of the opposition to completely sell out before they have achieved power.
Was this the sort of change you had in mind when Keir Starmer fooled the Labour Party membership into voting for him with yet another slogan?
The Labour leader insisted “Another Future is Possible”, back in 2020, when the left commentariat insisted we would be getting “Corbynism without Corbyn”.
But this future with the malevolent Labour leader looks remarkably like the increasingly-authoritarian recent past and present under the current fascist Tory government.
But a glimmer of real hope is on the horizon in the shape of Collective.
There is an alternative
Not heard of us? You will soon, from me in the unashamedly-left, anti-establishment Canary, and a bonafide broad coalition of left-wing groups, organisations, independent parliamentary candidates, and grassroots activists.
Seen and heard it all before? Give Collective a chance, because we are growing a movement based around the principles and values of Jeremy Corbyn and the Peace and Justice Project.
We are utterly determined to turn Collective into the political party that we so desperately need and want and I am convinced we have the right people and political figures in place to make this a HUGE success.
Wink wink, nudge nudge.
We have already been accused of being a “front”, and I absolutely cannot deny that because we are a front for peace, justice, equality, and humanity, and you know what? I’m really proud of that.
I cannot simply abandon my principles to fit in with the mainstream narrative, and why should I?
Sure, the Green Party has a tonne of Corbynesque policies and commitments that are being touted on social media, and I absolutely applaud them for that.
But I wholeheartedly believe we need something new to build upon with a leadership team that can be trusted, and I’m afraid I just don’t get that vibe from the Green’s deputy leader – a man that once offered hypnotherapy to women who were seeking breast enlargement, and happily joined in with the ‘Corbyn is an antisemite’ lie.
It was a scam. I won’t forget what the nasty bastards did to Jeremy, and I won’t forgive anyone that was a part of spreading these vile, hurtful lies for the sake of a few likes and a pat on the head from your media friends.
Starmer must at least be on history’s right side
Change is inevitable. Starmer will have his moment, but I predict it won’t be anything like the 200+ seat majority some of the polls are throwing up.
Before I go and do Sunday things I have a plea to make.
Please don’t stop talking about Palestine. Distractions will come and go, but the issue of Palestine will not be resolved until Israel is held to account for its brutal genocide and the state of Palestine is free from Israeli occupation.
And for their part, the next Labour government must commit to ending arms sales to Israel, call for an immediate end to the Gaza genocide, and unilaterally recognise the state of Palestine within the first 100 days of government, not just for electoral necessity but also to find themselves on the right side of history.
Today is the 24th anniversary of renegade and failed businessman George Speight’s coup in 2000 Fiji. The elected coalition government headed by Mahendra Chaudhry, the first and only Indo-Fijian prime minister of Fiji, was held hostage at gunpoint for 56 days in the country’s new Parliament by Speight’s rebel gunmen in a putsch that shook the Pacific and the world.
Emerging recently from almost 24 years in prison, former investigative journalist and publisher Josefa Nata — Speight’s “media minder” — is now convinced that the takeover of Fiji’s Parliament on 19 May 2000 was not justified.
He believes that all it did was let the “genie of racism” out of the bottle.
He spoke to Islands Business Fiji correspondent, Joe Yaya on his journey back from the dark.
The Fiji government kept you in jail for 24 years [for your media role in the coup]. That’s a very long time. Are you bitter?
I heard someone saying in Parliament that “life is life”, but they have been releasing other lifers. Ten years was conventionally considered the term of a life sentence. That was the State’s position in our sentencing. The military government extended it to 12 years. I believe it was out of malice, spitefulness and cruelty — no other reason. But to dwell in the past is counterproductive.
If there’s anyone who should be bitter, it should be me. I was released [from prison] in 2013 but was taken back in after two months, ostensibly to normalise my release papers. That government did not release me. I stayed in prison for another 10 years.
To be bitter is to allow those who hurt you to live rent free in your mind. They have moved on, probably still rejoicing in that we have suffered that long. I have forgiven them, so move on I must.
Time is not on my side. I have set myself a timeline and a to-do list for the next five years.
Jo Nata’s journey from the dark, Islands Business, April 2024. Image: IB/Joe Yaya/USP Journalism
What are some of those things?
Since I came out, I have been busy laying the groundwork for a community rehabilitation project for ex-offenders, released prisoners, street kids and at-risk people in the law-and-order space. We are in the process of securing a piece of land, around 40 ha to set up a rehabilitation farm. A half-way house of a sort.
You can’t have it in the city. It would be like having the cat to watch over the fish. There is too much temptation. These are vulnerable people who will just relapse. They’re put in an environment where they are shielded from the lures of the world and be guided to be productive and contributing members of society.
It will be for a period of up to six months; in exceptional cases, 12 months where they will learn living off the land. With largely little education, the best opportunity for these people, and only real hope, is in the land.
Most of these at-risk people are [indigenous] Fijians. Although all native land are held by the mataqali, each family has a patch which is the “kanakana”. We will equip them and settle them in their villages. We will liaise with the family and the village.
Apart from farming, these young men and women will be taught basic life skills, social skills, savings, budgeting. When we settle them in the villages and communities, we will also use the opportunity to create the awareness that crime does not pay, that there is a better life than crime and prison, and that prison is a waste of a potentially productive life.
Are you comfortable with talking about how exactly you got involved with Speight?
The bulk of it will come out in the book that I’m working on, but it was not planned. It was something that happened on the day.
You said that when they saw you, they roped you in?
Yes. But there were communications with me the night prior. I basically said, “piss off”.
So then, what made you go to Parliament eventually? Curiosity?
No. I got a call from Parliament. You see, we were part of the government coalition at that time. We were part of the Fijian Association Party (led by the late Adi Kuini Speed). The Fiji Labour Party was our main coalition partner, and then there was the Christian Alliance. And you may recall or maybe not, there was a split in the Fijian Association [Party] and there were two factions. I was in the faction that thought that we should not go into coalition.
There was an ideological reason for the split [because the party had campaigned on behalf of iTaukei voters] but then again, there were some members who came with us only because they were not given seats in Cabinet.
Because your voters had given you a certain mandate?
A masked gunman waves to journalists to duck during crossfire. Image: IPI Global Journalist/Joe Yaya/USP Journalism
Well, we were campaigning on the [indigenous] Fijian manifesto and to go into the [coalition] complicated things. Mine was more a principled position because we were a [indigenous] Fijian party and all those people went in on [indigenous] Fijian votes. And then, here we are, going into [a coalition with the Fiji Labour Party] and people probably
accused us of being opportunists.
But the Christian Alliance was a coalition partner with Labour before they went into the election in the same way that the People’s Alliance and National Federation Party were coalition partners before they got into [government], whereas with us, it was more like SODELPA (Social Democratic Liberal Party).
So, did you feel that the rights of indigenous Fijians were under threat from the Coalition government of then Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry?
Perhaps if Chaudhry was allowed to carry on, it could have been good for [indigenous] Fijians. I remember the late President and Tui Nayau [Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara] . . . in a few conversations I had with him, he said it [Labour Party] should be allowed to . . . [carry on].
Did you think at that time that the news media gave Chaudhry enough space for him to address the fears of the iTaukei people about what he was trying to do, especially for example, through the Land Use Commission?
I think the Fijians saw what he was doing and that probably exacerbated or heightened the concerns of [indigenous] Fijians and if you remember, he gave Indian cane farmers certain financial privileges.
The F$10,000 grants to move from Labasa, when the ALTA (Agricultural Landlord and Tenants Act) leases expired. Are you talking about that?
I can’t remember the exact details of the financial assistance but when they [Labour Party] were questioned, they said, “No, there were some Fijian farmers too”. There were also iTaukei farmers but if you read in between the lines, there were like 50 Indian farmers and one Fijian farmer.
Was there enough media coverage for the rural population to understand that it was not a one-sided ethnic policy?
Because there were also iTaukei farmers involved. Yes, and I think when you try and pull the wool over other people, that’s when they feel that they have been hoodwinked. But going back to your question of whether Chaudhry was given fair media coverage, I was no longer in the mainstream media at that time. I had moved on.
But the politicians have their views and they’ll feel that they have been done badly by the media. But that’s democracy. That’s the way things worked out.
“The Press and the Putsch”, Asia Pacific Media Educator, No 10, January 2021. Image: APME/Joe Yaya/USP Journalism
Pacific journalism educator, David Robie, in a paper in 2001, made some observations about the way the local media reported the Speight takeover. He said, “In the early weeks of the insurrection, the media enjoyed an unusually close relationship with Speight and the hostage takers.”
He went on to say that at times, there was “strong sympathy among some journalists for the cause, even among senior editorial executives”.
David Robie is an incisive and perceptive old-school journalist who has a proper understanding of issues and I do not take issue with his opinion. And I think there is some validity. But you see, I was on the other [Speight’s] side. And it was part of my job at that time to swing that perception from the media.
Did you identify with “the cause” and did you think it was legitimate?
Let me tell you in hindsight, that the coup was not justified
and that is after a lot of reflection. It was not justified and
could never be justified.
When did you come to that conclusion?
It was after the period in Parliament and after things were resolved and then Parliament was vacated, I took a drive around town and I saw the devastation in Suva. This was a couple of months later. I didn’t realise the extent of the damage and I remember telling myself, “Oh my god, what have we done? What have we done?”
And I realised that we probably have let the genie out of the bottle and it scared me [that] it only takes a small thing like this to unleash this pentup emotion that is in the people. Of course, a lot of looting was [by] opportunists because at that time, the people who
were supporting the cause were all in Parliament. They had all marched to Parliament.
So, who did the looting in town? I’m not excusing that. I’m just trying to put some perspective. And of course, we saw pictures, which was really, very sad . . . of mothers, women, carrying trolleys [of loot] up the hill, past the [Colonial War Memorial] hospital.
So, what was Speight’s primary motivation?
Well, George will, I’m sure, have the opportunity at some point to tell the world what his position was. But he was never the main player. He was ditched with the baby on his laps.
So, there were people So, there were people behind him. He was the man of the moment. He was the one facing the cameras.
Given your education, training, experience in journalism, what kind of lens were you viewing this whole thing from?
Well, let’s put it this way. I got a call from Parliament. I said, “No, I’m not coming down.” And then they called again.
Basically, they did not know where they were going. I think what was supposed to have happened didn’t happen. So, I got another call, I got about three or four calls, maybe five. And then eventually, after two o’clock I went down to Parliament, because the person who called was a friend of mine and somebody who had shared our fortunes and misfortunes.
So, did you get swept away? What was going on inside your head?
George Speight’s forces hold Fiji government members hostage at the parliamentary complex in Suva. Image: IPI Global Journalist/Brian Cassey/Associated Press
I joined because at that point, I realised that these people needed help. I was not so much as for the cause, although there was this thing about what Chaudhry was doing. I also took that into account. But primarily because the call came [and] so I went.
And when I was finally called into the meeting, I walked in and I saw faces that I’d never seen before. And I started asking the questions, “Have you done this? Have you done that?”
And as I asked the questions, I was also suggesting solutions and then I just got dragged into it. The more I asked questions, the more I found out how much things were in disarray.
