Tag Archives: politics

What to make of the proposed Ukraine peace deal.

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The first point to make is that this deal is a carve up between Trump and Putin. It puts Ukraine in an invidious position and makes it hard to accept for its failure to include Ukraine in the negotiations.

With Trump threatening to hang Ukraine out to dry if it doesn’t accept the deal by Thanksgiving (perverse as that is, but what should we expect from a pervert), it is no wonder that Zelensky and European leaders are in a spin.

As details emerge of this deal, we can see Trump’s fingerprints all over it. The key points appear to be:

  • Territorial concessions: Ukraine would formally recognise Russian control of Crimea and the occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, while Russia would retain de‑facto authority over those regions.
  • NATO status: Ukraine would be barred from joining NATO, though it would receive “unspecified security guarantees” from the West.
  • Sanctions and economic ties: Existing sanctions on Russia would be lifted, and the United States would resume cooperation with Russia on energy and other industrial sectors.
  • Energy arrangement: The United States would take operational control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and supply electricity to both Ukraine and Russia.
  • Security guarantees: Western countries would provide security assurances to Ukraine despite the loss of NATO membership, aiming to prevent further aggression.
  • Frozen Russian assets: These assets are to be used to help rebuild Ukraine, with the USA overseeing this and taking 50% of any profits made.

This smacks of the same sort of approach as Trump has exhibited towards Gaza. It takes no account of the views of the innocent civilians living in the areas being carved up. It treats the areas as little more than real estate and business opportunities, driven as ever by the greed and profit-motive that seems to be the only thing that motivates Trump to get involved in anything.

Of course, the citizens of Ukraine and Russia will naturally be relieved at the end of a war that has had such dire consequences in terms of loss of lives and damage to property, but it seems they will get very little from this deal.

The causalities to date are truly horrific. I have seen estimates ranging from 800,000 to 1 million dead on the Russian side, with 400,000 to 700,000 dead on the Ukraine side. There are tens of thousands missing and unaccounted for too. Add to this the injuries and long-term disabilities, the displacement of people from their homes leading to a mass exodus of refugees mostly into EU countries and the mental health impacts of all this and conscription, and the human costs are staggering.

And then there is the huge damage to infrastructure, homes, and the environment to consider. And all for what? Answers on a postcard please! It is easy to understand why the majority of Ukrainian and Russian civilians want a negotiated peace desperately.

But Starmer and the EU leaders are opposed. The official line is that this is because they are concerned for the Ukrainian people who should be involved in negotiations and who can’t be allowed to have sacrificed so much in vain. It is nothing to do with (officially) the massive rearmament programme and the convenient excuse to increase military spending while continuing to inflict austerity on their people. European leaders are now committed to getting themselves on a war footing and to continuing the expansion and strengthening of NATO. Ukraine is now the victim of a proxy war between Western Europe and Russia, to all intents and purposes. And Trump is lapping up all involved sucking up to him, metaphorically fellating him even, as he relishes effectively franchising out USA military operations in Europe while extracting great economic and political leverage. If he is to keep USA committed to NATO, it is going to be on his extortionate terms. Otherwise, he’s quite willing and capable of standing by as Europe crashes and burns.

Thus, for the time being at least, it is in the interests of Zelensky, the EU leaders and Starmer to keep the war going. Zelensky is in deep shit when the conflict ends. He has been haemorrhaging popularity across the country and faces a huge corruption scandal. He needs to win the war to survive and can only do that with NATO backing. The European members of NATO are more than happy to provide assistance and weaponry but are rightly wary of allowing it to escalate into full-blown war between them and Russia, mainly for fear of near inevitable nuclear escalation.

Things have reached something of a stalemate and Trump, ever the opportunist, sees now as a time to force the hands of Zelensky and Putin. That it will likely look similar to the terms on the table four years, rendering the immense losses since pointless, is just another layer of tragedy.

There had been violent conflict over the Donbas for years, with legitimate concerns in the Russian speaking population over rights and language. Russian long-standing opposition to the expansion of NATO was never properly acknowledged either. There is no evidence that NATO poses any sort of existential threat to Russia, but independent analyses (e.g., the Quincy Institute) note that NATO’s combined conventional forces, especially airpower and advanced missile systems, far exceed Russia’s current operational capacity. In a hypothetical full‑scale NATO‑Russia war, Russia would likely suffer decisive losses, which underpins its “existential” rhetoric. But it also underlines the USA’s critical role in determining the balance of power. Trump seems intent on maximising the leverage this gives him on both sides for his own benefit and what he perceives as the USA’s benefit.

