Guardian columnist John Harris has a new piece where he laments the UK’s “drift to the right” and the rhetoric on refugees. But imagine if Jeremy Corbyn, who has long stood with refugees, was prime minister. Refugees certainly wouldn’t be facing the Conservative government’s Rwanda bill, which threatens to deport them to Rwanda as a ‘deterrent’.
Both Harris and the Guardian tirelessly pushed anti-Corbyn narratives while he was Labour leader.
Guardian: intentionally smearing Corbyn
In a 2016 article, Harris declared “this is the end” for Labour, characterising the democratic surge of political involvement under Corbyn as a “collapse into spite and bullying”.
In another piece, Harris said Labour was in a “deep irrelevance”, arguing the party should instead be a pro-EU protest movement.
Again in a separate 2018 column, Harris argued Labour should focus on Brexit, accusing Corbyn of being “lost in a rose-tinted vision of Labour’s past”.
By the 2019 election, Labour had adopted a policy of a re-run of the Brexit referendum. This meant the party bled votes to the Tories in key pro-Brexit seats, losing Corbyn the election.
By contrast in 2017, when Labour respected the referendum result, Corbyn made greater gains than any Labour leader since 1945.
If the supposedly progressive Guardian had been behind him, perhaps he would’ve won in 2017.
They know that their Rwanda plan will never work. That’s not the point. Their intention is to whip up hatred, division and fear.
Refugees do not make arduous and deadly journeys to the UK for fun. They make huge risks to reach our shores. I’ve been to Calais on several occasions, and each time I learn more about the diabolical conditions facing those who are trying to seek a place of safety. Plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda will not “deter” them from crossing the Channel. It will simply make life even harder for some of the most vulnerable human beings in the world.
He continued:
Instead of demonising refugees, the government should address the roots of their plight: war, human rights abuses and persecution.
The Guardian remains a useful resource, but the outlet and its columnists are clearly not serious about real progressive political change.
Otherwise, they would have got behind Corbyn. Now we’ve been stuck with more years of Tory rule, which Harris ironically laments.
All aboard the hating disabled people bus for our next batshit destination! Having just left ‘doctors can’t be trusted to write sicknotes’ lane and careening past the UN report at breakneck speed so as not to allow us time to digest it, we arrive at our next stop – that’s right, it’s ‘give people on PIP vouchers‘!
Yep, the latest in the Tory’s horrific announcements about disability benefits is that they plan to scrap PIP payments and replace them with a system which will involve answering a wizard’s riddle to get any money.
Okay, that’s not strictly true, but the actual plan isn’t any more serious. What Rishi actually wants to do is replace Personal Independence Payment with vouchers. I did warn you.
Vouchers for disabled people?! Come off it!
This is such a horrible idea I can’t even fully articulate how cruel it would be. For starters, it strips away the ‘independence’ part of PIP as it takes away our financial autonomy.
Vouchers would limit where we spend our cash. Would they be accepted in all shops? How much would the vouchers be for? Will they just be things to help support us – like care and mobility aides – or will they also be for food and bills?
Will taxis accept them? What about carers and people we hire to help us like cleaners? Can I pay my prescription charges exemption certificate in vouchers?
Okay now you’re taking the piss
The other option the government is ‘exploring’ is submitting receipts to claim money back.
This is even more absurd because it almost insinuates that the DWP runs effectively enough as it is, never mind when swamped with millions of expenses requests a month.
There’s also one very obvious fact, though apparently its not obvious to the Tories. So I’ll spell it out here.
You can’t buy things to claim the money back if you don’t have any money in the first place
What this plan will do is make disabled people take out loans and enter into buy now, pay later schemes. It’ll push us further into debt – and you can guarantee you won’t get reimbursed plus the interest.
By proposing we send the government receipts to claim money back, they’re treating our everyday essentials and commodities as expenses.
Though I guess to a man who’s worth £700 million they are.
Not the millionaire PMs problem
Sunak never has to worry about whether he can afford to turn the heating on or where his next meal is coming from.
The man will never be in debt in his life. He will never know the humiliation of having to use vouchers and coupons for food and electricity.
Oh, the inaccuracy
So of course the media has been full of regurgitated and unchallenged inaccurate rubbish, mainly that PIP is an out of work benefit. This is not true. Many on PIP work and as a result are the taxpayers you claim we’re stealing from.
Human wet wipe and DWP minister Mel Stride was on BBC Breakfast this morning once again demonising us. During this, he said PIP was a ‘very blunt’ benefit. This is only correct if he’s talking about the rigid assessment criteria and traumatising assessments.
The best part of what the human equivalent to farting and blaming it on the dog said though was this:
You get a fixed amount every month, irrespective in many ways of your condition. In some cases that may be a condition that needs something like a grab rail to get into the bath and various other appliances of that kind.
Which are relatively inexpensive, you might even be able to get them from your local authority or local NHS and yet the PIP thousands of pounds a month.
So lets break this snippet of bullshit down
PIP is only ‘irrespective of conditions’ in the sense that it doesn’t take into account the nature of many conditions and the assessments focus on if you can feed and dress yourself.
Grab rails don’t mean anything when we can’t afford specialist food or to have the heating on more.
Local authorities and the NHS are already stretched, they don’t have the funding.
PIP is a maximum of £798.63 a month, but many get much less.
As I said in my column previously it’s a huge problem that these lies are being allowed to be continuously spread – and worse regurgitated by the media.
The government and the corporate media have spent months demonising conditions like autism, ADHD, and anxiety and it was all building up to this. Because you can’t just straight out announce you’re cutting disabled people’s support. But you can spend months making them out to be liars and a drain on society so that the public will think they don’t deserve the support.
The thing is I don’t think the aim is to cut PIP, because those fuckers know they’ve got to win an election first.
What vouchers for disabled people is actually about
We don’t know what you will be able to claim vouchers for or expenses on, but I can tell you what you absolutely won’t be able to claim for: anything nice. The little things we treat ourselves to get through this awful reality the government has forced us into.
This “plan” is an attempt to appease the sad little losers who clog up my mentions telling me to get a job and stop ripping off taxpayers anytime I get my nails done. It’s the 72% who think people on benefits shouldn’t be able to have a takeaway once a week.
The people who are constantly wanging on about how we’ll only spend it on booze and iPhones and helicopters (but not helicopters) anyway – whilst MPs piss away thousands of taxpayers money on just that (and nearly helicopters) – with the almost side-by-side announcement that Lord Hamface Cameron has just bagged himself a £42m private jet).
Why don’t we make MPs and former PMs live on vouchers instead?
That’s 200 days without clean water, food, electricity, life-saving medicines, a bathroom, privacy, or just simply a place of sanctuary that you are able to call home.
That’s 200 days of unbridled mass slaughter, starvation, dehydration, displacement, torture, mass arrests, and 200 days of relentless dehumanisation.
It has been 200 days of genocide, enabled and paid for by Western elites and brutally executed by the coloniser-in-chief, Benjamin Netanyahu.
200 days of genocide in numbers
United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said a child in Gaza is killed or wounded “every 10 minutes”. A staggering 72% of Israel’s victims have been women and children.
At least 7,000 people are still missing. Israel is using thermobaric bombs to quite literally vapourise Palestinian civilians.
At least 75,000 tonnes of explosives have been dropped on Gaza by Israeli forces. Civilians have been intentionally targeted and Israel wants to build new settlements on the children’s graveyard that is Gaza.
At least 30% of children in Gaza are suffering from acute malnutrition and at least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people are dying every day from outright starvation or a combination of malnutrition and disease.
At least 180 UNRWA staff have been killed by Israel, from October to March, and at least 196 humanitarian aid workers have been killed by the occupation since 7 October.
At least 350 healthcare professionals have been killed since 7 October with at least 520 wounded. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN special rapporteur on the right to health, says the numbers were “grossly underreported”.
Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’? Fuck off.
At least 34,262 Palestinians have been killed by the racist colonial state of Israel since 7 October. This is at least 171 humans murdered every single fucking day by a nuclear-armed military that claims to be the most moral in the world whilst in reality they are committing the most heinous of crimes against humanity in our lifetimes.
That’s roughly where we are following 200 days of genocide and ethnic cleansing, yet the deranged extremists in the Knesset want MORE dead children, MORE enforced displacement, and MORE devastation and destruction wreaked upon the innocent Palestinian population.
I hate to say it, but if you are still blaming Hamas for the actions of the Israeli war machine, and if you are still banging on about Israel’s right to “self-defence”, despite the mounting evidence that clearly illustrates the most brutal of genocides, you’re an absolute cunt.
I mean, wouldn’t it be a tad hypocritical to suggest Israel has every right to defend itself, but Palestine doesn’t? An occupied state has every fucking right to fight back and resist, both morally and legally, whether you approve of their methods or not.
Netanyahu: everything is now antisemitic
You might’ve noticed the beautiful chaos that has engulfed campuses across the US as pro-Palestinian student protests spread to universities across the length and breadth of the country.
The protests began at Columbia University in New York City where students set up the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, on 17 April.
Hundreds of anti-genocide, pro-humanity students have been arrested by typically heavy-handed American cops that see any other skin colour than white as a threat to their American ‘values’.
Netanyahu responded to the mass protests by declaring everyone and everything is antisemitic and is reminiscent of what happened at German universities in the 1930’s.
This is the same child killer Netanyahu that has ordered the destruction of every university in Gaza.
The Islamic University of Gaza, Al-Azhar University, Al-Quds Open University, University College of Applied Sciences, University of Palestine, Al-Israa University, University of Gaza, Al-Aqsa University, Palestine Technical College, Palestine College of Nursing, and the College of Applied Sciences have all been bombed by the Tel Aviv terrorists.
Yet this fucking abomination of a failed human wants to clamp down on entirely legitimate protests at universities across the United States?
Harsh? I don’t think so.
This isn’t just a war on Gaza, nor is it a war on the children of Gaza, but it is a full-throttled assault on humanity itself, and this genocide of the Palestinian people would have been impossible without the backing of the Western imperialists.
The despot hijacker of Judaism, Netanyahu, could go to the burning pits of hell and back a million times over and it still wouldn’t even begin to compensate for the devastation he has unleashed upon the Middle East.
Harsh? I don’t fucking think so.
Harsh is telling a civilian population to flee to a safe zone whilst shooting them on their way and bombing them when they arrive.
Harsh is being starved to death when truck upon truck laden with humanitarian aid is just a stone’s throw away from you, but extremist colonial settlers refuse to allow the aid through.
Harsh is being detained by the Israeli military without charge or trial and being physically, sexually and psychologically abused on a daily basis. Torture is rife, dogs are used to bite children. Men, women and children are urinated on by deranged Israeli soldiers.
Harsh is the horrifying discovery of mass graves at Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals in Gaza.. Hundreds of bodies have been exhumed, some decapitated, many tortured, others missing their limbs or organs. Patients were executed with their hands tied.
Shining a light on power in places of darkness
How on earth are we supposed to co-exist with these fucking barbaric Israeli arseholes? The apocalyptic scenes from Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals over the past week or so are worse than anything you will ever see in a horror movie.
I’ll finish up this week by mentioning a new report from former US officials and human rights experts expressing ‘grave concerns’ with the Biden administration’s weapons transfers to Israel.
You will do well to find any mention of it through traditional media outlets, but that’s the joy of independent media such as The Canary.
We are happy to shine a light on power in places of darkness. We have no shareholders to satisfy and we never answer to pro-Israel Zionists or the forces of evil that enable them. We don’t do “off-limits”.
The hushed up report, submitted to the US government on 19 April said the authors found:
a clear pattern of violations of international law, failures to apply civilian harm mitigation best practices, and restrictions of humanitarian assistance, by the Government of Israel and the IDF, often utilizing US provided arms.
Remember: Israel submitted a written assurance to the US government back in March saying that it was using American-supplied weapons per international humanitarian law.
76 years of occupation
The panel of experts — whose objective was to inform the US Departments of State and Defence of its findings as they prepare a final assessment for Congress slated for 8 May — said it reviewed thousands of reports of Israeli violations of international law, noting an Israeli strike on 9 October on Jabalia refugee camp that destroyed several multi-story buildings and killed at least 39 people, which the UN said appeared to have no specific military objective.
The damning report goes on to say:
The Task Force concludes that the incidents… are just the most easily identifiable among a clear pattern of violations of international law, failures to apply civilian harm mitigation best practices, and restrictions of humanitarian assistance, by the Government of Israel.
In short, Joe Biden is up to his fucking eyeballs in the blood of the Palestinian people, and the diminished responsibility line just isn’t going to cut it when history passes its judgement on Biden’s complicity in genocide.
The mounting evidence before the Biden administration now pales only in comparison to the humanitarian crisis afflicting Palestinians in Gaza.
It has been 200 days of live-streamed genocide and 76 years of occupation, and the world will never be the same again.
For every complex problem there is always an answer that is simple, clear and wrong.
We often see these answers crop up when dealing with the wicked social issue that is violence in our society.
There is currently a petition circulating online asking for legislation changes that would allow women to carry pepper spray.
I absolutely appreciate that in the wake of the crimes in Bondi people are feeling confronted and afraid, which comes with the need for action.
I can offer assurances to these people. There is a lot of meaningful work happening across the country. For the first time in a decade, we have a government who is genuinely invested in reducing violence against women.
In 2018 the Australian Party’s Senator Fraser Anning pushed for a bill that would allow pepper spray to be imported into the country and would legalise its use in all states and territories for self-defence. Mr Anning’s motion was rejected due to the complexities of how the legalisation of pepper spray could be more broadly weaponised. That hasn’t changed.
I am concerned about how this horrific event is being weaponised, even from those with the best of intentions who are hoping to shine a light on gender-based violence.
In trying to advocate for women’s safety, they are demanding reactive policy with potentially catastrophic outcomes.
This campaign has not come from the public sector or government despite some false claims that my colleagues and I are fully supportive.
We are certainly not.
Reactive response like this lacks a trauma-informed lens. It puts the responsibility of the choices of one individual onto victims and does not address the core issues of male violence.
I have read completely irresponsible rhetoric in the Daily Mail that has suggested if women had pepper spray the Bondi attacks would have been stopped. Let me be exceptionally clear – there is zero evidence to support this claim.
The attacker was neutralised with a weapon– not pepper spray- by a senior police officer. This would have been an educated choice based on training and years of experience by the officer who did an exceptional job.
The issue with the blanket statement ‘pepper spray reduces violence against women’ is that there isn’t evidence to support it.
The ABS personal safety survey from 2022 demonstrates in the most recent incidents of violence by a male, the perpetrator was more likely to be someone the woman knew (85%) than a stranger (16%). The perpetrator was most commonly an intimate partner (53%), including a cohabiting partner (28%), and boyfriend or date (25%).
The data tells an important story of how and who women need to be protected from.
What are we suggesting will happen when a potential victim is armed with pepper spray? What happens when the violence escalates and the perpetrator is also armed with the same weapon?
If women and non-binary folk can carry pepper spray, so can men. So can gangs. So can everyone.
Pepper spray is legalised in WA, however the legislation requires a high threshold for people to be able to carry it – as it should.
In 2022, a 20-year review into people with pepper spray injuries that presented to emergency departments in the United States (where pepper spray is freely available) concluded that patients with pepper spray-related injuries tended to be older children and young adults. Not people protecting themselves from lone wolf attacks.
In the wake of widespread protests in 2020, it was found that protestors and police were both using pepper spray as well as its far-stronger counterpart, bear spray.
This study and many others find that the use of pepper spray is not effective in reducing rates of violence.
The petition does not address the role that men need to have in being a voice in the protection of women. They have to be involved in challenging systems and power structures that entrench the view that women are responsible for the violence that happens to them.
The simple argument that ‘women need to carry pepper spray’ creates a neat media narrative to avoid having that tough conversation on a national scale.
Gender-based violence and men’s violence is mostly importantly an issue for men to take the lead on.
Carrying a concealed weapon simply supports the idea that men don’t have an active role to play in the prevention of violence.
There is a lot of work happening across the country to address these issues and I would encourage all people who want change to engage with established campaigns and organisations who champion the issue of women’s safety to Parliament in a way the ensures they will really be kept safe.
No, it arrested, prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned and deported the Israeli agents, plus made them pay a big sum of damages. And it refused to restore normal diplomatic relations with Israel until Israel apologised to NZ. Which Israel did.
Today’s government needs to treat Israel the same way it treats other aggressors, like Russia, with the likes of sanctions.
And the government needs to designate Zionism as an inherently racist, terrorist ideology.
Everyone knows that the Gaza War would stop in five minutes if the US stopped arming Israel to the teeth and allowing it to commit genocide with impunity.
Israel is the mass murderer; the US is the enabler of mass murder.
New Zealand is part of the US Empire. The most useful thing we could do is to sever our ties to that empire, something we bravely started in the 1980s with the nuclear-free policy. Also, do these things:
Develop a genuinely independent foreign policy;
Get out of US wars, like the one in the Red Sea and Yemen;
Get out of the Five Eyes spy alliance;
Close the Waihopai spy base and the GCSB, the NZ agency which runs it;
Kick out Rocket Lab, NZ’s newest American military base;
Stop the process of getting entangled with NATO; and
Stay out of AUKUS, which is simply building an alliance to fight a war with China.
I never thought I’d find myself on the same side of an issue as Don Brash and Richard Prebble but even they have strongly opposed AUKUS.
Zionism is the enemy of the Palestinian people.
US imperialism is the enemy of the Palestinian people and the New Zealand people.
Murray Horton is secretary/organiser of the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) and gave this speech last Saturday to a Palestinian solidarity rally at the Bridge of Remembrance, Christchurch.
In today’s America there is no need for a contract for millions of my fellow working stiffs. With many states like mine (Florida) having “Right to work laws,” unions are few and far between. Duh, like not even 10% of private sector workers are unionized. So, you work for a boss on hourly, weekly, or on commission (as this writer still does for over 40 years) you can be replaced or as the Brits say “redundanized” just like that! And they complain, the Fat Cats who own industry, about slow motion or uncaring employees. Well, like with the guy who put in our laminate floors told me several years ago: “At the place I work, with three of us wood craftsmen, the owner just bought himself, his wife and his two children new BMWs. Yet, never a thought to give us raises or a nice bonus at Christmas.”
Let’s not just obsess over the shitty work climate for blue and white collar working stiffs. No, check this out: I used my smart TV and found many “Free Channels” meaning no cost to watch. I got into a three season series and was really hooked on the storyline etc. Well, with this channel, TUBI, they have more commercials than I have ever experienced. The way things are set up if you try to leave the show you may lose where you are in it, so I had to sit through the ****. Most of the commercials were geared for young millennials (20s to early 30s) or the Medicare age folks like myself. I could not believe commercials pushing “Up to $500 cash NOW with no hassles.” Then you have the ones like Credit Karma whereupon the guy wants to rent this apartment and his credit score is low. So, with Credit Karma you see the guy signing for the “way too costly for my budget” apartment as the For Rent sign is taken down. God bless finance capitalism! How about this one, again geared for that 20 to 30+ age group. It’s so easy to buy a new car or sell your old one. With the app in hand this young woman bought the car online… having never test driven it. No bargaining on the price, and who cares, this is modern America! The other young woman is bragging about selling her car online, and how much she got for it. Again, no bargaining. Obviously, those transactions were through some corporation that has the analytics down to a science… for them!