I just thought I’d do my bit [because] they were people who had taken over Parliament and they did not know where to go from there.
But you were driven by some nationalistic sentiments?
I am a [indigenous] Fijian. And everything that goes with that. I’m not infallible. But then again, I do not want to blow that trumpet.
Did the group see themselves as freedom fighters of some sort when you went into prison?
I’m not a freedom fighter. If they want to be called freedom fighters, that’s for them and I think some of them even portrayed themselves [that way]. But not me. I’m just an idiot who got sidetracked.
This personal journey that you’ve embarked on, what brought that about?
When I was in prison, I thought about this a lot. Because for me to come out of the bad place I was in — not physically, that I was in prison, but where my mind was — was to first accept the situation I was in and take responsibility. That’s when the healing started to take place.
And then I thought that I should write to people that I’ve hurt. I wrote about 200 letters from prison to anybody I thought I had hurt or harmed or betrayed. Groups, individuals, institutions, and families. I was surprised at the magnanimity of the people who received my letters.
I do not know where they all are now. I just sent it out. I was touched by a lot of the responses and I got a letter from the late [historian] Dr Brij Lal. l was so encouraged and I was so emotional when I read the letter. [It was] a very short letter and the kindness in the man to say that, “We will continue to talk when you come out of prison.”
There were also the mockers, the detractors, certain persons who said unkind things that, you know, “He’s been in prison and all of a sudden, he’s . . . “. That’s fine, I accepted all that as part of the package. You take the bad with the good.
I wrote to Mr Chaudhry and I had the opportunity to apologise to him personally when he came to visit in prison. And I want to continue this dialogue with Mr Chaudhry if he would like to.
Because if anything, I am among the reasons Fiji is in this current state of distrust and toxic political environment. If I can assist in bringing the nation together, it would be part of my atonement for my errors. For I have been an unprofitable, misguided individual who would like to do what I believe is my duty to put things right.
And I would work with anyone in the political spectrum, the communal leaders, the vanua and the faith organisations to bring that about.
I also did my traditional apology to my chiefly household of Vatuwaqa and the people of the vanua of Lau. I had invited the Lau Provincial Council to have its meeting at the Corrections Academy in Naboro. By that time, the arrangements had been confirmed for the Police Academy.
But the Roko gave us the farewell church service. I got my dear late sister, Pijila to organise the family. I presented the matanigasau to the then-Council Chairman, Ratu Tevita Uluilakeba (Roko Ului). It was a special moment, in front of all the delegates to the council meeting, the chiefly clan of the Vuanirewa, and Lauans who filled the two buses and
countless vehicles that made it to Naboro.
Our matanivanua (herald) was to make the tabua presentation. But I took it off him because I wanted Roko Ului and the people of Lau to hear my remorse from my mouth. It was very, very emotional. Very liberating. Cathartic.
Late last year, the Coalition government passed a motion in Parliament for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Do you support that?
Oh yes, I think everything I’ve been saying so far points that way.
Do you think it’ll help those that are still incarcerated to come out and speak about what happened in 2000?
Well, not only that but the important thing is [addressing] the general [racial] divide. If that’s where we should start, then we should start there. That’s how I’m looking at it — the bigger picture.
It’s not trying to manage the problems or issues of the last 24 years. People are still hurting from [the coups of] 1987. And what happened in 2006 — nothing has divided this country so much. Anybody who’s thought about this would want this to go beyond just solving the problem of 2000, excusing, and accusing and after that, there’s forgiveness and pardon.
That’s a small part. That too if it needs to happen. But after all that, I don’t want anybody to go to prison because of their participation or involvement in anything from 1987 to 2000. If they cooked the books later, while they were in government, then that’s a different
matter.
But I saw on TV, the weeping and the very public expression of pain of [the late, former Prime Minister, Laisenia] Qarase’s grandchildren when he was convicted and taken away [to prison]. It brought tears to my eyes. There is always a lump in my throat at the memory of my Heilala’s (elder of two daughters) last visit to [me in] Nukulau.
Hardly a word was spoken as we held each other, sobbing uncontrollably the whole time, except to say that Tiara (his sister) was not allowed by the officers at the naval base to come to say her goodbye.
That was very painful. I remember thinking that people can be cruel, especially when the girls explained that it was to be their last visit. Then the picture in my mind of Heilala sitting alone under the turret of the navy ship as she tried not to look back. I had asked her not to look back.
I deserved what I got. But not them. I would not wish the same things I went through on anyone else, not even those who were malicious towards me.
It is the family that suffers. The family are always the silent victims. It is the family that stands by you. They may not agree with what you did. Perhaps it is among the great gifts of God, that children forgive parents and love them still despite the betrayal, abandonment, and pain.
For I betrayed the two women I love most in the world. I betrayed ‘Ulukalala [son] who was born the same year I went to prison. I betrayed and brought shame to my family and my village of Waciwaci. I betrayed friends of all ethnicities and those who helped me in my chosen profession and later, in business.
I betrayed the people of Fiji. That betrayal was officially confirmed when the court judgment called me a traitor. I accepted that portrayal and have to live with it. The judges — at least one of them — even opined that I masterminded the whole thing. I have to decline that dubious honour. That belongs elsewhere.
This article by Joe Yaya is republished from last month’s Islands Business magazine cover story with the permission of editor Richard Naidu and Yaya. The photographs are from a 2000 edition of the Commonwealth Press Union’s Global Journalist magazine dedicated to the reporting of The University of the South Pacific’s student journalists. Joe Yaya was a member of the USP team at the time. The archive of the award-winning USP student coverage of the coup is here.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Once upon a time, red squirrels in the UK lived peacefully, with plenty of food and habitat to share between them. But in the late 1800s, their harmonious balance was destroyed, when gray squirrels were brought into the country for the first time from North America. The gray squirrels were larger and far better at finding food, and the red squirrels couldn’t compete. Their numbers declined dramatically, and now, there are likely only around 120,000 reds left across the whole country. But while they are often painted as the big, bad grays, the North American squirrels are not the villain of this story. They didn’t swim the Atlantic to land in the UK, they were brought there by humans.
Back in the 1800s, people thought that gray squirrels would be a pleasant “ornamental species” for stately homes in the UK, reports British Red Squirrel. And so they were shipped over on boats, and by the time society realized they were invasive, they had spread across the country.
The tale of the red vs gray squirrels isn’t unique. Around the world, research suggests there are now more than 37,000 species around the globe that are considered invasive and destructive to environments. Most didn’t leave their natural habitat by choice but were removed due to various human activities—including the pet trade. Some believe that to get control over invasive species, we should start eating them. But is more animal consumption really the answer to this widespread problem?
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What is an invasive species?
An invasive species is, quite simply, a plant, animal, or microorganism that is not native to a specific ecosystem. Their presence is usually negative, and likely causes harm to the environment or even to human health. In North America, for example, carp is one example of an invasive species.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), invasive carp species, like silver, grass, and bighead, were brought to the US in the 1970s in a bid to control algal blooms in wastewater treatment plants and aquaculture ponds, but they escaped into the environment, and now cause havoc in large rivers across the Midwest, disrupting ecosystems by competing for food and habitat.
“These invasions can have negative impacts on ecosystems, leading to biodiversity loss and the extinction of native plants and animals.” —Piero Genovesi, Chair of the IUCN SSC Invasive Species Specialist Group
In Australia, cane toads were introduced in the 1930s in an effort to control pests in sugar cane fields, but now they have spread far out into the environment, where their poison kills native species.
These are just a handful of examples out of thousands, and the numbers are increasing. “We see a constant increase in the number of new invasions in all taxonomic groups and in all regions of the world,” Piero Genovesi, Chair of the IUCN SSC Invasive Species Specialist Group, said in 2017.
He added that as well as the environment, this can also have a knock-on impact on humans, too. “[It] can have potentially devastating consequences on the food, medicines, clean water, and other benefits that nature provides, making it more challenging for the global community to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals,” he continued.
Should we eat invasive species?
Some believe that one of the best ways to deal with invasive species is simply to eat them—the approach even has its own name, “invasivorism.” In Edinburgh, Scotland one eatery, called Wedgwood the Restaurant, serves up squirrel haggis, for example, as well as invasive plant species like Japanese knotweed. In New England, US, some restaurants serve invasive European green crabs.
Conservationist and invasivorism advocate Joe Roman, who founded the website Eat the Invasives, told Salon last year that he doesn’t want to punish invasive species, as “they didn’t do anything wrong,” but the fact remains that they need to be dealt with in some way.
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For many, eating invasive species brings up welfare concerns. After all, just like all other animals that are slaughtered for meat, they do suffer and feel pain. And like Roman stated himself, they are innocent victims in the situation, too.
But ethical concerns aside, many experts note that it’s likely not possible to eat our way out of the invasive species crisis anyway. There are simply too many of them, and they’re not all good for us either. Take Burmese pythons, for example. They are an invasive species in Florida, but they’re likely not safe for consumption due to their high mercury levels.
What is the best solution for dealing with invasive species?
The invasive species crisis has several causes, and so it has many solutions, too. According to the National Wildlife Federation, it is working to deal with invasive species in the US by preventing more invasive carp from entering the waterways, and by advocating for the treatment of ballast water on ships. Ballast water is a key culprit for the spread of invasive species, as ships take in water in one area before discharging it in another, which spreads eggs and larvae across the oceans.
The federation also notes that it is “championing robust restoration” of areas that have been damaged by invasive species, too, and it is working to clarify the legal situation around the transportation of animal species both between states and into the US. Just like back in the 1800s, when English aristocrats wanted ornamental gray squirrels for their stately homes, today, people are still transporting animals around the world for their own pleasure—with major consequences.
The Argentine tegu, for example, likely made its way into Florida’s waters via the pet trade. And the same likely happened with the aforementioned Burmese python. The green iguana is a common sight in the wild in Florida, likely because of a pet trade boom in the late 20th century.
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Like the National Wildlife Federation, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) is working to get control over the pet trade. It supports the introduction of a universal list, which identifies species that can be kept as pets and those that pose an invasiveness risk, and is working towards the adoption of better codes of conduct for online platforms, where many animals are bought and sold.
“Prevention and preparedness are the most cost-effective ways to manage the threats from invasive alien species,” notes the IFAW. “Policymakers have a big role to play—but it’s in every person’s best interest to understand the high cost of exotic pets.”
This post was originally published on VegNews.com.
Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a revered Kanak visionary, was inspirational to indigenous Pacific political activists across Oceania, just like Tongan anthropologist and writer Epeli Hao’ofa was to cultural advocates.
Tragically, he was assassinated in 1989 by an opponent within the independence movement during the so-called “les événements” in New Caledonia, the last time the “French” Pacific territory was engulfed in a political upheaval such as experienced this week.
His memory and legacy as poet, cultural icon and peaceful political agitator live on with the impressive Tjibaou Cultural Centre on the outskirts of the capital Nouméa as a benchmark for how far New Caledonia had progressed in the last 35 years.