Zelenskyy addressed the nation, saying Ukraine was faced with a choice of “losing our dignity or the risk of losing our key partner”. He spoke of an extremely difficult week ahead, and of unbearable pressure being put on Kyiv.

Trump, for his part, is in a hurry, reportedly keen to get a deal done before Thanksgiving next Thursday, and perhaps with one eye on the “Fifa peace prize”, apparently created solely as a gift to his ego, which he is expected to be given at the World Cup draw in Washington DC on 5 December.

As the Grauniad’s Shaun Walker put it a few days ago:

“For all the public bravado, there has been a private admission in some parts of the Ukrainian elite that a deal may need to be done sooner rather than later, even if everyone sees Moscow as a bad-faith negotiating partner.”

Thus, this may well prove to be Trump’s crowning achievement, not that he has any interest in the suffering born by the people on the ground or their futures ahead. Given that the region is now awash with weaponry, real long-lasting peace is highly unlikely. And given that the tensions and paranoia across Europe have been cranked up so high, we will continue to welfare budgets sacrificed for warfare spending.

As ever, it is the military-industrial complex and its doyens that are the only ones to gain anything from such conflicts.

The erasing of our rights – how long before this blog gets erased, just like Banksy’s latest work?

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The artwork below appeared on the wall of the Royal Courts of Justice after almost 900 demonstrators were arrested last Saturday (in similar fashion the 500 I reported on the week before). Banksy confirmed it was his handiwork on Instagram

Responding to Banksy’s work, a spokesperson for campaign group Defend Our Juries, which organised Saturday’s rally, said it “powerfully depicts the brutality unleashed by Yvette Cooper on protesters by proscribing Palestine Action”.

They said: “When the law is used as a tool to crush civil liberties, it does not extinguish dissent, it strengthens it.”

“As Banksy’s artwork shows, the state can try to strip away our civil liberties, but we are too many in number and our resolve to stand against injustice cannot be beaten – our movement against the ban is unstoppable and growing every day.”

The artwork was scrubbed off within about 48 hours (see above), as it was inevitably going to be, being on a listed building, but the symbolism of its removal, on top of the symbolism of the artwork itself, strongly resonates with people, like myself, concerned about the attempts to quash and silence dissent in this country right now.

Starmer and his ‘starmtrooper’ cabinet colleagues have become prone to misusing legislation to impose an Orwellian agenda of silencing grassroots opinion. They cut their teeth first by thoroughly purging and/or silencing the left wing of his own party through suspension and expulsions on trumped up charges. The extent of this is that once lifelong Labour Party members are now seeking to rehome what were once that party’s core socialist values and defence of the working classes and disadvantaged in an altogether new party of the left (provisionally named ‘Your Party’). This leaves Starmer’s Labour Party with a moral vacuum at its centre which allows it to be complicit in the Zionist atrocities being committed in Gaza and beyond as it prostitutes itself to Zionist and related corporate interests.

Thus, it was able to distort its definition of terrorism to actively support the terrorist state of Israel but proscribe as terrorists UK citizens so appalled at the UK’s complicity in genocide that it dared to damaged RAF property and daub blood red paint on some war planes.

As I’ve reported before, this re-defining of ‘terrorism’ has been criticised and condemned by many, most notably by Volker Turk (UN’s high commissioner on human rights). I would like to believe that Yvette Cooper has subsequently been removed as Home Secretary for growing tired of defending this indefensible authoritarianism.

Volker Turk described the prosription as disturbing, disproportionate and unnecessary.

Starmer’s mob have created a whole raft of new opportunities to silence dissenting voices his Online Safety Act. Superficially, nobody can really argue with an objective of keeping children safe from exploitation and harm online. But is this the only objective of this legislation?

While some will argue that it is “making the internet safer”, it is also destroying hundreds, if not thousands of smaller online communities that simply cannot bear the cost of compliance. This includes registering a “senior person” with Ofcom who will be held accountable should Ofcom decide your site isn’t safe enough. It also means that moderation teams need to be fully staffed with quick response times if bad (loosely defined) content is found on the site. On top of that, sites need to take proactive measures to protect children. Failure to comply can lead to fines of millions of pounds.

Not surprisingly, many law-abiding forum hosts have simply shut down. This from LFGSS, a small one-person passion project for bikers in London:

“We’re done… we fall firmly into scope, and I have no way to dodge it. The act is too broad, and it doesn’t matter that there’s never been an instance of any of the proclaimed things that this act protects adults, children and vulnerable people from… the very broad language and the fact that I’m based in the UK means we’re covered.