Twelve years ago, I decided to go back to doing stand-up comedy after a hiatus of 40 years. There was a comedy contest at some club in St Augustine, about 50 miles away. I signed up by computer and wrote a nice bit for myself. It was primary election season, so I focused on that and my other major peeve: Dental charges for most Americans with no dental insurance. When I arrived at the club, we contestants met with the MC. He was a regular comic at the place, maybe early 30s. Nice guy. I drew the short stick so I had to go on first. He told me that he would warm the audience up and then introduce me. The rule was to go for 8 minutes. I sat offstage by the bar to observe him. He spent his entire warm up time of 10 minutes with Fart, Tit and Dick jokes. They were laughing hysterically while I was sighing. “I’m dead!” Before he introduced me I did a quick study of the audience. Thirty five people, mostly two tops, a few fours. Their ages varied from mid twenties all the way up to the lady sitting by herself who looked my age. I started out with the Republican primary contenders. “It’s funny folks but if you think about it anyone can kind of look like someone else. Look at the Republicans running for president in 2012. You have Newt Gingrich who looks like a pedophile Bishop.” [Only the lady right below me is really laughing.] “Then you have Rick Santorum, Senator from PA, who looks like he belongs under a car changing the oil with Gomer and Goober.” [Silence] “Or Sarah Palin, who looks like a very attractive Drag Queen.” [Oh boy, tough crowd]. So I changed gears and did my dental bit. “How many of you folks have dental insurance, raise your hands.” Two thirds of the audience raised hands… are these people from earth? I went on anyway. “With the way things are nowadays here is how a first visit to a dentist will look like. You’re in the chair, he probes your mouth with his assistant taking notes. “OK # 17, $2200- root canal and crown. # 6 and #7 both have cavities, $600 total. # 21 $1100” [The lady below is laughing through it all, while with the other 34 people a silence there’s that can kill.] My mouth became as dry as a desert and I prayed the 8 minutes would come… and they did! I walked right out and drove home and never looked back.
During the Vietnam debacle in the 60s and early 70s many of us college students and young working stiffs got out and protested. Even before and after the Bush/Cheney illegal (and immoral) invasion of Iraq, we had many young folks joining us on the street corner. Perhaps not as many as when we had the military draft, but still enough to give us some hope. Well, since that time, where in the hell are the majority of our young Americans? Nowhere to be found, except in the bars and clubs doing what we all did at some time: partying. The difference is that my generation of young Americans who saw through the **** found time to both protest and party. Not anymore. The empire now owns us. As far as those senior citizens like yours truly, well, too many of my fellow baby boomers are more concerned about their next Social Security check, investments, and personal health care. No room for the people of Gaza or the dead-end job workers throughout this nation. No room for the blatant racism, homophobia, etc.
Finally, this Military Industrial Empire actually loves it when working stiffs and retired working stiffs are divided by issues their embedded media and politicos embellish. We have finally become, for certain, the permanent consumer society we always were, especially after WW2. Those commercials reflect just how far down the rabbit hole we landed. When the choices continue to be presented to us of who should rule us, between a Clinton and Bush Sr., a Gore or a Bush Jr., and Obama or a McCain, a Hillary or a Trump, and then (twice, mind you) a Biden or a Trump, we are lost as a culture. And they laugh at the other “Banana Republics”.
Why are Western diplomats scornful and apoplectic with rage towards Iran while failing to denounce Israel’s deadly strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria? I don’t think it’s a particularly controversial question, do you?
Am I understanding this correctly?
Let me get this right: Israeli bombs are fine, but Iranian bombs aren’t? It’s okay to target innocent civilians in Gaza, but not European colonialists in Tel Aviv? And Israel, the perpetual aggressor, has a right to self-defence, but Iran has to suck it up and accept Israel can attack them whenever they feel like it?
Britain, Germany, and the United States hide their interior wickedness under the appearance of virtue. Hypocrisy is not a way for the crestfallen West to find its way back to the moral high ground. There is no way back now, and I can think of at least 34,000 reasons why.
We can pretend we are moral, and we can certainly say we are moral, but this is not the same as acting morally.
Honestly, the people trying to tell you that Britain has acted morally during the last six months will be the same fucking headbangers that will tell you Fred West was a bit of a bastard, but his patio laying skills were second-to-none, if it scores them just one minuscule political point.
It is absolutely beyond me how Britain — now just a bit-part player on the global scene — or any other state sponsor of genocide can condemn a relatively unspectacular missile launch from Tehran while not having a single fucking word to say about the barbaric Israeli drone strike on a playground that executed 11 innocent Palestinian children, this past week.
Israel’s killing of Palestinian children versus Iran’s unspectacular missile launch
These children, already physically and mentally shattered by 6 months of genocide and many years of illegal occupation, were playing in a playground that was built for Gazan children to find some temporary respite from the slaughter that follows them.
I cannot stress enough how vitally important it is for you to wake up every single day and not just wholeheartedly believe, but insist we want to live in a world where helpless innocent children aren’t targeted, maimed and murdered by a fucking drone strike.
How many Hamas resistance fighters were hiding in this playground? None.
How many senior Western diplomats had the moral testicles to call out this brazen act of Israeli genocide? None.
The galling hypocrisy of the Western elite has dragged this preach-but-never-practice and utterly mythical rules-based world order to the point of no return. Gaza has become the eternal grave of the Western-led world order.
The pariah state provocateur
Israel, the pariah state provocateur, is poking and prodding in a desperate attempt to force other countries into an entirely different narrative other than the genocide it is conducting in Gaza.
34,000 dead. 76,000 injured. Millions displaced. Gaza is under a state of siege and starvation with humanitarian aid being used as a tool for political blackmail. Israeli quadcopters are playing recordings of distressed babies in an attempt to lure out worried civilians, so the Israeli monsters can execute them.
Humanitarian aid workers, doctors, nurses, journalists, men, women, children and babies — all murdered in their thousands because Israel can and will continue to do so without as much as a sanction from an impotent international community because of the power of the colonialists veto.
That’s the fucking narrative right there.
Israel’s TikTok colonialism
Colonialism on steroids for the 21st century. An army that proudly displays its evils on TikTok with zero fucks given for international law.
The Israeli campaign to “bring them home” is probably in your face as much as it is mine. Ask any senior British minister or shadow minister for their opinion of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and they will always caveat every answer with some scripted crap about releasing the hostages.
No civilian deserves to be caught up in Israel’s ethnic cleaning and genocide of Gaza.
If this statement applies to the several dozen Israeli hostages being held by the Palestinian resistance it must equally apply to the 3,660 Palestinian hostages held under Israel’s administrative detention — a remnant of the British Mandate era — without being charged or allowed to stand trial.
Palestinian Prisoner’s Day: where was the ‘rules-based order’?
These detainees — including many women and children — are held by the Israeli terrorist forces for renewable periods of time based on ‘secret evidence’ that neither the detainee or their legal representative is allowed to see.
Israel and its fanatical extremist supporters cannot lecture me or anyone else about releasing hostages until they are demanding the release of every single Palestinian hostage being held under administrative detention by the Israeli savages.
Wednesday April 17th marked Palestinian Prisoner’s Day. This is an annual event that is dedicated to the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
Campaigners use the day to call for the human rights of Palestinian prisoners to be upheld and for those who have been detained without charge to be released.
Four in 10 Palestinian men have spent time in an Israeli prison. If you want a comparison just look towards the United States, a country with the world’s largest prison population where one in 200 people is in jail.
Israel’s cult of Zionism
From its earliest days, Zionism – a cult that claims a divine predestination leading them to regard themselves as God’s chosen people – was deeply imbued with the same racist attitudes of other European settler-colonial movements.
Some of the most important people on the face of the planet, both past and present, have always believed Zionism should be entirely immune from criticism, and this has allowed it to flourish into the extremist, vicious tool of imperialism that it has become today.
Has anyone even considered the very simple fact that under the Fourth Geneva Convention, it is against international law for an occupying power to transfer an occupied people from the occupied territory? Anyone?
The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory.
That’s thousands of Palestinians being illegally detained, often without charges or a trial, subjected to horrifying torture, brutal beatings, rape, and often forced to make entirely fabricated confessions under duress.
Yet the Western elite want you to believe its this entirely legitimate resistance, armed with (by way of comparison) no more than a few beefed-up peashooters, who deserve to have tax-dollar-funded bombs dropped on their children as they sleep in a fucking flooded filthy tent.
A reputation irreparably damaged
I know we lost our national moral consciences some time ago, long before Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and when that went, the myth of Western humanity was lost at the same time. But at what point did we completely lose our marbles?
It is now impossible to mention the name “Israel” without automatically thinking of the atrocities they have committed in the name of “self-defence”.
Israel’s reputation on the world stage has been irreparably damaged, and not a moment too soon, and if reports are to be believed, Israel is seriously considering the prospect of arrest warrants being issued by the International Criminal Court for Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders for alleged violations of international law in Gaza.
Just for once, I think I’ll end on that positive possibility, and if I rant on for much longer the editor of the Canary might not want me back next Sunday.
Australians are being urged to stay united following the horrific events in Sydney last week, reports the ABC’s Saturday Extra programme.
Five women and one man were killed in a mass stabbing at Bondi Junction last Saturday by a man with a history of mental illness, and a nine-month-old baby baby was among the eight people wounded.
The attacker was shot by a police officer and died at the scene.
Three other unrelated knife attacks took place in Sydney this week. Only the Wakely church attack was officially described as a “terror” attack although there had been widespread media speculation.
Those attacks coupled with anger and division caused by the war on Gaza as well as the polarising impact of the Voice referendum last year and Australians are seeing their sense of community and social cohesion challenged.
The ABC has spoken to a panel of analysts about the solutions to staying united and their comments were broadcast yesterday.
The panel included Khairiah A Rahman, an intercultural communications commentator from Auckland University of Technology who is also secretary of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and a member of Muslim Media Watch.
The programme highlighted New Zealand’s experience in March 2019 when an Australian gunman entered two mosques in Christchurch and killed 51 people while they were praying.
Asked what her message had been to the New Zealand government through the Royal Commission established to look into the mass killing, Rahman replied:
“Overall, social cohesion when we think about it has got to do with the responsibility of all people and groups at all levels of society. So we can’t actually leave it to the government or the leaders, the Muslim leaders.
“At the end of the day, the media also had a hand in all of this and my research had to do with media representation of Islam and Muslims prior to the attack. One of the things I found was unfair reporting, so pretty much what you have experienced in your media reporting of Bondi.
“The route that extremists take from hate to mass murder is a proven one, and you need to report fairly and stay calm in a society.”
Interviewees:
Dr Jamal Rifi, Lebanese Muslim Community leader, Sydney
Tim Southphommasane, Australia’s former race discrimination officer
Khairiah A Rahman, intercultural communications researcher, Auckland University of Technology
With regular maintenance stuff lasts longer, but eventually, in spite of every effort, things break down: the washing machine stops washing, the car won’t start, the mobile phone refuses to connect to the internet.
Socio-economic-political systems also collapse; shaped by an ideology of some kind, they are, like all ‘isms’, limited, and divisive. Looking at The State of the World it is clear that the systems that govern our lives and the modes of living they support are breaking down, fragmenting. The signs are many and varied.
Autocratic regimes are on the rise and many democratic governments, influenced by right wing extremism, are adopting policies and attitudes more usually associated with autocracies.
The values and moral codes that have been in place for generations, some unspoken, culturally shared and absorbed, others formally enshrined in international law, are being ignored, discarded or distorted. The ‘Rules Based International Order’, so-called, is made up of a range of laws or conventions, which underpin geo-political engagement: The UN Charter, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Geneva Conventions and UN General Assembly Resolutions among other texts.
Self righteous hypocritical western politicians routinely refer to the Rule of Law or International Humanitarian Law, particularly when criticising their enemies (Russia, Iran, China etc), not so much when they or their allies act illegally. The double standards of western governments knows no limits and is a major cause of global destabilisation.
As systems, structures and animating principles disintegrate, extremism and intolerance grow, polarities intensify, the threat of armed conflict and fragmentation expands; fear and uncertainty increases.
And while the underlying causes remain unchecked, the everyday consequences of disintegration deepen and become more pronounced: the environmental emergency, armed conflict/war, poverty/hunger, displacement of people, social alienation and economic inequality, are some of the major effects. Interconnected complex issues resulting from behaviour and attitudes flowing from The Ideology of Greed, which underpins the socio-political systems and the institutions of control; creaking outdated models that are incapable of creating solutions to the crises, no matter how much they are manipulated.
Take climate change for example, clearly the greatest challenge facing humanity. Climate change is the consequence of the fossil fuel economy and endless consumerism; overwhelmingly rich western nations consumerism. Along with the wider environmental emergency, climate change is caused by behavior flowing from a reductive view of life that prizes individual happiness above all else; happiness, which is, in fact, nothing more than pleasure, that can be achieved, the advocates preach, through the accumulation of things or experiences.
This deeply materialistic approach to life, which, far from bringing happiness, actually guarantees discontent, is integral to the socio-economic system. Constant consumption is demanded, and it is consumption, with its insatiable sucking in of energy (and people) and churning out of waste, that is fuelling climate change, has polluted the air, water and soil, and contributed to the creation of societies rife with unhealthy unhappy people.
Curbing climate change, reducing waste and curtailing pollution requires an economy of sufficiency not excess as we have now. An economy, rooted in social justice and environmental responsibility. A dramatic reduction in consumption is essential – in rich nations at least – and a shift to ethical business practices. All of which is incompatible within the suffocating web of Neo-Liberalism.
If reducing climate change and saving the planet is not reason enough to change the socio-economic-political order, how about ending war?
In order for peace to be realised, social justice and freedom must prevail; this means ending all forms of exploitation and discrimination, inequality and injustice. Such sane measures are impossible within a system wedded to money, to competition and greed, and unthinkable while short-term self-interest is the driving factor behind the actions of governments, corporations and many individuals.
Peace also requires that the Military Industrial Complex and all military alliances, including Nato, be dismantled, again unimaginable within the confines of the current economic order.
As everything breaks down and frays, including the nervous systems and mental health of many people, the inadequacies of the present structures become increasingly apparent. This includes the existing forms of parliamentary democracy, which is non-representative, particularly within societies that are increasingly diverse.
If the slide into further chaos, including the possibility of a major war and complete environmental collapse is to be avoided, fundamental change is desperately needed. Both structural change and a change in values and attitudes, which will lead to changes in behaviour. Systemic changes designed with the aim of achieving universally championed principles: peace, social justice, real democracy and freedom.
People throughout the world are desperate for such changes, the men and women in power, less so. Their resistance comes from the recognition that such a shift would inevitably result in the privilege and power they currently enjoy being swept aside.
The choice before us is clear: maintain the status quo, continue along the existing path, which is narrowing to a point of greater extremism, intolerance and conflict and suffer, or unite, reject all forms of division and re-imagine society.
Humanity has faced such choices many times over long ages, has routinely made the wrong decisions and we are living with the disastrous effects. But now, at this moment in time, the consequences of our collective decisions are far reaching in a way that was not the case in the recent or distant past.
These are extremely uncertain dangerous times. Transitional times for sure, but transitioning to what, to a more extreme, dystopian version of the present, or transitional towards a more just peaceful world?
Something I struggle to contend with is being a disabled journalist. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do – but there’s no denying that the media does not speak well about disabled people and benefits claimants.
That’s putting it fucking kindly. To put it unkindly: the media perpetuates dangerous stereotypes of disabled people. They continuously regurgitate Tory bile for clicks and newspaper sales with no care for how it affects real people. As I wrote last week, the media is how most people form opinions, so to only give one side and not challenge it is dangerous.
It’s further dispiriting knowing how hard I and other journalists work to get real stories and views into the press and seeing our pitches completely ignored.
Case in point: when I was offered my place in the Deaf and Disabled Peoples’ Organisations (DDPOs) coalition going to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) to hold the government to account, I pitched that story to every mainstream newspaper and got absolute tumbleweed. But then to instead see them gladly stuff their pages with hate from the DWP is just insulting.
So onto the week!
The sporty men are still at it
Last week saw, to give him his official title (bestowed by me) Exercise Bore Joe Wicks bullshit about how everyone has ADHD because of junk food. Due to the enormous backlash Wicks had to make an “apology” on Instagram.
He clarified that what he actually meant is he thinks too many people are misdiagnosed with ADHD and food is a factor. And he doesn’t see how that is so much worse. It’s almost like the man has a book to flog on kids’ healthy eating or something…
Elsewhere, Lewis Hamilton’s even shitter brother went on Loose Women and let the internalised ableism spew forth. Nicholas sees himself as no longer disabled because he “pushed through” and forced himself to stop using a wheelchair and walk again.
This is a dangerous enough narrative, but to then go on national TV and be given the space to talk about how your life was sad and hopeless whilst you were in a wheelchair, on a show that has a wheelchair-using panelist is just vile. Nicholas’s view of his disability is honestly the most tragic thing about him, but the media feeding that and calling him inspirational helps nobody,
However – absolutely coincidentally I’m sure – the night before DWP boss Mel Stride revealed to the press that there had been a spike in people with ADHD claiming PIP and suggesting that it’s influencers’ faults.
That’s right.
We all think we have ADHD cos some kids on TikTok said so, it’s not that these incredible people speaking about their experiences mean others have realised they aren’t broken or wrong.
A significant line in the Times article about this was that Personal Independence Payment (PIP) is “given regardless of work”. It almost insinuates that those who work shouldn’t be entitled to benefits. It completely ignores that PIP is there to help us manage the extra costs of disability. Though I guess it fits when DWP have been trying to quietly make it means-tested for years.
Three Tory scandals yesterday but headlines about “sicknote” skivers
Thursday 18 April was a fucking banner day for the Tories. Mark Menzies using tens of thousands of Tory funds to pay off “bad people” (and getting a dog pissed – wtf??), Jonathan Nunn accused of horrific domestic violence, and then one of Rishi’s donors having £14m in assets frozen.
That’s of course while we still have more coming out about who sent their cocks to William Wragg’s blackmailer, and Liz Truss cunting about all over telly with her terrible joke of a book. So what’s the front page of the Telegraph today? That’s right you guessed it! “PM Vows to end sicknote culture”.
Rishi claims he’ll strip GPs of their powers to sign people off the sick and the corporate media has no trouble repeating this without pointing out how dangerous that would be, and also who the fuck else is gonna do it? Oh that’s right: unqualified job centre workers who have to do their job or they’ll be fired.
It seems Rishi thinks bullying disabled people is more important than holding all his corrupt MPs and donors to account.
Funny that.
It’s almost like disabled people who are too scared to stand up for themselves are easier to squash than the rich and powerful. Well, think again dickhead.
Disabled joy: Girl Unmasked is a Sunday Times bestseller!
God knows we need disabled joy this week and I’m so glad that this one features one of my close friends. The incredible Emily Katy is such a force for good in this world. Having been through the ringer as a teenager, sent to a psyche ward instead of supported with her autism, Emily is now raising awareness of how much we need to protect and support autistic young women.
That’s why it’s the best news ever that her incredible book Girl Unmasked was a Sunday Times Bestseller! I’m so very lucky to know you Em – and I’m so glad your important message and autistic joy is being spread to the world.
And finally… some figures
Policy in Practice revealed yesterday that last year £22.7bn was saved in unclaimed benefits. That’s a rise of £8bn since I first reported on this issue in 2021. £8.3bn was saved just from unclaimed Universal Credit, which is higher than the £8.2bn they claim was lost in “fraud and error” of all benefits last year.
Again, I’m sure it’s a pure coincidence the DWP aren’t crowing about this.
That’s why we need to arm ourselves with this which they cannot fight against: pure stats. Take these figures and shout them from the rooftops.
Until next time, fuck the Tories and don’t believe everything you read.
Helen Clark, how I miss you. The former New Zealand Prime Minister — the safest pair of hands this country has had in living memory — gave a masterclass on the importance of maintaining an independent foreign policy when she spoke at an AUKUS symposium held in Parliament’s old Legislative Chambers yesterday.
AUKUS (Australia, UK, US) is first and foremost a military alliance aimed at our major trading partner China. It is designed to maintain US primacy in the “Indo-Pacific” region and opponents are sceptical of claims that China represents a threat to New Zealand or Australian security.