However, the wave of pro-independence protests that descended into urban rioting this week invoked more than Tjibaou’s memory. Many of the martyrs — such as schoolteacher turned security minister Eloï Machoro, murdered by French snipers during the upheaval of the 1980s — have been remembered and honoured for their exploits over the last few days with countless memes being shared on social media.
Among many memorable quotes by Tjibaou, this one comes to mind:
“White people consider that the Kanaks are part of the fauna, of the local fauna, of the primitive fauna. It’s a bit like rats, ants or mosquitoes,” he once said.
“Non-recognition and absence of cultural dialogue can only lead to suicide or revolt.”
And that is exactly what has come to pass this week in spite of all the warnings in recent years and months. A revolt.
Among the warnings were one by me in December 2021 after a failed third and “final” independence referendum. I wrote at the time about the French betrayal:
“After three decades of frustratingly slow progress but with a measure of quiet optimism over the decolonisation process unfolding under the Nouméa Accord, Kanaky New Caledonia is again poised on the edge of a precipice.”
As Paris once again reacts with a heavy-handed security crackdown, it appears to have not learned from history. It will never stifle the desire for independence by colonised peoples.
New Caledonia was annexed as a colony in 1853 and was a penal colony for convicts and political prisoners — mainly from Algeria — for much of the 19th century before gaining a degree of autonomy in 1946.
“Kanaky Palestine – same combat” solidarity placard. Image: APR screenshot
Here are my five takeaways from this week’s violence and frustration:
1. Global failure of neocolonialism – Palestine, Kanaky and West Papua
Just as we have witnessed a massive outpouring of protest on global streets for justice, self-determination and freedom for the people of Palestine as they struggle for independence after 76 years of Israeli settler colonialism, and also Melanesian West Papuans fighting for 61 years against Indonesian settler colonialism, Kanak independence aspirations are back on the world stage.
Neocolonialism has failed. French President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to reverse the progress towards decolonisation over the past three decades has backfired in his face.
2. French deafness and loss of social capital
The predictions were already long there. Failure to listen to the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) leadership and to be prepared to be patient and negotiate towards a consensus has meant much of the crosscultural goodwill that been developed in the wake of the Nouméa Accord of 1998 has disappeared in a puff of smoke from the protest fires of the capital.
The immediate problem lies in the way the French government has railroaded the indigenous Kanak people who make up 42 percent pf the 270,000 population into a constitutional bill that “unfreezes” the electoral roll pegging voters to those living in New Caledonia at the time of the 1998 Nouméa Accord. Under the draft bill all those living in the territory for the past 10 years could vote.
Kanak leaders and activists who have been killed . . . Jean-Marie Tjibaou is bottom left, and Eloï Machoro is bottom right. Image: FLNKS/APR
This would add some 25,000 extra French voters in local elections, which would further marginalise Kanaks at a time when they hold the territorial presidency and a majority in the Congress in spite of their demographic disadvantage.
Under the Nouméa Accord, there was provision for three referendums on independence in 2018, 2020 and 2021. The first two recorded narrow (and reducing) votes against independence, but the third was effectively boycotted by Kanaks because they had suffered so severely in the 2021 delta covid pandemic and needed a year to mourn culturally.
The FLNKS and the groups called for a further referendum but the Macron administration and a court refused.
3. Devastating economic and social loss New Caledonia was already struggling economically with the nickel mining industry in crisis – the territory is the world’s third-largest producer. And now four days of rioting and protesting have left a trail of devastation in their wake.
At least five people have died in the rioting — three Kanaks, and two French police, apparently as a result of a barracks accident. A state of emergency was declared for at least 12 days.
But as economists and officials consider the dire consequences of the unrest, it will take many years to recover. According to Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) president David Guyenne, between 80 and 90 percent of the grocery distribution network in Nouméa had been “wiped out”. The chamber estimated damage at about 200 million euros (NZ$350 million).
Twin flags of Kanaky and Palestine flying from a Parisian rooftop. Image: APR
4. A new generation of youth leadership As we have seen with Generation Z in the forefront of stunning pro-Palestinian protests across more than 50 universities in the United States (and in many other countries as well, notably France, Ireland, Germany, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom), and a youthful generation of journalists in Gaza bearing witness to Israeli atrocities, youth has played a critical role in the Kanaky insurrection.
Australian peace studies professor Dr Nicole George notes that “the highly visible wealth disparities” in the territory “fuel resentment and the profound racial inequalities that deprive Kanak youths of opportunity and contribute to their alienation”.
A feature is the “unpredictability” of the current crisis compared with the 1980s “les événements”.
“In the 1980s, violent campaigns were coordinated by Kanak leaders . . . They were organised. They were controlled.
“In contrast, today it is the youth taking the lead and using violence because they feel they have no other choice. There is no coordination. They are acting through frustration and because they feel they have ‘no other means’ to be recognised.”
According to another academic, Dr Évelyne Barthou, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Pau, who researched Kanak youth in a field study last year: “Many young people see opportunities slipping away from them to people from mainland France.
“This is just one example of the neocolonial logic to which New Caledonia remains prone today.”
Pan-Pacific independence solidarity . . . “Kanak People Maohi – same combat”. Image: APR screenshot
5. Policy rethink needed by Australia, New Zealand
Ironically, as the turbulence struck across New Caledonia this week, especially the white enclave of Nouméa, a whistlestop four-country New Zealand tour of Melanesia headed by Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, who also has the foreign affairs portfolio, was underway.
The first casualty of this tour was the scheduled visit to New Caledonia and photo ops demonstrating the limited diversity of the political entourage showed how out of depth New Zealand’s Pacific diplomacy had become with the current rightwing coalition government at the helm.
Heading home, Peters thanked the people and governments of Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Tuvalu for “working with New Zealand towards a more secure, more prosperous and more resilient tomorrow”.
The delegation is now heading home
Many thanks to the people and governments of Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu & Tuvalu for their kind hospitality – and for working with New Zealand towards a more secure, more prosperous & more resilient tomorrow.
His tweet came as New Caledonian officials and politicians were coming to terms with at least five deaths and the sheer scale of devastation in the capital which will rock New Caledonia for years to come.
News media in both Australia and New Zealand hardly covered themselves in glory either, with the commercial media either treating the crisis through the prism of threats to tourists and a superficial brush over the issues. Only the public media did a creditable job, New Zealand’s RNZ Pacific and Australia’s ABC Pacific and SBS.
In the case of New Zealand’s largest daily newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, it barely noticed the crisis. On Wednesday, morning there was not a word in the paper.
Thursday was not much better, with an “afterthought” report provided by a partnership with RNZ. As I reported it:
“Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, finally catches up with the Pacific’s biggest news story after three days of crisis — the independence insurrection in #KanakyNewCaledonia.
“But unlike global news services such as Al Jazeera, which have featured it as headline news, the Herald tucked it at the bottom of page 2. Even then it wasn’t its own story, it was relying on a partnership report from RNZ.”
Also, New Zealand media reports largely focused too heavily on the “frustrations and fears” of more than 200 tourists and residents said to be in the territory this week, and provided very slim coverage of the core issues of the upheaval.
With all the warning signs in the Pacific over recent years — a series of riots in New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga and Vanuatu — Australia and New Zealand need to wake up to the yawning gap in social indicators between the affluent and the impoverished, and the worsening climate crisis.
These are the real issues of the Pacific, not some fantasy about AUKUS and a perceived China threat in an unconvincing arena called “Indo-Pacific”.
Dr David Robie covered “Les Événements” in New Caledonia in the 1980s and penned the book Blood on their Banner about the turmoil. He also covered the 2018 independence referendum.
Loyalist French rally in New Caledonia . . . “Unfreezing is democracy”. Image: A PR screenshot
New Caledonia’s capital city, Nouméa, has endured widespread violent rioting over the past three days. This crisis intensified rapidly, taking local authorities by surprise.
Peaceful protests had been occurring across the country in the preceding weeks as the French National Assembly in Paris deliberated on a constitutional amendment that would increase the territory’s electoral roll.
As the date for the vote — last Tuesday — grew closer, however, protests became more obstructive and by Monday night had spiralled into uncontrolled violence.
Since then, countless public buildings, business locations and private dwellings have been subjected to arson. Blockades erected by protesters prevent movement around greater Nouméa.
Four people have died. Security reinforcements have been deployed, the city is under nightly curfew, and a state of emergency has been declared. Citizens in many areas of Nouméa are now also establishing their own neighbourhood protection militias.
To understand how this situation has spiralled so quickly, it’s important to consider the complex currents of political and socioeconomic alienation at play.
The political dispute At one level, the crisis is political, reflecting contention over a constitutional vote taken in Paris that will expand citizens’ voting rights. The change adds roughly 25,000 voters to the electoral role in New Caledonia by extending voting rights to French people who have lived on the island for 10 years.
This reform makes clear the political power that France continues to exercise over the territory.
The death toll has now increased to four.
The current changes have proven divisive because they undo provisions in the 1998 Noumea Accord, particularly the restriction of voting rights. The accord was designed to “rebalance” political inequalities so the interests of Indigenous Kanaks and the descendants of French settlers would be equally recognised.
This helped to consolidate peace between these groups after a long period of conflict in the 1980s, known locally as “les événements”.
A loyalist group of elected representatives in New Caledonia’s Parliament reject the contemporary significance of “rebalancing” (in French “rééquilibrage”) with regard to the electoral status of Kanak people. They argue after three referendums on the question of New Caledonian independence — held between 2018 and 2021 — all of which produced a majority no vote, the time for electoral reform is well overdue.
This position is made clear by Nicolas Metzdorf. A key rightwing loyalist, he defined the constitutional amendment, which was passed by the National Assembly in Paris on Tuesday, as a vote for democracy and “universalism”.
Yet this view is roundly rejected by Kanak pro-independence leaders who say these amendments undermine the political status of Indigenous Kanak people, who constitute a minority of the voting population. These leaders also refuse to accept that the decolonisation agenda has been concluded, as loyalists assert.
Instead, they dispute the outcome of the final 2021 referendum which, they argue, was forced on the territory by French authorities too soon after the outbreak of the covid pandemic. This disregarded the fact that Kanak communities bore disproportionate impacts of the pandemic and were unable to fully mobilise before the vote.
Demands that the referendum be delayed were rejected, and many Kanak people abstained as a result.
In this context, the disputed electoral reforms decided in Paris this week are seen by pro-independence camps as yet another political prescription imposed on Kanak people. A leading figure of one Indigenous Kanak women’s organisation described the vote to me as a solution that pushes “Kanak people into the gutter”, one that would have “us living on our knees”.
#NewCaledonia: At least four have been killed during riots in the French territory of New Caledonia after #France introduced new constitutional reforms. The reforms allow French residents of the island voting rights after 10 years of residence, with indigenous Kanak people… pic.twitter.com/QVG7fLFybp
Beyond the politics Many political commentators are likening the violence observed in recent days to the political violence of les événementsof the 1980s, which exacted a heavy toll on the country. Yet this is disputed by local women leaders with whom I am in conversation, who have encouraged me to look beyond the central political factors in analysing this crisis.
Some female leaders reject the view this violence is simply an echo of past political grievances. They point to the highly visible wealth disparities in the country.