The act simply does not care that this site and platform is run by an individual, and that I do so philanthropically without any profit motive (typically losing money), nor that the site exists to reduce social loneliness, reduce suicide rates, help build meaningful communities that enrich life.

The act only cares that is it “linked to the UK” (by me being involved as a UK native and resident, by you being a UK based user), and that users can talk to other users… that’s it, that’s the scope.

I can’t afford what is likely tens of thousands to go through all the legal hoops here over a prolonged period of time, the site itself barely gets a few hundred in donations each month and costs a little more to run… this is not a venture that can afford compliance costs… and if we did, what remains is a disproportionately high personal liability for me, and one that could easily be weaponised by disgruntled people who are banned for their egregious behaviour (in the years running fora I’ve been signed up to porn sites, stalked IRL and online, subject to death threats, had fake copyright takedown notices, an attempt to delete the domain name with ICANN… all from those whom I’ve moderated to protect community members)… I do not see an alternative to shuttering it.”

Of course, the big players can carry these costs and will benefit from losing the competition with myriads of small platforms. And the truly nasty, exploitative operators will either ignore the law or find loopholes. It’s naïve in the extreme to think compulsive, sick abusers will pack it in simply because one channel of operation has become trickier.

… such as anything endorsing Palestine Action

But look how easy it is now for government to closedown dissenting voices. Are we safer or in more danger now that vandals can be convicted as terrorists? Is the internet really safer now that any small community can be closed down as a potential refuge for abusers?

Demonstrations against genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza overshadowed by Orwellian oppression by a Labour government, witnessed with my own eyes and ears.

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I’ve attended a few of the nigh-on-thirty National Marches for Palestine in London and many others in Cardiff. This is the first that has had me welling up in tears.

The first pro-Palestine demo I attended in London, maybe 10 years ago, had somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand marching. The monthly marches over the last 18 months or so have had between 80 and 200 thousand on them. With the news this week that Netanyahu is about to embark on the last phase of  his project to ethnic cleanse the Gaza strip, there was the anticipation that there may be well over 200,000 there today from all over the country.

The whole atmosphere was a bit more intense, it seemed to me, as we slowly made our way from Russell Square to Downing Street, via my old stomping ground of Aldwych and the Strand

I suspect I was not alone on reflecting on the mounting horrors being committed in Gaza, with our government’s ongoing complicity, but also that today also marked the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, three days after the bombing of Hiroshima. These war crimes killed 120,000 people instantly and hundreds of thousands more slowly and excruciatingly due to the aftereffects; more than everyone of us on the streets of London today. We didn’t get to see people dying excruciating deaths on our screens in 1945; most didn’t own any screens back then (there were less than 10,000 televisions in the UK in 1945). Now we get to watch genocide, including the starvation of children, in real time on all our many screens.

Hiroshima or Gaza?

The other undercurrent today was that this was the first time many of us had been on such a demo since the proscription of Palestine Action. Most of those attending would be supporters, in principle at least, of Palestine Action’s cause, but all now were wary of falling foul of interpretations of this and facing the prospect, and consequences, of being arrested, labelled a terrorist sympathiser and facing a potential 14-year term of imprisonment. Add all this together and is it any wonder that the mood was even more sombre than usual.

My sign in Russell Square.

Because of concerns about conflating the issues of the Gaza genocide and the UK civil rights oppression, support for Palestine Action was organised in a totally different way, such that those that didn’t want to get caught up with opposing the proscription were in no danger on the main march. Indeed, the policing of this march was very low key and discreet. This was in sharp contrast to the Palestine Action support protest.

While the National March saw perhaps 200,000+ people congregate in Russell Square to commence the March at exactly 1pm, two miles away in Parliament Square 500 briefed and prepared volunteers awaited Big Ben to chime 1pm, sat down on the grass, and unrolled their own hand-written A2 posters, all saying exactly the same thing:

I OPPOSE GENOCIDE, I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION

I got to Parliament Square about 2.30pm by which time those sitting in the square and a whole lot more people, including a lot of journalists and camera operators, were effectively kettled by a ring of around 200 police officers. I asked if I could join my friends inside the cordon and was told in no uncertain terms “No”. When asked why not, all I got from the Met officers was that “A section 13 of the Public Order Act is in place.” When I asked what that was the Met officers refused to say and just said “Look it up”.