The recent proposal to bring New Zealand into the alliance under “Pillar II” would represent a shift in our security and alliance settings that could dismantle our country’s independent foreign policy and potentially undo our nuclear free policy.
Clark’s assessment is that the way the government has approached the proposed alliance lacks transparency. National made no signal of its intentions during the election campaign and yet the move towards AUKUS seems well planned and choreographed.
Voters in the last election “were not sensitised to any changes in the policy settings,” Clark says, “and this raises huge issues of transparency.”
Such a significant shift should first secure a mandate from the electorate.
A key question the speakers addressed at the symposium was: is AUKUS in the best interest of this country and our region?
Highly questionable
“All of these statements made about AUKUS being good for us are highly questionable,” Clark says. “What is good about joining a ratcheting up of tensions in a region? Where is the military threat to New Zealand?”
Clark, PM from 1999-2008, has noticed a serious slippage in our independent position. She contrasted current policy on the Middle East with the decision, under her leadership, of not joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Sceptical of US claims about weapons of mass destruction, New Zealand made clear it wanted no part of it — a stance that has proven correct. Our powerful allies the US, UK and Australia were wrong both on intelligence and the consequences of military action.
In contrast, New Zealand participating in the current bombardment of Yemen because of the Houthis disruption of Red Sea traffic in response to the Israeli war on Gaza is, says Clark, an indication of this change in fundamental policy stance:
“New Zealand should have demanded the root causes for the shipping route disruptions be addressed rather than enthusiastically joining the bombing.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that if the drift we see in position continues, we will be positioned in a way we haven’t seen for decades – as a fully-signed-up partner to US strategies in the region.
“And from that, will flow expectations about what is the appropriate level of defence expenditure for New Zealand and expectations of New Zealand contributing to more and more military activities.”
A hugely important interview with Helen Clark about AUKUS
Economic security
Clark addressed another element which should add caution to New Zealand joining an American crusade against China: economic security.
China now takes 26 percent of our exports — twice what we send to Australia and 2.5 times what we send to the US. She questioned the wisdom of taking a hostile stance against our biggest trading partner who continues to pose no security threat to this country.
So what is the alternative to New Zealand siding with the US in its push to contain China and help the US maintain its hegemon status?
“The alternative path is that New Zealand keeps its head while all around are losing theirs — and that we combine with our South Pacific neighbours to advocate for a region which is at peace,” Clark says, echoing sentiments that go right back to the dawn of New Zealand’s nuclear free Pacific, “so that we always pursue dialogue and engagement over confrontation.”
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
I came to this evening of short films not sure what to expect.
I have a history with West Papua (here referring to the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea, which comprises five provinces, one named “West Papua”) from my days fronting the legendary West Papuan band Black Brothers in the early 1990s.
During that time, I was exposed to stories of struggle and pride in the identity of the people of West Papua. From their declaration of self-determination and self-government and the raising of the Morning Star flag on 1 December 1961, to the so-called “Act of Free Choice” referendum in 1969 which saw the fledgling Melanesian state become part of the larger Indonesian state, to the next 40 years of struggle.
However, apart from the occasional ABC or SBS news story and the 1963 ethnographic film Dead Birds, I hadn’t seen much footage on West Papua until now.
The West Papua Mini Film Festival is a touring festival of short films organised by the West Papuan community and their allies and supporters in Australia to raise awareness of the situation in West Papua.
The four films I saw, at the first screening in Sydney, were:
My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee) Pepera 1969, A Democratic Integration? Papuan Hip-Hop: When the Microphone Talks Black Pearl and General of the Field
The first two films were quite harrowing portrayals of internal displacement and coercion in West Papua. My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee) follows the lives and families of two children, both named “refugee”, born and currently being raised in parts of West Papua distant from their families’ places of origin.
Their displacement is clearly correlated with the increased presence of extractive corporate interests backed in and supported by a military presence.
In both children’s cases this has been enabled by the gradual breaking up of the region of West Papua into first two, and now five, separate provinces.
A scene from My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee)
My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee). Video trailer: Jubi TV
The second film, Pepera 1969, A Democratic Integration, deals with the history of oppression and coercion under Indonesian rule and the absurdity of the rubber-stamping process undertaken by Indonesia (the Act of Free Choice, the Indonesian acronym for which is Pepera) which enabled it to annex West Papua under the impotent gaze of the United Nations and the complicit support of countries including the US and Australia.
The film documents the process leading into decolonisation and West Papua’s short-lived period of self-rule.
The second two films were insightful celebrations of Papuan identity in the arts, through hip-hop artists like Ukam Maran and the earlier musical group Mambesak, and in sport, with the incredible story of the Persipura football club of Jayapura.
The latter’s achievements as a football team and subsequent discrimination and suppression in the racially charged Indonesian football league provide an allegory of West Papuan identity.
In both cases, the strength and resilience of West Papuan identity, and West Papuans’ pride in their ancient ties to land and culture, are palpable.
A scene from Papua Hip-Hop: When the microphone talks.
What I liked about the four films was that they presented a montage of West Papua from rural to urban, from the everyday life of internally displaced people to the exciting work of hip-hop artists with their songs of protest; from the big picture and history of West Papua to the smaller microcosm of the Persipura football team and supporters.
All in all, I was surprised how much I came out of the festival better informed about a place, its history and current developments. And this despite having the privilege of knowing more about West Papua than many Australians.
For those who don’t know much about West Papua and would like to know more, attending the West Papua Mini Film Festival is a must. It is on at various locations around Australia until 21 April 2024, with details here.
And to end on a happy note, my evening of film appreciation included meeting one of the festival’s organisers, Victor Mambor. Victor is the nephew of the late Steve Mambor, drummer for the Black Brothers!
West Papua Mini Film Festival 2024, 9-21 April 2024, Wollongong, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, Lismore, Hobart, Melbourne, and Darwin.
The films are also available to view with English and Indonesian subtitles on the Jubi TV Youtube channel.
‘Alopi Latukefu is the director of the Edmund Rice Centre. He previously worked for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This review was first published on ANU Development Policy Centre’s DevPolicyBlog and is republished here under Creative Commons.
Content warning – this article mentions trauma and addiction.
Over the past thirty years, LEGO has been used as a therapeutic tool for both children and adults. It seems that many people benefit from this kind of intervention, but how exactly does LEGO help adults heal from trauma?
Across numerous social media sites, huge communities of adult Fans of LEGO exist. One group alone which I’m a member of, boasts over 100k members internationally. Adults come together virtually to enjoy and benefit from both building LEGO, and the sense of community.
Whilst many of the sets are designed for children, some of the newer sets, such as the McLaren & Ayrton Senna set, were created with adults in mind. With an 18+ label, most of them are more complex or designed as display pieces – rather than those children can play with.
What is trauma?
Trauma is an event or series of events which is distressing and overwhelms our nervous systems ability to cope. In England, one in three adults have experienced one or more traumatic events.
People with trauma will use grounding techniques to help them when something triggers them. Specifically, it allows a person to interrupt their nervous system’s response and start feeling safe and present again, rather than trapped in a traumatic memory.
There are many versions of very similar grounding techniques. Notably, the majority of these involve a person trying to reconnect with the present moment, rather than something traumatic from the past. Additionally, many of them aim to engage different senses, such as physical touch along with forcing the brain to focus on something else as a distraction. Of course, LEGO ticks all of these boxes.
Whilst other creative activities tick one or two of these boxes, it seems LEGO is on another level. Using both hands to build and at the same time focusing on making sense of the instructions, is an incredibly grounding combination.
How is LEGO helping people heal from trauma?
There are many reports online of people using LEGO to get through various traumatic events. From US Veterans overcoming PTSD, addiction and reducing anxiety, to helping someone through the loss of two children. LEGO has helped many people survive difficult times in their lives.
Sofie Furio is a military veteran who was diagnosed with PTSD after spending 24 years in the US Air Force. She told me:
I found that by building LEGO, I am reprogramming my brain to work through distractions and frustration that are often triggered as a result of trauma. Building LEGO is something that helps me ground myself. I work on a LEGO set and I practise my breathing. PTSD made me isolate, disconnect and avoid. But LEGO has become the link to interact and regain a meaningful connection with others.
Nervous system regulation
To put it simply, nervous system regulation means our ability to move through life’s stresses without getting overwhelmed.
During periods of stress, our fight or flight response is activated. A regulated nervous system will quickly return to normal once the threat is over. For people with a history of trauma, this is a much harder task. Trauma creates changes in the brain meaning that sometimes the fight or flight response becomes the default setting.
This can lead to overstimulation and finding it difficult to calm down. Or, on the other hand they may become disconnected and depressed or even alternate between the two states.
In recent years there has been a lot of hype on social media sites such as TikTok surrounding nervous system regulation. But have we been overlooking such a simple tool like LEGO?
Unlike many meditation techniques, LEGO allows a form of mindfulness that does not involve sitting completely still. For some people like Hayden, who experienced a traumatic event as an adult, this makes it easier.
LEGO gets me to slow down. I really struggle to sit still and be present. But when I’m building LEGO it’s like nothing else exists. I haven’t managed to find that anywhere else.
A.J, who also has PTSD, shared similar experiences:
Lego allows me to switch my mind off and gives me a break. Sometimes I use it to help me distract myself. If my brain is too full to think I will just follow the instructions of a set. Other times I feel more creative and will just build and see what comes from it. Either way it helps me de-stress and have some fun.
The importance of Play
Play is often how children start to make sense of the world around them. However, often when individuals have experienced trauma at a young age, they miss out on ‘normal’ things such as play.
I spoke to Rose, who is healing from multiple traumas and is learning to manage her PTSD symptoms. She told me:
Childhood trauma casts a dark shadow over the entirety of your childhood… it’s difficult to recall anything that stirs a ‘happy thought’. But LEGO gently and safely unearths those memories that aren’t filled with terror and gives you the power to unlock your inner child.
Having fun and even playing, enables so many of us to actually feel alive – rather than just keeping our heads above water.
I spoke to Dr Jay Watts – Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Psychotherapist:
I am a huge fan of LEGO for adults who have been traumatised in childhood, including myself!
When we’ve been traumatised, we often miss out on opportunities to play and create safely. These experiences leave many scars, one of which is the struggle to find joy in creativity. We develop our joy in play early in life, partly by seeing it mirrored in others.
Without that reflection, it’s like a drought to the growth of the soul; it limits our joy in life. We need to be able to play because it’s part of the life force—the antidote to the greying stillness, deadness, and exhaustion that many of us can feel.’
Psychology has begun to recognise that play is as important to healing from trauma as processing trauma memories and establishing good-enough relationships. We’re reawakening an inner child that’s been too scared, too damaged, or too paralyzed to move, and freeing them historically helps free us a little in the now.
Letting our imaginations run riot
Ultimately, Dr Watts concluded:
Will LEGO heal our trauma? Well, no, of course not entirely. But LEGO allows us both to let our imaginations run riot and to engage in a precision that demands qualities akin to mindfulness.
Whilst many different creative activities all seem to have some therapeutic benefits – LEGO seems to provide more than most. And if nothing else, when everything feels chaotic and you can’t get your thoughts in order. You can always get your LEGO in order. Personally, it makes me feel in control. No matter what is going on.
As Dr Watts highlighted however:
Were it only less expensive, I would consider it a gift to the world!
Still, whether you are following an instruction booklet or creating something of your own, you cannot beat the feeling of putting the last piece into place. No matter how old you are, the sense of achievement rivals that of flat pack furniture. But LEGO is way more fun and usually, better to look at. And if it helps people with their trauma, all the better.
LEGO is often a metaphor for life. Eventually all the pieces will fit together. No matter how many are currently scattered all over the floor.
The announced closure of Television New Zealand’s last primetime current affairs programme seems to be the final nail in the coffin for New Zealand’s television credibility. Coming a day after the announcement of the closure of Newshub, it shows that Kiwis have the worst television and video media in the Western world.
Let’s compare ourselves with our mates across the ditch. Australia’s ABC TV features a nightly current affairs show called 7.30. The blurb for it reads:
“Sarah Ferguson presents Australia’s premier daily current affairs program, delivering agenda-setting public affairs journalism and interviews that hold the powerful to account. Plus political analysis from Laura Tingle.”
Clearly 7.30 is far more serious than our Seven Sharp with its fluffy stories and advertorials. The ABC also screens six weekly current affairs shows and documentaries this week. Shows like Australian Story, Four Corners and Media Watch.
But Australia has five times as many people as we do so that’s why they can afford it, right?
Ireland has five million people, like NZ, but they still have primetime current affairs. In fact, the Irish enjoy quite a lot of it. The Irish version of TVNZ is RTÉ and features a nightly current affairs show called Nationwide and three weekly current affairs programmes on serious topics.
There are several other human interest factual programmes too, on subjects like history, gardening, dance and more. It’s the same in other countries with similar populations such as Norway, Denmark, Finland and so on.
It’s true that in New Zealand, there’s still the off-peak studio politics programmes like Q+A, and current affairs in te ao Māori are well examined on Whakaata Māori. But what about the rest of NZ?
Some people might say television is dead, and everything is online now. But nearly all online current affairs videos start out as television programmes. The only exceptions are Newsroom’s video investigations with Melanie Reid, and Stuff Circuit which is now disbanded. And for younger audiences there is Re: which TVNZ is also making cuts to.
Death of current affairs TV
The death of New Zealand’s prime-time current affairs television has been a long time coming. At first it was documentaries that dwindled and then disappeared off our screens.
Other genres that are expensive to produce have also become extinct or rarer than a fairy tern — drama, science programmes, kidult, arts programmes, wildlife documentaries, chat shows. Now we can add consumer affairs and prime-time current affairs to the list.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If other countries can do it, why not NZ?
This suggests either a lack of understanding of her role or a lack of ambition. She also let slip that there was no way she could save Newshub.
The only substantive solution to come from the minister is her promise to review the Broadcasting Act. But that review process was initiated by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage years ago and started under the Labour government.
Moreover, the Broadcasting Act does little more than lay out the rules for broadcasting complaints, election broadcasting, and establish NZ On Air, the BSA and Te Māngai Pāho.
Minister just tweaking
The minister says she is reviewing the Broadcasting Act to create a “more level playing field” and allow media businesses to “innovate”. That doesn’t sound like it will do much for television and video current affairs, which will take much more than just tweaking how NZ On Air and the BSA work.
Perhaps she intends something much more comprehensive, such as a new funding stream for public media, perhaps through a levy, a compulsory subscription, or even a licence fee.
Despite her protestations, there are several options available to the minister. To save TVNZ’s Fair Go and Sunday, she could provide TVNZ with an interim cash injection (which is actually what governments often do in disasters) until the comprehensive long-term funding is sorted out.
To save Newshub she could promise to remove advertising from TVNZ, or partially on weekends only. This would throw Warner Bros Discovery a lifeline in the form of advertisers looking for a television station to advertise on. She does not have to stand by and watch while our media burns.
Sunday is only with us for a few more weeks. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Another day, another disturbing Tory scheme to fuck over chronically ill and disabled people. In the UK government’s latest state-of-the-art vanity project to drive up its direemployment rate statistics, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is funnelling millions into the pockets of obscure AI companies. What could possibly go wrong?
DWP AI “back to work” drive
On 14 April, the DWP announced it had awarded £1.5m to companies working to “boost occupational health services for small and medium-sized businesses.”
Tellingly, its press release said that the investment was to:
to tackle in work sickness and boost economic activity
In other words, the projects are part of the government’s plans to push sick people into, and keep them in work. For this, it awarded the funding between five companies. These were: Wellics Ltd, Kinseed Limited, Elaros 24/7 Limited, Latus Health Ltd, and Armour Labs Ltd.
So what ingenious support will these companies be offering? Well, the DWP wasn’t shy in boasting the answer. A significant element of the investment will go towards artificial intelligence (AI) occupational health programmes.
One such company delivering this AI will be Wellics Ltd. Predictably, the company leans into the warm, fuzzy wellbeing rhetoric. On its website, Wellics explains that its technology:
provides a comprehensive view of employee well-being by measuring four key areas: sleep, mental well-being, nutrition, and physical activity. This data can be used to identify areas where employees need support and track their progress over time.
So, employers snooping on employees’ health, and how they are managing it, then? Got it. Of course, this could spell particular trouble for chronically ill people, but it’s right up the toxic Tories street. Notably, it’s entirely in step with a government agenda hell-bent on harassing sick people back to work.
Dressed up wellbeing guff
Significantly, one of the awardees – Kinseed – may show what this could mean in practice for one sizeable group of chronically ill people. As the DWP explained, the company:
is developing a revolutionary cloud-based occupational health platform aimed at offering employers’ powerful new tools to help maintain and improve employee health and wellbeing.
Their new service “MediWork” is breaking ground with AI and uses data to monitor individual health trends and identifies early warning signs of ill health. It will tailor suggestions to improve workplace wellbeing, and help clinicians do their job more effectively and quickly than before.
Again, the AI service dresses up in wellbeing language, but, emphasis on the “employers’ powerful new tools”. It suggests the potential for employer control over employee health information. Coupled with the DWP’s garble about “economic inactivity” and supporting a “more productive workforce”, it’s not rocket science to see where that could end. Put another way, it’s for sating the capitalist urge to squeeze every last drop of profit from ill employees.
Predictably then, the government is already sizing up the role of this AI technology for people with long Covid. Specifically, its press release said AI and new occupational health tech will be:
at heart of revolution including expansion of remote services, digital health hubs, and Long Covid support.
Notably, Kinseed offers instructive insight into where this might lead next.
Graded exercise therapy 101
According to its website, Kinseed is partnering with the occupational health company Cordell Health to develop this.
And Cordell’s advice document for long Covid sounds a lot like its advocating for a dangerous treatment that has harmed people living with a related chronic illness:
Keep as active as possible whilst ensuring that activities are commensurate with levels of energy. Those affected may find it useful to keep a diary in order to track activity and monitor steady improvements over time. Rest is important but resting too much increases the risk of losing muscle mass and delaying recovery.
This screams graded exercise therapy (GET) 101. Notably, this ‘therapy’ involves a gradual increase in physical activity. Practitioners have prescribed this as the primary treatment for people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).
However, the treatment is actively harmful to people living with ME. This is due to the disease’s hallmark feature – post exertional malaise (PEM). PEM causes a disproportionate worsening of multiple debilitating symptoms after physical, mental, social, or emotional exertion.
Despite this, medical professionals subscribed to the biopsychosocial model of ME have repeatedly pushed the treatment. This is the view that ME is largely psychosomatic in origin – or in short – that the disease is all in the patient’s head.
Of course, this is palpable bullsh*t and multiple international organisations, national health bodies, and scientists have time and again proven the disease is biophysiological and impacts multiple systems in the body.
Psychologisation and so-called “scroungers”
Nonetheless, a vocal pyschologising lobby has monopolised the funding for research and played gatekeeper to the treatment for people living with the disease for many years. For example, until 2021, the UK’s health body the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence had maintained it in its guidelines.
However, the damage has been done. Many people living with ME have reported the devastating impact GET has had on their health. Given that over 50% of people living with long Covid meet the diagnostic criteria for ME, the treatment is inappropriate – in fact, dangerous – for many patients with the condition.
Yet, as the Canaryhaspointed out before, psychologising chronic illnesses has also served as the perfect excuse to deprive sick people of access to benefits. What’s more, Cordell Health’s guidance plays into “deconditioning theory” – another erroneous trope perpetuated by psychologisers of the disease.
Essentially, this is the notion that people living with ME are making themselves sicker by not exercising. Again, studies have debunked this. In spite of this however, the sham theory fits nicely alongside a toxic government campaign to brand sick and disabled benefit claimants as “scroungers”.