These fuel resentment and the profound racial inequalities that deprive Kanak youths of opportunity and contribute to their alienation.
Women have also told me they are concerned about the unpredictability of the current situation. In the 1980s, violent campaigns were coordinated by Kanak leaders, they tell me. They were organised. They were controlled.
In contrast, today it is the youth taking the lead and using violence because they feel they have no other choice. There is no coordination. They are acting through frustration and because they feel they have “no other means” to be recognised.
There is also frustration with political leaders on all sides. Late on Wednesday, Kanak pro-independence political leaders held a press conference. They echoed their loyalist political opponents in condemning the violence and issuing calls for dialogue.
The leaders made specific calls to the “youths” engaged in the violence to respect the importance of a political process and warned against a logic of vengeance.
The women civil society leaders I have been speaking to were frustrated by the weakness of this messaging. The women say political leaders on all sides have failed to address the realities faced by Kanak youths.
They argue if dialogue remains simply focused on the political roots of the dispute, and only involves the same elites that have dominated the debate so far, little will be understood and little will be resolved.
Likewise, they lament the heaviness of the current “command and control” state security response. It contradicts the calls for dialogue and makes little room for civil society participation of any sort.
These approaches put a lid on grievances, but they do not resolve them. Women leaders observing the current situation are anguished and heartbroken for their country and its people. They say if the crisis is to be resolved sustainably, the solutions cannot be imposed and the words cannot be empty.
Instead, they call for the space to be heard and to contribute to a resolution. Until that time they live with anxiety and uncertainty, waiting for the fires to subside, and the smoke currently hanging over a wounded Nouméa to clear.
After weeks of hearing the awful changes the Tories have got planned, the Labour Party took to the podium today to announce their pre-election pledges. While there was a lot of talk about Labour’s six pledges for change, there was notably one thing missing – none of the many many speakers mentioned unemployed people and especially not unemployed disabled people.
Keir Starmer has said many times he will be the complete opposite of Rishi Sunak and this appears most notably for me to be the case when talking about disabled people and the challenges we face.
Whilst Sunak and his wet wipe army seem to view us as public enemy number one, disabled people are apparently completely insignificant to Labour.
A Labour six pledges roadshow about everything but welfare
In the over an hour-and-a-half roadshow of how a Labour government will transform the lives of working people, those at the bottom rung of the ladder who can’t work weren’t mentioned once.
Angela Rayner got the show on the road by saying
People want change and Labour are the only ones who can deliver that.
She then set out many different types of people whose back Labour have got. Missing from this, of course, was disabled people and those who couldn’t work.
Rayner then touted the old chestnut “making work pay for working people”, a phrase which completely ignores anyone who can’t work or might need more support into work.
Next up came Rachel Reeves, who spoke about tough spending rules and that actually, by being stable and not messing around too much “stability is change”. Which was swiftly followed by a quick run-through of the reforms (changes) Labour will set out.
There were reforms on employment rights, reforms on, bizarrely, planning but nothing on reforming the DWP. Of course, we don’t want the cruel reforms that the Tories are putting forward, but a bit of reassurance that Labour would make applying for benefits fairer would’ve been nice.
Even Miliband couldn’t save the day
Next, she introduced some people who supported Labour to talk them up. Firstly an ex-Tory donor housebuilder who spoke lavishly about how Labour would build more houses, but there was nothing on easing the social housing backlog.
They also showed the CEO of Boots talking about the importance of the High Street. I dunno about you, but I’m sure disabled people would love a high street pharmacy where they can access the consultation room and don’t have to get jabs over a bin.
I need to confess something here- Ed Miliband is my guilty pleasure. I was deep in the Milifandom, I met him at Labour conference a few years ago and was enthralled. That’s why it pained me that Eddie babes also ignored disabled people.
His focus on green energy is of course good and needed, but there wasn’t anything on people who can’t afford bills who are losing their government support. Ed, like others, mentioned working people, but those who are struggling most with astronomical energy bills are disabled and unemployed people.
In the crime section, we had nothing on about the rise in disability hate crime, in the schools bit we likewise saw nothing on SEND provision or working to make school life easier for disabled kids.
We reach the end of the build-up to Starmer Time and I realise we’ve heard nothing on welfare, the cost of living, or carers support.
Stop! Starmer time!
When Starmer takes to the stage it’s obvious the persona he’s trying to portray. Sleeves rolled up, no tie, lots of open-handed gestures, talking to the crowd. It’s straight out of the Man of the People handbook.
Starmer talks about the human cost of the past 14 years, but by this he apparently means people who are struggling to buy houses or some bizarre analogy about a woman who showed him her bad eye in a service station.
He doesn’t mean the actual human cost – the untold thousands of disabled people who have died due to Tory cuts and cruelty.
Overall Starmer’s speech focused on working families and giving them hope, but there was no hope thrown the way of disabled people, especially those who couldn’t work. He closed by saying:
This is a message we can take to every doorstep across the country.
So I hope you’re all prepared to ask them about poverty and disability provision when they come knocking on your doorstep.
Labour: just as dangerous as the Tories
In my opinion, this announcement will appeal to the people who are sick of the Tories but who will never fear not being able to put food on their table. It was appeasing and surface-deep, with nothing for those of us who are struggling to stay above the surface.
Where the Tories have made unemployed disabled people the punching bag, Labour are acting like we don’t exist. And that’s just as dangerous.
An open letter to The New Zealand Herald has challenged a full page Zionist advertisement this week for failing to acknowledge the “terrible injustices” suffered by the Palestinian people in Israel’s seven-month genocidal war on Gaza.
In the latest of several international reports that have condemned genocide against the people of Gaza while the International Court of Justice continues to investigate Israel for a plausible case for genocide, a human rights legal network of US universities has concluded that “Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing” and sought to “bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza”.
The University Network for Human Rights, along with the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law, the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School, the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, and the Lowenstein Human Rights Project at Yale Law School, conducted a legal analysis and the 100-page damning report,“Genocide in Gaza: Analysis of International Law and its Application to Israel’s Military Actions since October 7, 2023.”
The Israeli military have killed more than 35,000 people — mostly women and children — and more than 78,000 people and the UN General Assembly voted by an overwhelming 134-9 votes to back Palestinian statehood on May 11.
The full page Zionist advertisement in The New Zealand Herald this week, 14 May 2024. Image: NZH screenshot APR
In the full page Zionist advertisement in The New Zealand Herald on Tuesday, senior pastor Nigel Woodley of the Flaxmere Christian Fellowship Church in Hastings claimed “the current painful war is another episode in Israel’s history for survival” with no acknowledgement of the massive human cost on Palestinians.
The open letter by Reverend Chris Sullivan in response — dated the same day but not published by The Herald — says:
An advertisement in the Herald supports the creation of the State of Israel.
For the same reasons we should also support the creation of a Palestinian state; don’t Palestinians also deserve their own nation state?
Just as we decry Hitler’s Holocaust, so too must we raise our voices against the killing of 35,000 people in Gaza (most of them innocent civilians), the destruction of 70 percent of the housing, and imminent famine.
It is disingenuous to focus solely on the Arab invasions of Israel, without looking at their cause — the killing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians which accompanied the creation of the modern state of Israel.
It is never too late for both sides to turn away from violence and war and build a lasting peace, based on mutual respect and a just solution to the terrible injustices the Palestinian people have suffered.
Wednesday 15 May marks 76 years since the Nakba – literally meaning ‘the catastrophe’ – when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their native land. This period also saw dozens of massacres, including at Deir Yassin in which over 100 villagers were killed by Israeli paramilitaries.
The Nakba made stateless refugees of much of the Palestinian people, with the rest living under occupation. In the words of Edward Said, Palestinians “had their lives broken, their spirits drained, their composure destroyed forever in the context of seemingly unending, serial dislocation.” This is why we must continue fighting for a free Palestine and for the right of return for refugees.
As Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza makes painfully clear, the Nakba never ended – and continues to this day.
In Gaza, Israel forces have killed over 36,000 people including 14,500 children. The situation is beyond unbearable, with an Israeli assault on Rafah, which now houses the majority of the Strip’s population, expanding. Watch Jeremy Corbyn’slatest Double Down News video on the situation in Gaza:
Please join us at the next National Demonstration this Saturday. Here are the details you need:
Date: Saturday 18 May
Time: Assemble 12pm
Location: BBC Portland Place, W1A:
We continue to be inspired by people organising in their communities, by students occupying campuses, by Artists Supporting Palestine, and by protesters shutting down arms factories. Our solidarity lives on – we will never give up on the Palestinian people.
Sorry Palestinian women and children. It seems Australia’s leading women’s media company has more pressing issues to cover than the seemingly endless human rights atrocities committed against you.
It’s been seven months of almost complete silence from Mamamia and their most popular writers and podcast hosts.
I’ve respected and appreciated their work in the past, which is why it’s truly disheartening to see.
Mamamia Out Loud has found time and scope to speak about me personally in two recent episodes (both sadly devoid of context and riddled with inaccuracies) yet can’t seem to find the words to report on or reflect on the man made famine in Gaza.
The murdered and orphaned children. The women having c-sections with no anaesthesia. The haunting screams from mothers hugging their lifeless babies bodies for the last time.
Faux feminism? Or is it all still “too complex”? I can’t answer that, except to say it’s dispiriting and disappointing to witness given Mamamia’s tagline.
What we’re talking about
Because Gaza is what millions of Australian women “are actually talking about”. It’s what’s waking countless Australian women up at night. It’s what’s making Australian women tremble in tears watching children’s body parts dug out from beneath the rubble.
Mamamia’s audience is being let down, they deserve better.
As for the innocent women and girls of Palestine — tragically “let down” doesn’t even begin to describe it. They deserve so much more.
I’m utterly heartbroken witnessing such disregard for their lives.
So I fixed the Mamamia headline in the above photo.
Antoinette Lattouf is an Australian-Lebanese journalist, host, author and diversity advocate. She has worked with a range of mainstream media, and as a social commentator for various online and broadcast publications. This commentary was first published on her Facebook page.
The EU has ramped up its assault on refugee rights with its latest sweep of borderisation policies. On Tuesday 14 May, the bloc gave the final greenlight for a broad overhaul of its migration and asylum policies. However, the new EU ‘Migration Pact’ is simply another extension of its racist “fortress Europe” project. Crucially, its colonial undertones were unmistakable amidst platitudes to “help people fleeing persecution”.
EU Migration Pact
Across a suite of ten legislative acts, the EU has reformed its framework for asylum and migration. A majority of EU countries backed these, ensuring its passage despite opposition from Hungary and Poland. The overhaul comes into effect from 2026.
It establishes new border centres that will detain migrants while their asylum requests are vetted. Notably, the new policies will effectively accelerate deportations. Partly, it will do so through new border procedures that categorise asylum seekers. Border officials will use this new system to make quick assessments on applications.
European politician clamoured to hail the new policies. In one breath German interior minister Nancy Faeser said the reform will help people fleeing persecution, while in the other she said that it will make:
clear that those who do not need this protection cannot come to Germany or must leave Germany much more quickly
Unsurprisingly then, migrant and human rights organisations have consistently slammed the EU’s new slapdash approach to asylum applications and migration in general.
