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Category: Opinion

  • Assange: a huge win for journalistic freedom – but a huge loss for survivors

    Content warning: this article discusses rape and sexual assault in detail. Reader discretion is advised. 

    On Tuesday 25 June, we learned UK authorities had released Julian Assange from Belmarsh Prison on the condition that he pleads guilty to US espionage charges. This is great news for journalistic freedom. However, many people seem to have forgotten that two women accused Assange of rape, sexual assault, and other offences.  

    It seems in the reporting of Assange’s release, the majority of the mainstream media have conveniently forgotten about the allegations against him:

    One woman accused Assange of rape, and another of sexual assault. He also faced investigations for unlawful coercion and molestation. Obviously, Assange protested his innocence. After losing a high court appeal against his extradition in from the UK to Sweden in 2012, he requested political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.

    As always with X, people were quick to point out that eventually, the Swedish prosecution dropped the allegations – so he must be innocent.

    However, it is worth noting that at least in the UK, a mere 1.3% of rape cases recorded by the police actually result in them charging a suspect. When you include the number of rapes that go unreported, which is thought to be around 63%, this figure drops substantially more.

    In 2015, some of the allegations against Assange were dropped due to the statute of limitations. However, the rape allegation still stood.

    According to Amnesty International, in Sweden:

    The statute of limitations is 15 years for gross (aggravated) rape and 10 years for rape and “less serious” rape, calculated from the date the crime was committed.

    In 2017, Swedish prosecutors dropped the rape case. They claimed it was impossible to proceed while Assange was hiding in the Ecuadorean embassy. They reopened the case in 2019 and shortly after, dropped it again:

    At the time, the Swedish Prosecution Authority said:

    The reason for this decision is that the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question.

    I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events.

    Believe women

    Something that much of social media fails to grasp is that two things can be true at the same time.

    Assange exposed brutal war crimes and corruption. His release is a huge win for journalistic freedom. However, when did we stop believing women? All the progress we have made as a society since the #MeToo movement seems to be forgotten as soon as a man who did something good gets accused.

    The allegations do not change the win for journalistic freedom. Similarly, his achievements don’t negate the accusations against him.

    Stereotypes keep us stuck

    This stereotype that abusers are 24/7 ‘bad people’ can prevent people from recognising real life abusive situations. It makes people believe that men who do good things cannot possibly be abusive. 

    People tend to have a very specific image in mind when they think of abusive men. They’re often angry, old, and slightly overweight. This image leads people to believe that abusers are easily visible – you can spot them a mile off. It creates a false sense of safety.

    In reality, abusive men inhabit all walks of life, often have money, and are highly successful. Usually, they are also kind and thoughtful. It is these traits that allow them to get away with their behaviour – because no one questions the nice guy.

    Abusive men know how to manipulate power, and as Jessica Valenti wrote in 2018:

    Knee-jerk sympathy for men accused of wrongdoing isn’t new
    People find it hard to believe when their favourite TV star or celebrity is accused of sexual violence. The version of them that we see in the media is portrayed purposefully – powerful people want to feel familiar to us, so that we put our trust in them. That is how they get away with being abusive – because the image they have painted of themselves would never do the things they are being accused of.
    In reality, that is not them at all.

    The prevailing argument for Assange

    Writer Caitlyn Johnstone has argued that the allegations were politically motivated – and it is of course important to understand the power dynamics at work. In particular, she has set out how the US used these allegations to try extradite Assange. She argues:

    This was never resolved because this was never about rape or justice. It was about extraditing Assange to the United States for his publications.

    She continues:

    Don’t try to justify what Assange is accused of having done, just point out that there’s no actual evidence that he is guilty and that very powerful people have clearly been pulling some strings behind the scenes of this narrative.

    However, these facts aren’t mutually exclusive. The US could have weaponised the allegations to get hold of Assange. At the same time, it doesn’t mean they’re not true.

    This whole ‘he says, she says’ argument is where we have been getting stuck for decades.

    While Johnstone points out that there is no actual evidence that he is guilty, it is worth pointing out that there is also no actual evidence that he is a) innocent and b) was set up by the US government, as she claims in her article.

    Yes, I think it is correct to question why there was such a huge response from Interpol and the UK authorities compared to every other sexual violence accusation, as Naomi Wolf points out. However, that isn’t evidence of a set up as people are claiming.

    A 2016 article by Celia Farber argues that:

    Was it rape? Was it somewhere in the “grey zone”?

    Now, lets get one thing clear. There is no ‘grey zone’ when it comes to rape, sex, and consent. There is consensual sex, and there is rape. I do not go and hit someone over the head with a surfboard and call it surfing. Consent has to be clear, ongoing, and can be withdrawn at any time.

    Consent is not complicated

    One of the accusations against Assange was that he initiated ‘sex’ whilst the victim was half asleep, and without a condom. Previously, the woman had consented to sex with Assange on the condition a condom was used. Let’s make another thing clear – someone cannot consent to sex if they are unconscious, asleep, or in any way do not have the capacity to make informed decisions. The Guardian reported in 2010 that:

    She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. “According to her statement, she said: ‘You better not have HIV’ and he answered: ‘Of course not,’ ” but “she couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night. She had never had unprotected sex before.”

    I will say it again. A woman who is asleep cannot consent to sex. Not that hard to get your head around, is it? As if that wasn’t bad enough, she had also made it very clear she didn’t consent to sex without a condom. That alone, is also rape. Clearly, some people do not understand the definitions of rape and consent.

    Another allegation also specified that Assange tampered with a condom after making it clear he didn’t want to use one. Again, the victim consented to sex on the condition a condom was used. She did not consent to unprotected sex. Therefore, the act of tampering with the condom so it becomes ineffective, changes it from sex, to rape. In the UK at least, this specific crime is called ‘stealthing‘ and someone who carries it out can be prosecuted for rape.

    There is no ‘normal’

    Johnstone’s article also states:

    SW freaked out when she learned the police wanted to charge Assange with rape for the half-asleep incident, and refused to sign any legal documents saying that he had raped her.

    No one has even stopped to consider that maybe, the police naming the incident as rape was the first time the woman had considered the severity of what had happened to her. Often, victims are so immersed in denial that they are not able to process what has happened to them, or acknowledge that the experience was in fact rape. Trauma impacts everyone differently and there is no ‘right’ way to respond when something like that happens to you.

    Johnstone also commented on the timing of the allegations:

    This all occurred just months after Assange enraged the US war machine with the release of the Collateral Murder video, and he was already known to have had US feds hunting for him.

    While there are valid questions around this, she fails to recognise one key thing about sexual assault allegations. There was a reason why so many women came forward during the #MeToo movement.

    Partly, this was because when the media threw these powerful men into the spotlight, they too were empowered to come forwards. In Assange’s case – the media attention meant that these women might have felt the world would finally listen to them.

    Glorification of Assange

    The mainstream media ignoring allegations against Assange is one thing – but putting him on a pedestal is a whole other matter. Unintentionally, its true that Assange has become somewhat of a symbol of press freedom. However, the media need to be able to separate the man from the cause. Glorifying Assange as the embodiment of press freedom is unnecessary and actually, in this case it is highly inappropriate.

    The message this sends is that as a saviour of journalistic freedom Assange is above the law when it comes to violence against women.

    Our freedom of press feels a little bit safer. But lets not forget about the women who have made allegations against him. When other powerful men are accused of similar crimes we don’t sit here and gush over them. The default should not be questioning women’s accusations. That is how powerful men get away with being abusive for far too long. 

    Feature image via WWLTV – YouTube

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Reform canvassers are the thin end of wedge in bigoted Britain

    Undercover reporters from Channel 4 News have exposed in Clacton the cesspit of bigotry festering inside the Reform Party ahead of the general election. Of course, practically no one was surprised by this.

    However, the open bigotry itself from Nigel Farage flunkeys should not be the key take-away. In reality, it speaks to the hate-filled political environment that the two mainstream parties and the corporate media have fomented.

    In short, Reform’s racist, homophobic canvassers are the thin end of the violent political landscape that makes up bigoted Britain.

    Reform: Clacton canvassers caught out spouting hate

    Channel 4 News have sent an undercover reporter on the campaign trail in Clacton, where Farage is standing for election.

    In covertly captured footage, it caught out Reform canvassers spouting racist slurs and anti-LGBTQ+ hate. On top of this, the news outlet exposed them advocating disgusting violence against migrants:

    People on X were shook and expressed their horror at the entirely unpredictable behaviour of Farage’s cult *ahem* canvassers:

    Because, knock me over with a feather, Reform riddled with rabid racists? You don’t say! Needless to say, the ‘news’ was entirely unsurprising to everyone. As one person on X expressed, racists in a racist country is pretty par for the course:

    Bad apples from the Reform tree rotten to its core

    As a case in point – the replies were cesspool of revolting bigotry:

    So what came of Channel 4’s findings in Clacton? Predictably, Reform kicked its public relations face-saving machine into action. Campaign manager for Farage Peter Harris told the outlet that:

    Any individuals who have been identified as making unacceptable comments and holding those views are not welcome in our campaign. We are running a campaign to represent all voters in Clacton.

    And Farage said that:

    I am dismayed by the reported comments of a handful of people associated with my local campaign, particularly those who are volunteers. They will no longer be with the campaign.

    In other words, Reform is distancing itself from the bigots the media caught out. Here we go again, a few bad apples is it? One poster on X rubbished this deception:

    Consequences for coconuts, but not actual bigots

    People also compared this to the reaction of a brown woman using an established critique from Black intellectual thought of how white supremacism manifests through elite Black and brown politicians:

    Notably, the term coconut satirically criticises the idea that having diverse representation – in this case, in parliament – actually makes a difference for marginalised communities. As the Canary’s Maryam Jameela has articulated before, this is simply not the case, because:

    Getting Black and brown faces into positions of power means very little if those same people don’t use their power to make life better for the most vulnerable people in society.

    Crucially, she highlighted that their class identity, in other words, the fact they come from rich and privately educated backgrounds, means they don’t typically represent the most vulnerable in society. Instead, they act in the interests of power. That is, they uphold the white power structures in place – and their regressive, scapegoating policies reflect this.

    This is what the term ‘coconut’ is all about, because as the Canary explained:

    calling someone a “coconut” is a casual way to suggest that someone who is brown on the outside, is white on the inside. In other words, whilst being brown they are committed to whiteness above all else.

    It’s hardly a new term, and documents a social reality that doesn’t often make it into the mainstream.

    It’s a complex articulation of racial dynamics and hierarchies.

    In short, it wasn’t a racial slur from Marieha, but actually a valid expression of her view that Sunak and Braverman do not speak for her or her community. Ridiculously then, she’s now in court for an entirely unwarranted public order offence.

    On Wednesday 26 June, police also arrested protesters who turned out in support of Marieha – many sporting placards that detailed the satirical nature of the term.

    Meanwhile, on shit-hole Island, Reform canvassers utter actual racial slurs on the campaign trail and will face no consequences for this.

    Of course, as the Canary has consistently pointed out over recent Palestine protests, the cops are servile instruments of the state. Naturally then, they act to protect this power structure – invariably, this means the elite, patriarchal, white supremacist and heteronormative status quo. Unsurprisingly, racism, homophobia, and sexism is therefore deeply embedded in the police too.

    Bigotry in ‘bad words’ only

    All this is the inevitable end result of an establishment commentariat wedded to the corporate capitalist system. These canvassers are the supporters of a man the BBC and other outlets keep plastering onto our screens:

    Far from de-platforming the political symbol of this vile hate, the mainstream media has consistently normalised him.

    However, one poster on X articulated how the Clacton Channel 4 News investigation demonstrates another part of this. Specifically, the broadcaster’s piece is illustrative of a broader problem in the mainstream media. That is, how the press only recognises bigotry in its most blatant forms:

    And the poster was right. Bigotry isn’t simply the hate-filled words that people utter towards marginalised communities. This is just the visible and thin end of the wedge. Of course, it needs calling out, but so too do the systems that continue to oppress our communities.

    Because the reality is, those words are simply the slurs the architects of discriminatory policies are usually too guarded, too politically savvy to say out loud.

    Gormless Reform gammons regularly buck this trend, but be under no illusions. The bigot in a nice suit, with slick political gymnastics to justify punching down, is still a bigot. They’re just better at making their violence publicly palatable, and securing the billionaire backers and press to make it happen. In other words, the mainstream political class is actively complicit in this:

    Reform might be openly, brazenly fascist, but the creeping fascism of the Tory and Labour right is if anything, more insidious. If you’re wondering why Starmer is comfortable sitting in parliament with Farage, this is the reason.

    In other words, Farage and Reform’s existence is almost convenient. Its transparent bigotry lays cover for the Tories and Labour, as they push legislation couched in the same violent hate. And the same corporate media that downplays Reform and Farage’s hate-mongering, also does this with the Tories and Labour to devastating effect too:

    It’s the Overton window in its finest, most dangerous hour. At the end of this day, a poster on X summed up this political pantomime in one fell swoop:

    Feature image via the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Keir Starmer’s U turns are making me dizzy – never mind the electorate

    Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has made yet another U-turn when he spoke out in favour of the first past the post electoral system:

    Obviously, Starmer decided to go even further. Hilariously, he said the current electoral system has given us ‘strong government’.  Which is a complete joke to anyone who hasn’t spent the last 14 years in a coma:

    Political jokes

    Millions of voters have historically been misrepresented by the first-past-the-post system. In three of the last five general elections, 50% of the votes went to losing candidates. This is down to MP’s being elected with very small vote shares when there are three or more candidates standing in one area. This means that at the 2019 general election, 71% of votes were wasted:

    Tactical voting or shooting ourselves in the head?

    In recent weeks, Labour has been encouraging people to vote tactically in order to keep the Tories out. According to the Guardian, tactical voting is set to be higher than ever before at this election. Previously, Lib Dem and Labour voters have often switched sides to get rid of the Tories. However, it seems this year that both parties are carrying out extremely specific campaigns. They are focusing on ousting as many Tories as possible.

    The problem with tactical voting is that it forces voters to make a choice. One between who they really want to represent them, and someone who they don’t really like, in order to keep out whoever will fuck them over the most.

    As Alex Rice said in 2015:

    The sentiment of voting should be one of hope not negativity. It should be an act that gives people a stake in society and their community. It shouldn’t be a calculated decision or one that leaves you feeling uneasy on your way home. So here’s a simple message, vote for whoever you think would be your best local MP, then lobby them for change.

    Back in October 2023 – which is less than a year ago – Labour adopted official policy which recognised that:

    the flaws in the current voting system are contributing to the distrust and alienation we see in politics.

    This came after the 2022 Labour Party conference which voted in favour of proportional representation at general elections. Notably, the majority of Labour members, Constituency Labour Parties, and over two thirds of affiliated trade unions all support electoral reform:

    Starmer screwing with the electorate

    Starmer and his leadership team are choosing to ignore the fact that the labour movement overwhelmingly endorses ditching first past the post and embracing a form of proportional representation. The Labour leadership refuses to represent the policies that its members have voted for.

    A recent poll also showed that the British public more generally, albeit narrowly support a change to a more proportional voting system. This means that Starmer isn’t only ignoring Labour voters – but the public mood more generally.

    I don’t know about anyone else, but all the U-turns are making me dizzy. Either Keir is the most indecisive man I’ve ever met, or he is purposefully screwing with every single member of the electorate:

    Importantly, the UK is the only democracy in Europe which still uses first past the post for its main elections. Meaning, it’s not the only way and we don’t have to remain trapped in a broken system:

    Ultimately, now the wind is blowing in Labour’s favour, Starmer is sticking to the familiar. Like many before him, he is willing to sell his soul for the capitalist establishment in order to get the keys for Number 10. Starmer’s Labour was never going to be the party of political reform.

    Millions of voices don’t matter to Labour. While they might take power at the next election, they will not speak for the majority of the UK.

    And as this guy put it:

    Feature image via BBC News/YouTube

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The Forde report may be the foundational document that splits the Labour Party for good

    In 2020 Keir Starmer commissioned an investigation into antisemitism, racism, sexism, and bullying in the wake of a leaked document containing private WhatsApp messages exposing an insidious racist environment fostered by senior Labour Party workers.

    The Forde report exposes a hierarchy of racism denied by the Labour leadership. It came out to a tsunami of Labour PR approved tweets. Their response effectively was ‘the report says the party was out of control. Keir is now in control and everything is going to be ok now because he’s getting rid of those people’.

    However, racism in the Labour Party predates both the current and last Labour leader.

    Starmer: framing himself as president

    As former director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer has a legacy of fast trials and night courts rigging the system so that Black and brown people served longer sentences after the England-wide riots in 2011. Thus the current leader of the Labour Party is finding it difficult to appease those he marginalised both at that time and now, as the left of the party accuses him of purges.

    Hardly a far fetched claim when Labour has lost nearly 100,000 members since he took the helm of the party.

    More troubling still, Labour has only ever elected leaders who are white and male. Four of the last five have heralded from Islington.

    With the Tory party stumbling early on and never quite getting off its knees, it has become a one-sided general election campaign race. Under little pressure Keir Starmer has increasingly framed himself as president (there were 33 photos of him in Labour’s 131 page manifesto), rather than prime minister.

    The manifesto released mid-June would introduce legislation for its New Deal for Working People within 100 days of taking office.

    Scandal one

    What looked like the first big scandal in the campaign came five days later via an exclusive report by Nadine White in the Independent that David Evans, Luke Akehurst, and Starmer himself had threatened legal or professional action against the author of the report Martin Forde KC.

    This was because he was “acting against the party’s interest” having given an interview to Al Jazeera English in March 2023, highlighting Labour’s failures in relation to acting comprehensively on the report’s recommendations or even being willing to discuss them with him.

    Yet Starmer’s attempted suppression of the report and its author hasn’t caused widespread condemnation, other than from a few ex-Labour Party members such as author and columnist Owen Jones who has unsurprisingly used it to rustle up votes for the Green Party he now supports.

    There has been little reporting in the press and seemingly not made him miss a step. It would almost be preferable if the Forde report WAS used as a political football. The quiet is unsettling.

    Days after this news came about, another bombshell hit.

    Clacton: handing it to Farage or the Tories?

    According to African, Caribbean, and Asian Lawyers for Justice the Labour Party has thrown its Clacton candidate Jovan Owusu-Nepaul who has said he is running against the Reform candidate “for every Black and brown person in the country” to the wolves for opposing Nigel Farage in uncompromising anti-racist terms. The group said:

    Jovan faced the kind of horrendous racism last seen in the 1950s on the campaign trail. We suspect he may not have received the support he was expecting from the Labour Party. Inundated with racism-hostile media and a Labour Party whose anti-racism is cosmetic, he is in shock…

    They selected him, and then when the Farage machine turned up and his stance was resolutely and authentically anti-racist, they abandoned him.

    Former editor-in-chief of Britain’s only Black national newspaper the Voice, Lester Holloway, followed up, saying:

    Jovan is calling out Farage because Starmer isn’t. We need to see leadership from the next PM or we all catch hell, especially Black and Asian people.

    A supporter of Jovan and Labour Party member, who has campaigned for him in Clacton, told me that:

    we need to embarrass HQ to turn his Contact Creator back on!! it’s so appalling on so many levels.

    Speaking to PoliticsHome about his candidacy post-Farage’s decision to run, Jovan said:

    My grandparents who came to this country in the 40s and 50s, who had to deal with ‘no dogs, no Blacks, no Irish’, and so many other people like myself who came here with that level of racism – it felt like all of that history had culminated to this fight.

    According to a report on Wednesday 26 June:

    Jovan was told [by an official] to never come back to Clacton, and yesterday, was instructed to move to the West Midlands region.

    So for him that fight for a couple of days seemed over until this breaking news tweet from the Guardian’s deputy political editor on Thursday 27 June:

    This is a clear turnaround from Starmer, no doubt enabled by the thousands of outraged exhortations from voters enraged over the party’s capitulation to Farage and his far-right movement in Clacton and beyond.

    Whether the leadership put resources behind Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, send their high profile and popular members such as Sadiq Khan to campaign, and help him get the votes he needs to roundly beat Farage remains to be seen.

    Muslim candidates have not fared well in the party either.

    Rampant Islamophobia and anti-Blackness in Labour

    Zarah Sultana has repeatedly spoken out about abuse she receives as a Muslim woman MP. Meanwhile, another left-wing MP, Apsana Begum, was signed off work by her GP in June 2022 following a “sustained campaign of misogynistic abuse” and Islamophobic hate in her local party.

    Expecting any support has been futile, however. In an interview in 2021 Zarah noted:

    I find it quite hurtful that the leader of my party [Starmer] has found it difficult to express solidarity publicly with me and Apsana Begum. I think in any job you expect that as a bare minimum.

    Both have repeatedly faced risk of reselection.

    The treatment of Diane Abbott has also left a bad taste in people’s mouths across the House and beyond.

    That she had the whip returned after supposed racist comments she made only a matter of days before candidate selections for the general election closed was a stumbling block that Starmer may never recover from in the eyes of Black Britain. Especially after the muted reaction from the party earlier this year when it was revealed that Tory donor Frank Hester had made racist and violent comments towards her.

    Enter Kemi Badenoch

    This comes in stark relief to the reaction from Keir Starmer only this week when another Kemi Badenoch scandal took over the discourse.

    In an awards speech, actor David Tennant said:

    Until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore – I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.

    It didn’t take long for Kemi, who called Frank Hester’s comments “trivial” to use the situation to her benefit. Having previously condemned ‘identity politics’ as “tribal” she released a statement via her Twitter/X account saying:

    A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end.

    Starmer who was slow to respond to the Hester comments, including the latter saying that looking at Diane Abbott makes you “want to hate all black women”, came out quickly in her defence, saying:

    I wouldn’t have engaged in the way that he did. I think it’s right that we have these robust discussions, but we must do it respectfully.

    It is curious that he wasn’t so quick or unequivocal with his own party member, Britain’s first Black woman and longest-serving MP Diane Abbott, months before.

    Labour is uniting nothing

    Nonetheless, according to Sir Keir Starmer, speaking in July 2022:

    Only Labour can unite the country and clean-up politics.

    This was somewhat undermined by a report from the Labour Muslim Network which was largely ignored by the Labour leadership. It showed that one in four Muslim members and supporters had directly experienced Islamophobia in the party, while one in three had directly witnessed it.

    After the release of the Forde report, the Network made another public statement saying:

    Muslim members have consistently told us they feel Islamophobia often sits at the bottom of this perceived hierarchy. It is difficult to read this report and reach any other conclusion than there being institutional Islamophobia within the Labour Party.

    These statements have even more weight now after a week of dogwhistle politics from the Labour Party.

    A week of dogwhistle politics

    First, Starmer – during a debate hosted by the Sun newspaper – said that:

    I’ll make sure we got planes going off… back to the countries where people came from.

    He went on to highlight Bangladesh as an example:

    at the moment people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed.

    Then Jon Ashworth, shadow secretary of state for work and pensions speaking to BBC Newsnight, said:

    we are going to process people’s claims and send them back, those people who shouldn’t be here, when they come from countries like Bangladesh or wherever, were going to send them back.