I wandered around the cordon until I stumbled across a whole section, in front of the Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi statues, ironically enough, that consisted of officers from Wales! They were very conspicuous due to the HEDDLU labels, but also much chattier (would you believe that!). Chatting to a few of them, I clarified that my placard would likely not get me arrested today as it is ambiguous enough as to whether I was expressing support for Palestine Action, and they had plenty of unambiguous ones to sort out first. I asked her if I verbally removed the ambiguity and told her I supported Palestine Action, would she arrest me. She said that that still would not be a priority today. Oh well, I tried!

Many of you reading this will know how embarrassed I have become over the years at never having been arrested on a demo. Despite the impression I may have given above, I had already determined that I didn’t really want to be arrested today. I had had a long chat with a couple of the legal observers that are present at all such demos about the changing climate around the criminalisation of protest in the UK, specifically the Palestine Action situation.

The implications of being arrested and either accepting a caution or being prosecuted and found guilty of supporting a proscribed organisation can be dire. It was not anticipated that mere supporters, as opposed to members and/or participating activists, were likely to be jailed, but even a mere caution stays on your record for 10 years and could have serious career and other ramifications for many, and also incur travel bans to many countries. I have no career worries anymore, but I do still have plenty of travel plans!!

The legal advice around being arrested has been the same for years. Below is an up-to-date copy of the cards the legal observers hand out on demos. The only thing that has changed is the phone numbers and email addresses, so if, like me, you have been carrying one of these in your wallet/purse for years, you might want to check you have the current contact details.

I’m sure all of those arrested in Parliament Square today will have had them. Because of the consequences outlined above, the 500 volunteers will have all known the possible consequences and how to handle the near-inevitable arrest. Perhaps because of this, the demographics of these 500 people are a bit different to most people I have seen arrested at demos over the years.

As of 10:00pm this evening, 474 people had been arrested in Parliament Square, according to the BBC. That number had been 365 at about 8:00pm. I witnessed about 30 arrests myself, between 2:00pm and 4:00pm.

The first person I saw being arrested (above) was this smartly dressed gentleman. I was told that he was a solicitor. Apparently, one of the first arrested, before I got there, had been an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair. I was a bit sceptical of this story initially, but then witnessed many elderly people, especially women in (I’m guessing) their 80s being bundled off into police vans. There were university lecturers, vicars, self-employed professionals like dentists and accountants, many retired people from all walks of life and a smattering of smart, articulate young people all prepared to stand up (or be dragged away) and be counted.

89 years old.

It was this spectacle that I was surprised to find had tears rolling down my cheek at one point. These people were guilty of no more than supporting efforts to end a genocide that is occurring before our eyes. They were being labelled as supporters of terrorism by a government arming the genocidal regime and effectively condoning (through Palestine Inaction) the ethnic cleansing and bulldozing of Gaza to enable its annexation and redevelopment as luxury seafront real estate for wealthy Israelis and American tourists. Trump can’t wait to get involved!

WTF has the UK become?

After so many years of Tory incompetence and corruption, we now have an even more disgusting Labour government continuing with austerity for the poorest while Starmer’s net worth of well over £10m rapidly starts chasing after Tony Blairs obscene £50m+ and the guy knighted for service as a human rights lawyer tuns into an Orwellian “Big Brother” proscribing direct action way less damaging than that he worked hard and successfully to get cleared in courts of law little more than 20 years ago. Nauseating!

Starmer and Cooper may yet be forced to rescind the proscription of Palestine Action, despite Cooper doubling down on it today. On 30 July, a High Court judge ruled that Palestine Action can bring a legal challenge against the UK government over its designation as a terrorist organisation. This followed a hugely damning statement from Volker Türk, High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations that says:

“UK domestic counter-terrorism legislation now defines terrorist acts broadly to include ‘serious damage to property’. But, according to international standards, terrorist acts should be confined to criminal acts intended to cause death or serious injury or to the taking of hostages, for purpose of intimidating a population or to compel a government to take a certain action or not. It misuses the gravity and impact of terrorism to expand it beyond those clear boundaries, to encompass further conduct that is already criminal under the law.”

This Labour Government is not just nauseating, but it almost as embarrassing as the Johnson government.

Just to lighten the mood a tad, let me share two true stories from today of arrests that made me chuckle. These were not in Westminster Square but on the National March. These were people whose placards were deemed less ambiguous than mine in their support for Palestine Action. Both were dismissed when taken for processing with the arresting officers rebuked for their illiteracy, I warrant. The first went something like this:

That’s one officer now aware of the importance of commas!