Amnesty EU called the new EU Migration Pact out on X:
The #EUMigrationPact will imply: More people detained at #EU borders Low quality procedures for asylum seekers Emergency measures that restrict asylum Limited support for border states Shifting responsibilities to countries outside Europe
In other words, the new policies will sure up Europe’s racist borders. Meanwhile, more borderisation will put migrant lives at risk. As Amnesty previously highlighted in April:
For people escaping conflict, persecution, or economic insecurity, these reforms will mean less protection and a greater risk of facing human rights violations across Europe – including illegal and violent pushbacks, arbitrary detention, and discriminatory policing.
“Final nail in the coffin for human rights”
The Europe-wide umbrella organisation the Platform for Undocumented Migrants (PICUM) also criticised the EU’s move:
— Platform for Undocumented Migrants (PICUM) (@picum_ngo) May 14, 2024
PICUM has previously articulated the multitude of ways the new EU Migration Pact will endanger migrant rights. Alongside pushing up deportations, the policies will exarcerbate racial profiling, limit access to legal representation, and remove vital safeguards.
The UK’s Migrant Rights Network – a member of PICUM – has warned this will:
expand the digital surveillance at Europe’s borders and further embed the mass criminalisation of migrants.
Specifically, it explained that in practice, this will mean:
the use of intrusive technology including surveillance and drones, in addition to the mass collection of people’s data which will be exchanged between police forces across the EU. Notably, this includes changes in the Eurodac Regulation. Eurodac is an EU database that stores the fingerprints of “international protection applicants” and migrants who have arrived irregularly.
This will mandate the systematic collection of migrants’ biometric data including facial images which will be retained in massive databases for up to 10 years. This data can be exchanged at every step of the migration process and made accessible to police forces across the European Union for tracking and identity checks purposes.
This means biometric identification systems will also be used to track people’s movements.
Colonial borders
In parallel with the sweeping reforms, the EU is stepping up its colonial ideology. Specifically, it has been negotiating deals with countries of transit and origin aimed at curbing the number of arrivals. Of course, this entails outsourcing the EU’s borders.
In recent months, it has inked agreements with Tunisia, Mauritania and Egypt.
Meanwhile, Italy has also struck its own accord with Albania. This will allow it to send migrants rescued in Italian waters to the country while their asylum requests are processed.
Furthermore, a group of countries spearheaded by Denmark and the Czech Republic are laying the groundwork for a similar approach. They have been coordinating a letter to the European Commission pushing for the bloc to transfer migrants picked up at sea to countries outside the EU.
However, Migration Policy Institute Europe Camille Le Coz said that there were “many questions” about how any such initiatives could work.
Under EU law, immigrants can only be sent to a country outside the bloc where they could have applied for asylum, provided they have a sufficient link with that country.
That rules out – for now – any programmes such as the UK’s abhorrent Rwanda scheme. Therefore, Le Coz said that it still needs “to be clarified” how proposals for any EU outsourcing deals would work.
EU Migration Pact: racist apparatus
Unsurprisingly then, entrenching its hard borders is EU’s answer to people seeking safety and community in Europe. Specifically, the EU originally launched work to reform its migration legislation off the back of the so-called 2015 “refugee crisis”.
Now, this has culminated in a slate of racist legislation that will put migrants at greater risk of harm. Of course, outsourcing borders and criminalising migrants is entirely on brand with the colonial “fortress Europe” rhetoric.
Invariably, this has become the intrinsic racist apparatus of colonial nations dodging responsibility for driving violence and displacement across the globe in pursuit of continued capitalist plunder. To the politicians in the halls of power, migrant lives continue to be expendable.
When the politics of New Labour finally died it left behind a legacy of inequality, insecurity, slogans, spin over substance or solutions, growing privatisation, failed military interventions, and a social security system that stigmatised single mothers, disabled people, refugees, and the poor and vulnerable as ‘scroungers’.
Skip to the present day and the neoliberal capture of the Labour Party has given a whole new lease of life to the New Labour relics and their utterly failed dogmas.
Anti-Tory sentiment is the only thing Starmer has going for him
Labour is undoubtedly a right-wing political party.
This isn’t a dig, or even intended to be offensive to the torpid Labour leader, or his supporters that *still* haven’t quite worked out that the only reason their messiah is polling so well is because 80% of the country detest the Tories (blue) with every single fibre of their being.
The recent local elections weren’t pro-Labour elections, they were anti-Tory ones, and voting for Labour was made just that bit easier by Starmer’s four-year-long impression of a respectable Conservative.
Britain is traditionally a conservative country. Labour is a right-wing political party that has been infiltrated by Blairite globalists. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility the two might just get along.
When Tory MPs, Tory councillors, Tory voters, and even Tory donors are giving their constituencies, wards, votes, and millions to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party you know it is utterly indistinguishable from the very enemy it was created to oppose.
After fourteen years of Tory disasters — austerity, Brexit, and Covid, to name but a few — it wouldn’t be unreasonable to ask Starmer why he is planning to employ Tory policies to deal with the numerous Tory crises he is likely to inherit.
Labour: the party of literal Tories
The Labour Party of Attlee, Bevan, Benn and Corbyn is now the Labour Party of Starmer, Streeting, Reeves and erm… Natalie Elphicke, the Tory reject with a thing for ‘stopping the boats’.
Elphicke — a genuinely nasty piece of work that has built and trashed her reputation upon demonising refugees and aid charities — should feel at home in Starmer’s “changed” Labour Party.
One Tory MP said of the defection: “I didn’t realise there was any room to her right.” Don’t they realise that the hierarchy of racism that is burning through the soul of the Labour Party has made the duopoly barely distinguishable?
There’s plenty of room to Elphicke’s right in Labour.
Come forth Suella, a place in Starmer’s cabinet awaits, once we hand over 100% of the power and the keys to Downing Street because they have been supported by less than a third of those eligible to vote.
If the subservient and sadly apathetic British were ever to realise the power of the people is considerably greater than the people in power we might actually get somewhere.
But the British people seem to enjoy being lied to by the elite. They thought Boris Johnson was worth an 80-seat-majority, despite being fully aware of the fact that he is a racist, divisive liar.
‘Things Can Only Get’… Umm…
And it will be no different when the crimson conservative Starmer — he of the ten pledges and countless U-turns — wanders down SW1A 2AA for the first time as prime minister.
But this time it won’t be to the ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ song that carries the storyteller Starmer through the famous black door because things are only going to get much worse.
Imagine a carousel at a fairground. On each beautifully decorated horse sits a fully bought and paid for member of the unscrupulous British ruling class in the guise of a politician.
Some of the horses are painted in blue, some are painted in red, and if you look carefully enough you might see one or two painted in an orange/yellow colour.
But each malevolent, self-serving individual that is going round and round on the carousel is from the same right-wing, Israel-centric stock that’s ideological foundations are rooted in the enrichment of the elite at the expense of the poor, disabled people, minorities and working classes.
As soon as a rider falls off the carousel the British establishment have another rider that is ready to take up the reigns, and the colour of the horse that they are riding quite simply doesn’t matter one single iota to them because the replacement rider, Keir Starmer, is a safe pair of hands for the rich and powerful.
Starmer: morally repugnant, feeble and unimaginative
You’ve seen what happens when the wealth of the elite is in danger. At one end of the scale you’ve got Liz Truss. As soon as she started wiping billions off their hoards of cash through sheer incompetence she was out on her ear.
And then at the other end you’ve got Jeremy Corbyn. A very different type of threat to the one posed by Truss, of course, but after the unexpected success of Corbyn at the 2017 general election there wasn’t a chance in hell the establishment were going to risk him winning the next time around, and that was the end of that.
Everything now points to the Tory, Keir Starmer, winning the next general election. It might not be the whopping majority being touted by Starmer’s people, but it should be a decent-sized majority that will give Starmer the power he needs to carry on where the Tories left off.
If you plan to vote for smug Starmer’s feeble and unimaginative fraud of an opposition, don’t be too surprised when they turn out to be just as feeble and unimaginative in power.
An acquiescent punditocracy and their billionaire string-pullers are preparing for a Labour government. They know the game is up for the Tories, but they also know this morally repugnant incarnation of the Labour Party — funded by big business and the pro-Israel lobby — is no threat to the status quo.
Sure, the Tories are finished.
There’s no way back from the dead for them, so celebrate that moment while you can because once the dust has settled the incoming Labour government, armed with no more than spin and slogans, really won’t feel much different to where we are now.
As expected after an embarrassing time at the polls, the Tories were back to take it out on disabled people this week. The human wet wipe, the DWP’s Mel Stride, has been gurning in the press again about how his “plan is working”. This time, he was launching the WorkWell programme.
The human wet wipe: dealing in miracles
The initiative apparently aims to help people recover from long-term sickness, cos ole Stridey Boy deals in miracles now as well as bullshit.
He told Sky News:
“what I want to do is get in there early and bring together both healthcare support and critically also work coach support so that we can keep people in work rather than out of work… as part of their recovery”
He once again cited mental health, because long-term depression is something that can definitely be cured by forcing someone into work. He also weirdly said GPs can refer people to the service, which is funny because last week he didn’t trust them to determine whether someone was sick enough to get a fit note.
But as is often the case, the blustering on TV didn’t even tell us half the story, and was nowhere near as funny as when Wet Wipe (WW) launched it on Twitter.
The DWP stealing my jokes. Whatever next?
In cringe the likes we haven’t seen since Pursglove donned his stabvest, we saw WW practising for his new role of Uber driver.
“Join me on the road for the next generation of welfare reforms” he shouted.
Hang on – this sounds familiar… “we’ll be making a few stops along the way” No surely not?
The reason it sounded so familiar was that last week I started my column with “all aboard the hating disabled people bus” – little did I know that the DWP were going to take inspiration from it.
The thing is though, Stride has clearly never taken a bus in his life, so instead it becomes a zippy little black car, but the message is the same.
In my piece, I said we’d already had stops along the way such as “Doctor’s can’t be trusted to write sicknotes” lane and sure enough WW is going “full throttle” towards what appears to be a fitnotes layby.
WorkWell. A contradiction in terms if ever there was one.
So what is WorkWell? Basically as far as I can tell it’s a scheme ran by the DWP where instead of supporting disabled people who can’t work they’ll pass you around to other services.
Instead of giving people the Universal Credit they need to survive and allowing them to focus on their health, the DWP is going to cure their chronic conditions – with a life-changing four whole physio sessions and a meeting with a counsellor.
But that’s not all! You’ll also get referred to Citizens Advice for financial advice where you can ask questions as ‘how do I pay my bills when the government aren’t supporting me to look after my health or helping me get back into work’.
But wait! There’s more!
You’ll also be socially prescribed a support group for loneliness where you can all discuss how you have no money to feed yourself and the government wants you dead.
Of course, this is once again just another example of how out of touch the government are. They’re investing £64m into WorkWell but there’s no mention of extra funding for the NHS or local services to support them with the influx of disabled people accessing their services.