    Combined it has kicked off a racism storm that has already resulted in Tower Hamlets Labour councillor Sabina Akhtar resigning, saying in her resignation letter:

    I was a proud Labour Party member but I find I can’t be proud of this party anymore when the leader of the party singles out my community and insults my Bangladeshi identity. I have defended the party all my life and was proud of it. But it is clear the direction it is heading in is unacceptable to me and my community.

    What Starmer seems to have forgotten is that Black and brown communities also watch the election debates, even the ones hosted by the Sun newspaper. He’s performing for an imagined xenophobic white audience, one without disabilities, economic inequality, without different gender identities, or seemingly empathy.

    Veteran sports journalist Darren Lewis was quick to point out the dilemma for Black and brown communities leading up to the general election:

    Loyal British Black and Asian voters can justifiably feel angry and abandoned when one of precious few Black male candidates for Labour is sidelined and the language of the right is employed (not for the first time), this time to single out Bangladesh as a country where migrants are not being deported quickly enough. Are we supposed to just ignore it all?

    Considering all this, the Forde report, which the party tried to suppress, may become the foundational document that heralds the end to Labour’s affinity with Black and brown voters.

    The Forde report

    Writing in the Voice after the report came out, Dawn Butler MP from the 2005 intake said that:

    I often had a feeling that my concerns were not being taken seriously, but was afraid to say in case I was seen as paranoid. But seeing it written down in black and white, being mocked by senior members of staff within the party made me feel sad and let down.

    Soon after, Keir Starmer dismissed the Forde report as the problems of a different era, silencing the complaints of his Black MPs and at the same time called for unity. But at what cost and for whom?

    The Forde Report concluded that:

    racism in the party is not experienced by individuals solely through acts of aggression or microaggression – it is experienced through seeing colleagues being passed over for promotion, being the only person from an ethnic minority background around the meeting table, being managed by a near-exclusively white management team; and hearing the particular disdain which colleagues reserve for ethnic minority MPs, councillors and CLP members.

    In another key part of the report it says:

    in our view, the fundamental problem is that people who are committed to progressive politics find it difficult if not impossible to accept that they might have acted in a way which was discriminatory.

    The latter comes as no surprise. It’s rare for an institution to admit it’s failings, especially if denying its seriousness may hamper its perception of itself as not just doing good, but being seen to do good.

    Supporting the reports findings, Labour Black Women’s Network had tracked and complained about a culture of racially-motivated bullying and harassment in the party as far back as 2010. The complaints submitted to Labour HQ between 2010 and 2019 had never been addressed, and repeated emails were ignored.

    Thus they submitted their concerns to The Forde Inquiry. The complaints come from Constituency Labour Party (CLP) members as well as officers and local and national candidates for councils, the London Assembly and parliament as well as members who are local council employees and union activists.

    The complaints included the blocking of Black and Asian candidates for local council election, regional London Assembly Selection, and National PPC selection, that there is a culture of bullying and harassment in local CLPs, and that members were being systematically driven out of local parties having been constantly undermined.

    ‘Change’

    Former Labour advisor and Tony Blair’s former director of political operations John McTernan has said that Keir Starmer has transformed the Labour Party in only two years, triumphantly making it electorally competitive again.

    In fact he’s changed it so much that the party of labour banned front bench MPs from standing on picket lines.

    So, whether they come from Islington or not it’s unlikely we will see a shortlist of senior Black and brown MPs run for Labour leader anytime soon, whilst their advancement is dependent on their willingness to ignore the hierarchy of racism which Starmer denies, and their support of neoliberal capital ideals which suit the party’s future and the ‘fresh start’ and ‘change’ that Starmer’s press machine keeps announcing.

    At the same time, I can’t help but think we should be concentrating on the far right and even more pernicious, the classical liberal ‘left’ who to varying degrees disgraced themselves in the wake of news that Farage was indeed going to be a candidate – this time in the former UKIP stronghold Clacton.

    Liberals disgracing themselves again

    Lord Finkelstein, who was accused of promoting the forced depopulation of Muslims in his erstwhile role on the board of governors of the Gatestone Institute, now says ‘there is good reason to fear the far right’.

    In 2018 Baroness Claire Fox, alongside broadcasters David Aaronovitch and Trevor Phillips (suspended just two years later from the Labour Party for Islamophobia) and academics Matthew Goodwin and Ben Kauffman, were pictured promoting the panel event ‘Is Rising Ethnic Diversity a Threat to the West?’.

    They were subsequently accused in an open letter that the debate was framed within the terms of white supremacist discourse thus normalising the far right. Fox’s former business venture is now pushing ‘clash of civilisation rhetoric’, through the Ideas Matter Academy (formerly Battle of Ideas of which she was a director) which:

    seeks to renew social life through debate, discussion and education about the big ideas that have inspired humanity throughout history.

    Promising talks at their residential event in August such as From Decolonisation to Islamism: Civilisation under siege? The Clash of Civilisations Revisited, What is Western Civilisation – and how should we defend it? And Can we save Western Civilisation? How?

    Last but not least far right influencer and Times columnist Melanie Phillips, who was extensively quoted in the 1,500 word manifesto of far right Norwegian gunman Ander Breviks, says as of last week that ‘complacent liberals are to blame for the rise of the right’. What a topsy-turvy turvy world.

    Writing in 2018, academic and journalist Dr Nafeez Ahmed noted that:

    Both Phillips and Finkelstein have openly affiliated with dangerous, fringe far-right hate groups which have brazenly used the spectre of a migrant, Muslim invasion of the ‘free world’ to advance an apocalyptic vision that is racist at its core and rooted in far-right antisemitism.

    Unity in Labour is a far-fetched dream

    After the Forde Report got little attention from the party leadership or the press, Labour councillor Shaista Aziz said:

    for the Labour Party to be a progressive and democratic space – it must be an anti-racist party willing to tackle all systems of oppression.

    Whether that’s something Keir Starmer is willing or even able to do is another matter. So whilst Black and brown votes and voters are taken for granted, unity is a far fetched dream.

    We’re all still waiting for Labour’s Race and Faith mini-manifesto which they’ve published in the past three elections. In light of news that Black children are more than six times more likely than white children to be subjected to a strip-search by police, and growing momentum behind the Ethnicity Pay Gap campaign, it’s more than necessary if the Labour Party want to convince Black and brown voters not to abandon them.

    It’s all on a worrying scale. I’m just hoping I can watch the new series of The Boys free from this feeling of impending doom.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Samantha Asumadu

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Self-indulgent shill Sonia Sodha shamelessly claims ‘anti-Starmer left’ are splitting the vote

    This general election’s trophy for liberals shitting their pants goes to Guardian columnist Sonia Sodha. At least for today, anyway. After Sunak announced the election, Sodha penned a pompous piece laying into the left for kicking Keir Starmer’s rightwing Labour Party to the curb. However, folks on X are fed up with her lofty opinions, and her spineless outlet bootlicking for Labour.

    Sonia Sodha: ‘Don’t vote Labour’ left splitting the vote?

    Sodha unironically titled her article:

    It is foolish and self-indulgent for the anti-Starmer left to split the Labour vote

    Setting aside that it’s laughable she thinks there’s such as thing as the ‘Starmer left’, Sodha’s premise is barmy. People on X articulated a number of reasons why.

    For one, it showed staggering cognitive dissonance from long-time Corbyn detractors:

    In particular, people on X are old enough to remember when the Labour right straight up sabotaged Corbyn’s chance at Number 10:

    Because, who exactly does the country have to blame for Boris Johnson again?

    Naturally, Sodha seems to have forgotten her part in this, so people on X kindly reminded her:

    People were also understandably amused by Jess Philip’s smug mug as the feature image. This was particularly the case, given her public (and brutal) disavowal of Corbyn at the last election:

    Starmer showed the left the door

    Moreover, when Sodha opines about splitting the vote, she has a conveniently short term memory. Remember the time Starmer literally showed the left the door, Sodha? Well, again, people on X do:

    As a result, one poster had a go at a more accurate headline:

    But of course liberals can’t help throw their weight around with astonishing levels of entitlement:

    Liberal stooges gonna stooge, though, and short-changing democracy is their God-given gift to the world, that literally no-one asked for:

    Labour’s “politics are shit”

    Back in the real-world, people pointed out that if anything Starmer is the one ‘splitting the vote’ by turning Tory-red traitor:

    And more to the point, people aren’t ditching the party because of Starmer specifically. Funnily enough, people vote for their values, and Starmer’s Labour is in short supply:

    Ultimately, people know that a vote for Starmer and his loyalists is a vote for another corporate capitalist hell:

    Or it hardly needs to be said at this point, but a bunch of literal Tories:

    Sonia Sodha: Starmer shill can shut up

    At the end of the day, Starmer’s Labour has crossed one too many red lines. Abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza was and is an unconscionable step too far:

    If anything, Sodha’s article might have had the direct opposite effect to what she was hoping:

    If the feeling on X is anything to go by, it’s about time these hypocrites shut up shilling for a shit party without principles.

    Perhaps Sodha could put her pen to unpacking precisely why the left has up and gone. But that might suggest the neoliberal stenographer has an interest in holding the powerful to account. And that’s not something a self-indulgent suck up like Sodha knows how to do.

    So, like the good left folks on X, I won’t be holding my breath.

    Feature image via the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Shameless corporate media spouts DWP propaganda on PIP benefit fraud from TEN YEARS AGO

    Corporate media outlets are no strangers to spinning bile on DWP benefit fraud, but one site has recently ramped this up to disgusting new heights over PIP. In a vitriolic assault on disabled people, BirminghamLive has penned a piece outing a sweep of benefit fraudsters.

    Specifically, it centres round people that have purportedly claimed the disability benefit Personal Independence Payment (PIP) on false pretences.

    However, the article is both massively misleading, and packed full of ableist dog-whistles masquerading as facts.

    DWP benefit fraud bluster from the gutter press

    On 17 June, BirminghamLive published an article sensationally titled:

    The shameless DWP benefit cheats whose PIP application lies were busted on camera

    In it, the news site detailed how a handful of supposed fraudsters:

    managed to swindle thousands of pounds from the system with their lies. Some used the money to fund a life of luxury and pay for expensive holidays, while others took it upon themselves to pocket the cash.

    But each and everyone was caught out, whether they were captured on CCTV stealing from supermarket giant Asda or seen in holiday snaps.

    Presumably, its aim was to illustrate the scale of PIP benefit fraud. Only, it doesn’t really do this. It gives over the rest of the article to describing snapshots of just five separate cases of this fraudulent activity.

    Given the scathing tone of the article, you might assume assume PIP benefit fraud is rife. There’s just one problem: it’s precisely the opposite. For the financial year ending 2024, the DWP considered PIP benefit fraud so negligible, it classified it at 0%.

    So where exactly has the outlet dredged up these examples from? Funnily enough, just two of these cases of purported PIP benefit fraud were from the last financial year. On top of that, the majority of these aren’t even recent cases at all.

    BirminghamLive’s examples came from 2022, 2020, 2018, and one far back as over a decade ago.

    The obvious implication is that disabled people can’t or shouldn’t participate in society the way non-disabled people do. According to Birminghamlive, disabled folks shouldn’t lift boxes, shop, exercise, work, or go on holiday.

    News flash: disabled people have fulfilling lives of their own, and damn well live them. Naturally, that doesn’t matter to the corporate media hell-bent on punching down on marginalised communities. In a double whammy of this, the BirminghamLive piece managed to be both factually misleading, and full of ableist rhetoric.

    It’s not an out of work DWP benefit

    Predictably then, the BirminghamLive article forgot to mention that, on PIP, people CAN both work and go on holiday the same as everyone else.

    Firstly, though DWP ministers and corporate media cronies like to ignore this fact on the regular, PIP is NOT an out of work benefit. PIP is a disability benefit, ergo, many claiming it actually do work.

    It’s simply that Tory policymakers want most people to forget that fact, because it doesn’t fit into their demonising narrative. Specifically, if PIP claimants are in fact, taxpayers themselves, then they’re not exactly stealing from the taxpayer, as the Tories like to cast it.

    But in a galling example of how disabled people just can’t win, BirminghamLive laid into PIP claimants for doing precisely that. Because according to the shitrag, disabled people are STILL penny-pinching from the public purse. This time, it’s because they work and get benefits. Nevermind that PIP is there to make life a bit more equitable for disabled folks in a society set up for non-disabled people.

    Of course, in theory, the amount of PIP a claimant gets does indeed depend on a person’s level of disability. Although, there are numerous problems with this in reality. For instance, the shoddy assessment itself for one, as well as subjective, unqualified, and sometimes downright cruel assessors who invariably don’t always get this right. In fact, by and large, they don’t, as the huge number of PIP claimants receiving benefits and uprating at appeal, or tribunal consistently demonstrates.

    MS: a case in point

    However, that aside, the fact also remains that disabled people’s health can and does change over time. These are known as ‘fluctuating’ conditions where a person’s disabling illness can vary in intensity and frequency.

    Take Annette Bond, the lady who claimed PIP for multiple sclerosis that the outlet shamed for “going for 5km runs in her neighbourhood”. Now, it might well be the case that she lied about her condition entirely. However, MS is also one such fluctuating condition. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society states that:

    The symptoms of multiple sclerosis are variable and unpredictable. No two people have exactly the same symptoms, and symptoms can change or fluctuate over time.

    Moreover, there are treatments like disease modifying therapy (DMT) that can reduce the number of relapses a person with MS experiences. In other words, like with other fluctuating conditions, it’s possible to have better days and bad days, and treatments exist to improve this.

    Not disabled enough

    What the article also fails to acknowledge is that in some conditions too, a person can engage in physical activity, but:

    • Be in pain while doing so – in other words, pushing themselves.
    • Have a relapse after doing so. For example, this is the case for people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), with its hallmark feature – post-exertional malaise (PEM). This entails a disproportionate flare in multiple symptoms involving dysfunctions across many of the body systems.

    With the first point, it’s also salient to note that many disabled people don’t have full-time carers, or support. For one, PIP certainly isn’t enough to cover it. But crucially, this means that yes, disabled people with reduced mobility sometimes have to do essential tasks, despite the toll it can take on their condition in the short and long-term. Of course, not everyone disabled can ‘push’. The DWP has designed PIP typically to this narrow experience.

    Moreover, PIP is not enough to get by, particularly with the spiralling cost-of-living. And that’s even taking into account out of work/ low-income benefits like Universal Credit as accompanying support. That is, if you can get it, which many can’t owing to their partner’s income and work status.

    The government hasn’t increased any of these in line with inflation either. As a result, claimants are actually largely worse off in real-terms than before the pandemic. In short, everyday essentials have gone up in price, but benefits have not kept pace to match.

    In other words then, the outlet is playing into the ableist trope on not being “disabled enough” to deserve disability welfare.

    Disabled and poor people can’t have nice things

    In its vitriolic tirade, the gutter outlet also couldn’t possibly entertain that disabled folks might get to do nice things. It spouted that:

    A benefit fraudster who said he was too sick to work was seen riding an elephant in India. Lying Stephen Worton, 55, was caught out by his holiday albums which showed him in Amsterdam, Turkey and riding a camel and an off-road buggy in Egypt while claiming £85,000 of public cash.

    So, in ten years of claiming benefits, Worton went on a handful of holidays with his family. However, under government rules on disability benefits, there’s nothing wrong with this. With PIP for instance, claimants can go on holidays, and need only inform the DWP if they plan to go abroad for more than four weeks.

    The article noted that Worton was also claiming income support, housing benefit, and council tax help. However, again, why should this preclude someone from getting to participate in some of life’s joys?

    Poor people can’t have nice things either, like holidays, apparently. Of course, those benefits exist to subsidise employers paying poverty wages and landlords charging extortionate rents.

    Fluctuating conditions

    Worton was prosecuted, but not specifically for a little jet-setting. Instead, the DWP found him guilty largely owing to his two businesses and savings, which made him ineligible for out of work benefits. Partly, it was also due to the fact he hadn’t notified the DWP of a change to his health. In other words, it wasn’t necessarily the case he’d lied about his disability, just that he’d failed to update the DWP that it had improved.

    Far from exposing systemic abuse of the benefits system then, the BirminghamLive article actually tapped into the glaring issues with PIP itself. Because there again, the piece inadvertently highlighted another shortcoming.

    The problem with this is that fluctuating conditions are unpredictable. Specifically, they can literally change from day to day, hour to hour. Setting aside the incredible impracticalities of constantly updating the DWP on these changes, there’s also a risk in doing so. A person’s condition could improve temporarily, but can just as quickly worsen. In these circumstances, the DWP could put claimants through another gruelling reassessment, where they could risk losing their benefits altogether.

    Blue or red ties, it’s all the same

    The timing of the article is likely no accident either. Sunak and his ministers have been out on the campaign trail dusting off the disabled benefit scrounger rhetoric. As the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey reported on 10 June, Sunak unveiled his plans to:

    slash welfare by £12bn a year and get Brits back to work

    Then, on 16 June, the Tories’ Welsh secretary David TC Davies built on this back to work bluster. In a TV debate, he said that the majority of people on sickness benefits were capable of work. Of course, as Charlton-Dailey also pointed out, it’s the government who decides who can and cannot work. And given the DWP’s record on killing claimants it has deemed well enough to do so, they aren’t exactly compassionate or reliable arbitrators on this.

    What’s more, it follows a series of recent articles on the DWP uncovering the Bulgarian benefit fraudster ring.

    Given all this, a well-timed press release from the DWP could bolster the party’s message in the heat of the election campaign. Of course, there’s no way to be sure, but it wouldn’t be implausible that one from the DWP instigated the BirminghamLive article.

    The DWP categorised PIP benefit fraud as essentially a non-issue, yet the corporate media still spews out these vile attacks on disabled people anyway. Scraping together a handful of examples from as long as a decade ago doesn’t prove a systemic problem. Far from it. However, that isn’t the point of these hit pieces.

    General election: no safe hands for disabled people

    The Tory-led (for now) DWP, with the aid of its dutiful lapdogs in the corporate media, is trying to dupe people into thinking that it is regardless. Or more to the point, pitch disabled people as the enemy of the hard-working taxpayer. This is even despite the fact that disabled claimants actually often work themselves. And it’s doing all this to manufacture consent for stripping back the welfare state.

    Maybe the DWP did find the minuscule minority abusing the benefit system. However, this should not justify the mass surveillance and control of disabled people’s lives that the Tories seek to implement. Unfortunately, error-riddled as the article is, it’s just the sort of discourse that sets up for this.

    While it’s likely the final desperate gasps of a government on its way out, as the Canary has been reporting, disabled people won’t likely find a safe pair of hands in Labour either. Ultimately, articles like this feed into the blue-Tory, red-Tory campaign to force sick and disabled people into work, no matter the cost to their health.

    Feature image via the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Assange’s release also exposes Starmer – born and raised to be a US/UK establishment-pleasing flunkey

    This archaic method of British democracy — soon to be disowned by the Tories in opposition when they realise proportional representation will award them enough MPs to fill at least one minibus — has left the right-wing Daily Mail telling their crayon-wielding ‘readers’ the best way to keep the Labour Party’s widely-predicted massive parliamentary “Starmer supermajority” in-check: tactical voting, Tory/Reform-style, in the general election.

    I’m not entirely sure why Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, is particularly concerned by the prospect of a Labour government under the leadership of Mail columnist Keir Starmer, who describes watching a nuclear submarine being built as a “humbling experience”, and any possibility of a wealth tax was ruled out by chancellor-in-waiting, Rachel Reeves some time ago now.

    Birds of a feather flock together.

    But then maybe Rothermere — whose great-grandad posed for a selfie with Adolf Hitler — remembered Keir Starmer’s long-abandoned ten pledges and thought it was best not to take a chance on Starmer keeping his word.

    Entirely understandable.

    Anyone but Labour

    The best way you can ensure Keir Starmer’s “supermajority” isn’t quite-so-super is by following this very simple guide.

    1. Attend your polling station on 4 July, not forgetting your identification. The elite love a bit of disenfranchisement.
    2. Look at the list of candidates on offer and do not vote for the Labour, Conservative or Reform candidates.
    3. Vote for someone like an independent left-wing socialist, and if this isn’t possible, vote Green.

    The Labour Party is starting to go big on insisting you must vote for Labour if you want to see the back of the Tories.

    This is absolute bullshit. Labour will win the 2024 general election with a comfortable majority without your vote.

    The reason the Labour machine doesn’t want you voting for an independent or Green candidate is nothing to do with seeing Starmer over the finishing line and everything to do with ensuring left-wing candidates cannot build a modest support base to attack Labour from in five years time.

    Starmer doesn’t need your vote

    Labour doesn’t need your vote. Labour doesn’t deserve your vote. Keir Starmer is a pillar of the establishment. I repeat: Labour does not need or deserve your vote.

    Being fractionally less dishonest than the deplorable and discredited Conservative government really isn’t a massive selling point to the politically homeless.

    Starmer’s assault on true Labour Party values and the contempt for the people that stand by those values has been utterly galling. The Labour Party has become an amoral and vindictive sham under the leadership of the toolmaker’s son.

    Joseph Stalin purged the Soviet Union of all his opponents in order to rule the country through despotism. Keir Starmer purged the Labour Party of all of its socialists in order to rule the country through despotism, from the traditional conservative right.

    To his credit, Mr Stalin didn’t refuse to axe the two-child benefit cap that is set to impact an extra quarter-of-a-million children in 2025.

    Assange: a case in point

    On a separate but absolutely related point, I must say I was absolutely delighted to hear of the long-overdue release of the Wikileaks founder and journalist, Julian Assange.

    Assange has been a defining case for the left, and it is worth remembering that even when Starmer — a slavishly loyal asset of the British security state — was pleading for left-wing votes during the Labour leadership contest in 2020, he took the most conservative position imaginable and aligned himself with the fascist Donald Trump.

    Starmer’s steadfast loyalty to the British and American establishment has never been in question. This isn’t a conspiracy theory that’s been scribbled down on the back of a fag pack.

    Keir Starmer served as a member of the highly-secretive Trilateral Commission some time between March 2017 and October 2018. He departed at some point between April 2021 and June 2022.

    Matt Kennard of Declassified UK revealed that while Starmer was publicly playing hero to the People’s Vote Ltd cause he was also moonlighting with the Trilateral Commission, serving alongside two former heads of the CIA.

    Another Kennard exposé revealed when serving as the Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, Starmer was in Washington three times while in charge of Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden.

    This cost the public purse £21,603.

    The Crown Prosecution Service — England and Wales’ public prosecutor — has now deleted all of their records relating to Keir Starmer’s trips to the United States.

    Kennard goes on to say:

    During Starmer’s time in post, the CPS was marred by irregularities surrounding the case of the WikiLeaks founder.

    A complicity of silence on Starmer and Assange

    I do hope a British journalist has the common sense to nail Starmer over his part in the scandalous treatment of Julian Assange, but I won’t hold my breath, and I equally hope an overwhelming majority of British ‘journalism’ hangs its disgraced head in shame for its complicit silence throughout this grave miscarriage of justice.

    Kennard has been quite brilliant in his quest to hold truth to power. He has gnawed away at Starmer like a dog with a fresh bone.

    Shortly after Starmer lied his way into the top job, Kennard sent the new Labour leader an astonishing letter asking him about his links to the British and American national security establishments.

    The letter, which contained five pertinent questions for Starmer unsurprisingly went unanswered, so Kennard published it as an open letter.