Weaponizing DWP AI against chronic illness
At the same time, the Canary’s Steve Topple has highlighted how the NHS has removed long Covid treatment targets. More significantly, this coincided with the NHS England’s appointment of one notorious psychiatrist as an executive director.
Specifically, psychiatrist Simon Wessely took to the helm in January 2023. The NHS board is the institution’s main decision-making body. Wessely is a prominent, powerful proponent of this psychologising crusade against people living with ME.
You can read more about Wessely and his alarming influence on ME treatment here. But effectively, the staunch biopsychosocial acolyte holds huge sway over the direction of treatment for people with ME. So, as Topple expressed:
his psychiatric approach to physical illness, coupled with his new job, may indicate the path the NHS is heading further down – and not just regarding long Covid.
Now, the DWP looks to be aligning workplaces with this dangerous psychologisation too. Naturally, it has form on this already. Crucially, it was DWP-sponsored medical trials which cemented GET as a core NHS treatment for people with ME. Of course, it didn’t do so out of the goodness of its heart to help people suffering the daily horror of the devastating disease. Now, it sure as hell isn’t sponsoring these new AI programmes to help out chronically ill people either.
And it wouldn’t be the first time that the DWP has weaponized AI against chronically sick and disabled people. As the Disability News Servicereported in February 2022, the department has been using an AI algorithm to select benefit claimants for fraud investigations. Yet campaigners have highlighted that it could be using this to discriminate against disabled claimants.
Government washing its hands of vulnerable people
So, what we have is AI spying on sick people in work, and AI spying on sick people not in work. Ultimately, this new DWP AI guff is just the government’s latest dodgy gambit to bring sick and disabled people under the thumb of the exploitative capitalist market.
Of course, it’s nothing new. As chronically ill and disabled folks, and indeed any marginalised community can tell you, if you’re not ‘productive’ – that is, running yourself into the ground for corporate paymasters – you’re expendable.
At the end of the day, it looks to be another ploy to push the blame for poverty and sickness onto poor and sick people themselves. Successive governments and their corporate media mouthpieces have long been saying if you’re poor and sick, it’s on you. Now, some corporate AI will make sure you know it too.
The Zionist Cameron claims that he has “reviewed” the legal advice and arms export licenses to the violent and oppressive apartheid state of Israel remain “unchanged”, in line with other “like-minded countries”.
These like-minded allies of Britain include Germany, who claim to have learned the lessons of the 20th century, by enabling a genocide against Palestinian children in the 21st century. In reality, Germany, you have learned less than fuck all.
Deutsche bomben töten Palästinensische Kinder. Fordern Sie, dass Ihre Regierung aufhört, kinder zu töten.
And of course, this also includes our like-minded friends the United States of America – a country that has invaded 68 other nations in its history – under the leadership of Genocide Joe.
If Germany, Britain, and the US are supposed to be the world’s moral compasses, is it any surprise to see that we are completely and utterly lost, somewhere between catastrophe and despair?
“Let me clear”, says Cameron; as transparent as Israel’s apartheid wall
Cameron has been around long enough to know that the public will expect their elected representatives to be able to access this remarkably questionable legal advice. However, unsurprisingly Lord Cameron of Tel Aviv – a man that made a career out of avoiding purposeful scrutiny – is refusing to allow its publication.
When David Cameron steps up the podium and says the words “let me be clear”, you can guarantee whatever nonsensical bullshit that follows will have a similar degree of transparency to the apartheid wall that runs through the West Bank.
“Let me be clear, though, we continue to have grave concerns around the humanitarian access issue in Gaza, both for the period that was assessed and subsequently”, said Cameron, prior to stopping off for dinner with Donald Trump at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Six long months of utterly brutal Western carnage, heaped upon some of the poorest people on the planet that only have their holy Quran to recite in defiance of the Zionist occupiers and their state-of-the-art weaponry, and all Cameron has to offer is “grave concerns”?
“Grave concerns” is the understatement of the century
I have grave concerns that the engine management light on my fourteen-year-old car is going to come on whenever I get in the smelly old thing.
I have grave concerns when I’m trying to work out how to pay x, y, and z and the budget only stretches to x and a bit of y on a good week.
In case you haven’t noticed, Dave, there is a genocide happening right now, and possibly the first genocide in history that was announced before it had even been implemented, and eventually live-streamed to a horrified global audience.
Grave concerns? The ham-faced bastard Cameron doesn’t care about Gaza. Ask him about sending further arms to Ukraine and his eyes light up, but if you ask him to apply the same standards of acceptable and legal resistance against an occupying force in Palestine, he is unable to do so because the Zionists have also occupied Westminster.
The BBC steps in to prop up the colonialism
I will be the first to admit, I had no idea who the sons and grandchildren of the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Ismail Haniyyah are, or in their case were, following their killings in an Israeli strike on the first day of Eid, this past week.
The BBC, the enduring voice of British colonialism around the globe, even put the story at the top of its news agenda because it gave the broadcaster another opportunity to portray legitimate resistance as Islamic terrorism.
The BBC wilfully fuels most Israeli narratives as standard. Any semblance of balance is lost when Britain’s biggest and oldest broadcaster propagates the flawed and often laughable evidence Israel and its narcissistic, pathological liars put forward.
However, let’s turn this around for a moment.
If the shoe was on the other foot
What if Benjamin Netanyahu’s children and grandchildren were killed by Al Qassam fighters? The West – morally playing second fiddle to an organised and effective Global South – would absolutely lose its collective shit.
Netanyahu’s coward of a son – described as the “lazy bum son” by Haaretz journalist Uri Misgav – is living an opulent lifestyle in Miami, some 7,000 miles from Daddy’s genocide.
Yair Netanyahu, 32, lounges around in a $5,000-a-month Florida high-rise protected by Israeli Shin Bet bodyguards, despite being eligible to serve as an IDF reservist until he is 40.
But what if the little red triangle caught up with Netanyahu Junior? How would our corrupt, bought and paid for politicians react? And will somebody please think of the Daily Mail?
The myth of superior Western humanity has been utterly destroyed. The double standards of Western hypocrisy have been well and truly exposed. A genocide has happened on our watch, approved and aided by your government and their loyal opposition.
Israel’s genocide is a war on humanity
Some 85% of Hamas fighters are believed to be orphans. Israel will not “destroy” Hamas because Israel cannot defeat an ideology.
This perpetual cycle of violence cannot and will not end until Israel is forced to stop killing children for fun. Then the occupation must come to an end because this is the only means of achieving a just and lasting peace.
Each time I see a new video clip appear from the very little that is left of Khan Younis, or the devastated Al-Shifa medical complex where Palestinian rescuers are still recovering the body parts of their loved ones, it is impossible not to sense Israel’s palpable desire to wreak havoc against an entire population.
This isn’t just a war on Gaza, or just a war on the children of Gaza. This is a war on humanity. And your government – as well as the would-be prime minister and his pro-Israel lobby funded shadow cabinet – must never be forgiven for its reprehensible complicity.
This week the two biggest TV broadcasters in Aotearoa New Zealand confirmed plans to cut news programmes by midyear – and the jobs of a significant proportion of this country’s journalists.
Many observers said this had been coming but few seemed to have a plan for it, including the government.
Mediawatch looks at what viewers will lose, efforts to resist the cuts and talks to the news chief at Newshub which is set to close completely.
By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter
On the AM show last Wednesday, newsreader Nicky Styris suffered a frog in the throat at the wrong time.
Host Melissa Chan Green took over her bulletin while Styris quickly recovered. Minutes later Styris had to take the place of no-show panel guest Paula Bennett.
Just before that, viewers saw co-host Lloyd Burr on his knees fixing the studio flat-pack furniture with a drill.
Three hours later they were at an all-staff meeting at which executives from offshore owner Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) confirmed the complete closure of Newshub by midyear.
On TVNZ’s Midday news soon after, reporter Kim Baker-Wilson was live from the scene of the announcement of Newshub’s demise.
The previous day the roles were reversed, with Newshub’s Simon Shepherd outside TVNZ’s building reporting TVNZ’s Midday had been scrapped, along with the late news Tonight and Fair Go.
On Wednesday TVNZ also confirmed flagship current affairs show Sunday will cease next month.
So as things stand, it’s the end of the line for all news bulletins on TVNZ other than 1 News at 6, though the news-like shows Breakfast and Seven Sharp survive because they accommodate lucrative sponsored content (“activations” in the ad business) as well as ads.
And TV channel Three will be entirely news-free for the first time in its 35-year history.
Senior journalists led by investigations editor Michael Morrah presented a proposal for a stripped-back and shortened news bulletin to keep the Newshub name alive (and some jobs) but while WBD took it seriously, it eventually turned the idea down.
Another media player to fill the Newshub void? There have been rumours and reports that other media companies were talking to WBD about filling the Newshub at 6 news void.
Initially light-on-detail reports of lifelines suggested a possible sale of Newshub to another media company. Then there were reports of other media companies pitching to make news for WBD on a much-reduced budget.
Among the names mentioned in media despatches was NZME, which has radio and video studios and journalists around the country, though most of them are north of Taupo.
NZME told Stuff “it was not currently part of the process”.
However when Stuff itself reported on Wednesday that Stuff was “understood to be a likely contender,” a spokesperson for Stuff declined to comment to Stuff’s reporter on whether Stuff had been in talks with WBD — or not.
RNZ said it wasn’t in the frame for this. (It recently killed off the video version of its only daily news show with pictures, Checkpoint).
Sky TV has production facilities galore and its free-to-air TV channel Sky Open currently runs a Newshub-made news bulletin at 5:30 each weekday. Sky has only said it was an “interesting idea” — or words to that effect.
“At this point there is no deal,” WBD local boss Glen Kyne told reporters after confirming the closure of Newshub on Wednesday.
Kyne also said the company’s “door has been open to all internal and external feedback and ideas, and we will continue to be”.
But anyone opening that door clearly isn’t willing to do it in daylight — or tell the rest of the media about it.
Lifelines likely?
Senior journalists led by investigations editor Michael Morrah presented a proposal for a stripped-back and shortened news bulletin to keep the Newshub name alive. Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
If there is to be any kind of “Newshub-lite” lifeline, a key question is: what is WBD prepared to pay for the programme?
Presumably not much, given that they said they had no choice but to carve the cost of Newshub — amounting to tens of millions a year — from its bottom line in line with its reducing revenue.
So is it worth any major media company’s while to commit to making news in video for another outlet? And it would have to be done in a hurry because the last Newshub bulletins screen on July 5.
When Newshub’s owners first announced they wanted to get rid of it in late February, its former chief editor Hal Crawford told Mediawatch the problem with finding a buyer was that minimum viable cost for a credible TV news operation was greater than anyone here was prepared to spend.
Longtime TV3 news boss Mark Jennings (now co-editor of Newsroom) said any substitute service on the fraction of the current budget would have another problem — TVNZ’s 1 News.
“You’re up against a sophisticated TVNZ product so viewers will have an immediate comparison. Probably that won’t be favorable for Warner Brothers,” he told RNZ.
TVNZ has its own news production problems after the cuts they confirmed this week.
“We’re proposing to establish a new long-form team within our news operation, which would continue to bring important current affairs and consumer affairs stories to Aotearoa in a different way on our digital platforms.”
TVNZ declined Mediawatch‘s request to speak to TVNZ’s news chief Phil O’Sullivan about that at this time.
Newshub’s news boss responds
Newshub news boss Richard Sutherland . . . “The so-called legacy news operations have almost done too good a job of keeping the lights on and papering over the cracks.” Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
One who did though is Newshub news boss Richard Sutherland — appointed as interim senior director of news at Newshub in January.
It was his second spell at Newshub, during a career in broadcast news spanning four decades at almost every significant national news outlet in the country, including RNZ, where he stepped down as head of news a year ago.
In that time he’s experienced many a financial crisis in the business — but did he see this one coming?
“The last couple of weeks has been coming for quite some time. I think that the so-called legacy news operations have almost done too good a job of keeping the lights on and papering over the cracks. And we just got to a point [the industry] couldn’t paper over the cracks any longer.
“But when you look at audience behaviour and the fall off and revenue, particularly in the advertising market, then that doesn’t surprise me that we’ve got to where we’ve got to.”
But if the audience was big, the ad revenue would be too?
“It’s certainly by no means as big as it once was simply because people have other options available to them. The cliche is that you’re not in a war with the other media, but in a war for people’s attention.”
“It’s not so much the audience has changed so much as the dynamics of the advertising market that has really changed over the last sort of 10 to 15 years. The digital advertising — and the big two main players in that space, Facebook and Google — are eating everybody’s lunch.”
TV ad income on the slide Annual advertising stats that came out this very week show media in 2023 attracted $3.36 billion across the whole of the media industry — about the same as in 2022.
But TV advertising revenue of $517 million in 2022 slumped to $443 million last year.
“That’s why what the TV industry has found is that can’t cut its costs fast enough to meet the falloff in the advertising income,” Sutherland told Mediawatch.
Digital-only ad revenue rose by $88 million in 2023 — but it’s Google and Facebook which secures the vast bulk of that.
But if this has been coming for a number of years, as Sutherland says, has there been enough planning for it?
After the closure of Newshub was mooted by its owner last month, seven of Sutherland’s colleagues led by investigations editor Michael Morrah put together a transition plan to keep Newshub on air in a few days.
Shouldn’t this sort of transition planning have been done at high levels over recent years right across the television business?
“Every media company that I’ve worked for or have observed over the last few years has been trying to innovate and get to a more sustainable level. The revenue was just collapsing far faster than anyone ever anticipated.”
“It annoys me when I hear people say older media haven’t innovated enough. We’ve done a lot of innovation. That’s pretty lazy politics to just say: ‘You need to innovate.’
“It’s also lazy politics to say, the government should just come in and bail everyone out. New Zealand Incorporated needs to have a big conversation about what it wants to do with the media and how it wants to fund it.
“For the past few years the industry has been like so many rats in a sack, fighting with each chasing a smaller and smaller amount of ad dollars. We need to get together and work out how we get ourselves collectively out of the sack,” Sutherland told Mediawatch.
Shortly before TVNZ and Newshub announced their cuts, there was a meeting of chief executives including Newshub’s owners Warner Bros Discovery to discuss a shared new service. TVNZ rejected the idea.
“But a lot has changed in the last couple of months. And I would like to think that eventually we’ll get to a point where we can actually have honest and productive conversations about what we can do to help each other as well as maintaining a degree of competition, but also realising that if we just keep fighting with each other, we’re not going to have a sustainable industry,” Sutherland said.
Would Sutherland want to work for a low-budget alternative to Newshub stave off the complete closure? And would Kiwis want such a service?
“There is a segment of the audience that appreciates a very highly produced, well-curated news bulletin every night. And there’s large numbers of people who no longer see that as part of their media diet.
“The trick is to provide options so that people can get what they want when they want it.
“It’s not really for me to say what a possible replacement for Newshub might look like. I’m well away from those negotiations.
“If we reach a stage where the media scene here withers away to nothing, there’ll be no-one to tell the stories. The media uncovers a lot of shady stuff in this country.
“And the fear of media coverage prevents people in positions of power and authority at all levels doing a lot of shady stuff. So it is important to document the ructions of the New Zealand media scene just like we do in other parts of the country.”
Minister in a corner
Broadcasting and Media Minister Melissa Lee . . . “If only I was a magician, if I could actually just snap up a solution, that would be fantastic.” Image: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
The day the axe fell at Newshub and at TVNZ, New Zealand’s screen producers’ guild Spada said “while the newsroom cuts have dominated media coverage to date, it is actually the whole production sector being impacted”.
“While TVNZ and Three aren’t giving definitive numbers at this time, Spada has calculated that we are looking at around $50 million coming out of our sector,” said president Irene Gardiner.
Spada is also asking the government to exempt screen funding agencies from the percent public spending cuts and to force the international streaming platform to support local production.
Spada called for” swift and decisive action” from the government on this.
Should they be holding their breath?
When confronted by reporters for a response to the current TV news crisis, Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee said: “If only I was a magician, if I could actually just snap up a solution, that would be fantastic.
“But I’m not a magician, and I’m trying to find a solution to modernise the industry . . . there is a process happening.”
But the media are not expecting magic — just a plan rather than assertions of a process with no timeline.
She has repeatedly said she’s preparing policy in a paper to take to cabinet, but refused to give any details.
On RNZ’s Checkpoint, persistent and pointed questions from Lisa Owen yielded few further clues.
Newstalk ZB Drive host Heather du Plessis-Allan told Melissa Lee she was being “weird and shady” and the next morning ZB’s Mike Hosking told her she was using “buzzwords that don’t mean anything” and was doomed to fail.
Stuff’s Tova O’Brien reported that the need to consult coalition allies on policy means it can’t be progressed until after Winston Peters returns from overseas at the end of the month.
The under-wraps media policy is also not in the government’s recently-released quarterly action plan.
Meanwhile this week, our two biggest TV news broadcasters ran out of time.
Ex-minister leading resistance to cuts
E tū union negotiator Michael Wood . . . “There is a bit of a delicate dance which has to happen when media companies themselves are making these decisions. And media need to report on that.” Image: RNZ
After his unenlightening on-air interview with minister Melissa Lee on Thursday morning, Mike Hosking’s ZB listeners told him she reminded them of ministers in the last government.
Coincidentally, one of them was also one of few people who did speak out about the crisis while it was unfolding.
Michael Wood represented TVNZ journalists from the E tū union as its negotiations specialist.
E tū is now taking legal action against TVNZ, claiming it failed to abide by the conditions of their employment agreement.
Could that reverse or wind back any of the cuts TVNZ has announced?
“That does remain to be seen. The collective agreement has very clear processes around what should happen if TVNZ wants to move forward and make changes. It requires [staff members] to be involved throughout the process, and for the company to try and reach agreement with them. Our very strong view is that that hasn’t happened.”
“Staff have said: ‘Look, five years ago, we came to you and said we want to do these things with our shows to make sure they have a sustainable future to make sure that they have a strong online platform.’ And [TVNZ] frankly has not demonstrated strategy and leadership around those things.”
“These are still shows that are very, very popular. Canceling them will reduce costs, but based on TVNZ’s own information that they’ve provided, it will reduce revenue by more.”
It’s been difficult to get any media company executives or even journalists at the two companies affected by these cuts to talk about them, even off-the-record.
Wood is one of the few people who has spoken frankly to broadcasters’ executives, albeit confidentially behind closed doors.
“There is a bit of a delicate dance which has to happen when media companies themselves are making these decisions. And media need to report on that.
“So I have some sympathy, but these aren’t just individual employment issues. This is a public policy issue . . . about whether we have a functioning and vibrant Fourth Estate.”
Wood was until last year a minister in the Labour government which could have averted the TVNZ cuts.
It spent more than $16 million planning a new public media entity to replace TVNZ and RNZ with a not-for-profit public media entity — but then scrapped it weeks before it was due to begin.
“You’ve just identified one of the core things that we’ve got to deal with. TVNZ, in terms of its statutory form, is neither one thing nor the other. It has a commercial imperative and it also has some other obligations in terms of public good.
“News and current affairs should be at the heart of that — and that is something that we should be much clearer about.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This rejected “heartfelt” letter sent to The Press this week criticising its April 6 editorial about a “turning point” in the deadly war on Gaza by Earthwise co-presenter Lois Griffiths is republished here in the public interest.
Historian Howard Zinn stressed the importance of historical background if one wants to understand today’s world. The past cannot be changed. But learning about the past makes it easier to understand the present and how to strive for a better future.
Every Gaza war article, including the [6 April 2024] Press editorial “A turning Point in Gaza”, begins with Hamas attacking Israel last October and then Israel retaliating. No historical background is needed.
Yet UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that “October 07 did not happen in a vacuum”.