The second one I heard about and struggled to believe, but then I bumped into the guy and took his picture! Hopefully you’ll spot the issue quicker than the arresting officer!

But my final memories of the day occurred on my journey back home, and again had me welling up.

The first occurred on the tube from Westminster to Paddington. I was sat opposite a lady wearing a hijab and she read my sign and I saw a tear roll down her face. She stood up to get off at the next stop and leaned forward towards me and simply said “Thank you, thank you”.

The second occurred on the train out of Paddington, less than an hour later. There was a lady about my age, travelling alone, sat across the aisle from me but facing me. This was the conversation, initiated by the lady, with an east European accent:

         “Excuse me, can I ask you something?”

         “Sure.”

         “Do you hate the Jews for what they are doing in Gaza?”

         “No, not at all! What is happening in Gaza is not the doing of the Jewish people, but of a genocidal rogue state.”

         “Thank you. I agree with you.”

We said no more, and she got off at Reading.

What a day.

PS. A guardian article, a week later, about some of the older generation who were arrested:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/16/im-proud-to-have-made-this-stand-over-60s-arrested-at-palestine-action-ban-protest-explain-their-decision

Will ‘Your Party’ become my party?

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I am one of the 600,000+ people that have signed up to be kept informed of developments with the launch of Corbyn’s and Sultana’s new party of the Left. It holds out the hope of an anti-austerity, anti-war and anti-racist party that seeks to tackle the cost of living, reduce inequality, and promote public ownership. As such it certainly ticks a lot of boxes for me. However, I am struggling to get very enthusiastic or excited about it personally. But I do hope that it might just galvanise the young into seeing an opportunity to reshape their futures for the better.

In some ways I think I have never quite gotten over the orchestrated failure of the Corbyn project during his time as Labour Party leader. It was crushed by an obscene MSM campaign of libellous attacks, most notably the ridiculous antisemitic slurs, that were also used by his enemies within the Party, to their everlasting shame. The immediate consequence was the disastrous premiership of Boris Johnson, and then everything that has followed that.

Those largely-the-same Labour politicians and liberal commentators appear to have already settled on their main attack line: support for the Left Party will split the Labour vote and allow Reform to win. That they refused to get into line and support the democratically elected leadership of Corbyn, supported by a huge majority of the membership allowed ‘mini-Trump’ Johnson, seems to be a lesson at least partly learned, if way too late! Hypocrisy to the fore!

In fact, many opinion polls have already indicated potential for Reform to win the next general election, while Labour’s parliamentary representation collapses as a consequence of Starmer’s team consciously courting Reform voters and would-be voters while ignoring those who might back the left. That has failed miserably on its own terms, but it has also widened the audience for a new left party. They have only themselves to blame. Where do they think the Left can turn?

For those left-wingers who remain in the Labour Party, there are two main reasons cited for staying; essentially the same ones I was presented with when I quit the Labour Party after Starmer’s duplicitous campaign to usurp the Labour leadership. One is that recent controversies like the Welfare Bill and the recognition of Palestine illustrate how the Labour Party is not monolithic and still be shaped by pressure from the left through the winning of concessions. The other argument is that Labour retains the reluctant loyalty of many trade unions. But this can’t be taken for granted, especially with a new option, a genuinely socialist party, there to embrace them and their values.

If a year or so of a Starmer government doesn’t prove that the Labour Party is no longer fit for the purpose for which it was created, well, nothing surely will. The new party will need an activist base, and I therefore sincerely hope that those activists will stop pissing in the wind that is blowing through the Labour Party and migrate to where their efforts could potentially yield great gains for those abandoned by the Labour Party and tempted by right-wing populist scumbags (like that other mini-Trump sociopath, Farage) offering simplistic, short-sighted, scapegoating solutions that appeal to those most challenged by the crises at hand.

In any case, left wing pressure is being seen to exert pressure on this right-wing Labour administration from without, way better than from within. A genuinely left-wing party can exert pressure on the Labour government over controversial issues, perhaps even more effectively than, but certainly in allegiance with social movements. The main pressure on Starmer and foreign secretary David Lammy over Gaza has come from the mass movement, finding only a faint echo among Labour MPs.