Mel Stride: the cruellest of them all
The announcement was so popular that despite being viewed over 225 THOUSAND times, the tweet has just 69 likes. Surely they can’t still think the public supports them?
The government wants us to believe they don’t know that people don’t recover from disabilities and chronic conditions with four sessions of therapy. In reality, it’s much more sinister than that.
But we don’t matter to them. Disabled people are subhuman to Tories and they would prefer we were all dead. And old wet wipe Mel Stride, well he’s the cruellest of them all.
The man deserves a life as miserable as what he’s reducing disabled people to, but I’ll settle for him crying in a sports hall when he loses his parliamentary seat.
On Sunday 12 May, Catalan elections will be held to choose the government of Catalonia. Yet already Spain’s president Sánchez is trying to manipulate voters to avoid any victory by pro-independence Puigdemont and his allies.
Catalan elections: independence parties were already on the rise
Four years ago, Catalan pro-independence parties won with 52% of the votes and 55% of the seats. A Catalan pro-independence government of ERC and JUNTS was formed with the support of the CUP. But different strategies in the face of constant Spanish judicial repression meant that ERC was left alone in the government.
In these Catalan elections, the situation is totally different, because the result of the last Spanish elections has forced the PSOE to make a pact with JUNTS so that its seven votes would contribute to the investiture of President Pedro Sánchez.
This has forced him to accept an amnesty law with which, soon, all those persecuted by the “lawfare” (judicial warfare using fraudulently the law) of the Spanish justice system will be free of any accusation.
Among them, the Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, who in 2017 organised the referendum on self-determination, was illegally deposed by the Spanish government and had to go into exile in Belgium to avoid being unjustly imprisoned.
Puigdemont is back
At the beginning of this election campaign, the PSC (the Catalan PSOE) was leading the polls because the majority of the non-independence vote is concentrated in this party. A little further behind were the two big pro-independence parties, ERC and JUNTS.
But then Puigdemont announced that he was standing as a candidate and that he would return triumphantly to Spain for the investiture with the protection of the amnesty he has managed to wrest from Spain. Then voting intentions began to shift towards JUNTS and closer and closer to the PSC.
The thing is that Puigdemont is the number one enemy of Spanish nationalism and arouses great fear in Spain, because he represents insubordination to the state and has not been able to be subdued. This is why, at the start of the election campaign, Pedro Sánchez surprised everyone with a reckless and disturbing juggling act.
Sánchez: manipulating the voters
Without warning, he published a letter on social media announcing that he was very upset with the extreme right because his wife was accused of corruption. And he announced that he was giving himself five days to reflect on whether he should leave the presidency.
Sánchez had always denied the claims of the pro-independence movement that they had been victims of “lawfare”, with the mantra that Spain is a state governed by the rule of law. But now he has acknowledged that, in Spain, judicial dirty war is being practised.
The country was left on the edge of the precipice, waiting for the president’s decision.
After five days he affirmed that he would continue and, taking advantage of the state of shock, tried to call on his followers to vote in the Catalan elections with the justification of demonstrating to the extreme right that Pedro Sánchez has the support of the people.
With this manipulative strategy, Sánchez managed to increase the PSC’s voting intentions and stay ahead of Puigdemont.
Catalan elections will be a litmus test
But as the elections approach, it seems that this trend of PSC growth has stalled and, on the other hand, the pro-independence electorate is concentrating its vote on Puigdemont.
We shall see who ends up winning.
In any case, even if Puigdemont does not come out on top, it is possible that he will be the only one to obtain a majority to be invested as president of Catalonia.
In this case: how will Spain react to a person it has persecuted so viscerally? Will it respect the will expressed at the ballot box or will it give free rein to its repressive nationalism?
In the past couple of weeks, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) boss Mel Stride has lied not once, but twice about disabled people’s benefits – specifically, PIP. Naturally, the DWP boss that the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey has aptly branded a “human wet wipe” now refuses to apologise. Of course, it’s just another day in the life of ableist Tory scapegoat politics.
DWP boss lying through his teeth
First, in an interview with the BBC on 29 April, Stride claimed that those accessing the disability benefit Personal Independence Payment (PIP) get “thousands of pounds a month”.
However, people were quick to point out across X that the claim was verifiably bullshit. In fact, the highest amount people can actually receive on PIP is a measly £798.63 a month.
On top of this, the DWP gives many claimants much less than this, as a poster on X highlighted:
Apparently Tory MP Mel Stride is on TV conning the public telling them that people with anxiety & depression get "thousands of pounds per month PIP" They dont. The vast majority get just £28.70p per week. He's saying they get thousands so you go along with the Tories cruel cuts. pic.twitter.com/Ikd0E4pvwB
More to the point, PIP is about making the cost of living equitable – or in other words, attempting to somewhat level the playing field for disabled people financially. Disability activist Paula Peters underscored this:
#PIP Mel stride says pip is thousands of pounds a month in tv interviews today. High rate care & high rate mobility totals £737.20p a month. Disabled people have additional costs due to their disability.
Ultimately, Stride wasn’t worried about the truth. Benefits costing the taxpayer “thousands a month”? His goal is visibly to whip up hatred towards disabled people.
So why stop there?
Well naturally, he didn’t.
Spinning a web of untruths
Stride followed up this bare-faced lie with another. Disability News Service (DNS)picked up that during the same interview, he:
also told the BBC on Tuesday that PIP was “a benefit that has not been reviewed for over a decade”.
This was also untrue. There were two high-profile independent reviews of PIP, with the first published in 2014 and the second reporting in 2017, just seven years ago.
So once again, Stride was caught out spinning his web of untruths. Ostensibly, the only thing with more holes than his BBC interview was the social security safety net he’s been carping on about.
His fallacious comments to the BBC come amid the DWP’s rancid plans to scrap PIP for a voucher scheme.
For more on why that’s an astoundingly terrible and vile idea, you can read the Charlton-Dailey’s scathing take-down here. But in short, it’s the Tory’s latest diabolical proposal to punch down on disabled people.
Pitching to his ableist voter base
Predictably, Stride has made no apologies for his falsehoods. As DNS reported:
When approached about the two comments, DWP only responded to the first one, claiming that Stride “misspoke” and had meant to say “thousands of pounds a year”, which he said during other interviews that morning.
The department refused to explain why he had wrongly claimed there had been no review of PIP for over a decade, and refused to say if Stride would apologise for either statement.
Naturally, these weren’t his first offences. DNS also pointed out that:
It took him just six days after he was appointed in 2022 to claim wrongly that there were 2.5 million people who were “long term sick” and “economically inactive” and who wanted to work.
In fact, the Office for National Statistics figures he was quoting did say there were 2.49 million working-age people who were economically inactive and described themselves as “long term sick” in the latest quarter of that year (June to August 2022), but those figures also showed that only 581,000 (23 per cent) of this group wanted a job.
So essentially, Stride has been a serial liar on television interviews since he took up the role. He could walk back these missteps, but ultimately of course, the damage is done.
At the end of the day, his lies and glaring lack of apology either suggests the latest DWP incarnation of evil shitfuckery doesn’t know his brief.
Or, more likely, he’s deliberately dishing out deceit to drum up support from the Tories’ racist, ableist, classist gammon voter base.
My money – including every paltry penny of my PIP – is on the latter.
He was arrested, bizarrely as Bella Ciao, the Italian anti-fascist classic, belted out from a nearby protest sound system, to be beautifully recorded on the arresting officer’s body cam:
Up before the beak
Then, on Wednesday 1 May – workers solidarity day and of course the ancient festival of Beltane – Neil went before the beak.
He had one witness: impeccably besuited, silver-haired videographer Paul, who bears an uncanny likeness to the late and beloved journalist Paul Foot.
Charged with obstruction and failure to obey a lawful instruction under the oxymoronically named Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act, Neil stood his ground, metaphorically coz he can’t walk.
Beltane mayhem wafted through the stifling court. ‘Your name’s not on the list, proceed to court 3.’ ‘Your name’s not on the list because it’s a different court.’ ‘Oh you can’t get in the other court in a wheelchair. So the judge, the clerk, the cop, and the CPS will all come to you.’ Neil is a magic man.
The British government: complicit with Israel
The judge was strict, with a shimmer of kindness.
The CPS prosecutor gamely made his case, though with some weird swerves:
Why didn’t you go to the Israeli embassy?
Neil:
It’s scary there, and the disabled facilities at Westminster are pretty good. My protest was also against the British Government for failing to call a ceasefire and for facilitating arms exports.
The tech failed, so the CPS had to show their footage of Neil’s arrest twice on laptop, once to the cop and once to the judge.
Bella Ciao reverberated through the room. I could barely contain my chuckle at this beautiful juxtaposition.
‘What has Guernica got to do with this? Why have you got a picture of your grandparents?’ demanded the judge. Bombs, Nazis, war crimes, the Blitz, refugees, horrors of war, Neil got it all in there.
Neil’s closing argument (self representing with the excellent assistance of a Green and Black Cross McKenzie Friend, a lovely woman called Ruth) a powerful and tearful testimony of murdered and maimed children which compelled him to act.
Synchronicity
To target the British government on a Wednesday during Prime Minister’s Questions to achieve maximum newsworthiness – hoping to draw press and public attention to war crimes being committed in Gaza with the compliance and cooperation of the UK state.
Adjourned for lunch, we stepped and wheeled out of the court, to find Palestinian flags waving in the wind, held aloft by two women. Neil whipped out his home made Palestine/Guernica placard and joined the photo opportunity.
After some confusion, it became apparent they were there to show solidarity with another woman, a young student, charged with criminal damage against war profiteers Lockheed Martin, as part of a Palestine Action group. Of course it transpired that the lovely Ruth of Green and Black Cross was also to attend this trial in support.
What amazing synchronicity we all agreed.
Hastily scoffing hot paninis we returned for the Judgement.
A heartfelt act of solidarity
Barely begun, our new comrades unexpectedly joined us in the public gallery as their case was inexplicably adjourned.
Her honour continued, she agreed with the law, the instruction was lawful, case lost we thought.
She laboured on through the various aspects of the defence, demolishing every one. Until the last, lawful excuse and proportionality. Was it proportionate to find Neil guilty of a criminal offence? We waited for the hammer to fall.
And then:
The CPS and the Police have failed to prove that there was any detrimental impact to anybody, therefore, the case is dismissed.
Hushed, astonished, and gleeful glances exchanged, we could barely believe it.
Neil, cheeky Charlie Chappy that he is, pipes up:
Judge, can you please say the words not guilty?
The judge obliges:
As I have just explained, the lack of evidence leads me to say the case is dismissed [a little smirk, the aforementioned shimmer is shining now] in other words you are NOT GUILTY! And by the way, no need for receipts, we’ll send you a cheque for your travel expenses.
Unfuckingbelievably, this happened on Mayday 2024.
We posed again for photos outside, whilst we all understand this is a little victory in the face of such atrocities, it is a victory nonetheless. A glimmer of hope for good people of conscience who stand up, and a heartfelt act of solidarity from us, the little people – because what else can we do?