    The questions were:

    1. Why he met the head of MI5 for informal social drinks in April 2013, the year after he decided not to prosecute MI5 for its role in torture?
    2. When and why did he join the Trilateral Commission and what does his membership of this intelligence-linked network entail?
    3. What did he discuss with then US Attorney General Eric Holder when he met him on 9 November 2011 in Washington DC, at a time Sir Keir was handling the Julian Assange case as the public prosecutor?
    4. What role did he play in the Crown Prosecution Service’s irregular handling of the Julian Assange case during his period as DPP?
    5. Why did he develop such a close relationship with the Times newspaper while he was the DPP and does this relationship still exist?

    Labour: no justice, and definitely no peace

    These questions, first asked four years ago, seem particularly relevant following Julian’s release. But shifty Starmer, born and raised to be an establishment-pleasing flunkey, knows how to stay silent on the greatest issues of our times.

    Just ask the children of Gaza.

    Keir Starmer quite clearly isn’t going to put justice at the heart of how he governs, he is a Tory after all. But when Starmer boldly claims “country before party”, which country is he referring to?

    If Starmer meant us, in little Blighty, he would be providing a vision of how he would house the homeless, feed the hungry, offer dignity to disabled people and save our NHS from the corporate clutches of American privateer vultures instead of foolishly employing Tory policies to deal with one Tory-made crisis after another.

    There isn’t a force on this earth that’s going to make me change my mind about the American/Israeli asset, Starmer.

    Starmer lies as freely and brazenly as Boris Johnson ever did.

    While we have seen the British electorate aren’t particularly bothered if their Prime Minister speaks fluent bullshit — providing he has a bit of charisma, scruffs up his hair, and says a few preposterously long words every now and then — Starmer has the charisma of a rusty scaffolding pole, a tub of Brylcreem in his briefcase, and repeats three-worded soundbites that mean absolutely nothing to anyone.

    Vote Labour, get despotism, and get the British and American establishment’s security state at its very worse, working against the interests of justice around the world.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Starmer needs to stop courting the hateful Tory vote with benefit claimants comments

    As we hurtle into our last full week of campaigning before the general election next Thursday, the leaders’ true colours are showing more and more. On Sunday, I wrote about how the prospective PMs all seem to be shouting over each other to prove who hates disabled people most and not one to miss out on a trend, Keir Starmer stepped up.

    Starmer and the Torygraph: new bedfellows

    Writing in the Telegraph, Starmer wrote about how handouts lack the dignity that wages bring. The first red flag here is that he wrote an op-ed for the most right-leaning paper in the country; one which regularly demonises anyone who isn’t rich, non-disabled, white, straight or cis.

    This was a clear dog whistle to the most hateful in society. Coincidentally I’m sure, the hateful wet wipe in charge of the DWP (but not for long) Mel Stride also regularly writes for them.

    The piece was a classic appeal to Tory voters, signposting economic growth, tax burdens, our country is going backwards, etc:

    Serving the interests of working people means understanding they want success more than state support…

    He said, as only someone who has never needed state support could.

    He spoke about who Labour would apparently benefit: young families, taxpayers, and entrepreneurs – and then attempted to sneak this in about welfare:

    The Labour mission was built on the pride of working people earning a decent living for themselves.

    We will never turn our backs on people who are struggling. But handouts from the state do not nurture the same sense of self-reliant dignity as a fair wage.

    ‘Yes that’s right, why do all you scroungers think you deserve any sort of support when you should be working? Have some respect!’ – he might as well have said.

    Oh, the indignity!

    This language is very deliberate – calling benefits handouts instead of support to live and using words like dignity – because it implies those who don’t or can’t work are lacking in dignity or self-respect.

    The only reason we lose our dignity in the first place is by having to jump through hoops and lay all the worst parts of our illnesses out to unqualified strangers in order to get benefits. 

    It’s in the fact the PIP form asks you to detail your toilet habits and that the government and media spew out so much bile that we’re scared to go shopping. 

    Though he never directly mentions those on disability-related benefits, the insinuation is there: work is good for you, laying on your arses faking disability isn’t. It also couples with the fact that all proposed changes that activists are already fighting are to disability benefits. 

    He, like every other Labour and Tory politician, is focusing a lot on work and taxpayers, but the fact is many disabled people do work and are taxpayers – it’s just the fact that life costs so much more for us and benefits aren’t enough. 

    Starmer then has the audacity to appeal to regional voters by talking about levelling up and how unfair it has been to any regions outside of London and the South East:

    If it all comes from London and the South East, no matter because we can “level up”.

    Now, nobody could walk around our country and deny how urgently we need to tackle regional inequality.

    Which of course is true and something that does urgently need fixing, but I’m from Sunderland, one of the most deprived areas in the UK and one of the safest red areas. 

    Levelling what up?

    The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that in 2021/22, 31% of disabled people lived in poverty – with this jumping to 38% of people with long-term mental health conditions. In the North East, 25% of the population lived in poverty.

    So basically you’re more likely to be poor if you’re disabled and from the North East, which a good portion of Mackems and Geordies otherwise are.

    ONS data found that 21.2% of people in the North East are disabled – the highest in the UK. Also, 7.8% of households in the North East have two or more disabled people in them, compared with 5.1% in London. 

    So it’s all well and good Starmer promising more for the regions – something which happens so often during the elections that I’m surprised they haven’t all visited the Tyne Docks or Nissan yet – but those are empty promises when you’re going to harm so many of us with other policies, or lack thereof.

    There have also been some interesting stats out today from the TUC about child poverty. 

    69% of all children in poverty live in a working household. and there are 900,000 more children in working households in poverty since 2010, bringing the total to three million. So despite Starmer and Sunak running with taglines that work pays, it clearly doesn’t.

    Not to mention how hypocritical it is of him to be criticising those claiming benefits for sponging off taxpayers when, as my Canary colleague James Wright pointed out, when he’s spent vast amounts of public money in expenses and handouts himself.

    Starmer: the lowest common denominator ftw

    What Starmer is doing in his Telegraph op-ed is clear – he’s courting the Tory vote. 

    Those who hate what Sunak has done to the country and still think too many people are pretending they have poor mental health or ADHD so they don’t have to work. They probably don’t even believe those things are real and what people really need to is get a job. 

    With the lack of opposition to the proposed welfare cuts this last year we’re already mostly feeling conflicted and only voting Labour because we have to. How are we supposed to trust it’ll be any different?

    It’s the same thing he’s doing with trans rights, his team saw how badly the “Tories know what a woman is” bullshit paid off for him with the evil wizard lady and her minions so they’re attempting to claw it back.

    But by appealing to the lowest in society Labour are alienating those on the left who would’ve voted for them because they desperately want rid of the Tories. Disabled and LGBTQ+ campaigners feel they can’t vote for them now.

    Labour needs to spend less time begging for the hate vote and give more attention to those who want to fight for real change – or they’ll split the left vote like they did in 2019 and the Tories – this time with Nigel Farage’s Reform in tow – will win again. 

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Labour: a transphobic hell-hole, as it offers to talk with billionaire JK Rowling

    The Labour Party is once again capitulating to bigots. Naturally, it’s another billionaire – this time one with a zeal for transphobia. Specifically, Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has offered to meet with vehement transphobe JK Rowling to “discuss her concerns” about the party’s policies on trans rights.

    In other words, the party is gearing up to throw trans people under the bus some more, for a billionaire who once donated to the party.

    Labour JK Rowling meeting?

    On Monday 24, Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves held out a fig leaf to transphobic author JK Rowling. According to the Independent:

    Labour’s Rachel Reeves said the party would meet Harry Potter author JK Rowling to provide her with “assurances” over the protection of women-only spaces.

    The shadow chancellor made the offer after Rowling said at the weekend that Labour had “abandoned” her and others campaigning for women’s rights.

    Specifically, Reeves made the offer in response to an article Rowling had penned for the Times. In this, she accused Labour of “abandoning” women.

    By this, she didn’t mean the party’s refusal to budge on the appalling two child benefit cap which disproportionately impacts women. Nor was Rowling referring to Labour welcoming hard right Tory Elphicke. You know, the Tory that the party admitted in the knowledge that she had gone after the victims of her rapist ex-husband.

    Nope. Trans exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) – though ‘radical’ and ‘feminist’ are a stretch – JK Rowling objects to trans people’s rights. In particular, she has harped on about trans women’s rights – because in her bigoted worldview, these pose a threat to cisgender women’s rights.

    Specifically, Rowling, like the UK’s TERF brigade en masse largely fixate on trans women in single-sex spaces. The common argument goes that trans people’s rights – such as expanding gender recognition – will enable violent men to access these spaces more easily.

    This is of course, palpable bullsh*t. The Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey recently pulled this argument apart:

    The big argument around excluding trans women from hospital wards, toilets, changing rooms, and general life is that any man could ‘dress up as a woman’ and walk in to abuse women and kids. The problem with this though is men don’t need to do that to abuse women and kids, they just abuse them in broad daylight and people still don’t believe victims.

    What’s more, it’s routinely evident that right-wing hate groups have weaponised this argument to stoke fear and division. Ultimately however, the mask regularly slips with the vile rhetoric conflating trans folks with paedophilia. It shouldn’t have to be said, but a trans person is no more likely a sexual predator than a cis person. In short, it’s barefaced bigotry masquerading as concern for women’s rights.

    Rowling has racked up a torrid history of this type of transphobia in recent years. She has opined in numerous op-eds to the corporate media and spewed her anti-trans hate tirade across X to her millions of followers.

    Given all this then, why exactly is Labour appealing to Rowling for her views on women’s rights?

    Rolling over for Rowling and the billionaire class

    People on X were wondering this exact question:

    Rowling is of course a cisgender woman, so should have no business dictating policies that affect trans people:

    Others wondered whether a few billion quid might be the reason Labour was loaning a listening ear:

    Ultimately, it’s more proof that Starmer’s Labour is batting for the billionaires:

    All the while, it ignores trans voices on this:


    As some people pointed out, screwing over marginalised groups is very Starmer’s “changed” Labour. Like how it has sidelined its Black and minority MPs:

    Reeves also wasn’t the only insipid Starmerite crowing to get Rowling on side. Wes Streeting couldn’t help but weigh in with his worse than worthless opinions too. But as one person on X highlighted, both did this after Rowling had attacked a trans Labour councillor on X:

    Rowling supporting… the Communist Party of Britain

    Of course, Labour is flirting with a hateful billionaire who isn’t even going to vote for them. Instead, Rowling has actually encouraged people to vote for the Communist Party of Britain. Predictably, this was due to the party’s bigoted positions on – you guessed it – trans rights:

    The party openly opposed Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform bill, which the Tory government bulldozered in January. As Socialist Alternative explained, the Communist Party of Britain:

    Under the guise of “safeguarding women and children from predatory and abusive men”, the CPB prefer the existing 2004 Gender Recognition Act, claiming it “focuses on allowing people with gender dysphoria to change their legal sex”. The GRR, by contrast, “allows anyone over the age of 16 access to a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) with no medical requirement”.

    In the CPB leaderships’ mind, this is supposed to be a bad thing. What is ignored however, is the way in which the existing legislation has placed trans people in waiting lists for as long as five years while they seek medical attention.

    They call for “sex” as a protected characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act to be redefined as “biological sex”. This tears a page straight out the book of what is said currently by Tory ministers, who wish to remove existing rights and protections for trans people – even those with a 2004 certificate! Their claim to support the “right of trans people to live free from discrimination and prejudice” rings hollow.

    And while Rowling might once have been a Labour Party donor, she’s more busy these days pouring her billions into her crusade against trans people.

    Ironically, Labour’s attempt to attract Rowling’s support hasn’t gone very well either. First, she called on Labour to meet with a Who’s Who of transphobic lobby groups:

    Although, as people on X already pointed out, Labour has already done this:

    We’re old enough to remember when Labour’s shadow equalities minister Annelise Dodd’s met with the LGB Alliance. That’s because it was just last month. Somehow, this fact seems to have eluded Rowling.

    Then, Rowling quoted from fellow transphobe Julie Bindel, who declared sticking with Labour as an “act of self-destruction”:

    Labour Party’s transphobia

    And as Labour tried to cosy up to a transphobic bigot, it has been doubling down with vile rightwing culture wars over trans people’s rights.

    Here’s Starmer on Monday essentially telling the media that trans people are a “gender ideology”:


    As folks on X underscored, his proposed ‘ban’ on schools teaching children about transgender identities is effectively imposing the equivalent of Section 28:

    As one poster eloquently expressed, Labour is more concerned by this bogus harm to children, than the actual harm its policies will inflict:

    Far from being the bastion of trans rights Rowling rails against then, in reality, the party continues to fall short. One person on X explained how Labour needs to back self-ID, because tinkering around at the edges of gender reform is a sham:

    Again and again, Starmer’s spineless Labour has repeatedly shown its  contempt for marginalised communities. If you’re disabled, working class, Black, brown, Muslim, a migrant, or frankly, any oppressed minority under the sun in the UK, Labour will readily use you as a political football. Now, if it wasn’t already, it’s blatantly clear that the Labour Party will be no champion for trans people either.

    Because, it’s prepared to kick aside trans people’s rights for a billionaire, with a bloated platform for her bigoted bile. JK Rowling has made trans people the singular focus of her hatred to the exclusion of all else. Similarly, Labour has made the billionaire class the singular focus of the party, and doesn’t give a toss about the rest of us. She’d be right at home, but somehow, Labour isn’t quite hateful enough for Rowling – not just yet anyway.

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The Week in Ableist Bullsh*t: general election candidates try to prove who hates disabled people the most

    It’s hard to believe that we’re on week 756 of general election season.

    That’s because we’re not – it’s only week four. But fuck me doesn’t it feel like it?

    Voting for the Red Tories at the general election

    Maybe it’s because we had the build-up and the will-he, won’t-he like we were watching the shittest romcom in the world, but god this month has been the longest of my life.

    But one way or another, in less than two weeks time we will get these scumbags out, we will have seen many many Tories cry in sports halls, and while the UK has its biggest sleep ever (hungover or bored to death from Starmer already) the new PM will be sworn in.

    But for many, there’s still the question of who they’re going to vote for – because we’ve not exactly got a bumper crop of options. Quite a few of us have resigned ourselves to the fact that in order to keep the Tories out we’re going to have to vote for Tories in red and hope they can be held accountable.

    PM candidates all Elevenerifing each other to show who hates disabled people more

    So surely you’d think that the people who are all running for PM would be going out of their way to get disabled people on their side and win their votes? Lol of course not, that would mean they would have to actually think about us.

    Instead, its been a clown car of who can be the most hateful – like Farage hearing Sunak went to Tenerife so he went to Elevenerife – and they’re making even less sense than all the Mandys, Karens, and Sandras in the Jay Slater Facebook groups.

    Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve finally had all the manifestos out. For disabled people who’d felt invisible so far in the cycle, it meant we got to see what the major parties were pledging to do to ‘help’ us – though we of course knew many of their feelings about us already, either through the Tory’s actions over the last few years or Labour’s silence.

    My brilliant Canary colleague Nicola already recapped what was in them for disabled people and what bullshit was being promised so I won’t dwell on them too much.

    Suffice to say it’s the same bullshit hatred we’ve had spewed at us from the Tories for months and nowhere near enough reassurance from the Labour Party that it’ll be any different.

    Can’t trust the Lib Dems are far as Ed Davey can get on a paddling board without falling off

    The ones with the best policies are unfortunately the Lib Dems. There’s a plan to completely rehaul the welfare system and even enshrine the UNCRDP in law. It’s just a shame that you can’t trust the Lib Dems as far as you can throw them after getting into bed with the Tories last time. Though Ed Davey would probs volunteer to be yeeted if it meant another publicity stunt.

    Despite everything they say, many of my generation will never trust them not to throw us under the bus again for another taste of power, exactly as they did in 2010.

    For all Davey is projecting himself as this care-free uncle having the time of his life on teacup rides and taking the water slide five times, his refusal to take responsibility for the Lib Dems past is very troubling.

    Admitting your party is responsible for disabled deaths wouldn’t go down well on a teacup ride

    The Lib Dem leader was asked SIX times by Sky News whether he thought austerity was a mistake – and he refused to answer every time. He also specifically denied that the ConDem austerity policies were to blame for the NHS crisis, instead saying the problems only started in 2015 when we got a full Tory government (though they didn’t really have anyone stopping them before then).

    Instead, he spaffed on about renewable power, whilst looking in so much pain that he’d need the NHS nurses the coalition cut very soon.

    When you can’t take responsibility for your past actions which killed untold amounts of disabled people, how are we supposed to trust you now?

    Breaking: Nigel Farage is still a cunt and Greens are still irrelevant

    Reform unsurprisingly are an absolute shower of hateful shit when it comes to disability rights. John Pring at DNS reported that their general election manifesto not only suggests huge benefit cuts but would also risk the safety of benefits claimants. But we didn’t expect much from a party that panders to the lowest scum of humanity, Nigel Farage.

    Maybe if we doused all disabled people in milkshake Reform would care?

    Whilst the Greens are mostly irrelevant, there was one piece of ableist bullshit that caught my eye. The West of England Centre for Inclusive Living (WECIL) are holding a deaf and disabled people hustings for Bristol candidates. Unsurprisingly many candidates aren’t bothering to show up, and that includes leader of the Green Party Carla Denyer. 

    Considering the Greens are the only party pledging to increase benefits, you’d think she’d want to put her money where her mouth is.

    Cesspit media sucking off the DWP again

    Outside of the general election trail, we see how the disgusting rhetoric so many politicians peddle trickles down into the cesspit media and is then fed to the public.

    Birmingham Live, a paper so vile I’ve blocked them on Twitter for stealing my stories twice now, this week published one of the most violently ableist pieces I’ve seen in a while. I won’t link because they don’t deserve the views quite frankly:

    The shameless DWP benefit cheats whose PIP application lies were busted on camera

    Some were caught shopping in Aldi or running a 5K – while others were spotted travelling the world

    Cried the bastards, a dog whistle to the worst possible people in humanity who think disabled people should wear sackcloth and never leave the house. The accusatory tone of a disabled person having the audacity to shop in Aldi is so outrage mining its ridiculous – because how dare someone on benefits shop at the cheapest supermarket in the land?

    Fuck me next they’ll be inspecting our shopping bags to make sure we’re not buying any treats – but then that’s exactly want the plan to make PIP paid in vouchers would do.

    The DWP know what they’re doing… well, about spreading disabled hate at least

    The fact the DWP has released this when their own figures show there was literally 0% PIP fraud last year shows just how desperate they are to claw back voters by appealing to those who think we spend all our money on fags and booze, are all secret window cleaners, and run marathons of a weekend.

    Make absolutely no mistake, headlines like the above are a deliberate and violent attack on disabled people by the media and the DWP. It’s only going to get worse as the general election and next government cycle rolls on.

    So we need to be there to fight.

    And some good news – I’m writing a new book!

    I haven’t shared any disabled joy here in a while and it’s high bloody time isn’t it? I’m thrilled to be able to tell you all that I’m writing a book all about the history of UK disability rights activism and what we’re still fighting for.

    As you all know by now, disability rights is a huge part of my life. However, due to being a fresh-faced beauty I wasn’t there for a lot of it and I’m by no means the ultimate expert – luckily for me I know people who are and were. The date is yet to be set in stone but it’ll be coming sometime in July 2025, published by Hurst.

    The as-yet-untitled book will take you all with me while I learn more and help us all remember why we fight. A cover reveal will be coming soon and I’ll be updating you all on Twitter first.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: the choice in Islington North couldn’t possibly be any clearer

    The choice in Islington North couldn’t possibly be any clearer.

    An assiduous constituency representative with a proven track record of delivering for the many, or a self-serving, Starmer-imposed mountebank that believes the “privatisation of healthcare is very, very important”, for the money.

    An accomplished and genuinely popular man whose heart has been firmly placed in the middle of Islington North for some five decades, or a private health entrepreneur with the likability of vegetarian bacon that would privatise your heart, lungs, retinas, and reproductive organs for a guaranteed place in Keir Starmer’s “changed” Labour cabinet.

    Would the 75,000-strong electorate in the constituency of Islington North agree with the neoliberal Nargund’s assessment of the importance of private healthcare provision? They need an MP that is in it for the many, not the money. They need Jeremy Corbyn.

    Islington North: it’s not just trendy coffee shops

    Forget the lazy trendy coffee shop stereotypes, Islington North is a borough with a shocking crime rate of 145 crimes per 1,000 people and a staggering 47.5% of primary school-aged children are growing up in poverty.

    Sure, there’s some rich people living in Islington. Have you seen what a house costs in London these days?

    Allow me to show you this “light and airy” ex-council flat in Highbury. Yours for an eye watering £625,000. Blame Thatcher:

    Please, someone explain to me as if I was six-years-old, how a millionaire test tube Tory like Praful Nargund can even begin to imagine what it is like to serve ordinary people like you and me when he is preoccupied with trivial matters such as helping foreign private healthcare firms amass a £16 million profit in just nine months, from British patients?

    Put the whole left versus right thing out of your mind once and for all.

    This is quite simply a case of right versus wrong.

    Right versus wrong, not left versus right

    This is the well-oiled establishment engine, — determined to aggressively eradicate Jeremy Corbyn from frontline politics — versus the epitome of a people-powered grassroots campaign, determined to deliver an independent socialist MP to the House of Commons for the first time in nineteen years.

    Jeremy Corbyn is acutely aware of the enormity of the task that has been forced upon him by the Labour Party. But sapient Corbyn, a veteran of TEN general election victories in Islington North, acknowledges the importance of commanding a mass-canvassing ground force with the ability to knock on every door throughout the constituency:

    Labour has the data, they have the resources, there is only one way we can compete with the Labour machine: people power.

    It would be utterly remiss of me if I failed to point out that YOU can be part of the ‘every door in Islington North’ challenge TODAY. Jeremy needs your help to make history.

    How? Easy. You don’t need to sign up, just turn up at either of these locations TODAY.

    • 11am – Corbyn campaign HQ, 89-93 Fonthill Road, London, N4 3JH
    • 4pm – Phillip Noel-Baker Peace Garden, London, N19 3NF

    Tales from the Crypt in Islington

    No-nads Nargund’s spluttering, lackluster campaign — almost as invisible as Nargund himself whenever a local hustings event has been organised — was apparently supported by two political heavyweights from the Labour royalty unit, this past week.

    So I did my research, expecting to see the sultan of sperm standing next to Gordon Brown (texture like sun) and Chuka Ummuna, and all I could find was him getting back-up from the close friend of a prolific paedophile sex trafficker and Margaret flippin’ Hodge, who must be as welcome on the streets of Islington as a pissed up England fan in a Glaswegian pub.

    The not-once-but-twice disgraced Peter Mandelson — looking more like an extra from Tales from the Crypt by the day — is still determined to see the end of Jeremy Corbyn. Yawn.

    Baron Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, the Lord that once claimed nearly £3,000 in expenses from the public purse on fitting a shower in his constituency home in July 2003 — a year before he resigned to become a European Commissioner — will bring less than nothing to Nargund’s faltering campaign, because he has the charisma of a coffin lid.

    Independent activists and independent media

    I have stood back in awe over the past week or so and witnessed my good friend @RedCollectiveUK forensically expose the true extent of Nargund’s obscene profiteering from our NHS.