As for the Trade Unions, Ex-Unite boss Len McCluskey has hinted that trade unions might abandon Labour for Jeremy Corbyn’s new party if it proves “credible,” raising concerns on the left of a historic break in relations. McCluskey, 74, comments heap fresh pressure on Labour as internal divisions widen. Just days ago, Corbyn declared “change is coming” and praised Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana for quitting Labour to help “build a real alternative” to the party he once led. McCluskey, one of Corbyn’s staunchest allies, made clear that trade unions are weighing up their options. “If this new party demonstrates its credible, then trade unions will consider their affiliations,” he warned.

The remaining big trade unions of the working classes, such as Unite, UNISON, GMB and ASLEF are known to have had internal discussions and it is clear that, if they continue to support Labour under its current leadership, they risk becoming complicit in the erosion of worker’s and human rights, and the abandonment of progressive values. The participation of union activists can hugely enrich the new left-wing party, in every sense, giving it political substance and helping it develop roots.

I also know, of course, plenty who prefer to argue for Green Party membership, and see Zack Polanski’s leadership bid as a major opening. The Green Party has many left-wing policies but has never been a coherently or consistently left-wing party. It doesn’t ever present a political platform in class terms like Labour’s 2017 manifesto did: the many versus the few, us versus them. It veers in different directions depending on circumstances. It attracts votes from those who would otherwise vote Labour, but also from those who are more naturally Lib Dem voters. It has long had to contend with ‘Torie-on-bikes’ slurs too.

During Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, the Greens made efforts to attract those who were unhappy with Labour’s leftwards direction. For example, they supported overturning the EU referendum result of 2016. While it made some inroads into urban working-class areas, especially when Will Duckworth was around and working the West Midlands hard, the Green Party continues to have a mainly middle-class base. The kind of working-class towns where Reform poses a serious threat are places where the Green Party has little presence or profile. Nonetheless, I can certainly see value in the idea to form an alliance between the two parties to broaden their appeal and enhance their electoral prospects. This is, after all, what I wanted to do with the ecosocialist leanings in the Wales Green Party and Plaid Cymru (but failed).

This probably cannot go far beyond having loose electoral agreements at local level. Most left-wing activists will generally see the sense in avoiding standing Left and Green candidates in the same council wards. Then again, there will be areas in England where the Greens are already in office – either running a council or junior partners in a coalition – and have proved disappointing. It would be a serious mistake for socialists in those areas to align themselves with the Greens, even on the level of an electoral pact.

Pushing for a more formal alliance from the very beginning is liable to have a dampening effect. It dampens the insurgent, anti-establishment spirit that motivates and energises a new party, pulling it in a more conventional direction. The new party needs to establish its own distinctive priorities and demands. It should not be blunted by association with an established electoral vehicle, especially one of such modest success.

The new party will need to root itself in social movements and trade union battles. One of the issues during Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was the inability to separate electoral and internal party politics and develop a broader strategy for social change. Momentum, the left-wing organisation established to support Corbyn, originated with much talk about social movements, but did very little about it. It became, instead, the battle line for the internal warfare within the party. Those divisions are still there, despite Starmer’s intolerant, anti-democratic purge of the Left. The formation of a new, cohesive and coherent party of the left should remove these counter-productive internal divisions and be a whole lot more democratic and representative too, at every level.

The new party will have to be politically bold and audacious if it is to be a meaningful alternative to the prevailing political zeitgeist. We live in crisis-ridden times. Unsustainable economic models, the climate catastrophe, and a resurgence of imperialist rivalries are, perhaps, the biggest factors conditioning politics today. Crises of vast numbers of displaced people (on a scale yet to be imagined, let alone seen) and wars over water and food are just around the corner.

There has been a patent collapse in trust in established institutions and politics. There is a correspondingly an appetite for anti-establishment politics that thinks big (or is it just loud?) and pitches radical (or is it just different?) and in the absence of a coherent and organised left, it is the hard-right forces that flourish.

A critical area for the new party will be international issues. Foreign policy was Corbyn-led Labour’s weakest link: Corbyn’s own anti-war, anti-militarist politics were never matched by official party policy, with major concessions on NATO, nuclear weapons and more. Anti-imperialism needs to be woven into the fabric of the new party. The ‘welfare not warfare’slogan – rallying opposition to higher military spending at the expense of welfare, public spending, and international aid – will have to be politically central. As vital as this is, it is a particularly hard sell while tyrants like Putin are on the warpath.

The new party needs to be shaped by the energy and ideas of the more than 600,000 people who have signed up for it. It will have to be a deeply democratic party with high levels of participation. This is not merely because democracy is a virtue, but because mass involvement will shape it positively and help overcome the many obstacles it will face.