The pariah state of Israel is planning to launch a full-scale ground invasion of Rafah. This could well be its most disturbing and violent act of aggression since the beginning of the Gaza genocide.
Israel: monsters supported by monsters
Even little desperate-to-be-relevant Britain, forever devoted to the Zionist ideology, warned of the “potentially devastating consequences for the civilian population of an expanded Israeli military operation in Rafah”, should the genocidal maniac Netanyahu pursue this desperately dangerous course of action.
But what Britain must realise is the very real fact that it has not just supported Israel’s 210-day-long campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, but also the 76 years of ethnic cleansing and genocide that preceded it.
A few platitudes and the most tremulous of criticisms from the Foreign Office simply isn’t going to wash away the blood of 14,000 Palestinian children from Britain’s moral conscience, as eroded as it may already be.
The British political elite — fronted by Zionists, for the benefit of Zionism — and its unswerving and often sycophantic support for the United States of Israel, have comfortably secured their place in history.
The best the Conservative/Labour duopoly can hope for is being remembered as the monsters who looked away and allowed this unspeakable evil of Gaza to continue.
Rafah: on the brink
Around 1.7 million people are currently living in Rafah. Many are living under no more than a piece of canvas while Israeli bombs continue to pound the surrounding area with zero fucks given for international law.
People lack food, sanitation, water, adequate shelter, and healthcare and have had their suffering compounded by a heatwave, which has seen temperatures exceed an unbearable 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).
Just seven years ago, Rafah was home to 171,000 people. Now, an area around half of the size of Luton has seen its population increase ten-fold because of the genocide. This would be unsustainable in ‘normal’ times.
Who in their right mind would think sending in one of the best-equipped military forces in the world into the tent city of Rafah — Gaza’s last place of refuge — to obliterate anyone and anything that moves would be anything other than one of the gravest acts of evil that we have ever witnessed?
By any means necessary
Gaza’s fate beyond any Israeli assault on Rafah still remains unknown. The ultra-Zionist extremists claim they have thousands of colonial settlers ready to move into Gaza and build new settlements on top of the children’s graveyard created by Netanyahu and his TikTok terrorist military.
They must be stopped by any means necessary. Diplomatic or militarily, they must be stopped from completing the Israeli ethnic cleansing project.
The 75,000 tonnes of bombs that have devastated and destroyed Gaza over the last six months has caused a massive 37 million tonnes of debris and rubble. This will take at least 14 years to clear.
Gaza has more rubble on the ground than Ukraine and to put that in perspective, the Ukrainian front line is 600 miles long and Gaza is 25 miles long. Where is the outrage of the Zelensky fan club, or does this 21st century Nazism strike a chord with them?
While the costs to rebuild Gaza will be north of $20 billion, it’s still nowhere near the £37 billion the Tories gifted to Dido Harding and scamming Serco to run Britain’s hugely embarrassing and not-fit-for-purpose Covid-19 test and trace system for two years.
US students daring to give a voice to the voiceless
I spent a bit of time today catching up with the videos of fascist US police officers beating the living shit out of university students that had gathered at the Gaza solidarity encampments.
If only America put just as much effort into restraining the colonial outpost of Israel — the perfect child that it has fathered for the past 25 years — as it has done into pepper spraying and brutalising young American students for having the temerity to give a voice to the voiceless.
If the Zionist fart sucker, Donald Trump, describes the scenes of utter carnage and brutality as “beautiful”, you know the American authorities have gone way too far when shooting students with often-deadly rubber bullets is an easier option than holding Israel accountable for its grotesque genocide.
Is it not quite staggering how the American political elite and the Zionist-dominated global media are more outraged by these anti-genocide protests than they are by the actual genocide itself?
The IHRA definition has always been catastrophic
You can’t even get a state contract in 37 states of America unless you are willing to pledge allegiance to Israel. What kind of madness is this?
Israel is a racist endeavour, and no amount of crying over the IHRA definition of antisemitism will ever change that. Why would anyone pledge allegiance to a far-right, genocidal bunch of extremist god botherers?
The IHRA definition has always posed catastrophic risks for the human rights of the Palestinian people, and for the right to freedom of expression globally. Time and time again it has been instrumentalised to suppress entirely legitimate criticism of the extremist Israeli government’s policies by falsely labeling it antisemitic.
No amount of “but Corbyn”, or “you’re a Khamas-loving antisemite” will be able to even begin to cover up the mass murder and the colonial ethnic cleansing project. The grotesque weaponisation of the evil of antisemitism will no longer be tolerated. We will not be lectured by victim-card-waving virulent racists with a thing for killing babies.
Where has that solemn lesson gone?
The merciless brutality of the Israeli aggression has opened up millions of eyes around the world to the heartbreaking man-made suffering of the Palestinian people.
The horrors of the 20th century were supposed to serve as a solemn lesson to humanity of just how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it head on.
Thousands upon thousands of dead Palestinians cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them, and by god, we will, because the history of liberty is a history of resistance.
On a personal note, thank you for all of your kind messages about my new weekly column for the Canary. Your support and advice is always appreciated.
But I do need to tell you… we have got something ABSOLUTELY HUGE coming your way, sooner rather than later, and you will read it here first, exclusively for the Canary.
Along with the devastating death toll – now almost 35,000 people, hundreds of aid workers and hundreds of medical staff have been killed in the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza — journalists have also paid a terrible price.
By far the worst of any war.
In Vietnam, 63 journalists were killed in two decades.
The Second World War was worse, with 67 journalists killed in seven years.
But now in the war on Gaza, we have had 143 journalists killed in seven months.
That’s the death toll according to Al Jazeera and the Gaza Media Office. (Western media freedom monitoring usually cite a lower figure, around the 100 plus mark, but I the higher figure is more accurate).
And these journalists — sometimes their whole families as well – have been deliberately targeted by the Israeli “Offensive” Force – I call it “offensive” rather than what it claims to be, defensive (IDF).
Kill off journalists
Assassination by design. Clearly the Israeli policy has been to kill off the journalists, silence the messengers, whenever they can.
Try to stifle the truth getting out about their war crimes, their crimes against humanity.
But it has failed. Just like the humanity of the people of Gaza has inspired the world, so have the journalists.
Their commitment to truth and justice and to telling the world their horrendous story has been an exemplary tale of bravery and courage in the face of unspeakable horror.
But there has been a glimmer of hope in spite of the gloom. On Friday — on World Press Freedom Day, May 3 — UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency, awarded all Palestinian journalists covering the war in Gaza the annual Guillermo Cano Award for media freedom.
This award is named in honour of Guillermo Cano Isaza, a Colombian investigative journalist who was assassinated in front of the offices of his newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá, Colombia on 17 December 1986.
Announcing the Gaza award in the capital of Chile, Santiago, in an incredibly emotional ceremony, Mauricio Weibel, chair of the international jury of media professionals, declared:
“In these times of darkness and hopelessness, we wish to share a strong message of solidarity and recognition to those Palestinian journalists who are covering this crisis in such dramatic circumstances.
“As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression.”
Ultimate price
For those of us who watch Al Jazeera every day to keep up with developments in Palestine and around the world — and thank goodness we have had that on Freeview to balance the pathetic New Zealand media coverage — I would like to acknowledge some of their journalists who have paid the ultimate price.
First, I would like to acknowledge the assassination of American-Palestinian Shireen Abu Akleh, who was murdered by Israeli military sniper while reporting on an army raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on 11 May 2022.
Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh . . . killed by an Israeli sniper in 2022 with impunity. Image:
A year later there was still no justice, and the Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders issued a protest, saying:
“The systematic Israeli impunity is outrageous and cannot continue.”
Well it did, right until the war on Gaza began five months later.
But I am citing this here and now because Shireen’s sacrifice has been a personal influence on me, and inspired me to take a closer look into Israel’s history of impunity over the killing of journalists — and just about every other crime. (It has violated 62 United Nations resolutions without consequences).
I have this photo of her on display in my office, thanks to the Palestinian Youth Aotearoa, and she constantly reminds me of the cruelty and lies of the Israeli regime.
Now moving to the present war, last December, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh was wounded in an Israeli strike in which his colleague and Al Jazeera Arabic’s cameraman Samer Abudaqa was killed, while they were reporting in southern Gaza.
Dahdouh’s wife Amna, son Mahmoud, daughter Sham and grandson Adam were previously killed in an attack in October after an Israeli air raid hit the home they were sheltering in at the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Then the veteran journalist’s eldest son, Hamza Dahdouh, also an Al Jazeera journalist, was killed in January by an Israeli missile attack in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.
News media reports said he was in a vehicle near al-Mawasi, an Israel-designated safe area, with journalist Mustafa Thuraya, who was also killed in the attack.
According to reports from Al Jazeera correspondents, their vehicle was targeted as they were trying to interview civilians displaced by previous bombings.
In February, Mohamed Yaghi, a freelance photojournalist who worked with multiple media outlets, including Al Jazeera, was also killed in an Israeli air strike in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet has voted unanimously to close Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel.
Vote comes after the Knesset passed a law allowing the temporary closure of foreign broadcasters considered a threat to national security pic.twitter.com/zFDPQdowXG
Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu branded Al Jazeera as a “terrorist channel”. Why? Because it broadcasts the truth about Israel’s genocidal war and Netanyahu threatened to ban the channel from Israel under a new law to control foreign media.
“I am a daughter, a sister to eight brothers, and a wife.
“Choosing to stay here is a choice to witness and report on the unbearable reality my city endures. Forced from my home, alongside countless Palestinians, we strive for the basics – clean food and water – without transportation or electricity.
“I am not a superhero; I am shattered from the inside. The loss of relatives, friends, and colleagues weighs heavy on my soul. Israeli forces ravaged my city, reducing homes to rubble. [Thousands of] civilians still lie beneath the remnants.
“My heart is aching, and my spirit is fragile. Since October 7, journalists have been targets; Israel seeks to stifle our voices.
“I miss my family.
“But surrender is not an option. I will continue to report, to breathe life into the stories of my people until my last breath. Please, do not let the world forget Palestine. We are weary, and your voice is our strength.
“Remember our voices, remember our faces.”
Pacific Media Watch convenor Dr David Robie delivering a speech on media freedom at the Palestinian rally at Auckland today. Image: Del Abcede/Pacific Media Watch
This article is adapted from a media freedom speech by Pacific Media Watch convenor Dr David Robie at the Palestine rally today calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza war.
The compromised former top boss of the Australian civil service has the lick and smell of belligerence. Begrudgingly conceding error and when in office, a bully and meddler in party politics, an incessant advocate of threats visible and invisible, Mike Pezzulo switches into a warmonger’s gear with ease.
The former secretary of the Department of Home Affairs was sacked last November after revelations that he had used WhatsApp to communicate with abandon with former New South Wales Liberal Party deputy director Scott Briggs. Those messages, unearthed in a joint investigation by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, confirmed what many already knew: Pezzullo’s voracious appetite for meddling in the party politics of the Coalition government while denigrating fellow public servants and a number of politicians.