    It should go without saying, the Canary — one of the very few media outlets that hasn’t bent over backwards to accommodate the red-rosette wearing polyps upon the anus of humanity, just because they’re going to win a sizeable majority at the general election — wasted no time in amplifying Red’s incredible revelations.

    The old media could learn so much from citizen journalism and independent media working together to shine a light on what, and most crucially WHO these foreign-lobbyist-funded, corporate-owned Starmerite drones stand for.

    I believe Jeremy Corbyn can win in Islington North, securing an astonishing eleventh consecutive victory in the constituency, but this one will be the most difficult of them all.

    From speaking to friends on the ground, not everyone is aware of the fact Jeremy Corbyn is no longer standing for the Labour Party. This makes the accidental victory of Praful Nargund a distinct possibility.

    Corbyn’s principles, now more than ever

    I have heard the phrase “neck and neck” on more than one occasion, which could explain why we need to flood Islington with activists, not just today and tomorrow but up until the very last moment on July 4th.

    Every single conversation matters. Voters need to know that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer a Labour candidate. Look for the name “Corbyn” on the ballot.

    Stood on the steps of Islington Town Hall, shortly after handing in his papers to confirm his candidacy, Jeremy said:

    “I hope those who have always supported Labour will understand that I am here to represent the people of Islington North with the same principles I’ve stood by my entire life: equality, democracy and peace. These principles are needed now, more than ever.”

    As so very often in the past, Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely right.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Pints, pubs, and flags can’t conceal the gaping hole in Farage’s NHS waiting lists plan

    One of the first things I saw when I went onto X this morning was a photo of Nigel Farage at an event in Clacton, the constituency in Essex that he hopes to win.

    Farage is no court jester

    There were flashbulbs and drama, pyrotechnics on the stage, and a hall filled with people, all waiting to see him appear.

    It was a spectacle, and to some people it’s clearly refreshing, amid an election season which has been dreary and staid. Among shades of grey, Farage pops like a firework.

    He’s attracting an awful lot of media attention too, both on headline panel shows and in discussions between journalists during the endless “talk radio” which fills up our relentless 24 hours a day news cycle. And why not? They’re always looking for a bit of colour, an interesting story, a scandal. Farage delivers this by the bucketload, cleverly and intentionally. He’s wedged himself into the public consciousness, and he intends to stay there.

    In their discussions, journalists, particularly of the high-brow publications, often laugh at the scenes he creates, or the supporters he attracts, treating the whole thing as a circus. In town today, but then it’ll move on somewhere else, out of view. Even the attacks he receives, which are never acceptable and should never occur, are treated like theatre and reported like that too. Stocks in the street for the clown man of politics, the jester, the fool.

    But he’s not a fool, and he’s not light-hearted either. Farage is a beacon of the sort of sinister politics that we shouldn’t be entertaining, even to fill gaps in a barren news cycle.

    No one can claim ignorance about Farage’s political potential, because the man was a driving force behind Brexit which has arguably caused the greatest rupture in our political system in decades. He has great potential to cause damage again, and we should be extremely concerned.

    Legitimate concerns – but Reform is not the answer

    In 2024, at a time when millions of people have been profoundly failed by Conservative governments (ironically, enacting a political agenda which has in part been directed by Farage himself), many people are vulnerable to the politics Farage represents.

    Perhaps they are legitimately worried and anxious, because they cannot access the healthcare they need in the NHS, after the Conservatives have systematically undermined it for 14 years.

    Perhaps they believed that their town, once industrious but long left behind by politicians, would be lifted up again through plans to “level up” the country.

    Perhaps they can’t get work, and they’re not sure why, and they’re susceptible to the incorrect, hateful messaging of publications which point fingers at immigrants. Point fingers everywhere, in fact.

    It’s the “Westminster blob” who’s to fault. Or the hard-working immigrants who moved to the UK to offer their skills and jobs, and who we should be more supportive of, not less. Fingers pointed outwards, to deflect blame and ignite outrage in as many as possible.

    A lot of people are looking for someone to blame, and Farage will give you plenty.

    A slippery slope

    He’ll then throw in some cheeky anecdotes and rollicking nostalgia and imagery of pints and pubs and flags to cover up the gaps in his rhetoric. He wants to lower your defences, create a sense of connection and a clubby atmosphere for all of the people who are isolated, frustrated, looking for something to grasp hold of.

    It’s a slippery slope, and we’re slipping down it fast. The only thing that’s going to stop us, break our fall, stop us from descending as a country to the far-right support that other countries are experiencing at the moment, is to focus on facts. Because when it comes to actual policies, Farage is weak.

    He announced his political candidacy late (perhaps to avoid the sort of scrutiny that other political parties are experiencing), and we need to play catch-up now. We have about two weeks before the election to shine a light on the Reform Party’s policies and show them for what they are; empty promises.

    Farage claims that the Reform Party will reduce NHS waiting lists to zero within two years.

    This is absolute nonsense; completely unachievable.

    Facts, not Farage

    Since NHS waiting lists have first been recorded they have never been at zero, not even at the end of the most recent Labour years, when enormous investment had been pumped into the service to bring them down. Even if Reform pumped enormous sums of money into the service now, this goal would still be unachievable.

    The NHS is currently missing 121,000 full-time members of staff. NHS waiting lists are higher now than they were when Rishi Sunak pledged to reduce them. Some of the NHS buildings are literally crumbling, with an unmet repair bill of almost £12bn in England alone, because the Conservative government has allowed things to deteriorate so significantly.

    No, the Reform Party will not reduce the NHS waiting lists to zero in two years. It simply could not happen.

    If we want to stop Farage now, quieten his claxons, and minimise the support he receives from voters, journalists, think tanks, and others, we need to trawl through his manifesto and demonstrate that this is an unworkable contract, a contract without depth, or value, or strength.

    As a country, because of terrible policies and terrible politicians, we face a polycrisis. If we want to tackle that properly and turn things around, we need experts and facts, not Farage and unworkable policies.

    Featured image via

    By Dr Julia Grace Patterson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Marina Hyde just EXPOSED herself as the liberal chancer she really is on book festival boycotts

    Liberal shill and Guardian columnist Marina Hyde has thrown her toys out the pram with the most privileged take imaginable. It was over book festival boycotts against climate-wrecking and genocidal investments.

    Predictably, Hyde was incensed at the supposed “politicisation” of literary art and laid into the protesters fighting it. Or translation: she couldn’t give a toss about the Israel massacring people in Gaza, or people dying on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Because god forbid these get in the way of her little literary self-promoting event.

    In a six-minute rant of epic cognitive dissonance proportions, Hyde showed all that’s wrong with the Western liberal media class.

    Marina Hyde harping on about Baillie Gifford

    On 17 June, Marina Hyde and Richard Osman’s media and TV podcast The Rest is Entertainment turned its attention to book festival boycotts.

    Specifically, the pair opined on investment management company Baillie Gifford pulling out of or getting banned from major literary festivals. As the Canary has previously reported, this has largely occurred in response to protests against the company’s controversial investments.

    In this particular instance, Hyde lambasted one specific group: Fossil Free Books. The group comprises literary workers who are calling for their industry to divest from fossil fuels and businesses propping up Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As its website explains:

    Baillie Gifford currently has up to £5bn invested in the fossil fuel industry,[2] including the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)[3] and Petrobras.[4]

    CNOOC is a shareholder in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, which is already displacing people from their homes in Uganda and, if it goes ahead, will be the world’s largest heated crude oil pipeline.[5] Petrobras is one of the top ten companies for projected fossil fuel development and exploration this decade.[6] These investments are funding destruction and harm in very real terms.

    We’ve just renewed our call for Baillie Gifford to divest from the fossil fuel industry and from companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide. Read our updated open letter, signed by 800 members (and counting) of the literary community.

    However, Hyde took umbrage with Fossil Free Books’ aims, arguing that the festivals shouldn’t be “politicised”.

    The Canary won’t regale you with the nitty-gritty details of her soapbox tirade. The crucial point is, Hyde harped on about the wonderful philanphropic sponsorships of Baillie Gifford, and lambasted the boycotts. If you’re so inclined, you can watch her shit the bed here:

    Largely, it was a media masterclass in rank hypocrisy. Thankfully, the good people of X have graciously well and truly ratioed her for it.

    Hyde on her landed gentry high horse

    Marina Hyde also branded the cultural boycotts a “contraction of the mind”. We hear you Marina, Fossil Free Books equipping themselves with the tools and information to fight the oppressors is evidently an exercise in shrinking the cerebrum.

    A poster on X postulated that perhaps its those big Oxford bods that are festering in mindless mediocrity. What, like Hyde herself perhaps, who read English at Christchurch College?

    Of course, her high-horse shit is also rich from someone preaching from the landed gentry with an enormous media platform:

    Lest we forget, Hyde – or Marina Elizabeth Catherine Dudley-Williams – is the literal daughter of a baronet:

    What’s more, she shamelessy peddled the position that “not all art is political”, so why punish the spineless book festivals taking blood money?

    Except of course, Hyde quite literally makes a living out of just such snivelling liberal media takes herself:

    And, for Hyde, it’s blatantly about high-tailing it on the profiteering gravy train more than anything else too:

    Did we mention Hyde is a frequent-flier of the literary festival circuit? In May, she was a speaker at the Stratford Literary Festival. And you guessed it, Baillie Gifford is its sponsor. We’ll just leave that there…

    Mind-bending athletics

    Naturally, that might explain her doing mind-bending athletics to point the finger of blame at – *checks notes* – the protesters:

    In short, between ditching the book festival scene and divesting from fossil fuels and genocide, Baillie Gifford chose the former. Because ultimately, capitalists will always sacrifice their environmental and social goals for profit. It’s literally their MO. Nothing political about that. But of course it’s the boycotters fault that book festivals are short on funding.

    In other words, she has it quite backwards:

    In fact, as some on X highlighted, investment companies sponsoring cultural events is precisely this ‘politicisation’ she so despises:

    According to Marina Hyde, what’s not to love about laundering the image of climate crisis and genocide-funding corporations?

    Planet-wreckers or polite little literary festival wreckers

    Of course, that’s the rub. For the media establishment, it’s all about protecting the status quo:

    Because boo-hoo, your middle class book soiree is cancelled. Meanwhile, Hyde couldn’t even masquerade as someone who cared about the climate crisis or Gaza:

    Nevermind that Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s cultural institutions and sites, including over 140 historic monuments. Or that the climate crisis is decimating the natural world.

    It’s almost as if Marina Hyde isn’t actually interested in protecting art at all. Instead, reactionary punching down is the bread and butter of Western liberal chancers like Lady Dudley-Williams. Compare and contrast:

    Marina Hyde: hypocrisy on high

    Some on X exposed her as the hypocritical opportunist she really is. Notably, on the one hand Marina Hyde has spoken out against sports-washing for prolific human rights violator Saudi Arabia. Yet, when it comes to fossil fuels and Israeli genocide, art-washing is golden:

    Hyde brazenly flirts within the politically permissible – that is, the media has manufactured the conditions for her flaccid criticism of these boycotts. Largely, it has done this by dehumanising Palestinians and colonised Black and brown communities in the Global South. By contrast, as one astute X user suggested, she’d likely be champing at the bit to stick it to Russia:

    Yet, if Hyde’s rattled – she’s right to be. Because, with drivel like this, it’s only a matter of time before readers tire of her liberal lickspittle. Ultimately, Hyde’s selective outrage is not surprising. She predicates her privilege on massaging the image of criminal capitalists tyrannising people and the planet for profit. What is surprising, is that anyone still listens to her shite.

    If you weren’t already folks, now would be a good time to boycott the Guardian and its corporate capitalist-abetting band of two-faced stenographers.

    Feature image via The Rest is Entertainment – X

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: Labour’s manifesto proved Starmer’s party is a morally-bankrupt band of muggers

    The new right-of-centre Labour Party keep telling us they are going to “get Britain’s future back”, and yet despite ten pledges, six missions. five promises, the same number of fixes, 300,000/34/974,000 (HT Priti Patel) screeching great U-turns, fifteen relaunches, a vague and uninspiring manifesto launch, and an audience with that distended wanker Piers Morgan – (breathe) – I’m still none the wiser to what Keir Starmer and his morally bankrupt band of muggers are really about.

    Are you?

    Sure we know who the Labour Party stands for:

    • Big business that lines the pocket of the Labour Party.
    • Lobbyists for aggressive foreign states that line the pockets of the Labour Party.
    • Ex-Tory donors, that line the pockets of the Labour Party.

    Do you sense a theme here, Labour voters, and especially you, Labour members?

    Do you really think your ‘paltry’ £10 a month is appreciated by the party?

    You’re just a number to them. They couldn’t care less if your tenner meant buying a bit less shopping. The Labour Party is using you.

    Starmer: as dishonest as they come

    Keir Starmer started the week of the launch of his own manifesto with some off-the-charts dishonesty by claiming the Conservatives have built a “Jeremy Corbyn-style manifesto” that will “load everything into the wheelbarrow” without explaining how to pay for it.

    This is a manifesto that Keir Starmer absolutely supported, without so much as a grumble to anyone that mattered. Why didn’t he raise his concerns at the time? Did he mention his #FBPE-pleasing Brexit policy? I will.

    Now Starmer says he was “certain” Labour would lose the election but made “no apology” for backing Jeremy Corbyn at the time.

    Corbyn, no longer shackled by the chains of the Labour Party machinery, was unequivocal in his response to the ridiculous opportunist Starmer, accusing the Labour leader of “rewriting history”.

    “Get over it and get on with it. He was in the shadow cabinet, he was at the Clause 5 meeting. Both those meetings unanimously agreed the 2019 manifesto, and he was there.”

    The thing is, Starmer wasn’t completely wrong. We knew that we needed nothing short of a miracle to win in 2019, and we knew exactly why.

    The Brexit betrayal

    Corbyn’s Labour had a solid poll lead, even in 2018. Then came the annual party conference where the apparent Europhile Starmer announced Labour wouldn’t rule out a second EU membership referendum with Remain on the ballot.

    That was Starmer’s policy, not Corbyn’s. Jeremy Corbyn favoured a “Labour Brexit”, not least because of the obvious impact it would have on the red wall seats that Labour needed to retain to stand any chance of toppling Boris Johnson.

    Keir Starmer played a massive part in handing the 2019 general election to the Tories for two reasons. Firstly, he was tasked with getting Corbyn out, and secondly, he harboured his own leadership ambitions for some time.

    Starmer’s Brexit betrayal was swiftly backed up by a scam of an ‘antisemitism crisis’, ably supported by threats to quit Britain if Corbyn came to power from the testicle-faced Alan Sugar, and the well-loved* Margaret Hodge with her suitcase packed.

    *not in Islington children’s homes and Jewish cemeteries.

    Of course, Mr Corbyn successfully campaigned to keep the cemetery intact. Yes, Hodge’s own view was unknown, but this happened under *her leadership* of the council that gave the thumbs-up to destroying headstones and digging up the bodies before having them reburied elsewhere to allow for property developers to make a bloody massive profit.

    But when a ‘national treasure’ like Hodge claims someone or another is an “antisemite and a fucking racist”, the people of Britain sit up and take notice. Even more so when the wassername from Countdown and Dirty Den’s killer wife are in full agreement.

    It was a scam. A complete work of fiction. And one hell of a smokescreen.

    Teaching Margaret Hodge to suck eggs

    Meanwhile, Islamophobia in the forever-racist Tory party had become the norm and the extreme right-wing of the Labour Party took great pleasure in racially abusing and mocking Britain’s first ever Black woman to become a member of parliament.

    Anyway, what am I saying? This is like trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. To readers outside of England this means why on earth am I trying to tell you about something you already know, and most likely know more than me, and has absolutely nothing to do with the aforementioned Hodge being force-fed half-a-dozen free range eggs.

    I must admit, I did intentionally miss the live launch of Starmer’s Labour manifesto, simply so I could fast forward through the boring and meaningless bits when I sat down later with a coffee. You can just imagine my disappointment at reaching the end of the broadcast before I’d even managed a sip.

    The word of the day was “change”, and what better way of beginning the era of change than having a multi-millionaire CEO Tory donor that wanted to be a candidate for the Conservative Party under the leadership of the economically-illiterate adulterer Liz Truss to get the ball rolling?

    The centre piece of this utterly futile Labour manifesto is “economic stability”. To you, me, and a vast majority of the British people this means there will not be any policies that are likely to upset bankers, big business executives, and the obscenely wealthy.

    I swear this all sounds very familiar. Perhaps it’s just me…

    Now Mr Starmer, about the NHS and immigration…

    Labour has also removed the NHS “is not for sale” from its manifesto, although I am absolutely sure this has nothing to do with Labour’s insidious and mutually beneficial relationship with the private healthcare sector.

    But then they also proudly committed to 40,000 more NHS appointments each week, so they can’t be all bad if Starmer is willing to put our money where his mouth is, right?

    Wrong.

    There’s not going to be a huge new investment, they’re just going to “incentivise staff to carry out additional appointments out of hours”. Thank god they’re not already overworked, understaffed, and ridiculously undervalued.

    Starmer went on to discuss launching a new “Border Security Command” — just to demonstrate he can out-Farage the leader of the cult of Reform — so refugees can continue to expect to be scapegoated, demonised, and systematically discriminated by the next Labour government under the leadership of Keir Starmer.

    Labour claim they want to reduce net migration. They will fail, obviously, but the dog-whistling Starmer knows it’s the sort of nonsense that gets the Rwanda-or-bust vote off their backsides and down to the nearest polling station.

    While the last general election was won with the phrase “Get Brexit Done”, Starmer will look to win this general election with the mantra ‘Get Refugees Gone’.

    Starmer has also committed to getting the health service “back on its feet”, but quite clearly doesn’t seem to understand the dependency of the NHS on migrant workers.

    I don’t think we’ve quite forgotten PFI yet, have we?

    Starmer: a ‘change’ I wish to have no part of

    There was also some fluff about “Great British Energy”. Starmer told us this new publicly-owned power company will compete with private corporations, but there are no plans whatsoever for nationalising utilities to run them as a public service.

    GBE isn’t actually going to supply any energy. It is no more than a public relations con designed to create the impression of nationally-owned energy while still allowing greedy corporations to rip you off and make huge profits at the public’s expense. Simple as that really.

    There were no new groundbreaking flagship policies — the “new deal for working people” gives big business an effective veto on policy — and spending commitments were few and far between, yet the deceptive Starmer PR machine wants you to believe the age of beige is all about “change”?

    The only noticeable change after 4 July will be the colour of the rosette pinned to the chest of those in power. But ideologically, the two Tory parties are joined at the hip and the only real difference between Starmer and Sunak is around half-a-billion quid in the bank.

    If Keir Starmer is being the change that he wishes to see in the world in his cack-handed quest to “get Britain’s future back”, this isn’t a change I want any part of.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Why is NZ being so obstinate over its weak position on Gaza and Palestine? 

    COMMENTARY: By John Hobbs

    The New Zealand government remains disturbingly quiet on the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

    New Zealand’s silence is clearly undermining its self-image as a principled and independent state within the United Nations. It is following its Anglosphere English-speaking partners (United States, UK, Canada, and Australia) in avoiding putting in place any sanctions against Israel — as has been done with Russia — in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

    Not only is New Zealand doing nothing to influence Israel to stop its slaughter of Palestinian children and civilians, New Zealand is at risk of being seen to be complicit in a genocide. New Zealand, as a contracting party to the UN Convention on Genocide, has a responsibility under the convention.

    It is doubtful that New Zealand’s “performance” in the UN General Assembly (UNGA), where it typically votes the “right way”, supporting a ceasefire and Palestinian membership of the UN, provides a get out of jail card for New Zealand vis-a-vis its responsibilities under the convention.

    That the New Zealand government is ignoring the spate of decisions by UN international bodies calling out Israel for contravening international humanitarian and criminal law is, if anything, puzzling.

    These bodies are the guardians of the international rule of law. Member states of the UN are obliged to support their decisions actively, not just in voice, and again, New Zealand’s rhetoric historically is that it supports the international rule of law.

    The International Court of Justice (ICJ) deemed that a probable genocide is occurring in Gaza and has recently called for an immediate ceasefire in Rafah. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has recommended that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant be held criminally liable for the act of starvation inflicted against the Palestinian people.

    New Zealand also stubbornly refuses to recognise Palestinian statehood, even though it has been argued by successive New Zealand governments, since 1993, that it supports the Oslo Accords and its key feature, the two-state solution.

    This positioning has always provided a convenient smoke screen for New Zealand to appear to be supportive of an independent Palestinian state but in reality successive New Zealand governments have shown no real interest in doing so.

    Importantly, New Zealand fails to distinguish between Israel as the occupier of Palestinian land and the Palestinians as the occupied people. Given this inequivalence, the New Zealand rhetoric of “leaving it to the parties” to agree what Palestinian state arrangements and borders might look like is laughable, if it wasn’t so cruel.

    There are now more than 700,000 Israeli illegal citizens which have been illegally transferred (settled) by Israel to the Occupied Territories — which under a two-state solution would be a future Palestinian state. This area is tiny, only about half the size of the area of Auckland (which is about 5600 sqkm.) It makes the task of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state near impossible to achieve.

    The illegal transfer of Israeli citizens on to Palestinian land in the Occupied West Bank has a clear purpose — to transfer Palestinians off their land.

    By remaining quiet the New Zealand government is effectively ignoring the rules-based order which it has historically argued it bases its foreign policy decision-making on. Indeed, this shift or “reset” in New Zealand foreign policy was intimated by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winton Peters, in a recent speech to the NZ Institute of International Affairs.

    Aware of the growing criticism of the lack of independence in New Zealand foreign policy, the minister stated that “New Zealand’s independent foreign policy does not, and never has, meant we are a non-aligned nation, although that is the way some critics in politics and the media see us . . .  We take the world as it is, and this realism is a shift from our predecessors’ vaguer notions of an indigenous foreign policy that no-one else understood, let alone shared.”

    This is clearly a move to a more “realpolitik” approach to international relations, where New Zealand’s “interests” are paramount. Our values are clearly a secondary consideration, and it is only by good luck that our interests and values might align.

    As a recent Palestinian speaker in New Zealand, Professor Mazim Qumsiyeh, so rightly put it, “in the end we will not remember the words of our enemies but we will remember the silence of our friends.” Accordingly, New Zealand must employ all of its endeavours to place real pressure on Israel to stop its genocidal attack on the Palestinian people now.

    It only needs to look to its Ukrainian/Russian playbook, to begin to do the right thing.

    John Hobbs is a doctoral candidate at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPCS), University of Otago.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Are disabled and chronically ill people now politically homeless in the general election?

    After years of Conservative and Labour Party policies, and general election manifestos where it’s now difficult to tell the difference between the two – are chronically ill and disabled people politically homeless?

    Chronically ill and disabled? Good luck.

    Being chronically ill and disabled, I have spent years struggling with an ongoing decimated NHS to get a correct diagnosis for the conditions I live with.

    Due to years of both Tory and Labour policies I have also struggled with continued issues regarding firstly receiving the entitlements I was due, then secondly being able to keep these entitlements whilst navigating a benefits system that quite frankly a barrister would struggle with.