I am too battle-weary to have the energy to do the hard yards anymore. But if enough of those 600,000 do have it, especially the younger generations with the most to gain from a non-violent revolution in our politics and economics, then who knows what is possible.

Here’s hoping: HERE COME THE YOUNG

I’m a gay Jewish man.

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I’m a gay Jewish man, but how would you know that unless I had told you?

I’m a young black lad from South London, but I can’t hide my black skin from you, can I?

Pointing this out has ridiculously gotten Diane Abbott suspended from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. It is hard to adequately express the contempt I have for Keir Starmer, who is so far up the alimentary tract of Zionist interests that he deliberately conflates such comments with anti-semitism. This is not only a gross insult to a lifelong equalities campaigner who fights racism in all its guises, but also an insult to Jewish people that suffer genuine anti-semitism and value the support of campaigners like Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn. I would go so far as to suggest that the act of suspending Diane Abbott for differentiating different forms of racism is in itself more ant-semitic than anything Diane Abbott has ever said and done.

It is well worth listening to the whole of this 30 minute Reflections episode: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002fwpv

The supposedly controversial segment starts around the 18 minute mark.

Lindsey German adds additional context, in her weekly Counterfire briefing:

The scapegoating of black MP Diane Abbott was another low point last week. As it happens, I listened to her interview with the BBC’s James Naughtie on Thursday morning before she was suspended. I was totally taken aback a few hours later when Labour decided she had been anti-Semitic in her comments. She was nothing of the sort. She did not repeat her claims of two years ago, which got her suspended for the first time. Instead, she clearly said that anti-Semitism and anti-Traveller racism were real but talked about the differences between those and anti-black racism. She did so in terms of visibility. There should be no doubt about this: stop and search for example is targeted at black and to a lesser extent Asian kids. Black and Asian people suffer abuse on public transport, on the streets and from the police because they are visibly black.

I would go further than this important point: you cannot understand anti-black and Asian racism in this country without looking at the racial division of labour at work and the history of slavery and imperialism to which Britain was central. This brings us on to wider definitions of racism where of course many people on the left differ. But we should understand racism as a material reality which is not simply about moral imperatives. Of course racism is morally wrong and should be opposed in all circumstances. But the arguments of Marxists go further: it is deliberately created and recreated in order to divide working-class people and to dehumanise its victims. It is therefore anathema to any idea of collective action or socialism – and why it tends to break down where people do take collective action to change the world, for example on the Palestine demos.

Our rulers are happy to place opposition to racism under the general rubric of diversity. That in itself doesn’t address the bigger questions: why racism is also connected to class, why some racism is much more pervasive and damaging. Any racism is terrible for those who experience it. But the institutional anti-black racism and Islamophobia in Britain go to the heart of education, policing, employment, and much else. Diane has been attacked for daring to imply there is a hierarchy of racism. But in reality the daily oppression of working-class black and Asian people is much more far-reaching, and deliberately so, throughout society than other racial oppressions.

Diane Abbott is right to point to that.  As a working-class black woman who has experienced racism all her life she should be supported not sanctioned. And it’s about time we had a serious discussion about racism and how it works in society – not least within the Labour Party – rather than outbursts of moral outrage which end up attacking an MP who has received more racist abuse than any other.

We are living in dark times, but through solidarity and courage we still have Power in the Darkness!

It is hard to believe that this was released in early 1978. I was just 15. The intervening years have seen some progress at times, but we have seen that progress steadily eroded again, and most damningly by this current Labour government!!

Power in the darkness
Frightening lies from the other side
Power in the darkness
Stand up and fight for your rights

Freedom, we’re talking bout your freedom
Freedom to choose what you do with your body
Freedom to believe what you like
Freedom for brothers to love one another
Freedom for black and white
Freedom from harassment, intimidation
Freedom for the mother and wife
Freedom from Big Brother’s interrogation
Freedom to live your own life, I’m talking ’bout

Power in the darkness
Frightening lies from the other side
Power in the darkness
Stand up and fight for your rights

“Today, institutions fundamental to the British system of Government are under attack
the public schools, the house of Lords, the Church of England, the holy institution of Marriage, even our magnificent police force are no longer safe from those who would undermine our society, and it’s about time we said ‘enough is enough’ and saw a return to the traditional British values of discipline, obedience, morality and freedom.
What we want is

Freedom from the reds and the blacks and the criminals
Prostitutes, pansies and punks
Football hooligans, juvenile delinquents
Lesbians and left wing scum
Freedom from the niggers and the Pakis and the unions
Freedom from the Gipsies and the Jews
Freedom from leftwing layabouts and liberals
Freedom from the likes of you”

Power in the darkness
Frightening lies from the other side
Power in the darkness
Stand up and fight for your rights

Hypocrisy breeds hatred – and endangers us all (incl. ‘must see’ video)

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First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Martin Niemöller (1946)

How many of you learned the history of WWII in history at school and wondered how the people of Germany could be fooled into voting for a genocidal maniac like Hitler and then stand by as the biggest genocide in history was perpetrated under their noses?