Maybe, just maybe, he reads history. Maybe he is thinking of the Nakba of 1948, the regular Israel bombing campaigns with names like “Operation Cast Lead”.
If Israel has the right to retaliate, maybe Palestinians do too?
The same Press article refers to “Western media and its consumers” not being able to identify with “faceless, nameless Palestinians” .
Palestinians aren’t “faceless or nameless”. I’ve read about and seen pictures of some of the Palestinian journalists targeted. Refaat Alareer, a well-loved Gazan academic, writer, and story-teller, was targeted.
Our commitment to humanity challenges us to follow Howard Zinn’s advice and believe that another, kinder, world is possible.
Quoting Bethlehem Lutheran Pastor Munther Isaac, “Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world.”
It’s a tale of two countries: In some states, public officials are trying to make government work for their constituents. In others, they aren’t.
This week marks one year since the Great Medicaid Purge (a.k.a. the “unwinding”) began. Early during the pandemic, in exchange for additional funds, Congress temporarily prohibited states from kicking anyone off Medicaid. But as of April 1, 2023, states were allowed to start disenrolling people.
Some did so immediately. So far, at least 19.6 million people have lost Medicaid coverage. That’s higher than the initial forecast, 15 million, even though the process hasn’t yet finished.
Some enrollees were kicked off because they were evaluated and found to be no longer eligible for the public health insurance program — maybe because (happily!) their incomes rose, or because they aged out of a program. But as data from KFF shows, the vast majority, nearly 70 percent, lost coverage because of paperwork issues. …
These “paperwork issues” were added by self-alleged conservatives, or Republicans, in order to reduce the number of beneficiaries, supposedly in order to protect taxpayers against “waste, fraud or abuse,” by poor people, against taxpayers. Wikipedia’s article on Medicaid says:
Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 85 million low-income and disabled people as of 2022;[3] in 2019, the program paid for half of all U.S. births.[4] As of 2017, the total annual cost of Medicaid was just over $600 billion, of which the federal government contributed $375 billion and states an additional $230 billion.[4] States are not required to participate in the program, although all have since 1982. In general, Medicaid recipients must be U.S. citizens or qualified non-citizens, and may include low-income adults, their children, and people with certain disabilities.[5] As of 2022 45% of those receiving Medicaid or CHIP were children.[3]
Medicaid also covers long-term services and supports, including both nursing home care and home- and community-based services, for those with low incomes and minimal assets; the exact qualifications vary by state. Medicaid spent $215 billion on such care in 2020, over half of the total $402 billion spent on such services.[6] Of the 7.7 million Americans who used long-term services and supports in 2020, about 5.6 million were covered by Medicaid, including 1.6 million of the 1.9 million in institutional settings.[7]
Medicaid covers healthcare costs for people with low incomes, while Medicare is a universal program providing health coverage for the elderly.
Medicaid is means-tested (it’s for only poor people), whereas Medicare is not. President Lyndon Baines Johnson introduced Medicaid in 1965, and Medicare in 1966. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had introduced the federal taxation-based trust-funded Social Security retirement program in 1935; and both of those Presidents were Democrats, which used to be the Party that had some ideological commitment to workers, whereas the Republican Party, ever since a Confederate’s (pro-slavery) bullet assassinated the first (and the only progressive, or pro-democratic) Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, in 1865, has been, and is, committed only to investors, which is to say, only to the class of only rich individuals, the owners of businesses — managers instead of workers and consumers.
There are just two basic philosophies of government: either it is democratic, meaning one-person-one-vote rule (rule equally by all residents), or else it is aristocratic (rule unequally by residents on the basis of each person’s wealth), meaning one-dollar-one-vote rule (which is the way that a corporation is run: the more shares a person owns, the more of a say in managing it the individual willl have). The Democratic Party used to believe in democracy (government rule as being a right that each resident has equally), and the Republican Party after Lincoln was shot has always believed in aristocracy (government rule as a privilege that only certain residents have, they generally being the rich ones, but also sometimes only Christians). Consequently, the Democratic Party was “populist,” and the Republican Party was “elitist.” (Republicans — after Lincoln — were the Party of “business,” meaning of the owners of corporations.)
In America, as in all countries, there is also race as a political factor, and it’s traditionally categorized as being based upon either nationality or else religion of a person’s ancestors, or else (for instantaneous categorization) the individual’s appearance marks one’s ‘race’. But, whatever a ‘race’ is, racism or support for race being considered as a qualification for receiving a benefit from government or else as being a qualification for exclusion from receiving that benefit, can be supported both by populists and by elitists.
However, whereas racism is intrinsic to aristocracy, it is not intrinsic to democracy. Aristocracy believes in hereditary right, such as to pass wealth on to one’s children, whereas democracy rejects that and can survive only where intergenerational transmission of privately acquired wealth is by law either severely limited or else totally prohibited. And that exclusionary right for an aristocrat, to pass on to the next generation the person’s private wealth, is what produces, after many successive generations, increasingly concentrated wealth, and increasingly widespread poverty, which then institutionalizes aristocratic government and rule by privilege, instead of rule by individuals’ work and merit. Consequently, any democrat (or populist) who tolerates aristocracy, is tolerating the end of democracy.
For example, many of America’s Confederates considered themselves to be democrats but supported slavery of Blacks. Not only the Confederate aristocracy did. But — just as in Israel, there is no democracy, because only the Jews can vote there — the Confederacy was no democracy, because only the ‘Whites’ could vote there.
Similarly, Germany’s Nazis weren’t only the aristocracy, but also many Germans who considered themselves to be populists, and Hitler exploited this widespread illogicality among the public, in order to create his extremely elitist-racist-imperialist (or ideologically nazi) nation.
The theory behind the cutbacks in Medicaid is that the poor are to blame for their poverty. Any aristocrat believes it to at least some extent, despite its being stupid. It is stupid because any aristocrat knows that money is power: the power to hire people to do your will, and to fire ones who won’t or can’t. Any aristocrat experiences that reality all the time. The most-powerless individuals in any society are the poorest. Obviously, something causes a person to be poor, but heredity — being born poor and surrounded by only poor people — will always be the biggest portion of that cause. The people with the power are the aristocrats, the super-rich few who own the vast majority of the nation’s private wealth. They create — and, by means of their lobbyists and media and politicians, constantly impose — the system that produces, the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and so of power. The poor don’t, and can’t. And won’t. Consequently, any theory that the poor ought to be blamed for their poverty is an obvious lie, which benefits the richest. Of course, an individual also has some effect on his or her getting and staying out of poverty, but, in an aristocracy, the system itself has a much bigger effect on that.
By contrast against the aristocratic view, an intelligent democrat acknowledges (not merely to oneself but also publicly) that money is power, and consequently blames the super-rich — the very few who possess most of it — for society’s problems. Not the poor. And not any ‘race’. This isn’t to say that there aren’t intergenerational factors that help to explain how wealthy a given individual is — of course, there are (and that is the problem). But whereas a democrat tries to reduce them, an aristocrat tries to enlarge them. And that’s the ideological difference between an aristocrat and a democrat.
If America’s supposed effort to increase economic opportunity for poor people is to rely upon the poor ‘raising themselves up by their own bootstraps’, then it isn’t relying upon the billionaires to have the responsibility for solving this problem. But they, the super-rich, are the ones who actually caused the problem by their controlling not only their corporations but the press, and the lobbyists, and the politicians, who have so deceived and so controlled the public, as to have instituted this widely oppressive system, which the poorest suffer the most. It would not exist in an authentically one-person-one-vote government and nation and culture. It can exist only in an aristocracy (which is what post-WW2 America is).
The most efficient way to minimize social inequality is to replace aristocracy with democracy. It’s that simple, and that difficult. Only the super-rich possess the means to do it, but none of them actually wants to. Are all of them psychopaths? They benefit from the system that they have imposed. They benefit not only in wealth but in their corporate protective immunity from having to go to prison for any corporate crimes they require their subordinates to do in order to generate their wealth. For example, on April 10, Good Jobs First headlined “The Trillion-Dollar Mark: Corporate Misconduct Cases Reach a Dubious Milestone,” and reported:
Regulatory fines, criminal penalties, and class-action settlements paid by corporations in the United States since 2000 have now surpassed $1 trillion. Total payouts for corporate misconduct grew from around $7 billion per year in the early 2000s to more than $50 billion annually in recent years, according to a new report by Good Jobs First.
This amounts to a seven-fold increase in current dollars — a 300% increase in constant dollars.
These figures are derived from Violation Tracker, a wide-ranging database containing information on more than 600,000 cases from about 500 federal, state and local regulatory agencies and prosecutors as well as court data on major private lawsuits.
The database shows that 127 large parent companies have each paid more than $1 billion in fines and settlements over the past quarter-century. The most penalized industries are financial services and pharmaceuticals, followed by oil and gas, motor vehicles, and utilities. …
Among the findings:
Bank of America has by far the largest penalty total at $87 billion. It and other banks, both domestic and foreign, account for six of the 10 most penalized parent companies.
Other bad actors include BP (mainly because of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill), Volkswagen (because of its emissions software cheating scandal), Johnson & Johnson (largely because of big settlements in cases alleging its talcum powder causes cancer), and PG&E (due to cases accusing it of causing or contributing to wildfires in the West).
Recidivism is a major issue. Half a dozen parent companies—all banks—have each paid $1 million or more in over 100 different cases, led by Bank of America with 225. Two dozen parents have at least 50 of these cases on their record.
All of the top 10 and 95 of the 100 most penalized parent companies are publicly traded. The most penalized privately held company is Purdue Pharma, which is going out of business for its role in causing the opioid crisis.
In more than 500 of the cases involving criminal charges, the U.S. Justice Department offered the defendant a deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreement. …
That’s $1T during the reported 23-year period, and these fines are mere wrist-slaps to those stockholders’ annual profits. But the victims lost vastly more than that, and this report made no mention of anyone having gone to prison for any of these corporate crimes, though at least two of them did — Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried, both of whom had robbed their fellow-investors. But, for example, the Purdue Pharma case had killed at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, and yet none of the Sackler family that owned it, and that drove their employees to perpetrate it, had even a possibility of going to prison for any of those deaths, nor for the vast other harms that their personal wealth-building had driven.
In an aristocracy, the only super-rich who ever get imprisoned are ones who have harmed other corporate investors — never ones who have harmed or even killed vast multitudes of the middle and bottom economic classes.
Remarkably, the corrupt Democratic Party President of the United States has taken to the hustings in his fake-‘populist’ re-election campaign by citing a 2021 White House economic study, which calculated that America’s billionaires are taxed at far lower rates of income than regular Americans are. It found that if the 400 richest (highest-wealth) Americans (all of whom were multi-billionaires, and not merely billionaires, and who donate collectively around 30% of all of the money that is expended in U.S. political campaigns) had been taxed including their “income” from the corporate stock that they own (which now and always has essentially never been taxed because there are so many ways to avoid ever being taxed on it), then they were collectively being taxed at only an 8.2% rate on all of their income. It was a sound study. However, the billionaires-controlled think tanks and media slammed it by deceiving their public about it. For example, PolitiFact rated Biden’s statement “False” because (and this displays its contempt for the intelligence of its readers): “Under the current tax code, the top 1% of taxpayers pay an effective tax rate of 25% on the income the government counts.” But that’s exactly what the White House economists had been criticizing! They were criticizing the current tax-laws in the U.S., which DON’T include as reported income those stock profits. For once (while campaigning for re-election), Biden told the truth, even though it’s a truth that his billionaire backers want the public NOT to know. (And PolitiFact is funded by numerous billionaires, both Democratic Party ones such a Soros’s Open Society, and Republican ones such as the Charles Koch Institute.) Is it any wonder, then, why the U.S. wealth-distribution is becoming increasingly skewed to the billionaires, even though so much of their wealth is being hidden and not even reported to the Government?
Guardian journalist George Monbiot has been calling out the continued appalling abuse of people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME, also known as ME/CFS). However, there’s one prominent, powerful psychiatrist standing in the way of justice via an ‘ME inquiry’ over the “biggest medical scandal of the 21st century”: Simon Wessely.
Calls for an ME inquiry
Right now, the NHS is abusing – and killing – (at least) two women living with severe ME. Meanwhile, the spin-doctor-to-corporate media shill machine has continued to churn out the junk science that manufactured this unconscionable situation for people living with the devastating disease.
So, Guardian journalist George Monbiot is the latest to join people living with ME, their carers, and campaigners in calling for the UK government to conduct an inquiry:
Now we need an inquiry into the systematic mistreatment and abuse of ME/CFS patients, a massive scandal affecting far greater numbers of people than the poorly-evidenced Gender Identity Development Services (important as that issue is). Where's the major government investigation?…
Given this, it’s fair to ask why exactly the government hasn’t instigated an inquiry? Some people from the ME community on X had a good suspicion as to why this might be. Specifically, they pointed out that a chief scientist who promoted the quack PACE study has a convenient position over the levers of power.
Inquiry needed The only issue is that Wessely has planted himself on the JAC – Judicial Appointments Board – which allocates heads of tribunals & inquiries It's almost like he knows he's done something wrong that needs an Inquiry?! https://t.co/z9crJPetKp
Psychiatrist Simon Wessely started on the JAC in September 2017, and the JAC reappointed him again in 2020. Crucially, the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) decides who would head up inquiries. In other words, Wessely – a instrumental actor in the medical scandal – would get to choose who would oversee an inquiry on it.
However, when it comes to Wessely weaseling into all the worst places to influence the discourse surrounding ME, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Wessely – psychologiser-in-chief
Firstly, of course, Simon Wessely played a central role in the sham PACE trial itself.
It was a study, part-funded by the UK government, into treatment for ME. It found that people could recover from the disease by having cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). In other words, people living with a very-real, viral-based illness should just ‘think themselves better’. Essentially, the trial pushed the notion that the disease was part-psychosomatic or ‘made up’ by patients.
While Wessely wasn’t among the principal investigators, he supported and shaped the study in a number of critical ways. For one, his previous research on ME influenced the way in which the scientists carried out the study. On top of this, he was also directly involved. In particular, he sat as a centre manager for one of the trial centres, and was on the PACE Trial Management Group. The trial credited the group as one of the authors of the study.
Perhaps most significantly, Wessely was central to pushing out the PACE trial through the media.
However, psychologising physical illnesses has been Wessely’s modus operandi writ large. In short, he has long hawked in this type of psychosomatic junk science.
For one, Wessely started his glittering career peddling junk psychosomatic science studies on hysteria. Ostensibly, this notion has long dismissed women’s health conditions and cemented a pervasive misogyny throughout medical science.
Unsurprisingly then, it was also Wessely and his band of biopsychosocial science chums who first started tarring ME as something psychological. Specifically, in the 1980s, he and his colleagues began pumping out articles that promulgated the cognitive behavioural model of ME.
This entrenched its psychosomatic origin and pushed cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET) as the dominant treatment methods.
Moreover, as the Canary’s Steve Topple previously pointed out for example, Wessely gave Gulf War syndrome the psychologisation treatment in the 1990s too. As he explained:
Wessely is of course the person who (with Chalder, no less) perpetuated the myth that Gulf War syndrome was somehow psychosomatic – in the same way the pair helped ME to become ‘all in people’s heads’.
Punching down for a living
Of course, the medical establishment and state have lapped this up. Notably, elite medical bodies havelavished Wessely with multiple awards and memberships. Naturally, the prolific pillar of the psychosomatic bent was also knighted for his “services to military healthcare and psychological medicine”.
Alongside this, he has a stupefying number of influential roles in the medical establishment itself. He was president of the Royal College of Psychiatry, as well as the Royal College of Medicine. On top of this, the Queen and King’s College London (KCL) awarded Simon Wessely the first regius professor in psychiatry. Essentially, this is a special title bestowed by a monarch.
So, how did a psychiatrist with a history of pushing contentious studies and dubious science get these glamorous accolades on lofty titles?
Well, it probably can’t hurt when you rub shoulders with all the right people.
In Wessely’s case, he’s been a trustee and now sits as a vice-president to non-profit Combat Stress. It is the “UK’s leading veterans’ mental health charity”. As psychologiser-in-chief of a serious physical war-related condition, Wessely is of course right at home in a non-profit focused solely on the psychosomatic impacts of war. But significantly, King Charles has been the charity’s long-time patron.
More to the point however, Wessely has worked wonders for successive neoliberal government agendas. In short, stripping people of social security is a hell of a lot easier when the science (purportedly) is behind you.
Of course, this has been precisely the impact of his many years seeding the biopsychosocial model of ME. Therefore, if you want acclaim in medical and political circles – it helps if you push out studies to abet the neoliberal capitalist state in painting millions of people as so-called ‘malingerers’ and benefit ‘scroungers’.
Cosying up in the halls of power
So, Simon Wessely has moved in all the right circles to cosy up to the organ grinders in the halls of power.
Therefore, it was not surprising in 2017 when Theresa May’s Tory government asked him to review the Mental Health Act.
A coalition of Disabled People’s Organisations railed against this. They raised their significant concerns about his role, stating in a letter at the time:
A review is needed to address mental health injustice, yet Wessely’s body of work on ME (or “chronic fatigue syndrome”) demonstrates his lack of honesty, care and compassion for patients. His unsubstantiated claim that ME is driven by “false illness beliefs” has led to patients being labelled as hypochondriacs, treated with contempt by some in the medical profession and stigmatised by society. His recommended treatment regime of Graded Exercise Therapy caused deterioration in function for nearly 50% of ME patients surveyed, yet he dismisses their evidence as unreliable and labels all critics of this work as irrational and extremist.
Predictably then, Wessely punched down on mental health patients in this too. As Topple explained:
In it, he pushed the emphasis on the patient leading what treatment they had; ‘self-management’ if you like. This seems good on paper. But in reality, it could leave patients vulnerable. Because if treatments don’t work, then the blame for this can be pushed onto the patient for ‘not trying hard enough’. This absolves medical professionals, and ultimately the system, of responsibility.
So, to make matters worse, this hasn’t been the end of Wessely’s rise to alarming positions of prominent influence. In January 2023, the NHS appointed him to its board. As the NHS website explains, the board is:
the senior decision-making structure for NHS England. It has reserved key decisions and matters for their own decision, including strategic direction, overseeing delivery of the agreed strategy, the approach to risk, and establishing the culture and values of the organisation.
In other words, Wessely has a central role in dictating the direction of NHS services – which will of course include how the NHS treats people with ME. Additionally, the Canarypreviously noted that Wessely’s appointment coincided with the NHS deprioritising services for long Covid.
Crucially, it could signal the trajectory of treatment for ME, long Covid and other chronic illnesses under Wessely’s direction.
Wessely mingling with the media
Ultimately, people living with ME, scientists, some independent media, campaigners, and others have been meticulously researching and documenting this sordid medical scandal for many years. Yet the corporate and mainstream press has offered a cesspool of mockery, maligning, and gaslighting these same people at every turn.
So why hasn’t the corporate and mainstream media – including Monbiot’s own outlet – kicked up a fuss about this?
It’s the usual story. As the Canary’s Steve Topple has consistently reported, this is largely thanks to the ostensible “corporate industry spin doctor” the Science Media Centre (SMC)
Of course, one of its founders was none other than, you guessed it, professor Simon Wessely. He was also a director of the SMC between 2015 and 2019. In addition, the Maudsley Charity, under the NHS trust where Wessely works, has funded the SMC to boot.
Given this, it’s little wonder the SMC haslitteredhisquotes and views across press releases on ME research. Invariably, it shows that Wessely is comfortably well-connected with the corporate media too.
Justice for people living with ME
In light of all this, Simon Wessely’s grip on the science and future for people living with ME seems almost unassailable.
What we have is a high-profile medical professional and biopsychosocial proponent poised in all the right places to obstruct scrutiny of the “biggest medical scandal of the 21st century”. In other words, cronyism has obfuscated the truth and scapegoated a whole group of people. Sound familiar?