    Not dissimilar to the recent Child Benefit disaster, I was also left with nothing but Child Benefit for just under two years as a chronically ill single mother. God only knows what this has done to my National Insurance contributions – and therefore my state pension. Honestly, if it wasn’t for meeting my now partner and full-time career who helped me raise the funds to go private, I would never have received the correct diagnoses and disability status.

    And yes, this all sounds ridiculous that in 2024 that any disabled or chronically ill person should have to experience any of this living in the UK. But this unfortunately is pretty standard for many of us.

    The controlled ableism this has caused

    These politically-motivated polices that have come from both political sides have not only caused years of poverty for disabled and chronically ill people that have led to deaths and suicides, it has also left many of us now feeling politically homeless.

    One of the most recent policies affecting chronically ill and disabled people was the introduction of Universal Credit. Whilst this was supposed to help sort out the benefits system, it has made it very much worst.

    Many people, like myself, were firstly forced onto Universal Credit, to only then lose their disability benefits and carers allowance due to their partners work status – leaving them only with Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

    If you are on Universal Credit, it also means that your payments are only paid into one account.

    So not only does that mean disabled or chronically ill people have to rely on hand outs from their partners – stopping their independence – it is also open to many people being abused by this policy. This is away from the fact that there is the obvious potential for domestic violence and abuse. This is all creating a form of controlled ableism.

    Along with the loss of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), social care support, and NHS services, many disabled and chronically ill people are struggling to see any real change or support from the main political parties.

    Our current status in politics

    So where does this leave us as disabled and chronically voters in this years general election? Are we really even considered in any of the political parties plans or manifestos…? To be fair, we don’t seem to ever really be on anyone’s agenda.

    What the Tories are saying…

    Hmm, so after reading the Tories’ Clear plan bold action, secure future manifesto I struggled to find any direct policies for disabled or chronically ill people. Taking a further look, I discovered that it was all stuff they’d already announced, or extensions of existing policies. In reality, all the Tories are promising is to cut disabled and chronically ill people’s benefits even more. There’s a promise of more SEND school places, but there’s not a lot on social care. I didn’t expect anything less from the Tories, anyway.

    What Labour is saying…

    Labour’s manifesto Change wasn’t much of an improvement either. It promises to “review” Universal Credit – even though its been failing disabled and chronically ill people for over ten years. There was talk about social care, SEND, and making disabled and chronically ill people work. But there was little else for us. Come on Labour, seriously you need to get your act together. You proclaim to be a voice of the people, so please stop discriminating against the chronically ill and disabled ones. That’s 16 million votes, by the way…

    What the Lib Dems are saying…

    The Lib Dems For a fair deal is better than Labour and the Tories. It promises to make the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) law – unlike Labour and the Tories. Everyone has seen the Lib Dems free adult personal care pledge. They will scrap the hated bedroom tax, make some ‘reforms’ to other benefits, and focus on independent living. But the Lib Dems are not doing anything about Universal Credit and the £100bn of cuts to benefits since 2013. For all Ed Davey’s bravado, the Lib Dems are not doing a lot.

    What the Green Party is saying…

    The Green Party manifesto Real hope, real change is better but still leaves chronically ill and disabled people short. They have a ‘game changing investment plan to nurse the NHS back to health’ which, yep, you guessed it, has absolutely no mention of chronically ill and disabled people. They’re the only party that’s pledged to increase benefits, but as the Canary pointed out it still won’t be enough. The Greens have done a Lib Dems and offered free social care, but both also commit to assisted dying. For the party that is now supposed to be the most radical, the manifesto isn’t radical enough.

    Not all disabilities are invisible, but clearly disabled people are in the general election

    So, after reading all of these current plans, not only are my chronic illnesses and disabilities invisible, clearly I along with all the country’s chronically ill and disabled people are also often invisible to most of the mainstream political parties, their manifestos, plans, pledges, or whatever they want to call them – because none of them go far enough.

    As someone who lives with multiple chronic illnesses, none of the parties have said anything about improving healthcare for people like me, either.

    Also, the lateness in which they’ve released them completely disregards the time left in firstly applying for a postal vote, which many disabled and chronically ill people depend on, and secondly the time given to consider their vote and post them to be included in the general election.

    For anyone still wanting to do this the deadline for a postal vote is 18 June. You can apply here.

    But alternately, whoever you vote for they have currently left me and around 16 million other disabled and chronically ill people completely politically homeless – without a key pledge, decent promise, or plan for us if you’re the Tories or Labour, or not going far enough if you’re the Lib Dems or Greens.

    We are the most underrepresented and disproportionately neglected group of people living in the UK. This is just not good enough.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Nicola Jeffery

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The BBC just cemented its shameful record of bias towards genocidal Israel

    “The BBC seems to regard Palestinian lives as less valuable than Israeli lives”.

    Brian Eno was right.

    ‘FOUR HOSTAGES SEIZED AT NOVA FESTIVAL FREED IN GAZA RAID, declared the publicly-funded BBC.

    Then if you squint a little you can read underneath, “Hamas claims more than 200 Palestinians were killed in the densely populated area where the raid took place”.

    Of course, the BBC amended the article, but not before X/Twitter user @greg_herriett captured a screenshot and his post went viral.

    The BBC: Palestinian lives are subtext

    The BBC effortlessly relegated Israel’s wholesale slaughter of nearly three hundred Palestinians – as usual, mostly women and children, and which also left a further seven hundred civilians wounded — to a tiny bit of subtext, despite the horrifying images of disemboweled children being live-streamed to our phones.

    Palestinian children are continuing to bear the brunt of western complicity and a complete failure of international law and accountability mechanisms put in place to prevent exactly what is happening in Gaza right now.

    The children of Gaza should be at school learning, not buried under a mountain of rubble that used to be called home.

    Israel has quite literally just committed an illegal act of unspeakable brutality, but true-to-form, the shamefully complicit establishment media is found to be investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims when compared with Palestinians, who are routinely dehumanised and not even considered worthy of the label, “collateral damage”.

    The BBC’s news coverage of Palestine rarely offers context or history to current events. There is no acknowledgement that Israel made Palestinians refugees in their own land.

    Covering for genocide

    Be in no doubt, dressing up as an aid worker and driving into a refugee camp in a vehicle designated for aid workers is a violation of international law. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) defines war crimes, including the use of humanitarian assistance as a pretext for military attacks.

    So rather than obediently congratulating Israel for rescuing the soldiers-turned-civilians perhaps the British Broadcasting Corporation should focus on the criminality and the horrifying death toll of the Nuseirat refugee camp massacre.

    Israel — whose ‘history’ reads like a criminal record —  has committed some of the most heinous, wicked acts of unconscionable depravity and criminality in our lifetimes in the space of just eight bloody, genocidal months.

    Stick that on your website, ‘Auntie’.

    The former director of Labour Friends of Israel, David Mencer, is regularly put out in front of the cameras to minimise the genocidal lunacy of the colonialist superpower.

    Any idea who funds LFI? Me neither, so on that basis they should be a proscribed terrorist organisation.

    Why on earth does the mainstream media, including the BBC, treat this Eylon Levy with an extra chin character as some sort of a credible witness to the war crimes of the nuclear-armed rogue state of Israel?

    It would seem the only notable difference between Mencer’s previous post at LFI and his bullshitter-in-chief position with the Israel government is the addition of the word “official” to his job title.

    Not subtle, and not even tolerated by its own staff

    The BBC’s pro-Israel bias has always been as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face, and while the hard-right frequently describe the BBC as a woke, lefty, Hezbollah mouthpiece, headed by ‘Jermy Crumbin, and the ghost of Chairman Mao, you only need to look at the Beeb’s top brass to see why the flag-fondling fuckwits on the political right-wing are less intelligent than the hope-hoarding heroes on the political left-wing.

    I’m glad it’s not just me that is of the opinion the BBC fails to accurately report the Israeli genocide of Gaza.

    Eight of the BBC’s own journalists were so horrified by the state broadcaster’s appalling coverage they felt the need to send a 2,300-word letter to Al Jazeera, accusing the BBC of failing to portray the story of the Israel-Palestine conflict accurately and omitting key historical context in its coverage.

    Unsurprisingly, you didn’t hear about this on BBC News.

    Earlier this year, a study looked at thousands of online articles and posts from the BBC between October 7, the date of the Hamas attacks on Israel, and December 2.

    Researchers found a “systematic disparity in how Palestinian and Israeli deaths are treated” by the BBC, with words such as murder, massacre, and slaughter almost exclusively being linked to Israeli deaths.

    BBC is failing on every count

    I’ve got a headline for you BBC:

    THREE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY PALESTINIANS SEIZED FROM THE STREETS OF GAZA REMAIN HELD HOSTAGE IN ISRAELI TORTURE CAMPS WITHOUT CHARGE OR TRIAL

    In the occupied Palestinian territories, one in every five Palestinians has been arrested and charged at some point. This rate is twice as high for Palestinian men as it is for women – two in every five men have been arrested and charged.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted the Israeli detainees have returned home to their families — unlike the three Israeli captives that were shot dead by an unhinged IOF soldier, despite them holding a white flag —  but what about the thousands of Palestinians being held under administrative detention? Surely they deserve to see their families too?

    Neither the administrative detainees, who include women and children, nor their lawyers are allowed to see the “secret evidence” that Israeli forces say form the basis for their arrests.

    Does this sound reasonable to you? Locked up in prison for an indefinite period of time, and you don’t even know what you’ve done wrong? It is a penal system that is quite obviously ripe for abuse and maltreatment.

    Administrative detention is an anathema in any democratic society that follows the rule of law, and while Israel will argue it is a democratic society, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on when it comes to abiding by the rule of law.

    Israel’s genocide continues

    I thought it was important to write about the ongoing genocide. The general election here in Blighty is dominating the headlines and Gaza is barely afforded a few words on the page opposite the horoscopes. Don’t ever stop talking about Palestine, and don’t ever stop talking about the enablers and perpetrators of this harrowing genocide.

    Israel has committed some of the most heinous, wicked acts of unconscionable depravity and criminality in our lifetimes. History will not be kind to these evil bastards.

    The incoming Labour government will happily grasp the loyal subject of the Knesset baton from the Conservative Party, they already have, and let’s not pretend otherwise.

    The values of the Labour Party are the directives of the Likud Party. Whilst Israel occupies Palestine, the cancerous ideology of Zionism occupies the corridors of power across the Western world.

    Something has to change.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • We must not let politicians kick the NHS around like a privatisation football

    The general election is approaching fast, and as we get closer to polling day it’s clear that the NHS is a very hot topic for voters – with politicians from all sides making promises.

    Ipsos Mori recently carried out polling which showed that the NHS is the number one issue of concern to the public. YouGov described it last week as the second issue of importance after the economy, but the two were very close, commanding a significant lead ahead of “immigration and asylum” in third place.

    It’s not surprising, of course, that the NHS is on so many peoples’ minds.

    The NHS: falling apart around us

    The Conservative Party government has undermined the service to a terrifying degree for the past 14 years, and our public healthcare system is now facing the most significant crisis of its 75 year history.

    I qualified as a doctor in 2010, and the service is barely recognisable from the one I walked into as a newly-qualified medical graduate. The NHS has never been perfect; there were sometimes long waits, and errors, and during the winters things got very busy at times.

    But back then we felt that we were delivering a good service for our patients, and that things were improving too. All of that has changed now.

    There are the NHS waiting lists of course, which are the longest in the NHS’s history (they’re even longer now than when Rishi Sunak pledged to tackle them back in January 2023).

    There are chronic understaffing problems, because so many staff have moved abroad to places where they’ll be better supported, or have even left their careers in healthcare altogether, because of the relentless pressure and the real-terms pay cuts.

    There are crumbling buildings, crumbling morale, and crumbling satisfaction amongst patients, who feel understandably frustrated about the state of the service.

    The devastation that has been caused by the Conservatives is extraordinary; in just over a decade these politicians have created a bleak wasteland where there was once hope, and ambition, and collective pride in a service which has the ability to transform millions of lives.

    But there lies its danger; and we need to pay close attention now to what politicians are saying and the promises they make, because this ability, this promise of what it can offer, is the very thing that lays the NHS wide open to lies and exaggerations from politicians during a general election campaign.

    General election NHS promises and lies

    Politicians from all parties are falling over themselves right now to tell the public that they have the plan, the commitment, and the drive to save the NHS. We are hearing it from the Conservatives, unbelievably, who are promising new GP surgeries and community diagnostic centres (forgetting, perhaps, that they haven’t delivered on their 2019 manifesto promise of 40 new hospitals).

    We are hearing it from the Labour Party, who are alarmingly enthusiastic about working with private companies and claim that they will use “spare capacity” in the private sector to help with the NHS backlog, despite no evidence that this spare capacity exists in any meaningful way.

    We are even hearing it from the Reform party, with Nigel Farage saying on BBC Question Time that the NHS needs a new funding model (despite experts agreeing recently that the current funding model relying on public taxation is best.

    We can expect more of this as the campaigns roll on. More promises, more claims, big and bold and often inaccurate.

    Voters are vulnerable right now, and we are liable to listen to politicians who have a charismatic demeanour and a compelling vision for the NHS. But if we really want to save the NHS, we need to challenge them on what they are saying.

    Challenge the politicians – don’t take what they say as read

    Politicians have been undermining the NHS for many years now. Governments of different parties have come into office and have undertaken “NHS reforms” which we have been told will improve the service, but have actually inserted new layers of corporatisation and privatisation.

    None of this has improved the NHS; it has simply allowed public money to find its way into shareholders’ hands.

    If we want to save the NHS, this needs to stop. There is no evidence that privatisation benefits the NHS; in fact there is growing evidence that it is harmful.

    We need politicians who are brave enough and bold enough to reimagine the NHS; to transform the service not by creating “partnerships” with private companies, or by changing the funding model, but instead by eliminating privatisation from the NHS altogether, and investing in the service, its staff and infrastructure.

    We need a bold vision for the future of the NHS; and we need politicians who will put an end to profit-creation within the delivery of public healthcare in the UK.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Dr Julia Grace Patterson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Nick Rockel: RIMPAC 2024 training – NZ’s sabre dance with Israel ͏

    COMMENTARY: By Nick Rockel in Tāmaki Makaurau

    This morning I did something I seldom do, I looked at the Twitter newsfeed.

    Normally I take the approach of something that I’m not sure is an American urban legend, or genuinely something kids do over there. The infamous bag of dog poo on the front porch, set it on fire then ring the doorbell so the occupier will answer and seeing the flaming bag stamp it out.

    In doing so they obviously disrupt the contents of the bag, quite forcefully, distributing it’s contents to the surprise, and annoyance, of said stamper.

    So that’s normally what I do. Deposit a tweet on that platform, then duck for cover. In the scenario above the kid doesn’t hang around afterwards to see what the resident made of their prank.

    I’m the same with Twitter. Get in, do what you’ve got to do, then get the heck out of there and enjoy the carnage from a distance.

    But this morning I clicked on the Home button and the first tweet that came up in my feed was about an article in The Daily Blog:

    Surely not?

    I know our government hasn’t exactly been outspoken in condemning the massacre of Palestinians that has been taking place since last October — but we’re not going to take part in training exercises with them, are we? Surely not.

    A massacre — not a rescue
    A couple of days ago I was thinking about the situation in Gaza, and the recent so-called rescue of hostages that is being celebrated.

    Look, I get it that every life is precious, that to the families of those hostages all that matters is getting them back alive. But four hostages freed and 274 Palestinians killed in the process — that isn’t a rescue — that’s a massacre.

    Another one.

    It reminds me of the “rescues” of the 1970s where they got the bad guys, but all the good guys ended up dead as well. According to some sources, and there are no really reliable sources here, the rescue also resulted in the deaths of three hostages.

    While looking at reports on this training exercise, one statistic jumped out at me:

    Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza in eight months than were dropped on London, Hamburg and Dresden during the full six years of the Second World War. Israel is dropping these bombs on one of the most densely populated communities in the world.

    It’s beyond comprehension. Think of how the Blitz in London is seared into our consciousness as being a terrible time — and how much worse this is.

    Firestorm of destruction
    As for Dresden, what a beautiful city. I remember when Fi and I were there back in 2001, arriving at the train station, walking along the river. Such a fabulous funky place. Going to museums — there was an incredible exhibition on Papua New Guinea when we were there, it seemed so incongruous to be on the other side of the world looking at exhibits of a Pacific people.

    Most of all though I remember the rebuilt cathedral and the historical information about the bombing of that city at the end of the war. A firestorm of utter destruction. Painstakingly rebuilt, over decades, to its former beauty. Although you can still see the scars.

    The ruins of Dresden following the Allied bombing in February 1945
    The ruins of Dresden following the Allied bombing in February 1945 . . . about 25,000 people were killed. Image: www.military-history.org

    Nobody will be rebuilding Gaza into a beautiful place when this is done.

    The best case for the Palestinians at this point would be some sort of peacekeeping force on the ground and then decades of rebuilding. Everything. Schools, hospitals, their entire infrastructure has been destroyed — in scenes that we associate with the most destructive war in human history.

    And we’re going to take part in training exercises with the people who are causing all of that destruction, who are massacring tens of thousands of civilians as if their lives don’t matter. Surely not.

    NZ ‘honour and mana stained’
    From Martyn Bradbury’s article in The Daily Blog:

    It is outrageous in the extreme that the NZ Defence Force will train with the Israeli Defence Force on June 26th as part of the US-led (RIMPAC) naval drills!

    Our military’s honour and mana is stained by rubbing shoulders with an Army that is currently accused of genocide and conducting a real time ethnic cleansing war crime.

    It’s like playing paintball with the Russian Army while they are invading the Ukraine.

    RIMPAC, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise, is held in Hawai’i every second year. The name indicates a focus on the Pacific Rim, although many countries attend.

    In 2024 there will be ships and personnel attending from 29 countries. The usual suspects you’d expect in the region — like the US, the Aussies, Canada, and some of our Pacific neighbours. But also countries from further abroad like France and Germany. As well of course as the Royal NZ Navy and the Israeli Navy.

    Which is pretty weird. I know Israel have to pretend they’re in Europe for things like sporting competitions or Eurovision, with their neighbours unwilling to include them. But what on earth does Israel have to do with the Pacific Rim?

    Needless to say those who oppose events in Gaza are not overly excited about us working together with the military force that’s doing almost all of the killing.

    “We are calling on our government to withdraw from the exercise because of Israel’s ongoing industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza”, said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national chair, John Minto.

    “Why would we want to join with a lawless, rogue state which has demonstrated the complete suite of war crimes over the past eight months?”

    Whatever you might think of John Minto, he has a point.

    Trade and travel embargo
    Personally I think we, and others, should be undertaking a complete trade and travel embargo with Israel until the killing stops. The least we can do is not rub shoulders with them as allies. That’s pretty repugnant. I can’t imagine many young Kiwis signed up to serve their country like that.

    The PSNA press release said, “Taking part in a military event alongside Israel will leave an indelible stain on this country. It will be a powerful symbol of New Zealand complicity with Israeli war crimes. It’s not on!”

    Aotearoa is not the only country in which such participation is being questioned. In Malaysia, for example, a group of NGOs are urging the government there to withdraw:

    “On May 24, the ICJ explicitly called for a halt in Israel’s Rafah onslaught. The Israeli government and opposition leaders, in line with the behaviour of a rogue lawless state, have scornfully dismissed the ICJ ruling,” it said.

    “The world should stop treating it like a normal, law-abiding state if it wants Israeli criminality in Gaza and the West Bank to stop.

    “We reiterate our call on the Malaysian government to immediately withdraw from Rimpac 2024 to drive home that message,” it said.

    What do you think about our country taking part in this event, alongside Israel Military Forces, at this time?

    Complicit as allies
    To me it feels that in doing so we are in a small way complicit. By coming together as allies, in our region of the world, we’re condoning their actions with our own.

    Valerie Morse of Peace Action Wellington had the following to say about New Zealand’s involvement in the military exercises:

    “The depth and breadth of suffering in Palestine is beyond imagination. The brutality of the Israeli military knows no boundaries. This is who [Prime Minister] Christopher Luxon and Defence Minister Judith Collins have signed the NZ military up to train alongside.

    “New Zealand must immediately halt its participation in RIMPAC. The HMNZS Aotearoa must be re-routed back home to Taranaki.

    “This is not the first time that Israel has been a participant in RIMPAC so it would not have been a surprise to the NZ government. It would have been quite easy to take the decision to stay out of RIMPAC given what is happening in Palestine. That Luxon and Collins have not done so shows that they lack even a basic moral compass.”

    The world desperately needs strong moral leadership at this time, it needs countries to take a stand against Israel and speak up for what is right.

    There’s only so much that a small country like ours can do, but we can hold our heads high and refuse to have anything to do with Israel until they stop the killing.

    Is that so hard Mr Luxon?

    Nick Rockel is a “Westie Leftie with five children, two dogs, and a wonderful wife”. He is the publisher of Nick’s Kōrero where this article was first published. It is republished here with permission. Read on to subscribe to Nick’s substack articles.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How Patriarchal Pronatalism Dominates the Conversation about the Human Future


    “Global Population Growth Is Slowing Down. Here’s One Reason Why,” Scientific American

    Governments worldwide are in a race to see which one can encourage the most women to have the most babies. Hungary is slashing income tax for women with four or more children. Russia is offering women with 10 or more children a “Mother-Heroine” award. Greece, Italy, and South Korea are bribing women with attractive baby bonuses. China has instituted a three-child policy. Iran has outlawed free contraceptives and vasectomies. Japan has joined forces with the fertility industry to infiltrate schools to promote early childbearing. A leading UK demographer has proposed taxing the childless. Religious myths are preventing African men from getting vasectomies. A eugenics-inspired Natal conference just took place in the U.S., a nation leading the way in taking away reproductive rights.

    The push for more babies to increase our numbers is hardly a new phenomenon. Longstanding forces of reproductive control have always favored population growth. These go back 5,000 years to the institutionalized male domination and patriarchy that emerged upon the rise of early states and empires centered in cities. Societies at the vanguard of civilization had two main goals: population expansion and seizure of resources. These were realized by coercing women to have as many children as possible and by pressuring men to become soldiers. Because of the dangers of both childbirth and war, birthing and soldiering had to be exalted and reinforced through social controls. To this day, pronatalism and militarism remain among patriarchy’s key features.

    Its strength undiminished over the course of millennia, pronatalism serves powerful institutions of the state, the church, the military, and the economy by preaching that parenthood is an obligation, not a choice. Pronatalism runs so deep in our society, has become so pervasive, that to this day it colors the most important policy discussions and social norms.

    As the Earth system groans under the burden of too many people consuming too much stuff, a new twist on this ubiquitous ideology – one that contemptuously sees women as mere procreative vessels – plays out on the global stage. While scientists warn that human numbers are a key driver of ecological and social crises, the subject of overpopulation gets short shrift by policymakers, think tanks, and even environmental groups. We are told that numbers don’t matter; what matters is solely the level of per capita consumption.

    For example, when the revered Jane Goodall spoke about the harms of population growth, environmental journalist-cum-activist George Monbiot attacked her by insinuating that she was proposing the culling of people. Elsewhere he wrote, “It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men.”

    I am a woman, born in India and now living in Canada, happily childfree as I near the end of my reproductive years. I am grateful to have a steady income, but I am not wealthy. Some might say I’m obsessed with overpopulation, though obsession isn’t the right term to describe a rational assessment of the role of population in the ecological degradation that makes humanity’s future precarious.