In August 2018, for instance, Pezzullo offered Briggs his gamey views ahead of the Liberal Party revolt that would see the overthrow of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. “I don’t want to interfere but you won’t be surprised to hear that in the event of Scomo [Scott Morrison] getting up I would like to see [Peter] Dutton come back to HA [Home Affairs]. No reason for him to stay on the backbench that I can see.”
An inquiry into his conduct led by Lynelle Briggs found Pezzullo in breach of the Public Service Code of Conduct on various grounds. 14 breaches were identified from five broader allegations, including failures to maintain confidentiality regarding sensitive government information, maintain an apolitical stance, and disclosing a conflict of interest. Most fundamentally, he had misused his office and standing to benefit or advantage himself.
Last month heralded his return to the public arena, tinged by a sense of desperation that he wants to be taken seriously again. On the ABC’s 7.30 program, he admitted to making “mistakes” and accepted “the finding that no matter how rough and tumble there is in a place like Canberra, that the gaining of influence and the personal advantage to be gained by way of certain channels of communication, whether it’s to the prime minister or anyone else, crosses the line in terms of conduct.” Showing the mildest contrition, Pezzullo claimed he had “paid a price.” Hardly.
With such preliminaries out of the way, he could return to one of his favourite pass-times: warning about the Yellow-Red threat emanating from Australia’s north. He accepted that the prospect of a war with China was “actually quite low [but] the consequences would be significant and indeed catastrophic.” A meaningless percentage of such an eventuality was plucked out of thin air: 10 per cent. Notwithstanding that statistic of potential conflict, it was “meaningful enough to plan for and indeed to be concerned about.”
Focus, he insisted, should be directed to the dangers of cyber and cognitive warfare. Cyber and critical infrastructure were “vulnerable” to malware threats that could burgeon in the event of a conflict. Concerns held by FBI director Christopher Wray were cited (unsurprising – Pezzullo habitually fawns before the US national security state): “that there is malware implanted in both US and allied networks, which is specifically designed to be activated in the lead up to, or at the outset of, a conflict.”
Dusted off, this Manchurian candidate vision of the world, with its hibernating potency, has been repurposed as a threat against the critical infrastructure. “Director Wray has talked about the low blows that would be visited on the population at large … taking down hospitals, electricity grids, and the like.”
Close attention should be paid to the disfiguring way Pezzullo uses history. When he was Canberra’s most powerful (un)civil servant, he liberally offered gobbets of historical readings that were hopelessly out of context. Pezzulo has that charming sub-literate Wikipedia knowledge of the world that makes him tolerable in the company of other sub-literates. As Home Secretary, he was not shy in spouting febrile nonsense about such topics as, “The prospect of Great Power War” that he claimed would “approach, but not reach, a level of probability”, or the use of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons by actors that were not “readily identifiable”.
Such views were expressed in an address to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2019, alongside those fears that have become boringly recycled for endless consumption: “the deliberate subversion of our democratic institutions and our social cohesion”; “the world’s ungoverned and dangerous territories”; “radical extremist Islamist terrorism”; and “transnational, serious and organised crime” of the “globalised” variety.
His 2021 ANZAC Day address made no secret of his lust for conflict, masquerading, as ever, under the cover of peaceful intentions. “Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again, yet again, for the curse of war”. The speech was notable for mangling the legacies of two US generals: Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Fascinatingly enough, Pezzullo omits mentioning the sacking of MacArthur by President Henry S. Truman for exceeding his brief in wishing to bomb China during the Korean War, with atomic weapons, if need be.
As long as Sinophobic nonsense growls and barks in Canberra, most of it under the close, cultivating eyes of US-funded think tanks, political converts to empire and the Pentagon itself, this demagogic eunuch will have an audience.
I go on trial at Westminster Magistrate’s Court on May Day, having been nicked protesting the genocide in Gaza, blocking the entrance to parliament dressed as Charlie Chaplin.
This is what I hope to tell the judge.
Gaza protest: Why I did what I did
I had been feeling increasingly distressed by the tragic events unfolding in Gaza. Israel, with one of the most sophisticated arsenals and surveillance systems in the world, had launched a sustained attack against one of the poorest and most densely populated places on Earth, indiscriminately firing on defenceless and innocent people, many of whom were children.
Cutting off all water and electricity from 2 million people as a form of collective punishment. Using disturbing language to describe the Palestinians, such as likening them to, ‘human animals’. Ordering more than a million people, 80% of the population, to evacuate their homes within 24-hours before a barrage of near ceaseless bombing would begin.
A million people on the move in one day. Too many with just the clothes on their backs and a couple of carrier bags. Ordered to walk to one spot, Rafah, nearly 20 miles from Gaza City, where apparently it would be safe.
Hope and sanity seemed to be draining from the world, so I welcomed the ceasefire vote in parliament. But MPs voted 293 to 125 to reject the call. With the vast majority of MPs not even bothering to show up.
The final straw for me was seeing a video on LBC, three days before my Gaza protest. Headed, ‘They’re bombing the bit they told people to go to,’ a reference to Rafah. They were actually bombing the safe haven.
Amnesty International said that at least 95 civilians, nearly half of them children, had been killed in four rocket strikes.
This was not Israel defending itself or trying to rescue hostages. LBC’s James O’Brien said it well, ‘You can’t call it anything other than a massacre now. And you can’t justify it, frankly, on any level, unless you are prepared to accept the untold killing of innocent people, in the spurious pursuit of the guilty,’ he said, spurring me into action.
Mime activism: What I did
I arrived at Westminster on Wednesday 6 December, around the time PMQs would have been finishing up. The busiest time for both Parliament and the media who report on it. I positioned my mobility scooter outside the Carriage Entrance. My plan was to attract a swarm of police officers and elevate my protest to news-worthy-ness, and I’d do it dressed as Charlie Chaplin, with the hat and tails and full make-up:
For 18 years, I have inhabited a character that I have called Charlie X, a form of mime activism based on Chaplin’s the Little Tramp.
I held aloft a placard showing a powerful image of a young Israeli boy, and Palestinian girl tending a sapling, that was growing amidst the rubble. I’d added the words ‘Peace’.. ‘Shalom’ in Hebrew, and ‘Salaam’ in Arabic:
Disabled solidarity with music and art
40% of Gaza’s population is aged 14 and below. Save The Children says there’s about 610,000 children, or one for every 2 adults. That’s tens of thousands of babies, tens of thousands of toddlers, tens of thousands of kids of primary school age. Children trying to survive devastating injuries sustained in airstrikes and sniper attacks, their stories painting a harrowing picture of the human consequences of Israel’s prolonged hateful indiscriminate onslaught.
I’m disabled, but enjoy the support of family, friends and the NHS, so I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for a crippled toddler to survive the extreme trauma of terrible excruciating injuries? An estimated one thousand children in Gaza have become amputees since October 2023, have lost one or more limbs, often operated on without the use of anaesthetic, with no family, and no health service. A child who has to somehow survive their wounds on the streets of Gaza, with 24 bombed hospitals and 400 murdered healthcare professionals.
On the back of my placard was a little music box that played ‘Hey Jude’, when you turned the handle, it chimes, ‘Take a sad song and make it better.’ There is nowhere sadder than Gaza right now.
I also held a large sign showing a section of Picasso’s powerful painting ‘Guernica’, depicting the bombing of a Spanish market town in 1937. One of the first acts of genocide committed by the Nazis. Someone had filled it in with Palestine’s national colours, drawing a direct link to the bombing of Gaza:
Never again: from the Blitz to the Nakba
In one corner I had added in a Remembrance Day poppy to connect to Britain’s experience of war. My Great Grandparents were bombed out twice during the Second World War. The family archive has this newspaper clipping that says, ‘BOMBED OUT TWICE – Now couple celebrate diamond wedding’
Their son, my grandfather, was in the fire service, stationed at Lewisham. He never spoke about his wartime experiences, but it must have been extremely tough. He was probably on duty in July ‘44, when Lewisham market, was bombed, destroying a Marks and Spencer’s, killing 59 people, and seriously injuring hundreds of others.
My father, who was 7, fled London with hundreds of thousands of other kids. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people fled the capital in near panic during this period.
So, you see, the Blitz is very much part of my family history. It’s in my DNA. It’s partly why I think I have a natural affinity to the plight of the Palestinians today. Like them, my family knew what it felt like to be hated and hunted by a genocidal regime. Like them, my family knew what it felt like to face death at any moment, to lose everything, to have to flee their home, to run for their lives. In Britain we called it ‘The Blitz’. In Gaza they call it Nakba, which means – ‘Catastrophe’.
Charlie Chaplin getting busted for Gaza
I felt calm, empowered, exactly where I should be. I was soon approached by a police officer who told me to move, motioning towards the pavement beyond the cordon, saying I was free to carry out my protest ‘over there’. But ‘over there’ I was just another tourist attraction, and they would have no doubt already seen another and better Charlie Chaplin on the South Bank. My version was more ‘Modern Times’ than ‘do the box’. Defiant, political, prone to getting into trouble, wave a red flag, and recite the Speech from the Great Dictator at the top of my lungs. That has always been my version of the little tramp, and it was like the tourists expected to see Charlie Chaplin getting busted on their big day out in London. Hundreds of people from all around the world took pictures, and video, and many showed their approval:
At one point, an officer asked me if I would be prepared to move out of the way if an ambulance needed to enter parliament in an emergency. I gestured ‘yes’.
I don’t think that it can be properly said that I was blocking the gates. At no time was I aware of a vehicle needing to enter or leave Parliament. The double gates remained shut the whole time. The width of my scooter is 68cms, and judging by the Body Cam footage of my arrest, you can clearly see that there was still enough room for a vehicle to pass:
So, you could describe my obstruction as more than minor, but less than major, well targeted in terms of the time and place, and designed to attract media and by extension government attention to an immediate and dire situation, to warn about the moral jeopardy that the UK will find itself in if it continues to turn a blind eye to genocide. And to British companies thatare currently facilitating it:
After my arrest
In Charring Cross police station, at midnight, a detective came to my cell and offered me a caution to effectively forget the whole thing, and drive away. And after being in a cell for 9 hours, I have to say it was tempting. But I just thought of all those dead and injured Palestinian children being collectively punished for something they had nothing to do with. And so I thought, ‘No, let’s see this through.’ Let’s get my day in court and hopefully get a chance to say what I think needs to be said.
On the 29th December, about a week before my plea hearing, South Africa reported Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the crime of genocide, alleging that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to a deliberate policy of extermination against the Palestinian people. And on 26 January, with reportedly 1% of Gaza’s population, some 25,700 people, mostly women and children then killed, the ICJ delivered its interim judgement, with15 of the 17 judges finding plausibility in South Africa’s case.
I felt vindicated. On the right side of history. My little act of defiance justified. Happy that I hadn’t allowed myself and, by extension, my Charlie X character, to lose our humanity, our ability to act when it matters by taking a stand, and then to stand by those actions. I stand by my actions, my civil disobedience on the grounds of conscience, and am more than willing to vouch for the sincerity of my beliefs, and the world I want to live in, and accept any penalties imposed by law as a price worth paying.
Featured image and additional images via Christine Ongsieg and videos via Paul
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Final nail in the coffin for human rights at the EU's borders and beyond.