The Chronic Collaboration – a group fighting for people living with ME and other chronic illnesses – highlighted the uncanny parallels to the recent Post Office Scandal. Crucially, it ran a campaign to call for ITV to expose the post-viral scandal of ME. Of course, one outcome could be to force the government’s to set up an inquiry, as Monbiot said.
However, while an inquiry would be a good start – it must end with all those who’ve delayed and hampered action on ME being held accountable.
Most important of all, it needs to pave the way for justice, and nothing short of a revolution in medical care for all those living with ME, long Covid, and other chronic illnesses the psychologising lobby has long harmed.
I’m often asked what needs to change to make the world a better place for disabled people. It used to be a complex answer for me. It depended on the context I was being asked, who was asking, or what had been happening recently.
But now it’s simple: the world needs to stop hating disabled people and being so fucking ableist.
Ableism has always been rife in society, media, and politics. It feels like it’s been ramped up in recent years, but especially in the last few months. A big reason for this is that the government are intent on demonising us to cover for the fact they and their rich mates are stealing from taxpayers.
How the poison of ableism trickles down
This feeding of hate from the government and media to the common man is easily done when 75% of the British media is owned by the same two, rich, Tory-supporting men. The click-driven nature of news now means government ministers can call disabled people anything they want without the press challenging it.
After all, “languishing on benefits” is a much punchier vox pop than ‘minister claims people don’t want to work but they’re actually just trying to survive’.
These views are then repeated as fact by right-wing pundits on chat shows. Eventually, it becomes the public opinion that people on sickness and disability unemployment benefits are lazy and taking the taxpayer for a ride.
What the hatred manifests into
This awful rhetoric contributes to the centuries-old stereotype that disability is something to be ashamed of. Except now, they’ve made our lives so miserable that if you dare to attempt to live a happy disabled existence you MUST be faking it to rinse those hard-working taxpayers.
It means photography companies think it’s perfectly acceptable to leave disabled kids out of school photos. Young lads feel comfortable sitting on their shit podcasts and laughing about how they wouldn’t date a “mangled” woman in a wheelchair cos they’d be worried their equally shit mates would laugh at them. Heaven forbid they consider getting better friends.
It means cunts like Matthew Parris can week in and week out call disabled people lazy fakers who drain the taxpayer and when you, for example, co-ordinate 400 complaints against him the press regulator can come back with ‘Well that’s just his opinion as a journalist‘. Well isn’t it a good job that I get to have my opinion too?
And so The Week in Ableist Bullshit was born
If the last few weeks have proven anything, it’s that there’s simply too much ableism to keep track of and the media can’t be trusted to hold all of it to account – especially when they create a great chunk of it.
One thing I have always striven to do in my work is hold those making life harder for disabled people accountable. That’s why I’m delighted to be writing this new weekly column here at the Canary. In it I will collate and dissect the barrage of crap disabled people are facing from the government, media, social media, organisations, and society.
But I also want to celebrate the great things disabled people do too, so at the end of each column will be my disabled joy of the week. Come for the ableists bashing – but stay for the hidden pockets of joy.
This week’s is a much more condensed version but from next week expect no stone to go unturned. So, shall we?
Shakespeare’s Globe doesn’t give a fuck if disabled people hate them
A few months ago it was announced that in the Globe’s latest incarnation of the ableist classic, Richard III will be played by a non-disabled performer. In my opinion, the play and role have always been an awfully over-exaggerated portrayal of the disabled villain trope.
However, the Globe lost me when it released a statement following pushback from disabled people in which they almost claimed that there was an abundance of roles for disabled people to play. The artistic director Michelle Terry, who is taking up the role, stated “it will come around again”.
Many hoped that our voices would be heard and the Globe would change its mind, but today the full cast was announced and Terry remains in the role. When I visited a couple of years ago I found their access to be exceptional.
But access doesn’t matter when the historic theatre refuse to cast us in stories about us.
The government is trying to fuck over disabled students even more
Being a disabled student is already hard, but now the Department for Education (DfE) is proposing to abolish a huge chunk of disabled students’ allowance funding.
The cuts would apply to “specialist non-medical help” which could mean students lose funding for interpreters, note-takers, and more. It will mean disabled students will be put at an even bigger disadvantage.
The consultation closes on 3 July and is open to disabled students, providers, and higher education staff. You can have your say here.
Daily Mail is back on its ‘ADHD is fake’ bullshit
There are so many stories about different ways in which ADHD doesn’t exist that I fear ‘ADHD lies of the week’ may become a permanent feature here. I swear at times it feels like the Daily Mail and the Times are having a competition to see who can whip up the most hate about people with ADHD.
This time they’re aided by exercise bore Joe Wicks who is blaming processed food for the increase in ADHD diagnosis. The fact this has been disproven many times didn’t bother the rag though.
I know the realities of being neurodivergent all too well. Swapping my safe food – chicken nuggets – for some veggies won’t make my life any easier. But these ignorant fools not speaking on issues they have no idea about will.
Disabled Joy of the Week – Keedie
In amongst all the hatred towards neurodivergent women and girls, Elle McNicoll is a constant force for good. The author’s latest offering Keedie is a prequel to her behemoth A Kind of Spark.
The book is about standing up to those who try to make you feel small and celebrating the brilliance of autistic and neurodivergent people. Attending the Autistic Girls Network online event celebrating Elle felt like a balm for my soul that had been destroyed by all the abuse we’ve endured these last few weeks.
Neurodivergent women and girls loudly being ourselves and refusing to be made small in a world that wants to make us ashamed of who we are. You can buy Keedie here.
And finally…
I wanted to leave you with something my pal told me when I was feeling guilty about treating myself. As someone who comes from poverty, the idea of frivolously spending money on myself feels wrong.
Enter T with some excellent wisdom:
When you don’t treat yourself the Tories win a little bit.
In this terrible world it’s important that, when we can, we celebrate who we are – even if that’s by buying the cute boiler suit.
Until next week, fuck the Tories and don’t believe all you read.
The future of New Zealand’s media landscape is becoming clearer by the day, with confirmation that it will no longer feature one of the country’s big two TV news networks.
Warner Bros. Discovery has revealed that all of Newshub’s operations will be shut down, effective July 5. That includes the flagship 6pm bulletin, The AM Show, and the Newshub website.
294 staff are set to lose their jobs.
It’s also been confirmed that TVNZ’s programme Sunday will be cancelled, following yesterday’s announcement that Fair Go, as well as both 1News at Midday and 1News Tonight, are being canned in their current format.
“The day the news axe fell” – a huge blow to New Zealand’s democracy. Image: Stuff screenshot APR
New Zealand’s media industry has been rocked by the bleeding obvious which is that their failed ratings system for legacy media was always more art than science.
The NZ radio ratings system is a diary that you fill in every 15 minutes — which no one ever fills in properly.
The NZ newspaper ratings are opinion polls and the NZ TV ratings system is a magical 180 boxes that limits choice to whoever had the TV remote.
When the sales rep told the advertiser that 300,000 people would read, see, hear their advert, it was based on ratings systems that were flattering but not real.
With the ruthlessness of online audience measurement, advertisers could see exactly how many people were actually seeing their adverts, and the legacy media never adapted to this new reality.
What we see now is hollowed out journalism competing against social media hate algorithms designed to generate emotional responses rather than Fourth Estate accountability.
New Zealand has NEVER had the audience size to make advertising based broadcasting feasible, that’s why it’s always required a state broadcaster — with no Fourth Estate who will hold this hard right racist climate denying beneficiary bashing government to account?
Minister missing in action
Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee has refused to support the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill that Labour’s former minister Willie Jackson put forward that would at least force Google and Facebook to pay for the journalism they take for free.
Lee has been utterly hopeless and missing in action here — if “Democracy dies in darkness”, National are pulling the plug.
This government doesn’t want accountability, does it?
Instagram this year switched on a new filter to smother political debate and we know actual journalism has been smothered by the social media algorithms.
I don’t think that most people who get their information from their social media feeds understand they aren’t seeing the most important journalism but are in fact seeing the most inflammatory rhetoric to keep people outraged and addicted to doom scrolling.
When Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters does his big lie that the entire mainstream media were bribed because of a funding note by NZ on Air in regards to coverage of Māori issues for the Public Interest Journalism fund — which by the way was quickly clarified by NZ on Air as not an editorial demand — he conflates and maliciously spins and NZ’s democracy suffers.
Muddled TVNZ
Television New Zealand has always come across like a muddle. It aspires to be BBC public broadcasting yet has the commercial imperatives of any Crown Owned Enterprise. If Labour had merged TVNZ and RNZ and made TVNZ 1 commercial free so that the advertising revenue could cross over to Newshub, it would have rebuilt the importance of public broadcasting while actually regulating the broken free market.
When will we get a Labour Party that actually gives a damn about public broadcasting rather than pay lip service to it?
Ultimately Newshub’s demise is a story of ruthless transnational interests and geopolitical cultural hegemony.
Corporate Hollywood soft power wants to continue its cultural dominance as the South Pacific friction continues between the United States and China.
New Zealand is an important plank for American hegemony in the South Pacific and as China and American competition heats up, Warners Bros Discovery suddenly buying a large stake in our media was always a geopolitical calculation over a commercial one.
Cultural dominance doesn’t require nor want an active journalism, so they will keep the channel open purely as a means of dominating domestic culture without any of the Fourth Estate obligations.
That bitter angry feeling you have watching Warner Bros Discovery destroy our Fourth Estate is righteous.
Social licence trashed
They bought a media outlet that has had a 35-year history of being a structural part of our media environment and dumping it trashes their social licence in this country.
That feeling of rage you have watching a multibillion transnational vandalise our environment is going to be repeated the millisecond you see the American mining interests lining up to mine conservation land with all their promises to repair anything they break.
Remember — the transnational ain’t your friend regardless of its pronouns.
That person they rolled in with the soft-glazed CEO face to do the sad, sad crying is disingenuous and condescending.
Now Warner Bros has killed Newshub off, we have no option as Kiwis but to boycott whatever is left of TV3 and water down Warner Bros remaining interests altogether.
They’ve burnt their bridges with us in New Zealand by walking away from their social contract, we should have no troubles returning the favour!
The only winners here are rightwing politicians who don’t want their counterproductive and corrupt decisions to be scrutinised.
We are a poorer and weaker democracy after these news cuts.
Why bother having a Minister of Broadcasting if all they do is fiddle while the industry burns?
Welcome to your new media future in Aotearoa New Zealand . . .
It took a genocide for Torontonians to commit themselves to the goal of defeating Israel. It turns out Iranian President Akhmedinejad was right after all. ‘Israel’ must be wiped off the map. It is an ugly cancer that could kill its Earthly host. But it will disappear only by the will of the people, Palestinian, Canadian, Jewish-Christian-Muslim united.
The Palestinians have been at it from 1917, the year British Lord Balfour (arch anti-Semite) wrote his poison pen letter offering a Jewish state in the soon-to-be British colony Palestine (to rid Britain of Jews, but tastefully, not like Richard I in 1190 or Edward I in 1290). We fellow colonials are late off the mark, only recently acknowledging our own guilt for our genocide against Canada’s natives, but our efforts to stop funding genocide are equally vital. Better late than never.
My Jewish friend warned me that police seem to have a directive to intimidate, beat up, arrest, so ‘Watch out!’ When I arrived across from the US Consulate, it looked low key. No hate-filled Zionists trying to drown us out, like at previous demos. No police in sight beyond the ones blocking University Avenue.
The crowd was festive, joining in chants till the speakers came. As if on cue, the Revolutionary Communist Party made a stylish march past, shouting about revolution through class war, waving their bright red flags with hammer and sickle, like a voice from the past.
That nostalgia continued with a battle-scarred aging Jewish feminist recalling her earlier militancy in 1970s Toronto (abortion and Vietnam). The police on horseback trampled them, this before Canada had a constitution which protects the right to protest. Thank you Trudeau Sr, though I heard a ‘genocide Justin’ crack, and recent police brutality suggests that for them, we are ‘on notice’.
The protest spokesman recounted the litany of police nastiness at recent demos, the last where they choked off the demo and then started beating up protesters, seizing the truck with loudspeakers. Then, issued a press release claiming they, the police, were the victims and the protesters were terrorists. Ha! They tried the same tactics this time but orgganizers were prepared and the confiscated truck was replaced. But it seems the police were on their best behavior after that.
As we marched, I mingled to check out slogans. From the river to the sea, Palestine is almost free morphed into From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever. Lots of Jews, looking thoughtful and subdued. Jews against genocide, Jews against ethnostates.
An intriguing I condemn أمك
Your mothers?! I asked the protester. ‘Mothers of the soldiers killing Palestinians.’ Ahh, he was thinking of all the Palestinian mothers (especially pregnant) and children that have been the main targets of Israeli soldiers (female soldiers too brag on social media about killing Palestinians).
And a sad looking Einstein: It is with great sadness that I see Zionists doing to Palestinians what Germans did to Jews. And Move Israel to Florida. Another, a clever cartoon of Justin Trudeau and Mayor Olivia Chow with comic bubbles Next election? I’ll air drop my vote.
The star attraction was the Grim Reapess (feminine of reaper?) with a wagon of baby dolls covered in blood, her hubbie in top hat ringing the bell of the Apocalypse. And an outsize Palestinian flag which an agile volunteer weaved among the marchers, fluttering in the breeze (and in our faces), like we were a flotilla come to rescue the Palestinians from starvation.
Old codgers like yours truly were a tiny minority of the 2,000 celebrating the last Friday prayer day of Ramadan. Lots of baby carriages and teens, a wonderful cross-section of Canadians, as many whites as browns. And a feeling of celebration. The crowd knew: we are going to win this one. And it will change the world. For the better. Unless Israel unleashes its arsenal of nukes as their ship sinks. ‘They are loony. They will take us all with them,’ my Christian Palestinian friend said with a shudder.
Almost forgot: Free Palestine! Free Pakistan! Yes. Imran Khan is right up there with Hamas’ Yahya Sinwar and IRGC’s Qasem Soleimani as heroes in the struggle to free, free, free Palestine!
I feel elated too, after weeks of feeling the battle is lost. No. Muslims are in this for the long haul. The Crusaders managed to occupy Jerusalem for a century, massacring any Jews or Muslims who were there to greet them. Richard I fought there (and was treated nobly by Salah al-Din, who defeated the Crusaders).
We are in the right. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has put it on notice. The Grim Reapess’s death knell tolls. I may not live to see the happy day, but I will die assured that as long as there are Palestinians alive, the battle is not lost.
On July 19 2023, exactly a year on from the hottest day on record, and the devastating Wennington wild fire in East London which completely destroyed four houses, I had travelled up to parliament to raise the alarm about the effects a climate catastrophe will have on the disabled community and vulnerable groups, the old, and the frail.
I have multiple sclerosis (MS) and the hottest day in 2022 really drained what little energy I usually have. I felt like the plants in my garden, completely wilted, my leaves turning brown. It was the first time that I’d had to be pushed into my garden in a wheelchair. We rescued an exhausted robin, unable to even fly up to the bird bath, cooling off in a tub of rancid water. It was truly horrifying.
In early July 2023, I attended a talk at the Southbank Centre with Greta Thunberg and was shocked to learn that the government was preparing to sign new, and very significant, oil and gas licenses.
I learnt that the Rosebank project, the UK’s biggest untapped oilfield 80 miles off the Shetland coast in the North Atlantic, would have the potential if it were burned to produce as much carbon dioxide as running 56 coal-fired power stations for a year.
So, at a time when the UN Chief António Guterres started using the term ‘Global Boiling’, to describe the acceleration of terrifying climate impacts, Rishi Sunak was preparing to effectively tear up our commitment to Net Zero and the Paris Agreement and block our only escape route from global catastrophe.
Warnings from the 1990s
I am a documentary film maker.
In the late 90’s, when ‘Global Warming’ was very much considered to be junk science, I made a film called ‘Turned out Nice Again – Britain under climate change’, which set out to show what life would be like in the-near-future, about 2060, if we failed to curb our use of fossil fuels. Stuff I thought I’d never have a front row seat to witness:
It was during that time that I learnt that CO2 emissions take a while to affect the climate. Estimates range from between 10 to 30 years. So, the impacts we are experiencing today relate to past emissions, say the invasion of Iraq, and present emissions will affect the atmosphere roughly 10 to 30 years from now.
So, I knew that with CO2 it wasn’t simply a case of just turning off the tap. Phasing out needed to happen gradually and consistently, allowing the economy and society the time to adjust. It couldn’t be business as usual right up to the 2050 deadline, the deadline stipulated in the Paris Agreement, and then bother. It most certainly couldn’t involve utilising new oil and gas fields.
Disabled people taking a stand
So, extremely angry, I had travelled up to Westminster on a Wednesday, as I say, exactly one year on from the hottest day and the Wennington wild-fire, and at around the time PMQ’s would have been winding up and parked my mobility scooter right outside the Carriage Entrance to parliament.
I had dressed up the basket on the front to look like it was on fire, with a warning sign showing a wheelchair bound person caught between a fire and a flood; referencing the Wennington wildfire:
Also, the danger from flash flooding, which was tragically emphasised in the run up to my plea hearing by the death of an 83-year-old Chesterfield woman called Maureen Gilbert, who drowned in her home during Storm Babet, as she was unable to escape the rapidly rising water inside her terrace home owing to mobility problems.
‘I cannot run from a climate emergency’
I had carried a placard with fake flames coming out of the top that said, ‘I cannot run from a Climate Emergency’. Neither run literally, because of my disability, nor run from what I felt was my social responsibility to try and spotlight the implications of a climate emergency, not just for the disabled community, but for all vulnerable people – the old and the frail.
I had asked the first police officer who approached me, I believe my arresting officer, to turn on his body cam and record a safety announcement. Me detailing my various disabilities. I also have ankylosing spondylitis (AS), an arthritic like condition that fuses your joints, that has left me with a completely fused neck, and completely fused lower spine, called a bamboo spine.
I explained exactly why I was there, and I was told that I was liable to be arrested:
I remember asking him to see it not as an arrest, but a demonstration in how difficult it would be to save someone like me from a fire at a moment’s notice and to carry me to the safety of a police cell. To see it as an exercise in preparedness. To which, I remember him saying, ‘If you were in a burning building, I’d throw you over my shoulder and carry you out.’
And I remember thinking, if you threw me over your shoulder, it would be like throwing a 13 stone ironing board over your shoulder, as my back and neck are almost entirely fused, and you’d probably drop me and/or break my neck in the process. It certainly wouldn’t be that quick and easy.
Surrounded by cops
My plan was to attract a swarm of cops around me, then use them as bait to attract the press, thereby elevating my protest into newsworthiness, then get nicked.
No D locks, no superglue, no seriously pissed off commuters, just a very uncooperative seriously disabled man on a ‘burning’ mobility scooter, a potential public relations nightmare, saying, ‘come and have a go if you think you’re strong enough’. Or indeed, only if you’ve got suitably accessible police infrastructure. Which I had hoped to find out.
I was given every opportunity to leave, invited on numerous occasions to carry out my protest along the pavement, away from the entrance. But it felt right to remain just where I was. Right in the middle of what they like to call, ominously, The Sterile Zone:
It’s strange, but I felt both my strongest and weakest at the same time. Surrounded by cops, one of whom apparently had a best friend with MS. None of whom could lay a finger on me, through fear of breaking something.
Who knew that fragility could become a super-power? Through-out, the burning issue of climate change held aloft, perhaps barring the way of the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who’s motorcade would have usually swept past right about then.
One of the police mentioned a secret tunnel right through to Downing Street and a short journey by golf cart.