    But Monbiot’s is just one example. Environmental journalist David Roberts acknowledges that population growth is a problem and then goes on to explain why “there’s much downside and not much upside to talking about population.” Katherine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, an organization that has been accused of “promoting false climate solutions,” says in an interview, “As a climate scientist, I know that it’s not the number of people that matters. It’s how we live.” A formal statement by The Union of Concerned Scientists reads, “We’re sometimes asked ‘Isn’t population growth driving climate change?’ But that’s the wrong question—and it can lead to dangerous answers.”

    Let’s unpack these statements, all of which fall into what political and social theorist Diana Coole has called the discourses of population denialism.

    The first of these, “population shaming,” justifies silence about population by pointing to the excesses of “population control” movements of the past. And it is true that these coercive efforts deserve repudiation. Beginning in the 1970s, India forcibly sterilized millions of poor people (and it was backed in this endeavor by some Western powers). That was a dark moment in a benighted time, which focused on decreasing population growth in the lower-income countries rather than on moderating dramatically higher per capita consumption in the high-income countries.

    But it would be fallacious, and a disservice to the valiant history of family planning, to suppose all approaches to curbing population growth are destructive. During and following India’s reprehensible conduct, family planning programs in Thailand, Costa Rica, Iran, and elsewhere not only advanced greater personal and reproductive autonomy for girls and women, but also led to significantly lower fertility rates, decreases in poverty, and gains in environmental conservation.

    We know from historical experience that slowing population growth requires upholding fundamental human rights: championing universal education, prohibiting child marriage, empowering females, improving access to family planning services, and, most of all, standing up to patriarchy and pronatalism.

    This relates to another oft-used and largely-superseded discourse of population denialism that “development” or economic growth is required to spur declines in fertility, a claim that plays directly into the hands of pro-growth neoliberal interests. Research shows that declining fertility rates, however, are most closely associated with increasing use of modern contraception and are largely independent of changes in the economy.

    Disproportionately focusing on reproductive control efforts in the recent past, as so many environmentalists do, entirely misses the millennia-old chokehold of compulsive pronatalism in driving population growth—which makes these environmentalists unwitting accomplices of pronatalist patriarchy.

    Equally as offensive is that population denialism defies scientific evidence.

    In its 2022 report, the IPCC makes abundantly clear that “globally, GDP per capita and population growth remained the strongest drivers of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the last decade.” In a 2024 survey conducted by The Guardian, leading IPCC scientists candidly discussed their decisions to have no or fewer children, citing as their main motivations the impact of overpopulation on climate change and the fear of bringing their potential children into a perilous world environment.

    In 2017, over 15,000 scientists from 184 countries issued a warning that “we are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats.” Other Scientists’ Warnings have raised similar alarms.

    In 2022, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification warned that “within the next few decades, 129 countries will experience an increase in drought – 23 primarily due to population growth and 38 because of their interaction between climate change and population growth.”

    In its 2022 report, the UN Department of Social and Economic Affairs warned that “rapid population growth makes it more difficult for low-income and lower-middle-income countries to afford the increase in public expenditures on a per capita basis that is needed to eradicate poverty, end hunger and malnutrition, and ensure universal access to health care, education and other essential services.”

    It goes without saying that hyper-consumerism and affluence-seeking in rich countries have played an outsized role in these crises, yes. But to focus on consumerism alone misses the full complexity of the world problematique.

    The global middle class is the fastest rising demographic group, with at least one billion people—88% from Asia—projected to join it this decade, totaling 5.3 billion middle-class consumers. And other poorer billions surely have the right to increase their standard of living. Given that we are already in an extreme state of ecological overshoot, in which we are consuming 75% percent more than Earth can regenerate, further growth in our population and economy can only come at the expense of biophysical Earth systems, which means increased peril to our collective future. Refusing to deal with the twin threats of population and consumption, both of which are at unsustainable levels, only accelerates the destruction of other life and puts us on a long-term trajectory of immiseration of billions of people.

    Meanwhile, some politicians and pundits seem to believe the great threat to humankind is a shrinking economy driven by declining fertility rates and aging populations — that is, the threat is not too many people but too few. “Population declinism,” as this is known—another tentacle of population denialism—is what is fueling the global trend of pushing women to pump out the babies.

    Even amid declining fertility rates due to greater gender equality, global population is still growing by about 80 million people annually, just as in 1970, adding a projected 2.5 billion before the end of this century.

    Observers of the panic about declining fertility rates, such as Nobel laureate Steven Chu, have suggested that we are caught in a “Ponzi scheme” of endless growth that is “based on having more young workers than older people.” This unsustainable and ecologically-destructive scheme, which relies on an ever-increasing population, mostly serves the interests of tech billionaires, elites like Elon Musk, and the ideologies of far-Right, religious, nationalist, and market fundamentalists.

    Not only has population denialism among progressives emboldened the far Right to pursue its pronatalist agenda of rolling back reproductive rights, passing stricter divorce laws, and relaxing domestic violence laws, progressives are now joining the chorus of “baby-bust” alarmism.

    Media outlets regularly platform growth-biased pieces: this in the New York Times by an author whose organization received $10 million from Elon Musk for “fertility research”; this, this, and this in the Washington Post by contributors affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank with a history of climate denial and whose funders include ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers; and this by Vox in their Future Perfect section, a billionaire-funded project embedded in the deeply controversial effective altruism philosophy.

    More disturbingly, attempts to challenge pronatalism today are strategically conflated by these pro-growth actors with anti-natalism, baby hating, or misanthropy.

    Meanwhile, the rights of children to be born into conditions conducive to their social, psychological, and material well being are all but trampled as nations compete to pump out, by any means necessary, the next generation of worshippers, workers, consumers, taxpayers, soldiers, and of course, procreators. Warnings from leading authorities about dire population-driven consequences for children in the form of climate change impacts and extreme poverty, among others, go unheeded.

    The alarmism surrounding declining fertility rates is unfounded; it is a positive trend that represents greater reproductive choice, and one that we should accelerate. A smaller human population will immensely facilitate other transformations we need: mitigating climate change, conserving and rewilding ecosystems, making agriculture sustainable, and making communities more resilient and able to integrate more climate and war refugees.

    Research shows that societies with smaller populations and aging demographics can prosper. Instead of coercing women to have more babies, we can adopt progressive policies that strengthen social safety nets, wisely reallocate resources, and see seniors as meaningful contributors to society rather than a growing burden on a shrinking pool of younger workers. We can shift the failed paradigm of endless growth and transition to an economy that respects the biophysical limits of our planet.

    It’s time to reject “population shaming” that pretends to champion human rights while echoing pronatalist ideologies that treat women’s wombs as cogs in the growth machine. To defend the right of all to a livable future, we need to get off the growth treadmill, get past population denialism, and work for a future that has both fewer human beings and less consumption.

    The post How Patriarchal Pronatalism Dominates the Conversation about the Human Future first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Week In Ableist Bullsh*t: the Tories try to win back old bigots by threatening to kill disabled people, again

    It’s been a busy week for Rishi Sunak, who somehow managed to make himself look even worse and alienate his core voters – that’s right, old bigots who bang on about the war all day.

    With the Tories so far behind in the general election polls, you’d think someone on team Sunak would’ve realised what a home run turning up at D-Day and pretending to care about tanks could’ve been. But for that to happen there needs to still be anyone on team Sunak I guess.

    After fucking off home early and then having to spend the next few days in hiding amidst rumours of ousting, he knew what he had to do. And so Rishi unveiled his plan for welfare.

    Well, unveiled is a strong word. He wrote a column in the Sun. 

    Sunak: spouting welfare propaganda in the Sun

    I’ve written previously about how the British media allows the government’s lies about disabled people to flourish, but this takes the piss. A big problem with the media is that constant staff cuts mean analysis suffers and Tory bullshit is reported as fact. 

    But this isn’t even reporting. It’s straight up letting one of the most powerful men in the world spout his propaganda.

    There’s also the fact that we’re expecting the main party manifestos next week, which will obviously dominate the front pages. An old trick the government likes to do with welfare cuts is soft launch them a few days before the “meatier’ things, so they’ll be swept aside for sexier policies like funding for the NHS or tax breaks. 

    We saw Hunt and Stride pull this with last year’s autumn statement where the WCA reforms were the pre-drinks for the full-blown tory hate fest.

    Anyway onto the welfare plans.

    Writing in the Sun (vom), Sunak says he’ll ‘slash welfare by £12bn a year and get Brits back to work’. He states pretty early on that:

    ‘We Conservatives are compassionate [lol] and believe that those who really can’t work should be supported.’

    But there’s no elaboration on this – and crucially we need to remember that who ‘can’t work’ is decided by them.

    That imaginary benefit fraud again

    He goes on to say it’s his ‘moral mission’ to get as many people back to work as possible – though of course there’s no plans to shorten the waiting time for Access to Work or actually support disabled people into work. 

    Sunak reminds us all that the amount spent on sick and disabled benefits has increased by two-thirds since 2020. It’s almost like his government let a deadly pandemic rip through the country and created a whole new wave of disabled people. 

    Finally, after over 500 words, he tells us the Tories plan… and it’s the same one they already announced. 

    Expanding mental health treatment, reform the benefit system to ‘halt the unsustainable rise in claims’ whilst supporting those who need it most, and reform benefit assessments.

    The Telegraph meanwhile went with this headline and subheading:

    Rishi Sunak has promised to save the taxpayer £12 billion a year by clamping down on benefit fraudsters and reforming the welfare system.

    Major focus of Tory package will be cutting long-term sickness and ensuring more working age people are in employment

    Considering a few weeks ago it was revealed that disability benefit fraud is at almost zero, I’m not sure how much more it could be brought down? 

    But this is exactly what I was talking about when I said those figures, which they should’ve been really proud of, no longer fitting their narrative. 

    Wet Wipe meets Kuenssberg

    Never one to miss the disabled people hating, our favourite DWP wet wipe Mel Stride was on Laura Kuennsberg’s Sunday morning show. He had the prime spot of coming directly after Nigel Farage being racist as fuck, meaning he appeared almost rational.

    Whilst Sunak is having an absolute mare of a fortnight, Stride seems to have been media-coached to within an inch of his life. He spoke to Laura K in a low volume, ‘not angry just disappointed’ concerned tone that reminded me of a deputy headteacher who’s sick of residents complaining about kids being noisy walking home from school. 

    The way he was able to twist reform concerns and never directly talk about the people it’ll affect was masterful. He instead focused on how much it would save the poor innocent taxpayer in welfare. This is deliberate, as it means people are easily able to detach from those suffering and the people he’s planning to kill. It’s giving only those who make money humanity.

    He was weirdly proud of expanding Talking Therapies, as if he truly believed a huge waiting list and then six-eight sessions could cure the mental health crisis. It feels very insipid that the focus is on mental health. The Tories know that their vile core voters don’t take this as seriously, so wouldn’t object in the way they would a cancer survivor being forced back to work.

    In a truly chilling performance, he attempted to make 440,000 disabled people losing their benefits due to WCA changes sound like a good thing. There was no mention of supporting them and truly assessing if they really could work, just how much it would save the taxpayer. This man is truly a monster. 

    Sunak: none of this is serious but it forces Starmer to be viler

    This isn’t a new tactic, and it means they’ve been able to blur the line between Universal Credit and PIP by focusing on how much us workshy shirkers are stealing from the poor hardworking taxpayer. 

    It’s betting on the ignorance of non-disabled people to not know that PIP isn’t an unemployment benefit and that many disabled people claim it because our lives are so much more expensive. It’s also ignoring the fact you can be employed and claim Universal Credit, because even those who work can’t afford to live in a country that the Tories have destroyed.

    This means that the majority of disabled people, who you claim are tax dodgers, are in fact tax payers. But that doesn’t help their narrative. 

    As I’ve said before, none of these are serious plans – they’re using disabled people as bait to appeal to the vilest in humanity, those who think we truly are all scroungers. This time there’s also the clear use of us as a political football. 

    At every turn voters are reminded by the Tories that Labour doesn’t have a plan, almost daring Starmer to be even viler. Which is why we need to vote them out and then hold the next lot to account.

    On that note the deadline to apply for a postal vote is coming up this week, please make sure you sign up if you think you might need one.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: Starmer has jobs for the boys but he’s still a p*ss-poor Cameron tribute act

    Back in 2020, during the Labour Party leadership campaign, Keir Starmer – keen to demonstrate his passion for internal democracy – said:

    We should end the National Executive Committee (NEC) impositions of candidates. Local Party members should select their candidates for every election.

    How’s that working out?

    Keir Starmer: bare-faced liar extraordinaire

    The Labour NEC didn’t just impose candidates on local Labour constituencies, they actually chose THEMSELVES to stand in very winnable seats. This includes the painfully intolerable ultra-Zionist Luke Akehurst, of course.

    As if being made to be beholden to a rogue foreign state isn’t bad enough already.

    Labour NEC member Mish Rahman delivered this startling revelation on his X timeline to very little fanfare. The British media couldn’t give a shit if the next governing party is corrupt to its core.

    Why would they? They enabled and supported a government led by Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

    If this scandalous abuse of power – reported in the Canary on Wednesday – was carried out by a left-wing NEC under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn you can absolutely guarantee the Canary wouldn’t be alone in reporting the top-down corruption in the Labour Party.

    Yes, Corbyn should have been more ruthless

    People often say Jeremy should’ve been considerably more ruthless during his time as Labour leader, and I absolutely accept that criticism. But they must not confuse ruthlessness with malversation.

    Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t do corrupt. He doesn’t do rich private healthcare donors, and he certainly doesn’t do tenebrous pro-genocide lobbyists that are seeking a substantial degree of influence and direct access to power-on-speed-dial for the price of a new digital photocopier and a few glossy leaflets.

    I don’t think any Labour member voted for Jeremy because they were expecting something that resembles the merciless autocracy that is synonymous with the Labour leadership of today, did they?

    The right-wing saboteurs of Labour would often level unfounded accusations at Jeremy Corbyn, only to have the same or similar accusations credibly directed at them some time later.

    This tactic is straight out of the hard-right playbook. Ask Donald Trump and the pariah state of Israel why nearly every accusation turns out to be a confession.

    The Labour right: accusations-turned-confessions

    The Labour right insisted we were antisemitic.

    The Labour right had very little to say when one of their own, Barry Sheerman, tweeted about a “run on silver shekels” in reference to a rumour about two high profile Jewish businessmen missing out on peerages.

    The Labour right insisted we were racist.

    The Labour right had very little to say when a member of their own National Executive Committee called for an inquiry into the Islamophobia that has permanently stained the soul of the once proudly anti-racist Labour Party. Believe me, Labour is a racist cesspit.

    The Labour right insisted we were a risk to national security.

    The Labour right has plenty to say when it comes to further funding and fuelling global conflicts — particularly supporting the depleting of our own stock of military hardware so Zelensky can continue to fight Biden’s war with Putin.

    I can’t think of a much greater risk to our national security than provoking a state with 5,500 nuclear warheads at its disposal. Just one nuclear warhead dropped over the city of London would kill 583,000 of our friends and loved ones.

    The Labour right insisted that Jeremy Corbyn crushed internal democracy and stitched-up candidate selection processes in favour of left-leaning candidates.

    The Labour right has spent the entirety of Keir Starmer’s tenure as Labour leader meticulously exploiting candidate selection processes to block left-wing candidates from standing for Labour while promoting a “London clique” of candidates that could broadly be considered Blairite.

    When the ruling class tells you what motivates them, believe them the first time because when they come looking for your votes they lie, and lie, and lie.

    Barros-Curtis who?

    I was delighted to hear the Labour Party has dropped its lawsuit against five ex-staffers who had been accused of leaking a controversial internal report – the work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014–2029

    The announcement was made just days after the party’s legal director, Alex Barros-Curtis, who dealt with the expensive legal action, was parachuted in as Labour candidate for the safe seat of Cardiff West.

    So let’s get this straight. The legal eagle that chased an unwinnable case against the ‘ex-Labour five’ was rewarded for his utterly humiliating waste of £1.5 million worth of Labour membership fees with a job-for-life, a very generous salary, and perks that the working class backbone of this country can only ever dream of?

    One senior Labour MP said:

    The parachuting of Alex Barros-Curtis into a safe Labour seat is a disgrace now we know what he is responsible for.

    This Starmer-appointed official has spent millions of pounds of the Labour Party’s money dragging former party employees through the courts for four years, pursuing a pointless and failed political vendetta.

    Barros-Curtis, who I know absolutely nothing about whatsoever, seems to be a “legal director” in the same way that Keir Starmer is a “former leading human rights barrister”.

    We only mentioned the Seven Deadly Sins on Friday…

    Starmer himself is no stranger to the perks of power, which were quite beautifully exposed by openDemocracy last year.

    In fact, Keir Starmer has taken more freebies from the obscenely wealthy than all of the Labour leaders since 1997 combined – and that is based on figures from the start of the age of beige in 2020 until August 2023.

    Some of the gluttonous Keir Starmer’s freebies included tickets to a Coldplay concert in Manchester worth £698 by a concert promoter, while the Jockey Club gave him a box and hospitality at the Epsom Derby worth £3,716.

    You know who sits on the board of the Jockey Club, right? Baroness Dido Harding.

    Repeat after me: They’re all in it together.

    Take a deep breath. Here’s Starmer’s freebies

    Junket king Starmer has also pocketed freebies from companies such as *takes deep breath* Just Eat, the grocery delivery app GETIR, online retail business the Hut Group, construction giants Mulalley and Co on TWENTY EIGHT occasions, various multi millionaires and gambling giants, and the gifts have included hospitality at Chelsea and Tottenham Premier League matches, ANOTHER Coldplay concert, numerous days at the races, an Adele concert, and nights in luxury hotels.

    It probably goes without saying, Keir Starmer isn’t the only top ranking Labour official to take full advantage of the corporate lobbyists generosity.

    Shadow secretary of state for health and social care, the Blairite disciple Wes Streeting, was gifted hospitality worth more than a grand at Hay Festival courtesy of the broadcaster Sky and on top of that he received £600 worth of tickets to the opera at Glyndebourne by a lobbying and public affairs company, FGS Global.

    It is important that I make clear, Starmer and Streeting are doing absolutely nothing wrong providing the freebie is declared within thirty days – if it has a value of more than £300. As you can imagine, many of the freebies are worth £295, thus avoiding the need to declare it.

    Keir Starmer: a piss-poor Cameron tribute act

    Parachuted candidates, the cancellation of internal democracy, the lies, double standards and jaw dropping hypocrisy, the racism and antisemitism, the financial recklessness, the trough-clearing, freebie-loving greed, all in one Canary column and yet they still want us to believe this piss-poor Cameron tribute act is going to responsible in government when it is so catastrophically irresponsible in opposition?

    Dream on.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Unbecoming American: One strike, Two strikes, and You’re out

    One strike, two strikes and they are out…

    Meanwhile there are even respectable, Establishment scholars who appear to have overcome their indoctrination or institutional discipline to express views on the current campaign in the eternal war of the Anglo-American Empire although at variance—if not deviance—from the positions they have been known to hold in the past or those that continue to prevail among the ruling class, its prelates, acolytes and fanatical hordes.

    Tucker Carlson has continued to sail full speed ahead in the same manner with which he confronted the Establishment’s re-enactment of the Reichstag fire (1933) in 2021 and exhibited the strongest circumstantial evidence that the farce staged on 6 January was quite obviously anything but what the Establishment has insisted it was to this day. Then he exposed millions of traditionally ignorant US Americans to the intelligence and immanent sanity of the Russian federal president, Vladimir Putin. Just last week he released an extensive interview with Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. Although Sachs is probably still invited to parties and other events of the New York and Washington season, this prior preacher of shock therapy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—of whose legal dissolution he was personally informed by US stooge Boris Yeltsin—has arrived, on his own it seems, at an independence he could scarcely have been accused of exhibiting for much of his career. That said, just because he has said things with which critical historically conscious people can even violently disagree does not mean that his basic intellectual integrity is fraudulent.

    On the contrary, in the cult of individual personality that drives Western society there is also a compulsion to see every human as isomorphic with the verbal behaviour in which he or she engages. However since there is no immanent meaning in language—words—but only judged responses to verbal activity—it takes considerable energy and force to preserve dogmatic personalities of the kind with which we are routinely presented in mass media and wherever substantial power is exerted without corresponding challenge. What I mean is the judgement that anyone is inconsistent (as a liar or an idiot) relies on a more or less static and hence stereotypical or cliché-formed notion of the person whose behaviour is being judged. Hegel made this point more than two-hundred years ago in his journalistic essay “Who thinks abstractly?” (Wer denkt abstrakt?) It is not necessary to take vows of holy matrimony in order to have intimate and confidential relations—although as I child I did believe that children were mysteriously generated by the legal act.

    The education of Jeffrey Sachs, although far from complete, induced him to repudiate his role in the destruction of the Soviet economy while sitting on a New York Times panel discussing China. He was heavily criticized for that as well as his unwillingness to categorically condemn the Chinese State—especially by Western standards. However the economist is still ready to believe that the UN Sustainability Goals are benevolent policies driven by the sincere pursuit of human welfare. It appears that he does not advertise his destructive role in post-Soviet Eurasia. In speaking to Tucker Carlson he retained the positive version of his political-economic engagement. However he recounted an element of his epiphany when the very policy recommendations deemed a success in Poland (for reasons that are too extensive to explain here) were categorically rejected when it came to restoring Russia to the Western political-economic fold. The refusal of his masters to approve recommendations he had successfully implemented in the CIA-infested Catholic republic east of the Oder was by his own admission a stage of his Kairos. Apparently oblivious to actual Polish politics he assumed—not unlike the worshippers of Ludwig Erhard in Germany—that wonders come from liberal economics in lieu of canonized saints or the deity itself. This failure does not invalidate the lesson he learned, namely that the masters’ were not about to let their servant treat the hereditary enemy of Anglo-American Empire (I find hegemony an insufferable euphemism) in any other manner than destructive. Perhaps it should be said here that the very intelligence which elevated Jeffrey Sachs to the professorship and fellowship of Harvard University at such an early age was complemented by the spiritual-intellectual dependency sought in the loyal cadre. Repeatedly during the interview Professor Sachs refers to himself as naive or perhaps naive. That naïveté is cultivated among the bright, once talent-spotters have recruited them for the Establishment. He called the “neo-cons” “true believers”—a term popularized by Erich Fromm—but seems unable to recognise that he too was a true believer, spoiled with rewards that confirmed his own merit but ultimately had little to do with his undeniable intellectual capacity.

    Jeffrey Sachs, as a meanwhile marginalized if not banned regime critic, is important for two reasons. In the first place the credibility he enjoys because of his decades of devotion to the ruling cult lends some authority to the criticisms raised by those with little or no access to the apparatus of power. In the second place, Professor Sachs provides evidence of the permeability of a certain—albeit small—segment of the Establishment. His statements are evidence of the mendacity of his masters and ours. Although, unlike Tucker Carlson, Jeffrey Sachs is not willing to call his masters evil, he has at least reached the point of calling them insane. If we need proof that the evil 1% ought to be neutralized (to adopt a term favoured in those heights) there is at least testimony that the insanity requires us to act in our own defence.

    This interview was not unlike the Putin interview in one respect. Both Vladimir Putin and Jeffrey Sachs live in the world of diplomacy, civilized behaviour even among antagonists. Although of very different rank and station, Putin and Sachs demonstrate that there are limits to what one may say in public. The conversation Tucker Carlson conducted permitted him to interpolate or extrapolate from the statements made by his interlocutor. Hence we cannot know how critical Professor Sachs really is or how much he really understands beyond the framework his precocious academic career constructed.

    This is no where more evident than in the synthesis by which Professor Sachs asserts that none of the current crisis arose from spontaneous errors or miscalculations. On the contrary he argues very clearly that today’s brinkmanship derives at least from the policies (and culture) of Old Harrovian Henry Temple, 3d Viscount Palmerston and the Crimean War. The Old Etonian, David Cameron, who bowled Britain’s first innings against Russia until 2016 has continued that tradition in his assault as foreign secretary—recently on record as calling for direct assaults on Russia with British (and NATO) weaponry. In a discussion of his conclusions as chair of a committee appointed to investigate the origins of the so-called COVID-19 pandemic, Sachs traced the story back at least to 2008 and the ambiguity of US regime claims to research “biodefense”. He also asserted that the 1963 assassination of POTUS John F. Kennedy could no longer be explained credibly by the fantastic story recorded and certified by the late Chief Justice Earl Warren et al. Moreover he concurred with a view meanwhile widely held that the assassination was a coup d’etat at least organized by the US national security apparatus (e.g. CIA). In all these Candide-like remarks—with Pangloss implied—Jeffrey Sachs demonstrated that even the most well-rewarded prodigies can under certain circumstances be induced to question many if not all of the fundamental assumptions by which they were recruited.

    Another admission—certainly rare among those of his rank and station—is that he actually values the lives of his family beyond the balance sheets and capital accounts with which political economy is obsessed. The idea that atomic war should be avoided because it kills the innocent (not necessarily the warriors) is foreign to any living Western politician or Establishment intellectual. As in the case of the settler-colonial regime in Palestine, the ideological standard is that mass killing of women and children “is worth it” (as the finally late Madeleine Albright proudly proclaimed for half a million dead Iraqi children). Sadism is an implicit prerequisite for high office and senior civil or military service. Corporations have departments dedicated to it. For Jeffrey Sachs the annihilation of his children and all the children like his was reason enough to oppose the insanity of the ruling oligarchy.

    Nonetheless as thoroughly confessional and sincere as Professor Sachs was in his conversation with Tucker Carlson, there were numerous loose ends. Perhaps the loosest of those is the de-contextualization of George Kennan’s anti-Sovietism. While it is true that in later years Kennan criticized much of the Establishment policy toward the Soviet Union he never went so far as to violate the sanctity of Chatham House, so to speak. Candidly this true believer accurately asserted that without military force the US would not be able to retain control over some 60% of the world’s consumption with 4% of its population. He also predicted that the damage the West had done to the Soviet Union would require at least 20 years to repair. In other words those who had ultimately backed the Hitler Wehrmacht as a means of destroying the Soviet Union had succeeded in creating the living conditions claimed to be the fruits of socialism. When despite that devastation the Soviet Union recovered ahead of schedule, the war intensified.

    By missing the essence of Kennan’s policy papers, Jeffrey Sachs fails to understand that the atomic weapons developed by the Manhattan Project— the largest single government research project at the time—were always intended for use against the Soviet Union, not against the German Reich or Japanese empire. Perhaps he never saw the de-classified Sandia oral history of US strategic policy. Yet Curtis LeMay was really no exception among the centurions. It was the Soviet Union that preserved what we in the West experienced to varying degrees as peace and prosperity, not the US. Even the story of the arms race taught in the West conceals this fact so as to blame the USSR for what was always unilateral, not mutually, assured destruction.

    What was the fundamental change in 1989? Professor Sachs says it was the “neo-con” ascendency. However Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were already embedded in the Nixon administration. Richard Holbrooke and his slightly older roommate began their careers as Phoenix counter-insurgency managers in the Mekong Delta (VietnamI)—that is junior mass murderers for the CIA before the official “neo-con” tracts were published. The dramatis personae of American empire has been incestuously linked to Britannia’s (in fact the City of London) destiny ever since Cecil Rhodes and Lord Rothschild founded what would become the Royal Institute of International Affairs franchise and the Council on Foreign Relations. A century of continuous class war, for convenience launched in 1913 with such paragons of legislation as the Federal Reserve Act and the South African Native Lands Act, has been waged by the “banking” class, guided by its dogma of world population reduction. In 1989, the triumph of the 1.0% meant that the horrific labour (human) intensive industrialization process could finally be transcended. The merger of eugenics and ecology, exemplified in the Club of Rome, prepared the ideological foundation for elimination of 20-40% of the world’s population, instead of merely 20% of selected target populations (China, Soviet Union, Central America, African states). The United Nations organisation—mainly the plethora of “specialized agencies” and the Anglo-American dominated Security Council and Secretariat—provided deniability for genocide in Korea, Indochina, Indonesia and the Congo or Haiti and of course Palestine. What seems unmentionable is the global enclosures program being implemented behind the facade of UN Sustainable Development Goals. The WHO—originally founded as a shell organization for the Rockefeller petrochemical pharmaceuticals cartel—has openly taken the point for biochemical herd culling/ eradication. The pejoratively denoted “Woke” ideology has emerged very much like Huxley and Orwell described—under the pretext of a vacuous and hypocritical morality, human kind are to be replaced by NCEs, i.e. numerically controlled entities. The abolition of biological sex, both in microsocial and macrosocial senses, accompanies the total commodification of “identity”. It only takes a cogent sense of consistency to see that when there are no essentially human qualities, then there can be no human rights.

    Fictive wealth can be indefinitely maintained by the minuscule tribe of monsters with the elimination of sufficient numbers of human beings (20-40% or more). Injecting genetically-engineered toxins into a billion people at a time is entirely consistent with pushing Russia into what could be politely called an atomic exchange.

    To the extent Russia and China oppose this nihilism it is because, unlike the West, they have actually been on the receiving end of previous culling campaigns (millions murdered by Western warrior-terrorists). However even there one can hear the grunts of members in the “big club”. Resistance to evil and insanity is far from uniform, especially among those committed to AI and contract pharmaceuticals manufacture.

    Nikki Haley is meanwhile standing in for that character played by Slim Pickens in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. As can be seen on the banks of the Hudson, Thames, Seine and Spree, between the River Jordan and the sea, the entire Western political class is compromised and or complicit in this accelerating democide.

    The post Unbecoming American: One strike, Two strikes, and You’re out first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Last Rites for a Dying Civilization

    When the Black Death struck Europe in the Middle Ages, the fundamental values that held society together broke down. Husbands and wives abandoned each other and mothers abandoned their children. This void of ethics that overtook the population is described in Boccaccio’s The Decameron, considered a masterpiece of Italian prose and a documentary of life during that time. The book describes the sense of hopelessness that spread throughout the world, because it did not matter what stature one held in life or what one did or did not do to avoid the disease, all were subject to its lethality. Some implored their God in vain while others pursued a carpe diem spirit in an attempt to grab the last bit of pleasure from life when they were able. The common explanation for the indiscriminate devastation wrought by the Black Plague was God’s punishment for human wrongdoing. Nothing in human behavior has changed since then and I believe the ecological overshoot that man finds himself in today, manifested most prominently as climate chaos amongst a myriad of other threats, will cause humans to question the futility of life and their existence just as did those victims of the bubonic plague. A recent study has found that climate chaos is indeed worsening neurological diseases and mental health disorders. Another study found that people are denying climate change as a form of self-deception necessary to maintain their psychological health.

    Since those Dark Ages, mankind has developed the ability to accurately track and predict our own demise. Vast networks of satellites and other data monitoring tools are informing us that the planet is becoming increasingly more inhospitable for the vast majority of life on Earth, yet we plod onward, ignoring another plea by the world’s scientists. A reassessment of the Limits to Growth Study and its World3 model using different calibrations was done 6 months ago and the results are the same, which is to say that humanity is still following business-as-usual and heading for collapse within the next two decades:

    …the model results clearly indicate the imminent end of the exponential growth curve. The excessive consumption of resources by industry and industrial agriculture to feed a growing world population is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.

    All the expertise and modern technology we possess will not be coming to save us; there is no techno-fix or deus ex machina remotely scalable to the planetary crises we face. Emergency atmospheric geoengineering schemes won’t save us at this point. Can’t we just suck the 900 billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere that we have spewed since the beginning of the industrial revolution? No. It bears repeating that the spiking Keeling curve is non-reversible on human timescales.

    “We sadly continue to break records in the CO2 rise rate,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at Scripps. “The ultimate reason is continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels.” ~ May 8, 2024

    The rate of ocean warming has nearly quadrupled since the late twentieth century, doubling since 1993. In the last twelve month, ocean heating has been on a tear, shattering records consistently. The world is currently undergoing the fourth global coral bleaching event on record, the second in the last decade, and the Great Barrier Reef is suffering its worst bleaching event in recorded history. This year’s hurricane season will likely be a record-breaker. The oceans are starting to release all that thermal energy we have been unceremoniously dumping into them. At one time, oceans seemed like an endless sink for the emissions from humanity’s nonstop consumption of fossil fuels, but that appears to be coming to an end. The world’s rivers are warming and losing oxygen even faster than the oceans. In contrast to those grim stats, humanity is set to consume more resources in the next 30 years as we have since the dawn of civilization. We have already consumed the future and are now, as they say, eating the seed corn.

    We have breached tipping points and set in motion positive feedback loops that are accelerating non-linear ecological changes. Six of nine major planetary boundaries have been broken. Our unintended and haphazard experiment with complex Earth systems will unleash a Pandora’s box of deadly consequences. The current rate of CO2 change is unprecedented for the past 50,000 years. We have already passed the 1.5C warming threshold set by the Paris Agreement to prevent the irreversible and worsening effects of climate change. A recent study warns that as we add more and more CO2 to the atmosphere, its potency for warming is stronger at higher atmospheric concentrations than an equivalent increase at lower atmospheric concentrations. The polar regions are warming four times faster than the rest of the planet and have been undergoing fundamental changes to their ocean/ice system which will affect all life on Earth. An ice-free Arctic is just around the corner. In a warming world, pathogens will be looking for ways to exploit the fast-changing environment, potentially creating the next global pandemic for people or destroying our food supply. The tree line, as well as animals, are expanding northward as the climate heats up and the ice melts. Nearly a third of all tree species are now endangered by our radically changing environment. The clear blue waters of Alaskan rivers are turning orange and rusty brown by the heavy metals being released from melting permafrost. The oceans are also turning green due to the shift in phytoplankton population from warming waters.

    The insurance industry, the backbone of the global economy, is beginning to buckle: “I believe we’re marching toward an uninsurable future.” As is typical of our modern-day society, the hypocritical insurance industry is heavily invested in fossil fuels while simultaneously warning about the looming destruction from climate change. Billion dollar disasters are increasing while the time between such disasters is decreasing. This continual rebuilding that needs to be done more often would be another doom-loop cycle for our crumbling civilization, considering the carbon emissions required in such repair and reconstruction. Compound extreme weather and climate events, combinations of two or more extremes (hazards) that occur concurrently or sequentially, are also increasing and expected to grow many fold over in the future. These compound weather events will inevitably create a perfect storm that will one day permanently destroy supply chains and economies by acting as a constant disruptor to stability. It would have the same effect as a monster cyclone, or hypercane, traveling the globe in perpetuity, waxing and waning in strength but never dying, and leaving a path of destruction wherever it roamed. A stable climate no longer exists to support the reconstruction of what once was. Walden Thoreau’s words seem very prescient today: “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” With corporations also gobbling up single-family homes to monopolize the real estate market in America, we can officially say that the American dream of owning a home is dead. George Carlin always said you had to be asleep to believe anything about the American Dream.

    I have been hearing about the need to abandon fossil fuels since President Carter put solar panels on the White House 45 years ago. I am still waiting for the techno-optimists to explain to me how they will save us from this new age we have created, known as the Pyrocene or Age of Fire; rest in peace, Holocene. We could also call our modern-day clusterfuck the Plasticene or Age of Plastics. Scientists are finding the stuff in every nook and cranny of the planet, including Antarctic krill, men’s testicles, and throughout the human body. If you drive a vehicle, you are contributing to the primary source for microplastics in the environment, tires, which account for 78%. Just as they lied about their knowledge of the catastrophic effects from burning their fossil fuel products, so too did the oil and plastics industry lie about their greenwashing fraud called recycling.

    I never get an adequate, rational answer to our conundrum, because there is none. ChatGPT provides no better insight than the techno-optimists. The problem of a planet overrun by humans will resolve itself in short order and be recorded in the geologic fossil record after we put a cherry on top of this fossil fuel orgy, flattening the planet into a glass parking lot with nuclear weapons. That is another part of human nature that we will never escape…warfare. We seem to be one twitch away from WWIII and the next Stone Age. In fact, there are nearly 200 armed conflicts raging around the world right now, the largest number in decades. This marked uptick in violence could be an ominous sign of a violent new era. From the 2023 Armed Conflict Survey:

    “The accelerating climate crisis continues to act as a multiplier of both root causes of conflict and institutional weaknesses in fragile countries…”

    We are on the verge of authoritarian rule as global conditions break down and people embrace centralized solutions. Xenophobia will grow and borders will be shut down, sources of food and energy will be fought over and secured, and rationing of resources will be enforced.


    Illustration by Mark Bryan

    After studying our ecological overshoot for several decades, I have some observations that must be accepted as fact:

    • “Renewable” energy is not displacing our massive fossil fuel consumption at all, but only serving as a small addition to the total global energy consumption.

    • “Renewable” or alternative energy, such as solar and wind, is dependent on fossil fuels for its manufacture, installation, maintenance, and eventual disposal.

    •  The so-called “Energy Transition” away from fossil fuels is pure techno-hopium and will never materialize.

    • The general public and many scientists don’t understand the math and physics involved in transitioning a $100 trillion global economy, dependent on hydrocarbons, to intermittent alternative energy sources.

    • No such “Energy Transition” can be accomplished without radical reductions in resource consumption. This is antithetical to the basic biological urge for expansion by most organisms, including humans, and current trends illustrate this behavior. We also keep finding more ways to consume evermore energy. On top of this, the World Bank is urging faster economic growth for emerging economies in order for them to repay mounting debts.

    • Governments are ill-equipped to deal with industrial civilization’s complex polycrisis because effective solutions would undermine economic growth.

    The latest deadline to ‘save the planet’ is now two years from now, according to a UN Climate Change official. No doubt another arbitrary date given to justify someone’s job and department budget. According to Global Footprint Network’s calculations, humans have been in overshoot for over half a century. Others would say that we have been in overshoot since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, surviving only by mining the Earth’s soils. Like fossil fuels, the vast nutrient store of soils represents a unique one-time gift that has been squandered by agricultural erosion. Without petroleum and arable soils, the Earth will only support perhaps 5% of the present global population, as it did before the advent of agriculture. Considering that we are being constantly blindsided by faster-than-normal and worse-than-expected findings from scientists, I suspect there are far less food harvests left for us than we think. Hotter temperatures and pollution are hastening the destruction of topsoil. Our temporary extension of Earth’s carrying capacity for humans is coming to an end. Once Earth’s life support systems start to unravel, the grotesquely inflated human population will crash. In the meantime, “Memento moriturum; maxime faciunt vitae!”

    The state of the planet is getting considerably worse. I feel like the 2030s will be the decade when the wheels start coming off this ride of industrial civilization. Until I speak to you all again, please enjoy those blue skies and store-bought food while they last. And remember, industrial civilization is a heat engine and it will suddenly break one day!

    The post Last Rites for a Dying Civilization first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Seven Deadly Sins of UK politics – or rather, the BBC election debate

    On Friday 7 June, seven representatives from seven political parties thrashed it out in the second televised debate – the BBC debate – for the general election 2024. But did we get politics? Or was this a televised exposure of the seven deadly sins that currently exist in UK politics?

    Pride

    The pride that is displayed in UK politics is very clear to see from all parties – either defending their previous or future policies or boosting their parties’ current reputation. Friday’s BBC debate saw Penny Mordaunt from the Conservative Party as perhaps the worst offender, defending the indefensible: saying what they have done NHS has worked (it hasn’t) and blaming the pandemic for waiting lists, while talking about furlough.

    Greed

    After living under austerity for now 14 years the personal greed that resonates from the Tories has already been obvious. However, the BBC debate showed it even more – and also how Labour are now little more than self-serving careerists. Mordaunt was consistently talking over the Labour Party’s Angela Rayner amongst others throughout the debate –  including host Mishal Husain herself. Not to be outdone, Rayner did similar – leading to Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer to sarcastically say “well, that was terribly dignified”, to applause from the audience.

    Lust

    All politicians lust after power – however much they claim to the contrary. The prime example of this was when Husain reminded Lib Dems deputy leader Daisy Cooper on the BBC debate that her party was, of course, in cahoots with the Tories in government for five years – scandalously dropping their own pledge NOT to increase tuition fees, and infamously backing more attacks on chronically ill and disabled benefits in return for a 5p charge on carrier bags. Oh, and of course you had the very obvious sight of Reform’s Nigel Farage lusting after Tory votes.

    Envy

    Oh, what a tangled web we weave – even sometimes upon ourselves. Rayner, previously one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most allegedly staunchest allies, has become quite the worm that turned. However, even she must have been slightly envious of the impressive sermon the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn gave about the positives of immigration on the BBC debate. There was probably a bit of envy from Husain, as well – wishing she was Victoria Derbyshire, or anyone else who could have actually kept control of the debate – because she repeatedly lost control like a bad school teacher.

    Gluttony

    Take the literal meaning of gluttony, then apply it to Westminster politics, and what do you have? The Tories gobbling up all the funding for the London and the south of England – leaving the rest of the UK hungry. Flynn rightly showed during the BBC debate how everything goes back to Westminster for it to gobble up, leaving Welsh and Scottish devolved governments struggling. Oh, and speaking of gluttony, it seems Farage wants to keep all the BBC debates to himself – after his 37 appearances on Question Time.

    Wrath

    Farage was wrath, personified, on the BBC debate Apparently, giving the NHS more money doesn’t work and that the model of NHS is completely wrong. After all, he knows best – saying it should be managed like a private company with people paying insurance. Of course, this has nothing to do with his personal experience. Spoiler: it does, as he claimed in 2015 the NHS “almost killed” him. However, on immigration and his angry claims that its responsible for EVERYTHING that’s wrong in the country – we can’t pinpoint any other reason for his wrath than that he’s a big, fat, racist.

    Sloth

    There was a lot of sloth on the BBC debate – and not all of it intentional. For example, on defence the Lib Dems’ Cooper reiterated word-for-word the same pledges as Labour had made – showing there’s not really a fag paper between them. More broadly, where we are unfortunately so used to the political bravado, we didn’t really hear much from Denyer or Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth. The fact they couldn’t get a word in (or rather, Husain rarely let them) it appeared almost sloth-like. Speaking of sloth, it took an hour for someone to mention disabled people, and that was Cooper – while Farage used the lazy trope “people choosing not to work” to refer to the community.

    The warnings are there. We see the political red flags, but do we ignore them?

    So, from ancient writings to our modern day politics, the BBC debate has shown us that not only have we not really evolved much as a society over thousands of years, our politicians and potential leaders aren’t going to be evolving anytime soon either.

    We are still subjected to the same seven deadly sins by all seven of our potential political leaders that held society back thousands of years ago. We are clearly screwed as a society, democratic or not.

    Feature image via BBC iPlayer

    By Nicola Jeffery

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The Shameful Journey from “Prelude to Genocide” to “Slow-motion Genocide” to “Rampant Genocide”

    Israel’s illegal control over the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza has for decades prevented the Palestinian people from exercising their right of self-determination and full and effective self-governance. UN Resolution 3246 calls for all States to recognise that that right applies to all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination, including the Palestinians.

    The warning signs of genocide in Gaza had been there for all to see. But the lack of will on the part of UN members to implement 3246 not only let it happen but then failed to stop it even when its ferocity passed all comprehension.

    When October 7 erupted the West attempted to airbrush the pre-existing conditions Israel had imposed on Gaza and pretended Hamas started the ‘war’. But 1,000 lawyers, scholars, and practitioners immediately sounded the alarm about “the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” and issued an open letter as early as 15 October.

    For a start they reminded everyone that in 1982 the UN General Assembly condemned the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as “an act of genocide”.

    Pre-existing conditions in the Gaza Strip had prompted discussion on genocide before, with warnings given over the years that the siege of Gaza (from 2006 onwards) might amount to a “prelude to genocide” or a “slow-motion genocide”.

    And since 2007, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, Israel had defined the Gaza Strip as an “enemy entity”.

    Earlier in 2023 Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich called Palestinians “repugnant”, and “disgusting” and proposed “wiping out” the entire Palestinian village of Huwwara in the West Bank.

    Here’s a timely reminder of what else the open letter said.

    • In the short space of time between 7 October and 15 October (when the open letter was written), 2,329 Palestinians were killed and 9,042 Palestinians injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza, including over 724 children, huge swathes of neighborhoods, and entire families across Gaza were obliterated.

    • Israel’s Defence Minister ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water, and other necessities. This intensifies an already illegal and potentially genocidal siege turning it into an outright destructive assault.

    • The ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) stated that orders to evacuate, coupled with the complete siege, are incompatible with international humanitarian law. Almost half a million Palestinians have already been displaced and Israeli forces have bombed the only possible exit route that Israel does not control (the Rafah crossing to Egypt) multiple times.

    • The World Health Organisation published a warning that “forcing more than 2000 patients to relocate to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity and unable to absorb a dramatic rise in the number of patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence”.

    • In the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, since 7 October, Israeli settlers backed by the IDF and police, have attacked and shot Palestinian civilians at point-blank range (as documented in the villages of a-Tuwani and Qusra), invaded their homes, and assaulted residents. Several Palestinian communities have already been forced to abandon their homes, after which settlers arrived and destroyed their property.

    • Between 7 and 15 October, Al-Haq documented the killing by the Israeli military and settlers of 55 Palestinians in the West Bank with 1,200 injured there.

    • Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared on 9 October: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”, and afterward announced that Israel was moving to “a full-scale response” and he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces, also stating: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”

    • On 10 October, the head of the Israeli Army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed a message directly to Gaza residents: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell”.

    • Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari acknowledged the wanton and intentionally destructive nature of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

    • On 7 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay an “immense price” for the actions of Hamas fighters and asserted that Israel will wage a prolonged offensive that will turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers “into rubble”.

    • Israel’s President emphasized that the Israeli authorities view the entire Palestinian population of Gaza as responsible for the actions of militant groups, and subject accordingly to collective punishment and unrestricted use of force: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

    • Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz added: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

    • On 12 October UN Special Rapporteurs condemned “Israel’s indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza, comprising over 2.3 million people, nearly half of whom are children. They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for”.

    • UN experts warned against “the withholding of essential supplies such as food, water, electricity and medicines. Such actions will precipitate a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where its population is now at an inescapable risk of starvation. Intentional starvation is a crime against humanity”.