Finally nicked
I was arrested under the 143 Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, which I thought was quite apt, as I sincerely believed that I was acting socially responsibly raising these urgent issues, especially for the disabled, the vulnerable and the frail. Those who would be shoved onto the front line of the government’s war against the weather.
I later found out that that particular law had made it illegal to carry a sleeping bag in Parliament Square, in answer to Brian Haw’s more than a decade of dissent and Occupy.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t plucked to safety from my flaming mobility scooter. So, no dodgy optic of me being carried away.
I waited eight months for my day in court. With countless sleepless nights, abject terror and righteousness slugging it out all through the winter, fretting over fines, and legal costs, and the bailiffs seizing my stuff. You can take the tele, but don’t take my Penny Black!
Preparing for court
So, I had done myself a favour and talked to Andy at Green & Black Cross, who straightened me out on quite a few things.
Stuff like, the district judge that I would be getting at my trial last week, having a better understanding of the law than your ordinary magistrate, preferring to be addressed as ‘sir’ or just plain ‘Judge’ to ‘Your Honour’, and that he doesn’t wear the silly Les Misérables head gear. Unlike my nightmares, where he’s also wearing a black hankie.
The good news was that I wouldn’t be getting the dodgy hanging judge Silas Reid, the one who is trying to take away jury trials, basically redact that last little bit of the Magna Carta, and does you for contempt for even mentioning the word ‘climate’. He’s terrorising Just Stop Oil in the Crown Court.
I’d decided to represent myself, as, even though legal stuff just goes right over the top of my head, I’d learn on my feet and try and blag my way through the proceedings. Apparently, you get more leeway. Plus, I’d have a great McKenzie friend, called Josh, courtesy Green & Black, to whisper advice.
Climate change and the impact on disabled people
On the day, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) got off to a very bad start by disclosing crucial documents a quarter of an hour before the hearing. Very shoddy, I must say. But understandable, considering the mountain of paperwork Just Stop Oil is generating. No wonder the guy looked depressed. This apparently pissed-off the judge big time.
Before we got underway, there was just time to take the plea of a Met police officer accused of groping a colleague.
Right from the off, the judge began by making it clear that the existence of a climate emergency was not in question. So, all that evidence I’d gathered, and helpfully stuffed into a ‘bundle’ for the judge and CPS, couldn’t be heard.
I’d spent a lot of time looking at the government’s National Adaptation Programme (NAP,) particularly an outlook from Stephen Belcher, the Chief Scientist at the Met Office:
Climate change is happening now… Heavy rainfall events that can lead to flash flooding are expected to become more frequent and intense across the country. Summer temperatures above 40oC, seen for the first time in July 2022, will become more commonplace by the end of the 21st century.
Also the ‘UK Climate Change Risk Assessment’ (CCRA), the latest one published in January 2022, six months before the Wennington wild fire. Its Executive Summary sounding like an Extinction Rebellion leaflet:
Climate change is happening now. It is one of the biggest challenges of our generation and has already begun to cause irreversible damage to our planet and way of life. We have clear evidence demonstrating the pace of warming in recent decades and the impacts we will face should this continue. As we redouble our efforts to achieve net zero, we must also continue to raise ambitions on adaptation to ensure the UK is resilient to the challenges of a warming world.
CCRA3 landed on cabinet desks in January 2022, six months before the Wennington wild fire, giving us a snapshot of what the government knew about the seriousness and challenges of climate change at that point in time.
So the case would almost entirely revolve around Article Ten of the Human Rights Act 1998, and The Freedom of Expression, and how reasonable I was acting in pursuing this right.
Eight hours of cops bleeding their hearts
The prosecution set out the issues. I was arrested blah blah blah… and showed the body cam footage of my arrest. Me looking almost sullen. Even rude. Not saying a word, as my arresting officer cautioned me.
By that time, I had had two hours of eight cops worth of near constant questions and pleading and befriending and guilt trips. ‘My best friend has got MS.’ ‘I’m a lesbian.’ ‘My dad is dying of cancer and I was planning on visiting him.’ That kind of thing. So, I looked exhausted:
My arresting officer took the stand. I counted five mentions of Just Stop Oil, who were being mass arrested on Parliament Square at the time of my action. Sorry JSO, but I was keen to distance myself from you.
The judge asked me what if there was any campaign group that I was connected to. I told him I was loosely affiliated with DPAC, Disabled People Against the Cuts, although my placard had said DPACC, Disabled People Against Climate Change.
It turned out that the Met had just the one suitably modified van to transport disabled people to the nick, codenamed Pixie1 (my old road protestor mates will appreciate the name). And that had been on its way to Croydon that day with part of the latest Just Stop Oil mass arrest. JSO had been having their last big bash before the summer recess and had pretty much used up every available van and cell inside the M25, including Pixie1.
I’d heard of the arrest of a disabled JSO protestor called Ari, who had been arrested, and witnessed the police practically begging a black cab to take her to the station, and had often wondered whether the cops could possibly handle a group action.
CPS trying their best to smear a disabled man
The CPS and the judge went to great lengths to try and ascertain the size of the gap I had left at the entrance, which they agreed was a double gate.
Did I block anyone? No.
Would I block anyone? Perhaps.
Slowly they scrolled through the grainy, partly obscured Body Cam footage looking for the right angle. Looking to see if I had completely blocked the highway, or whether a vehicle could still get by. Once I realised what they were doing I couldn’t help but give a little chuckle. I had the perfect photo taken by my mate Gareth Morris, where you could clearly see the gap.
When I showed them Gareth’s pic, and that there was plenty of space, the prosecution argued that a vehicle still wouldn’t be able to pass by safely. Whereupon the judge gave me my second spontaneous chuckle of the day, pointing out there were plenty of policeman there to stand between me and a vehicle, to make sure it was safe. He really had it in for the CPS that day.
‘Doing my bit’
I trundled my wheelchair up to the stand, where I dropped my notes, and made a futile attempt to pick them up. I told the court that according to the MS society’s website:
excessive heat can often make MS worse. Which when you consider that we already suffer greatly from fatigue, often mentioned as one of the worst symptoms of MS, the promise of more days, perhaps entire weeks, of 40-degree heat, would make life impossible and intolerable.
I broke down twice on the stand. Once when I spoke of my devastated garden on 19 July 2022, and once when I spoke of the tragic and terrifying drowning of Maureen Gilbert, during Storm Babet, one of the people I said the government had thrown onto the front line of their war against the weather.
I told the judge that I saw this as doing my bit as a 58-year-old man and decried the 20 somethings who were being imprisoned for demanding a future. A future that I felt that I could at least now look in the eye.
A judge sees sense
We waited for the verdict for about half an hour. Me convinced that, whilst the judge might say nice things about my convictions, his hands would be tied legally.
When he came back, after the usher had demanded ‘All Stand’, and according to my friend Saskia’s excellent notes, he mentioned ‘reasonable excuse.’ That ‘The defendant was there to protest under Article 10’. That it had been about ‘Government failure and the granting of new fossil fuel leases.’ About ‘How this would affect people with disabilities. How high temperatures directly affect people with MS.’ The risk of fires, and ‘on the anniversary of the Wennington fire.’
I was so made up that I’d been successful in linking all these elements together on my day in court.
I was, ‘peaceful and dignified.’ And, crucially, there were doubts that it I ‘can be properly said to have been blocking the gates.’ That, ‘Not one vehicle entered or left’ whilst I was demonstrating, so there was ‘no evidence of obstruction.’ I was ‘fully cooperative’ and moved once I had secured my day in court. I was “passionate, articulate and honest in everything that [I] said’. I was proper blushing by this stage, but still expecting the words, ‘but’ or ‘unfortunately’.
He went on. Exploring ‘the balance of rights under Article 10’, and ‘reasonable excuse’, about ‘Zeigler’, which gets mentioned a lot. To be honest, there were loads of legals that just went over the top of my head, including the classic what the hell does that mean? line ‘The occupation was more than minor but less than major.’
I fought the law…
Whereupon, he suddenly blurted out ‘Not guilty. You are free to go.’ Leaving me to just stare into space, until the usher finally chucked me out.
So yes, I can now say that I fought the law, and the law… lost. No guesses as to what tune I first played when I finally got home.
Featured images and additional images via Gareth Morris
The NHS killed Sophia Mirza on 15 November 2005. Sophia lived with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS). In July 2003, psychiatrists got cops to smash the door into Sophia’s home down and forcibly take her to a secure psychiatric unit, where she was imprisoned against her wishes for two weeks before a tribunal ordered her release. This ultimately led to her death.
In January 2024, Olivia Jane Mott travelled from the UK to Dignitas in Switzerland to end her own life. She lived with ME. On 27 March 2024, Lucy Mayhew died. She lived with ME.
Right now, Millie McAinsh is dying in an NHS hospital because doctors don’t believe her illness is real. They previously sectioned her under the Mental Health Act, enforced Deprivation of Liberty Safeguarding (DoLS) measures on her, and are forcing her to have treatment she doesn’t want. Millie lives with ME. So does Karen Gordon – in an almost identical situation to Millie.
So, nearly 20 years after the NHS killed Sophia, people living with ME are still dying while the state either lets them or actively brings it about. The obvious question is why? Well, the Canary has extensively documented the answer to that.
However, the less obvious but perhaps more necessary question is why are we allowing this to happen?
ME/CFS: inaction, inaction, inaction
The answer to that is a complex melting pot of issues, including (but not limited to):
ME/CFS is still poorly misunderstood – or rather, made out by the medical profession, the state, and media to be.
The ME community exists in the most part of people online who are a) clued-up on the issues, and b) have a diagnosis in the first place. Read this about fibromyalgia and ME diagnoses.
People have their own political views which play into how they respond to situations of injustice, abuse, and discrimination. We’re a mixed bag of left, right, and no wing.
The full force of the media and state has been consistently putting its boot on the neck of the ME community.
Charities and Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) within the community tend to work to their own agendas – not collectively.
But one of the most pressing one is the community’s inability, and in some cases unwillingness, to protest.
Where are the protests? Where are the occupations?
Campaigning, protesting, and taking direct action have throughout history been the way ordinary people have brought about change. Be under no illusions: it is NOT politicians, charities, or the state who do – and even when they have, it’s because people like you and me have forced them to.
However, this has always been the circle that (until this point) cannot be squared: severely chronically ill and disabled people cannot easily protest. They’re bodies often won’t let them. So, they need allies and advocates to do it for them.
Yet where are the protests from non-chronically ill allies?
I seem to recall some shoes being placed outside the Department of Health and the BBC a few years ago (I’m being wry – I was there). Otherwise, the ME community doesn’t protest – unlike nearly every other marginalised group in the UK.
For example, me and my partner Nicola were literally blocking one of the main arterial roads into Westminster with other disabled people a few weeks ago. It was over benefit-related deaths. Cops kettled disabled wheelchair users and threatened people with arrest.
So, why has the ME community not embraced direct action and protest as part of its strategy?
I can’t safely answer that. That’s for all of us to reflect on. I think there’s elements of class within this. Many marginalised communities are also socioeconomically marginalised by the state. That is, they’re poor in every sense. Specifically, not only does the state marginalise you for, say, your ethnicity or disability, it also marginalises you economically.
As American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin summed up:
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
Black people, disabled people, refugees, non-working people all have the least to lose – therefore, civil disobedience isn’t as daunting.
The ME community needs to fully recognise its own marginalisation and take that to its very core. Millie is a case in point for us all: she has little to lose, now – and things can’t get much worse.
Shut up and sit down
There’s another element to this lack of protest and direct action.
Regarding Millie, I keep seeing comments, and am also being told privately by quite well-known figures in the ME community, that:
Things are going on behind the scenes.
But:
You shouldn’t really do ‘x, y, z’ as it will make the situation worse for Millie.
And:
The ME/CFS charities are working with Millie’s family.
If I hear another comment along these lines I’ll scream.
Whatever the ME charities and those in the self-appointed (which they are, unless people with ME took a vote on it that I missed) upper echelons of the community have been doing since the NHS killed Sophia on 15 November 2005 HAS NOT WORKED. If it had, Millie and Karen would not be in the situation they’re in.
Olivia would still be alive.
Lucy would still be alive.
And Merryn, Maeve, and Kara Jane would still be alive.
Does the minister think that it is unacceptable that any government policy should cause their citizens to take their own life or to die? If he does, should there not be a moratorium on this policy until it is got right? Surely one death is one too many.
Why has the ME community for decades accepted so many deaths of its own?
It is past time that the ME community realised that we are perpetually going round in circles, doing the same things over and over again – and that they are not working.
It is also past time that the ME community stopped allowing certain gatekeepers to govern how it conducts itself and how it responds to the abuse medical professionals and the state inflicts on its members; abuse that is not inflicted on those same gatekeepers.
And it is past time that the ME community stopped putting its faith in charities who take hundreds of thousands – sometimes millions – of pounds every year in donations and yet demonstrably achieve absolutely nothing with it.
That is, the ME community and its allies in other chronic illness communities like long Covid need to take matters into their own hands. Enough really is enough this time.
Get our acts together, or we are as good as dead
Larry Kramer was the founder of direct action group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Him and his supporters advocated for disruptive civil disobedience in the face of the HIV/AIDS crisis that was sweeping the US in the 1980s.
ACT UP members repeatedly got arrested for actions like blocking roads. However, Kramer and his group changed the course of HIV/AIDS: how it was viewed by the public, how it was represented by the media, and ultimately how it was treated by medical professionals.
I was trying to make people united and angry. I was known as the angriest man in the world, mainly because I discovered that anger got you further than being nice. And when we started to break through in the media, I was better TV than someone who was nice.
The ME community has been “nice” for far too long. It’s not like we’re complaining about potholes, tree-felling, or London’s ULEZ scheme. We’re fighting against the state-run health service literally killing members of our community. Yet, all those three other examples I gave have seen bigger – and often more civilly-disobedient – protests than the ME community has ever engaged in.
Crucially, though, Kramer famously screamed in the middle of a meeting of AIDS activists who were arguing among themselves and utterly disorganised:
Plague! We are in the middle of a plague! And you behave like this! Plague! 40 million infected people is a plague! Until we get our acts together, all of us, we are as good as dead.
So, get their act together they did.
The ME/CFS community needs it’s own ‘plague’ moment
The ME community’s “plague” moment should have been Sophia’s killing in 2005.
But it wasn’t.
It should have happened at the start of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.
But it didn’t.
It should have been Merryn’s, Maeve’s, Kara Jane’s, and every other person with ME’s deaths because of how the system has treated them.
But it wasn’t.
So, I ask you this: is it going to take the NHS killing Millie for the ME community to have its “plague” moment and finally ‘get its act together’? Because that cannot happen.
Millie’s story – ending with her returning home to safety – must be a watershed moment for all our sakes. It must be a moment where we as a community stare at ourselves in a mirror until our eyes collectively bleed and ask ourselves whether what we are, and have been, doing is right – and if we should continue with it.
And I can tell you now: the answer to those questions is ‘no’.
It’s been two weeks since the UK government was hauled over the coals by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) over their “grave violations” of the Convention on the Rights of Disabled People. Anyone who watched the hearing live online will know what went down. The government told a pack of lies then told some more to gloss over the deaths of disabled people when questioned.
It was frustrating for all disabled people to hear that the government – who’ve been not only failing them but actively endangering them – apparently think they’re, to borrow a phrase from Gillian Keegan, “doing a fucking great job”. However, it was even more infuriating for those of us in the room.
However, I was quite shocked when as well as giving me a quote, Ellen casually asked me if I wanted to go to the UNCRPD with the Deaf and Disabled Peoples’ Organisations (DDPOs) delegation in a couple of weeks to watch the government finally answer for their treatment of us.
Ellen and I have worked together a couple of times, and I was one of the few reporters who got the story of how the government just plain refused to show up at the UNCRPD last August (when they were originally invited to give evidence at the same time as the DDPOs) into mainstream media.
At the time the government told me they had always intended to give evidence in March in the ultimate “oh no you misunderstood us – silly little disableds” gaslighting we’re all used to by now.
That sort of abject trauma of fighting for disability rights and screaming til our voices break I suppose bonds people. So, despite it being in less than two weeks’ time I instinctively knew I had to be there with the incredible bunch of people Ellen was telling me about.
A delegation of lived experience
The delegation included activists from DPAC, Inclusion London, Disability Wales, Disability Rights UK, Reclaiming our Futures Alliance, DPAC NI, and unions such as Unite, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), and Equity. I was quietly anxious to meet the families of deceased benefit claimants, some of whom I’d written or edited pieces about.
Two flights and later and I was touching down in Geneva on Sunday 17 March. The delegation was split around the city and although the hearing was on Monday 18 March and obviously the main reason we were there, it gave us an excuse to all come together and just be in each other’s company.
We spent Sunday coming up with our clear messages whilst also eating fondue, chatting on the beach, exploring the city, sharing resources, and finding comfort in other people who had our lived experience.
Then Monday afternoon came round all of a sudden and there I was walking up to one of the most famous buildings in the world.
Before the session the DDPO delegation got together to have lunch and discuss what we hoped would come from today. Although we weren’t allowed to speak it was important to the DDPOs that we got the message out there that we were here standing up for rights – even if the government wouldn’t speak to us.
The government whitewashing its record at the UNCRPD
I’ve been asked a lot how it felt to be in the room when the government told the UNCRPD that they pretended to be:
committed to upholding the Convention on the Rights of Disabled People.
The short answer is frustrating. The long answer is frustratingly exhausting with moments of incredulity that meant I guffawed so loudly I thought I was going to be asked to leave.
Basically, after refusing to attend a hearing session that DDPOs were at, the government attempted to make it sound like they cared at all about disabled people.
They bragged about policies that they’d been forced to commit to by campaign groups. They boasted about the Disability Action Plan and National Disability Strategy. This is despite the fact that the strategy was being challenged in the High Court by disabled activists and the action plan had been widely derided for offering no solutions to the real issues affecting us.
The temptation to scream almost became too much when Alexandra Gowlland (someone who is so obscure in the Disability Unit I had to Google her whilst she was speaking) claimed the government are “Committed to transforming the benefits system”.
Lie after lie
I almost definitely muttered “Are you fuck” under my breath when she continued that they are:
ensuring people can access the right support and have a better overall experience when applying for benefits.
I felt the bile rise up in my throat as she claimed that “disability hate crime is completely unacceptable” when you consider the disgusting rhetoric that the government ministers are spreading via the press; something I’ve fought hard against.
I was unsurprised to see that the focus was kept on SEND kids, something the government love to tug on people’s heart strings about. But what happens when we stop being cute disabled kiddies? They’re quick to paint us as burdens then.
The most “you what mate??” moment was when Gowlland repeated that the government “welcome this dialogue” which was news to all of us who they couldn’t even make eye contact with despite being sat a few rows away.
‘Dehumanising disabled people’
There was a moment of intense validation though when it came time for the UK Rapporteurs to grill the government.
The outstanding Rosemary Kayess and Laverne Jacobs used evidence the DDPOs had shared with them about our real-life experiences under this government. Kayess said the government had created a “pervasive framework that dehumanises disabled people”.
Jacobs in her questioning brought up disability benefits deaths that had occurred after benefits had been stopped. The government did not even reference disability deaths in passing in their response. This was especially insulting when incredible campaigners like Alison Turner, daughter in law of Errol Graham, were sat in the room.
After the hearing I felt drained. Standing outside with Alison whilst she smoked a cigarette, we both sobbed frustrated tears. After many of the DDPOs expressed disbelief at the governments lack of shame, with one member cracking the group up with “well that could’ve been an email!”
Despite how disappointing and embarrassing the government’s “evidence” was, this wasn’t a loss for disabled people in my opinion.
The UNCRPD showed the power of community
The main aim was to make a huge fuss on social media and more than anything ensure the disabled community knew there were people in their corner.