    • On 14 October the UN Special Rapporteur, on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, warned against “a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale” as Israel is carrying out “mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war”.

    • The Palestinian population of Gaza appears to be presently subjected by the Israeli forces and authorities to widespread killing, bodily and mental harm, and unviable conditions of life – against a backdrop of Israeli statements that evidence signs of intent to physically destroy the population.

    • Article II of the Genocide Convention provides that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as # Killing members of the group; # Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; # Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; # Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; # Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

    • The Convention provides that individuals who attempt genocide or who incite genocide “shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”.

    • The International Court of Justice has clarified that “a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harboring specific intent (dolus specialist), it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit”. (The many means available to the British Government include sanctions – readily applied to other delinquent nations – and withdrawal of favored-nation privileges, trade deals, and scientific collaboration).

    • Competent elements of the United Nations, particularly the UN General Assembly, are required to take urgent action under the Charter of the United Nations appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide. Emphasis is on the General Assembly given that the Security Council is compromised by the US and UK (both permanent veto-holding members) sending military forces to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel.

    • All relevant UN bodies, including the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, are called on to immediately intervene, carry out necessary investigations, and invoke the necessary warning procedures to protect the Palestinian population from genocide.

    Chock-full of hate

    All this was quickly followed by the UK Lawyers’ Open Letter Concerning Gaza of 26 October 2023, which contained important warnings regarding international law — for example:

    ⦁ The UK is duty-bound to “respect and ensure respect” for international humanitarian law as set out in the Four Geneva Conventions in all circumstances (1949 Geneva Conventions, Common Art 1). That means the UK must not itself assist violations by others.

    ⦁ The UK Government must immediately halt the export of weapons from the UK to Israel, given the clear risk that they might be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law and in breach of the UK’s domestic Strategic Export Licensing Criteria, including its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty.

    So, within 3 weeks it was clear to everyone paying attention that the Israeli leadership, chock-full of hate, were set on a course of vicious and brutal genocide. Yet the following month John Kirby, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, dismissed claims that Israel was committing genocide and told everybody that “Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel is not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat. So if we’re going to start using that word, fine. Let’s use it appropriately.”

    Yes, and let’s use the term “right of self-defence” appropriately. In Gaza and the West Bank it only applies to the Palestinian resistance, not the belligerent illegal occupier.

    Incredibly, we’re now entering the 9th month of the genocide in Gaza and it has gone from bad to much, much worse. And there is still no let-up. People worldwide have been watching day after day mainstream and alternative media reports, seeing for themselves the horrors endured even by children, and aghast at the wholesale and wanton destruction of the Palestinians’ homeland. They cannot believe how depraved, immoral and spineless the international community has become, and how paralysed the UN in allowing the slaughter to continue. They are especially sickened by the conduct of the so-called ‘major powers’ and by the lunatic Netanyahu whom their own politicians call ‘friend and ally’ who thinks he can still dictate what happens in Gaza after he eventually condescends to end the butchery.

    If he thinks Israel can now grab Gaza by conquest he may be disappointed. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter expressly prohibits aggressive war and Article 5(3) of General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 1975 (which includes the definition of Acts of Aggression) nullifies any legal title acquired in this way. And 5(3) says “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations“.

    In carrying through its genocidal assault on Gaza’s civilians and their homes, infrastructure and livelihoods Israel cannot possibly claim to abide by international law or honour their obligations under the Charter. And by encouraging Israel — and supplying the weaponry — neither can the US and UK.

    And now we have Biden, Israel’s loony protector, setting ‘red lines’ which Israel must not cross while merrily carrying on with their genocide. But they are so elastic that, with US permission, the hateful maniacs can almost do as they please to satisfy their genocidal lust. Biden arrogantly overrules the red lines on war crimes and crimes against humanity that are already set out by international law.

    The post The Shameful Journey from “Prelude to Genocide” to “Slow-motion Genocide” to “Rampant Genocide” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • John Minto: The first casualty of war is truth – the rest are mostly civilians

    COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    Good slogans have people nodding their heads in agreement because they recognise an underlying truth in the words.  

    I have a worn-out t-shirt which carries the slogan, “The first casualty of war is truth — the rest are mostly civilians”.

    If you find yourself nodding in agreement it’s possibly because you have found it deeply shocking to find this slogan validated repeatedly in almost eight months of Israel’s war on Gaza.

    The mainstream news sources which bring us the “truth” are strongly Eurocentric. Virtually all the reporting in our mainstream media comes via three American or European news agencies — AP, Reuters and the BBC — or from major US or UK based newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Washington Post or The New York Times. 

    This reporting centres on Israeli narratives, Israeli reasoning, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications for what they are doing to Palestinians. Israeli spokespeople are front and centre and quoted extensively and directly.

    Palestinian voices, when they are covered, are usually at the margins. On television in particular Palestinians are most often portrayed as the incoherent victims of overwhelming grief.

    In the mainstream media Israel’s perverted lies dominate. 

    Riddled with examples
    The last seven months is riddled with examples. Just two days after the October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters were accused of chanting “Gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House.

    The story was carried around the world through mainstream media as a nasty anti-semitic slur on Palestinians and their supporters. Four months later, after an intensive investigation New South Wales police concluded it never happened. The words were never chanted.

    However the Radio New Zealand website today still carries a Reuters report saying “A rally outside the Sydney Opera House two days after the Hamas attack had ignited heated debate after a small group were filmed chanting “Gas the Jews”.

    Even if RNZ did the right thing and removed the report now the old adage is true: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its trousers on”. Four months later and the police report is not news but the damage has been done as the pro-Israel lobby intended.

    The same tactic has been used at protests on US university campuses. A couple of weeks ago at Northeastern University a pro-Israel counter protester was caught on video shouting “Kill the Jews” in an apparent attempt to provoke police into breaking up the pro-Palestine protest.

    The university ordered the protest to be closed down saying “the action was taken after some protesters resorted to virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews’”. The nastiest of lies told for the nastiest of reasons — protecting a state committing genocide.

    Similarly, unverified claims of “beheaded babies” raced around the world after the October 7 attack on Israel and were even repeated by US President Joe Biden. They were false.

    No baby beheaded
    Even the Israeli military confirmed no baby was beheaded and yet despite this bare-faced disinformation the Israeli ambassador to New Zealand was able to repeat the lie, along with several others, in a recent TVNZ interview on Q&A without being challenged.

    War propaganda such as this is deliberate and designed to ramp up anger and soften us up to accept war and the most savage brutality and blatant war crimes against the Palestinian people.

    Recall for a moment the lurid claims from 1990 that Iraqi soldiers had removed babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die on the floor. It was false but helped the US convince the public that war against Iraq was justified.

    Twelve years later the US and UK were peddling false claims about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” to successfully pressure other countries to join their war on Iraq.

    Perhaps the most cynical misinformation to come out of the war on Gaza so far appeared in the hours following the finding of the International Court of Justice that South Africa had presented a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide.

    Israel smartly released a short report claiming 12 employees of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) had taken part in the October 7 attack on Gaza. The distraction was spectacularly successful.

    Western media fell over themselves to highlight the report and bury the ICJ findings with most Western countries, New Zealand included, stopping or suspending funding for the UN agency.

    Independent probe
    eedless to say an independent investigation out a couple of weeks ago shows Israel has failed to support its claims about UNRWA staff involved in the October 7 attacks. It doesn’t need forensic analysis to tell us Israel released this fact-free report to divert attention from their war crimes which have now killed over 36,000 Palestinians — the majority being women and children.

    The problem goes deeper than manufactured stories. For many Western journalists the problem starts not with what they see and hear but with what their news editors allow them to say.

    A leaked memo to New York Times journalists covering the war tells them they are to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to avoid using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land.

    They have even been instructed not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” or the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza settled by Palestinian refugees driven off their land by Israeli armed militias in the Nakba of 1947–49.

    These reporting restrictions are a blatant denial of Palestinian history and cut across accurate descriptions under international law which recognises Palestinians as refugees and the occupied Palestinian territories as precisely what they are — under military occupation by Israel.

    People reading articles on Gaza from The New York Times have no idea the story has been “shaped” for us with a pro-Israel bias.

    These restrictions on journalists also typically cover how Palestinians are portrayed in Western media. Every Palestinian teenager who throws a stone at Israeli soldiers is called a “militant” or worse and Palestinians who take up arms to fight the Israeli occupation of their land, as is their right under international law, are described as “terrorists” when they should be described as resistance fighters.

    The heavy pro-Israel bias in Western media reporting is an important reason Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing violence which results from it, has continued for so long.

    The answer to all of this is people power — join the weekly global protests in your centre against Israel’s settler colonial project with its apartheid policies against Palestinians.

    And give the mainstream media a wide berth on this issue.

    John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • When even Reform hategoblin Nigel Farage doesn’t mind Starmer – we know we have a problem

    Did you know… the surname Starmer comes from the Old English words sterre, or starre, which meant star, and would have been given to someone with a bright personality?

    Keir Starmer has the charisma of a kidney stone. He is a half-filled bowl of semolina in human form.

    Even the Reform hategoblin Nigel Farage doesn’t mind Starmer because the Clacton carpetbagger claims his fellow right-winger Starmer is to the “right of the Tories on immigration”, accusing the Labour Party leader of “repeating the UKIP 2015 manifesto”.

    For shame.

    The ‘lesser of two evils’: you will always have evil and less

    I have never been one for buying into this lesser of two evils nonsense.

    If you always vote for the lesser of two evils — in this case, Keir Starmer’s “changed” Labour Party — you will always have evil, and you will always have less.

    For the easily confused, look at it this way.

    On one hand, the conquests of Genghis Khan are said to have caused around forty million deaths. While not being a personal associate of Mr Khan, I’d say that’s pretty damn evil.

    On the other hand, you have Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and dismembered seventeen males over a period of thirteen years. Again, I’d say Jeff was evil.

    Still with me?

    Dahmer’s death toll may well be significantly less than Khan’s, and on that basis he might be considered the lesser of two evils. But the fact remains, Dahmer, the ‘Milwaukee Cannibal’ was evil.

    Of course, Rishi Sunak isn’t Genghis Khan — Khan is a card-carrying member of the Green Party when compared to Sunak — and Starmer certainly isn’t Jeffrey Dahmer, indeed, Dahmer was convicted for his heinous crimes whereas Starmer is still waiting for his invitation to the International Criminal Court.

    The lesser of two evils is still evil.

    Give it up, already

    I have friends who have been out campaigning for Labour over the past couple of weeks. They are still of the belief that it’s better to fight for change from within, despite the change they seek having absolutely no place in today’s Labour Party.

    I am of the belief that handing over your membership fees to pay for Starmer’s next bottle of Just for Men is an unimaginably stupid thing to do.

    You may as well give it to a worthwhile charity — the Tories have created enough of them — or join a political movement that aligns with your own values, such as Collective, as I know many of my old Labour left friends have done.

    But vote for Labour, or encourage other people to vote Labour? I’d consider dinner with Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir before I tell anyone to vote against their own interests.

    Starmer replaced free broadband with focus groups and a peace-first foreign policy with a foreign lobbyists policy. It’s not the left that’s the problem here.

    Starmer: the betrayal is complete

    Keir Starmer has betrayed you. He has cheated you. He has stolen your hopes and ambitions and replaced it with division and deselections. You once dared to dream of a better tomorrow, now the best you can hope for is replacing one set of Tories with another?

    Has there been a single day during this pointless general election campaign where the Labour Party haven’t left you feeling betrayed, disappointed, disgusted, or even apoplectic with rage?

    Whether it’s the shelving of yet another “pledge”, “promise”, “mission” or “fix”, or the embarrassment of a selection process that has seen Black and brown left-wing prospective parliamentary candidates callously tossed aside for saboteurs, Tories, racists and warmongering propagators for a pariah state currently under investigation for crimes against humanity – and that’s just in North Durham.

    Didn’t Durham police investigate Starmer for alleged breach of Covid rules? Revenge is a dish best served Cold War….

    Perhaps you’re one of these voters that still naively supports our anachronistic voting system, essentially dictating whether you vote for blue Tories, red Tories, or urinary tract infection orangey-yellow Tories?

    I’m trying not to swear so much these days, so I won’t call them treacherous piss diamonds that betrayed students and agreed to the Tories harsher benefit sanctions in exchange for a fucking carrier bag tax.

    I did say “try”.

    Labour’s election campaign is NOT about Tofu and Meghan

    This election campaign isn’t Labour versus the Tories, and it’s most certainly not right versus left, unless you’re one of those pillocks that still reads the Daily Mail and thinks Keir Starmer is a tofu-munching Meghan Markle sympathiser that spends his weekends on the allotment with Jeremy Corbyn.

    Sunak versus Starmer is a battle of S*n columnists. A war between a pair of perfidious establishment lickspittles. Two very different coloured rosettes promoting exactly the same failed capitalist ideology, where corporate welfare matters more than societal welfare.

    Gosh, aren’t we lucky?

    In the old days we used to keep up with the Jones’s, but in 2024 we can’t even keep up with the price of a fucking tin of beans and neither of those elitist guardians of the establishment have the solution because they are promising to maintain the problem.

    If it walks like a Tory, speaks like a Tory, looks like a Tory, and behaves like a Tory, there’s a bloody good chance it’s Keir Starmer, a dipstick simp to the rich and powerful. A master of broken promises.

    We have already got one load of principle free, privatisation-embracing, poor-hating, anti-working class, freeloading, apartheid-supporting, blatantly corrupt gaggle of blundering subhuman effluent in government, so why would we want even more of the same, dressed in a red rosette?

    Starmer: hang your heads in shame

    One day many will hang their heads in shame when they realise the obvious evil they defended and the heroes they ridiculed.

    The only reason Labour find themselves so far ahead is because so many people have had it up to their eyeballs with the Tories. It is not an endorsement of the Labour Party – far from – but a complete rejection of the Conservative party and their failed dogma, set to be continued under Prime Minister Starmer.

    I absolutely reject the Labour Party, and for the first general election in my lifetime I will not be giving my vote to the Labour candidate. They don’t need my vote any longer, they’ve got Tory votes to see them home, and they certainly don’t deserve my vote.

    Do they deserve yours?

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Would Rishi Sunak’s plan for 100 more surgeries solve the NHS GP crisis?

    This is shaping up to be a very strange general election period, isn’t it? The polls are consistently showing that the Labour Party has a jaw-dropping lead over the Conservative Party, with YouGov’s first major poll of the election campaign showing that Keir Starmer could be on track for an even larger landslide victory than Tony Blair’s in 1997. Yet despite the enormity of this lead, its historic significance, and the impact it would have on the shape of UK politics for the next five years, the media is not spending much time reporting on Labour’s policies – specifically the NHS.

    General election: policies don’t drive clicks

    Conservative policies aren’t attracting much attention either (except for the widespread coverage about their terrible plans for National Service). Policies don’t feel central to the public conversation right now. Instead, everyone is discussing the selection (and deselection) of Labour general election candidates, the scandals surrounding all this, and (huge heart-sink) Nigel Farage.

    Perhaps this should come as no surprise, because personality politics and the associated drama, makes for great copy. It’s click-baity, it riles people up online, and all of that drives traffic to news websites and makes money for media organisations. But if we really want change for the country, we need to get to grips with politicians’ plans beyond election day.

    In the coming days and weeks, I’ll share information with you about the NHS policies that are being proposed by different political parties, and I thought I’d start today by talking about the 100 new GP surgeries that Rishi Sunak is promising to build in England.

    The Conservative Party’s NHS track record

    First of all, we cannot talk about the Conservative Party and their plans for primary care without talking about their failures in recent years.

    Jeremy Hunt pledged in 2015 that there would be 5,000 more GPs by 2020. They then made another pledge in the 2019 election, saying that they’d increase GP numbers by 6,000 by 2025. As it stood in April 2024, there were actually 1,759 fewer GPs than there had been in September 2015, which is a pretty damning record.

    I’m sure there are a lot of people right now who aren’t sure they can trust the Conservative Party to deliver on any of their NHS promises.

    But let’s imagine that Sunak did manage to deliver on this promise for 100 new GP surgeries. Is it really what we need right now?

    Are more GP surgeries the answer?

    There is a crisis in NHS primary care that cannot be denied, and it’s a crisis which hasn’t received enough attention. Politicians and many media outlets have been dismissive of the pressures that NHS GPs have faced since the pandemic, and have even gone so far as to scapegoat them for the problems in the system.

    They’ve been accused of “hiding behind their telephones” or “avoiding patients” when in reality they have been under extraordinary pressure to keep their patients safe.

    As the NHS waiting lists have grown, many patients have relied on their GPs more and more. Perhaps their symptoms have worsened as their condition deteriorates waiting for hospital treatment. Perhaps their medication needs have increased. Perhaps their mental health has even deteriorated – after all, medical conditions do not sit in isolation.

    People who are waiting too long for medical treatment sometimes lose work, or suffer relationship breakdowns, or even experience housing instability. All of these impacts are serious, and situations like this often require a GP to intervene and provide help.

    NHS: institutional issues

    As the NHS waiting lists have lengthened and politicians have failed to properly tackle the causes underlying the situation, GPs have come under increasing pressure. On top of this, the Conservative government has not funded GP services properly, leading to a situation where some GP practices cannot afford to hire the doctors they need.

    Many NHS doctors are losing their jobs as a result and are struggling to find work, at a time when millions of NHS patients are waiting for treatment.

    Many NHS buildings are in a very bad state right now, and at the end of 2023, the unmet repair bill in the NHS in England alone was close to £12bn On top of this, many GP surgeries have closed in recent years; in fact, Pulse showed in December that 474 GP surgeries had closed across the UK since 2013.

    That’s an enormous number, and it deserves attention, and it’s clear why Rishi Sunak feels that 100 new GP surgeries will make a compelling promise for the public during this general election season.

    But if politicians just focus on the buildings, and ignore the staff, they will not fix the problems in NHS primary care.

    Yes, we need more GP surgeries, but the health service needs more staff

    Even if Rishi Sunak managed to build those 100 GP surgeries, they’ll be no use at all if we don’t have the NHS staff to work within them.

    We desperately need politicians from all parties to create bold, transformative policies to restore the NHS to its previous functioning. But those policies have to start with the NHS staff, who deserve proper support at long last.

    The public deserves a robust, well-supported NHS workforce; one that is paid properly, has manageable workloads, and is equipped to provide patients with the excellent care they deserve.

    Featured image via Rishi Sunak – X

    By Dr Julia Grace Patterson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Tories “know what a woman is” – but what have they actually done for us?

    ‘We know what a woman is. Keir Starmer doesn’t’, tweeted the Tories, signalling the start of another week of them desperately trying to be relevant – by weaponising trans rights. 

    Here we go again

    This of course stood alongside another disastrous outing from Kemi Badenoch where she attempted to explain how hospital wards would ban trans women without being horrifically inappropriate.

    The big argument around excluding trans women from hospital wards, toilets, changing rooms, and general life is that any man could ‘dress up as a woman’ and walk in to abuse women and kids. The problem with this though is men don’t need to do that to abuse women and kids, they just abuse them in broad daylight and people still don’t believe victims.

    Another glaring issue this brings up is that this isn’t about trans women. It’s that many men can’t keep their hands to themselves and think they’re entitled to women’s bodies. 

    They’re our bosses, teachers, family members, partners, police officers, elected officials, and more. And the most powerful of abusers are surrounded by equally vile people in power who support them and silence their victims.

    And so we move on to the Tories.

    Tories: serial misogynists, rapists, and bullies

    How many Tory MPs and donors have been accused of bullying, harassing, abusing, and raping women and girls? More than 56 MPs were named in a report on sexual misconduct, But how many weren’t named? The true figure for that one I’m afraid is something we may never know.

    For all Badenoch, Sunak, and many others claim they want to make the UK safer for women their actions say the opposite. The tweet from the prime minister read “biological sex matters. We’re protecting women and girls”, but this is patently untrue.

    Whilst they’re pledging to restrict trans women’s rights they’ve actually made life much worse for all women. 

    Making life worse for all women

    One in three women have experienced some form of physical violence at the hands of a partner. Instead of helping them, the past decade has seen women’s domestic violence services and refuge shelters pushed to breaking point thanks to Tory cuts. 

    One in 30 women in the UK are sexually assaulted every year and yet the conviction rate for rape is less than 2%. In the past five years, 800 police officers were accused of rape and sexual assault. However only 10 were convicted and at least 350 of them are still serving in the police force. 

    The Tories have also made no attempt to support women trying to escape abuse – and in the instance of disabled women, their policies often ensure they have no way of getting out. 

    Disabled women

    Disabled women often find it harder to escape domestic abuse as their abusers are usually their main caregivers. Though also often violent abuse is very often mental and financial. Disabled women are often trapped in abusive situations by the benefits system that disqualifies them if their partner earns too much meaning they have no money of their own to get out or means to escape.

    Outside of abuse, there’s also the way women are consistently kept down in general life. Women earn on average much less than men, in fact the Trades Union Congress (TUC) estimates that women work 52 days unpaid a year that men are paid for. The gap is much worse for disabled women who can earn up to SEVEN GRAND less than non-disabled men a year. 

    There’s also the fact women are still seen as the primary caregiver so expected to look after children, husbands, parents, and disabled family members for free. Carers allowance is a pittance and childcare costs are unattainable.

    The cost of living crisis

    While we’re on the subject of kids, the Tories also brought in the two-child benefit cap, meaning you can only get government support for your first two children. There is a clause to this, however, if a third child is the product of rape – but would you really want that on your kids record?

    Women are also at the brunt-end of the cost of living crisis. Women are already lower paid so they have less money to spend on food and bills. They are more likely to be reliant on services that have been cut. Women go without food in their own homes to feed their children.

    And since the Tories love to talk about how much of a danger trans women are in healthcare – let’s talk about how dire it is for women seeking any medical attention. 

    Health inequalities

    The UK APPG on endometriosis surveyed over 10,000 women about their experiences prior to diagnosis. 58% visited a GP more than 10 times. 21% visited doctors in hospital 10 times or more. 53% went to A&E. 27% went to A&E three times or more. 38% said that they had symptoms for 10 years or longer. 

    The ADHD Foundation estimates that girls are three times less likely to be diagnosed than boys and on average are diagnosed nine years later. They say that 50-75% of the one million UK women with ADHD are undiagnosed.

    Women in the UK are 50% more likely than men to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack. It was thought up until 2021 that this was before symptoms presented differently, but it was actually attributed to women being so used to not being believed by a doctor that they come with a list where men can go “ouch here” and are believed

    Women are often not believed or treated as making up health problems for attention. A 2018 review found that men are viewed as “brave” for seeking help for pain, whereas women are perceived as ‘hysterical’ “emotional” and “choosing to not want to get better”.

    Tories: abusing trans women to lay cover for their failures

    Trans people meanwhile are twice as likely to sexually assaulted or abused and four times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime. One in eight trans employees have been attacked by a colleague or customer and a quarter of trans people have experienced homelessness.

    The truth is the Tories don’t actually care about “what a woman is” or where people pee, they just want to stoke further division to ensure that the plebs aren’t looking at how they’ve failed the country – and especially women. 

    But just FYI – Thatcher’s grave is a gender-neutral toilet

    Featured image via Matthew McNicholas – YouTube

    By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

    This post was originally published on Canary.