Being a disabled person can be isolating, even more so when the government and media are constantly belittling our rights and trying to make us scared to live our lives. The DDPO delegation showed disabled people at home that they’re not alone, to be part of that made me feel so empowered, surrounded by people who had mine and so many others backs.
There was never a single moment that didn’t feel huge and significant all weekend, from sitting on the beach discussing our lives and experiences to catching up over baba ghanoush. The trip felt serious sure, but it also felt joyous; significant to have this many disabled people not only fighting back but existing and thriving and loving our lives despite what the government threw at us.
The end of the trip was bookended the same way it began, with a big meal, this time also celebrating my birthday, which was on 19 March. When I was shocked, Ellen told me “It’s important we celebrate disabled people, there’s enough shit”.
The love and joy I felt from these incredible hardworking compassionate souls is something I will hold with me forever.
It’s this power in community that the government can never take away from us, no matter how hard they try.
If you ever wanted a job bootlicking for Tory big brother Britain, look no further, because the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) has you covered. Champing at the bit to snoop into the DWP benefits of the most marginalised members of society?
Well, it has a role just for you – as per the government’s latest machinations to persecute disabled, chronically ill, poor, and vulnerable people across the UK. Naturally, these new fraud-finder general jobs are part of the department’s suite of new plans to “crack down” on so-called “benefit fraud”.
DWP’s “benefit fraud” fiction
On 3 April, journalist Rachel Charlton-Daileybroke the news that the DWP has posted job listings for up to 25 “covert surveillance officers”. As the Big Issue reported:
The job roles are, according to the advertisement on GOV.UK, part of the DWP’s response to tackling fraud within the welfare system.
The ad says: “The department utilises covert surveillance to gather evidence to prove/disprove offences” – although it is not clear what these offences are.
Of course, this wasn’t to tackle the multi-billions in dud covid PPE type of fraud. Instead, these jobs are to wrangle with the criminal masterminds that are, largely, sick and out-of-work people barely surviving on the lowest social security benefits in Northern Europe.
As the Canary’s Steve Topple has previously pointed out, “benefit fraud” is, of course “a right-wing construct not grounded in reality”. More specifically, he has highlighted that a significant proportion of the DWP’s fraud estimates are not in fact from actual claimants. Instead, Topple has detailed how:
much of the £8.3bn the DWP promotes as fraud (and that the media dutifully laps up) is just based on assumptions and guesswork.
But why let the facts get in the way of a good scapegoating? Moreover, Charlton-Dailey noted that:
This latest recruitment drive comes after the government has upped its commitment to benefit fraud with its Fraud Strategy, which was released last year. According to GOV.UK the plan “sets out bold new measures to fight fraud against the welfare state” and they say it will save the DWP £1.3bn.
So, let us get this straight. The government spaffed multiple billions of pounds up the wall for rich Tory donors, and this new slick surveillance could help save the DWP – wait for it – a grand sum of £1.3bn.
Hang up your ballet shoes, as according to the DWP’s latest hiring drive, your next job could be in benefit snooping (you just don’t know it yet.)
Sweeping new surveillance powers
Of course, the roles are part and parcel of the Tory government’s sweeping new surveillance plans for the DWP.
Specifically, it’s currently trying to ram through a series of new powers to enable the department to spy on the bank accounts of benefit claimants. It is doing so through the innocuously titled Data Protection and Digital Information Bill.
So far, campaigners and media outlets have lambasted a litany of the DWP’s souped-up surveillance schemes for things like:
The use of AI to detect fraud (What could possibly go wrong? I’m old enough to remember when faulty AI wrecked the lives of 900 postmasters)
Posing a serious risk to disabled people who have set up bank accounts for social care
Threatening the dignity and privacy of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and other disability benefits claimants
Over 40 organisations condemned the bill’s surveillance powers in March in an open letter to work and pensions secretary Mel Stride. In it, groups including Disability Rights UK and Big Brother Watch argued that:
There are approximately 22.6 million individuals in the welfare system, including those who are disabled, sick, caregivers, job seekers, and pensioners. They should not be treated like criminals by default
Meanwhile, a petition is calling on the DWP to ditch the new surveillance plans.
Scapegoated as “scroungers”
As the Guardian’s Frances Ryan pointed out, the surveillance roll-out is the inevitable end result of the government (and its corporate media lapdogs) painting benefit claimants as “scroungers” and a burden on the taxpayer:
The government is seeking new powers for mass surveillance of the bank accounts of millions of benefit claimants to “scan for fraud.” Congrats to every politician and pundit who peddled the scrounger myth. This is where you took us. https://t.co/QxyJbnd6nq
Invariably, scapegoating is exactly the point. Ostensibly, the Tory government is shirking accountability for fomenting a devastating cost-of-living crisis. No changes there of course – it’s Tory writ large.
As Topple also recently reported for instance, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) accused the UK government of systematically violating disabled people’s human rights – and for the second time, no less. There too, the government of course denied responsibility.
But back in morally-bankrupt Tory Britain, the government’s putrid weaponisation of welfare benefits has had devastating consequences. The DWP has presided over tens of thousands of deaths, as claimants waited for benefits, or after the DWP told them they were fit to work. Repeated inquests into the deaths of benefit claimants have revealed the rot at the heart of its routinely punishing and deadly system.
So, it’s not hard to imagine what these new DWP benefit fraud-busting jobs will mean for the people claiming this social security. What’s more, finding new ways to deny people benefits – in this instance, by criminalising them – sits comfortably alongside the government’s plans to push people into work. Of course, this drive has particularly targeted sick and disabled claimants.
Naturally, the Tories want you to blame your neighbourhood “scrounger” for all social ills. After all, it has spent years peddling this pernicious rhetoric, demonising disabled, chronically ill, and vulnerable claimants to manufacture consent for stripping back the welfare state.
Spy on your DWP benefits-claiming neighbours
So, enter the era of “covert surveillance officers”. The Big Issueexplained that the new roles:
are based in 20 locations across the country with salaries ranging from £29,500 to £33,979.
Moreover, it highlighted that:
The job’s description is very vague on detail as to what the job actually entails. It includes “leading in taking forward tasking requests”, sometimes leading “on the activities of the surveillance team” and “actively participating in surveillance operations”, with hours described as “unsociable”, starting early and ending late.
The ad does however state that hirees will be producing “evidential packages” which include obtaining and writing up witness statements to provide evidence of the activities witnessed. Successful applicants may be required to wear “covert audio equipment” and will also have to present the evidence obtained, which includes compiling and editing video and audio data.
In other words, for five figures, you can become a dutiful agent of the UK’s fascist, eugenicist state. But hey, be grateful for the opportunity, or the DWP might deny you social security.
As ever, in Tory UK, it’s blame your benefit “scrounger” neighbour, not the slimy rich elite that grease the wheels of this despicable government. Now, you can even spy on benefit claimants’ spending too – and get paid to do it.
The below article is an opinion piece from Neil Goodwin, an activist who was arrested for blocking an entrance to parliament with his mobility scooter
I’m in Westminster Magistrate’s Court at 10am on Wednesday 3 April, charged with blocking the entrance to parliament in my mobility scooter; I’m disabled, living with multiple sclerosis (MS). This is a bit of what I am hoping to tell the judge.
Protesting the climate crisis as a disabled person
On 19 July 2023, exactly a year on from the hottest day on record and the devastating Wennington wild fire, I travelled up to parliament to protest. It was a Wednesday, and Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) was on – the busiest day of the week for parliament and for the media who cover it.
I positioned myself in front of the carriage entrance, facing towards the road:
I had dressed up the basket on the front of my mobility scooter to look like it was on fire, with a warning sign on the from showing a disabled wheelchair user caught between a fire and a flood – referencing the Wennington wildfire exactly a year previously.
It also referenced the danger from flash flooding, which was tragically emphasised in the run up to my plea hearing by the death of an 83-year-old Chesterfield woman called Maureen Gilbert, who drowned in her home during Storm Babet, as she was unable to escape the rapidly rising water inside her terrace home owing to mobility problems.
I carried a placard with fake flames coming out of the top, that said, ‘I cannot run from a Climate Emergency’. Neither run literally, because of my disability, nor run from what I feel is my social responsibility to try and spotlight the implications of a climate emergency, not just for disabled communities, but for all vulnerable people – the old and the frail.
Cops provide a concerning response
I asked the first police officer who approached me, I believe my arresting officer, to turn on his body cam and record a safety announcement – me detailing my various disabilities.
I explained exactly why I was there, and I was told that I was liable to be arrested.
I remember asking one officer, I think my arresting officer, to see it not as an arrest, but a demonstration in how difficult it would be to save someone like me from a fire at a moment’s notice and carry me to the safety of a police cell. To see it as an exercise in preparedness, as it were – to which, I remember him saying:
If you were in a burning building, I’d throw you over my shoulder and carry you out.
I remember thinking, if you threw me over your shoulder, it would be like throwing a 13-stone ironing board over your shoulder, as my back and neck are almost entirely fused, and you’d probably drop me and/or break my neck in the process. It certainly wouldn’t be that quick and easy.
I was given every opportunity to leave, invited on numerous occasions to carry out my protest along the pavement, away from the entrance. But it felt right to remain just where I was: right in the middle of what they like to call the Sterile Zone.
Now prosecuting disabled people to acting ‘socially responsibly’
It’s strange, but I felt both my strongest and weakest at the same time. Surrounded by cops, one of whom apparently had a best friend with MS, yet none of whom could lay a finger on me, through fear of breaking something.
Who knew that fragility could become a super-power; the burning issue of climate change held aloft, perhaps barring the way of prime minister Rishi Sunak who’s motorcade would have usually swept past by then.
So, I was arrested under section 143 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 which I thought was quite apt, as I sincerely believe that I was acting socially responsibly raising these urgent issues, especially for disabled, vulnerable and frail people; those who will be shoved onto the front line of this Tory government’s war against the weather.
I pleaded ‘not guilty’ because I don’t think that I did anything wrong. My mum told me to tell the judge that I had seen the error of my ways – when in fact some of us were beginning to feel a real terror in our days:
Featured image and additional images via Gareth Morris, via via Jamie Lowe
ANALYSIS:By David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report
On my office wall hangs a framed portrait of Shireen Abu Akleh, the inspiring and celebrated American-Palestinian journalist known across the Middle East to watchers of Al Jazeera Arabic, who was assassinated by an Israeli military sniper with impunity.
State murder.
She was gunned down in full blue “press” kit almost two years ago while reporting on a raid in the occupied West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp, clearly targeted for her influence as a media witness to Israeli atrocities.
As in the case of all 22 journalists who had been killed by Israeli military until that day, 11 May 2022, nobody was charged.
Now, six months into the catastrophic and genocidal Israeli War on Gaza, some 137 Palestinian journalists have been killed — murdered – by Israeli snipers, or targeted bombs demolishing their homes, and even their families.
Also in my office is pasted a red poster with a bird-of-paradise shaped pen in chains and the legend “Open access for journalists – Free press in West Papua.”
The poster was from a 2017 World Media Freedom Day conference in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, which I attended as a speaker and wrote about. Until this day, there is still no open door for international journalists
Harassed, beaten
Although only one killing of a Papuan journalist is recorded, there have been many instances when local news reporters have been harassed, beaten and threatened – beyond the reach of international media.
Ardiansyah Matra was savagely beaten and his body dumped in the Maro River, Merauke. A spokesperson for the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), Victor Mambor, said at the time: “‘It’s highly likely that his murder is connected with the terror situation for journalists which was occurring at the time of Ardiansyah’s death.”
Dr David Robie . . . author and advocate. Image: Café Pacific
Frequently harassed himself, Mambor, founder and publisher of Jubi Media, was apparently the target of a suspected bomb attack, or warning, on 23 January 2023, when Jayapura police investigated a blast outside his home in Angkasapura Village.
At first glance, it may seem strange that comparisons are being made between the War on Gaza in the Middle East and the long-smouldering West Papuan human rights crisis in the Asia-Pacific region almost 11,000 km away. But there are several factors at play.
Melanesian and Pacific activists frequently mention both the Palestinian and West Papuan struggles in the same breath. A figure of up to 500,000 deaths among Papuans is often cited as the toll from 1969 when Indonesia annexed the formerly Dutch colony in controversial circumstances under the flawed Act of Free Choice, characterised by critics as the Act of “No” Choice.
The death toll in Gaza after the six-month war on the besieged enclave by Israel is already almost 33,000 (in reality far higher if the unknown number of casualties buried under the rubble is added). Most of the deaths are women and children.
The Palestinian and West Papuan flags flying high at a New Zealand protest against the Gaza genocide in central Auckland. Image: David Robie/APR
Ethnic cleansing
But there are mounting fears that Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Gazans has no end in sight and the lives of 2.3 million people are at stake.
Both Palestinians and West Papuans see themselves as the victims of violent settler colonial projects that have been stealing their land and destroying their culture under the world’s noses — in the case of Palestine since the Nakba of 1948, and in West Papua since Indonesian paratroopers landed in a botched invasion in 1963.
They see themselves as both confronting genocidal leaders; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose popularity at home sinks by the day with growing protests, and Indonesia’s new President-elect Prabowo Subianto who has an atrocious human rights reputation in both Timor-Leste and West Papua.
And both peoples feel betrayed by a world that has stood by as genocides have been taking place — in the case of Palestine in real time on social media and television screens, and in the case of West Papua slowly over six decades.
Indonesian politicians such as Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi have been quick to condemn Israel, including at the International Court of Justice, but Papuan independence leaders find this hypocritical.
“We have full sympathy for the struggle for justice in Palestine and call for the restoration of peace,” said United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) president Benny Wenda.
Pacific protesters for a Free Palestine in New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. Image: David Robie/APR
‘Where’s Indonesian outrage?’
“But what about West Papua? Where was Indonesia’s outrage after Bloody Paniai [2014], or the Wamena massacre in February?
“Indonesia is claiming to oppose genocide in Gaza while committing their own genocide in West Papua.”
“Over 60 years of genocidal colonial rule, over 500,000 West Papuans have been killed by Indonesian forces.”
Wenda said genocide in West Papua was implemented slowly and steadily through a series of massacres, assassinations and policies, such as the killings of the chair of the Papuan Council Theys Eluay in 2001; Mako Tabuni (2012); and cultural curator and artist Arnold Ap (1984).
In the South Pacific, Indonesia is widely seen among civil society, university and community groups as a ruthless aggressor with little or no respect for the Papuan culture.
Jakarta is engaged in an intensive diplomacy campaign in an attempt to counter this perception.
Unarmed Palestinians killed in Gaza – revealing Israel’s “kill zones”. Video: Al Jazeera
Israel’s ‘rogue’ status
But if Indonesia is unpopular in the Pacific over its brutal colonial policies, it is nothing compared to the global “rogue” status of Israel.
In the past few weeks, as atrocity after atrocity pile up and the country’s disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions increasingly shock, supporters appear to be shrinking to its long-term ally the United States and its Five Eyes partners with New Zealand’s coalition government failing to condemn Israel’s war crimes.
On Good Friday — Day 174 of the war – Israel bombed Gaza, Syria and Lebanon on the same day, killing civilians in all three countries.
In the past week, the Israeli military racheted up its attacks on the Gaza Strip in defiance of the UN Security Council’s order for an immediate ceasefire, expanded its savage attacks on neighbouring states, and finally withdrew from Al-Shifa Hospital after a bloody two-week siege, leaving it totally destroyed with at least 350 patients, staff and displaced people dead.
Fourteen votes against the lone US abstention after Washington had earlier vetoed three previous resolutions produced the decisive ceasefire vote, but the Israeli objective is clearly to raze Gaza and make it uninhabitable.
As The Guardian described the vote, “When Gilad Erdan, the Israeli envoy to the UN, sat before the Security Council to rail against the ceasefire resolution it had just passed, he cut a lonelier figure than ever in the cavernous chamber.”
The newspaper added that the message was clear.
‘Time was up’
“Time was up on the Israeli offensive, and the Biden administration was no longer prepared to let the US’s credibility on the world stage bleed away by defending an Israeli government which paid little, if any, heed to its appeals to stop the bombing of civilian areas and open the gates to substantial food deliveries.”
Al Jazeera interviewed Norwegian physician Dr Mads Gilbert, who has spent long periods working in Gaza, including at al-Shifa Hospital. He was visibly distressed in his reaction, lamenting that the Israeli attack had “destroyed” the 78-year legacy of the Strip’s largest and flagship hospital.
Speaking from Tromso, Norway, he said: “This is such a sad day, I’ve been weeping all morning.”
Dr Gilbert said he did not know the fate of the 107 critical patients who had been moved two days earlier to an older building in the complex.
“The maggots that are creeping out of the corpses in al-Shifa Hospital now,” he said, “are really maggots coming out of the eyes of President Biden and the European Union leaders doing nothing to stop this horrible, horrible genocide.”
Australia-based Antony Loewenstein, the author of The Palestine Laboratory, who has been reporting on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories for two decades, described Israel’s attack on the hospital as the “actions of a rogue state”.
Gaza health officials said Israel was targeting all the hospitals and systematically destroying the medical infrastructure. Only five out of a total of 37 hospitals still had some limited services operating.
Indonesian soldiers gag journalists in West Papua – the cartoon could easily be referring to Gaza where attacks on Palestinian journalists have been systemic with 137 killed so far, by far the biggest journalist death toll in any conflict. Image: David Robie/APR
Strike on journalists’ tent
Yesterday, four people were killed and journalists were wounded in an Israeli air strike on a tent in the courtyard of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.
The Israeli military claimed the strike was aimed at a “command centre” operated by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad armed group, but footage screened by Al Jazeera reporter Hind Khoudary clearly showed it was a tent where displaced people were sheltering and journalists and photographers were working.
The Israeli military have killed another photojournalist and editor, Abdel Wahab Awni, when they bombed his home in the Maghazi refugee camp. This took the number of journalists killed since the start of the war to 137, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.
Al Jazeera has revealed that Israel was using “kill zones” for certain combat areas in Gaza. Anybody crossing the “invisible” lines into these zones was shot on sight as a “terrorist”, even if they were unarmed civilians.
The chilling practice was exposed when footage was screened of two unarmed civilians carrying white flags being apparently gunned down and then buried by bulldozer under rubble. A US-based civil rights group described the killings as a “heinous crime”.
The kill zones were confirmed at the weekend by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which said the military had claimed to have killed 9000 “terrorists”, but officials admitted that many of the dead were often civilians who had “crossed the line” of fire.
Call for sanctions
The Israeli peace advocacy group Gush Shalom sent an open letter to all the embassies credited to Israel calling for immediate sanctions against the Israeli government, saying Netanyahu was “flagrantly refusing” to comply with the ceasefire resolution.
“We, citizens of Israel,” said the letter, “are calling on your government to initiate a further meeting of the Security Council, aiming to pass a resolution which would set effective sanctions on Israel — in order to bring about an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip until the end of Ramadan and beyond it.”
A Palestinian-American professor of law Dr Noura Erakat, of Rutgers University, recently told a BBC interviewer that Israel had made its end game very clear from the beginning of the war.
“Israel has made its intent clear. Its war cabinet had made its intent clear. From the very beginning, in the first week of October 7, it told us its goal was to depopulate Gaza.
“They have equated the decimation of Hamas, which they cannot achieve militarily, with the depopulation of the entire Gaza strip.”
A parallel with Indonesia’s fundamentally flawed policies in West Papua. Failing violent settler colonialism.
(@LongCovidAdvoc) 
The star attraction was the Grim Reapess (feminine of reaper?) with a wagon of baby dolls covered in blood, her hubbie in top hat ringing the bell of the Apocalypse. And an outsize Palestinian flag which an agile volunteer weaved among the marchers, fluttering in the breeze (and in our faces), like we were a flotilla come to rescue the Palestinians from starvation.