I know I did, and it probably explains why I have always taken an interest in what our politicians are up to and why I am prepared to take to the streets when they do things I cannot support. But we are living in very dark times again and most of us are simply not doing enough. Most of us are simply doing what most of the German people did in the 1930s and are just getting on with our very comfortable lives while bleating about the ‘cost of living’ and saying nothing about the cost of other people dying and truly suffering.

Evil is a subjective thing, but if we open our eyes and truly witness what is going on around us, all too often in our names, then we will be forced to do something, even if that is a conscious and deliberate choice to do nothing and thereby condone what is going on.

Many people excuse themselves by saying they have ‘democratically’ elected representatives that they are happy to deal with these issues on their behalf. That’s what the German people in the 1930s did.  Things have changed very little. We still allow ourselves to tolerate our politicians’ blatant propaganda, lies, corruption and hypocrisy.

Take our duly elected PM Sir Keir Starmer, for example.

Starmer was knighted in 2014 ostensibly for his work as a human rights lawyer.

In the Fairford Five case, in 2003, his client had intended greater damage than Palestine Action did at RAF Brize Norton: Josh Richards was apparently planning to burn the wheels of American bombers slated to fly from an RAF base to Iraq. Keir argued while his client’s acts were illegal, they were morally justified, and the jury rightly – in my view, and presumably his – refused to convict.

The day that Starmer decided to proscribe Palestine Action was the day I first thought to join them. It’s counterproductive as well as disgraceful! But in theory at least, this would make me a terrorist and could get me 14 years in prison. As it happens, their website appears disabled. I would defy our democratically elected PM in order to support a group of people trying their damnedest to stop a genocide, a genocide being acted out in front of our eyes and with the support of that same democratically elected PM, i.e., in your name!

Thankfully, we have decent people, including lawyers with more moral fibre than Starmer, doing their best to hold government and power to account. This is why I am a supporter of Amnesty International and the Good Law Project. If and when I’m arrested, I’ll be contacting them both! (Please join them both if you haven’t already, before it is too late for you too!)

A recent newsletter from the Good Law Project contained these words from civil rights lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith (who worked on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainees, many of whom had been sold to the US for bounties by a corrupt – but ‘democratically-elected’ Pakistani government):

“Hypocrisy is sometimes spelled with a capital H. Hypocrisy breeds hatred, as it did when the US set up a law-free prison in Guantánamo Bay, purportedly established to protect Democracy and the rule of law. If you are a Labour government, committed to the Human Rights Act, you cannot expect to win votes away from Reform UK or even Suella Braverman by playing the hate card yourself. The Act is designed to protect people – including the children of Palestine – from vilification and even murder. I’d like my colleagues to remember why they became politicians and judges in the first place. As human rights advocates, we should be proud to stand up for those who most need us. It’s our job.”

As humans, we all need to be human rights advocates. They are our rights. But I suspect many of us don’t actually value them enough until ours are tangibly threatened. But we can sit back and watch while others have theirs stripped away, and worse.

And so, to that “must watch” video I promised you. I guess that if you have read this far, there is a chance that you might just watch it. But I am also guessing some of you won’t or will give up on it quickly as it makes you uncomfortable.

It’s a DDN presentation by Chris Gunness, the former chief spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). He is a reliable witness. Watch and listen, please.

One last quote for the benefit of those still ‘uncomfortable’ with criticising Israel for fear of being accused of being antisemitic (as has been done to lifelong campaigners against any form of of discrimination, like Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott). This comes from the son of holocaust survivors, Norman Finkelstein:

“The biggest insult to the memory of the Holocaust is not denying it, but using it as an excuse to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

I’ll leave you with these links (click on the logos). I hope to see some of you on the streets some time soon, but supporting those fighting on our behalf is the least we can do, isn’t it?

Letter to Trump from Lech Wałęsa

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As a student in the early 1980s, I remember being hugely impressed by the astonishing bravery of Lech Wałęsa, who headed up the Solidarity Union that led the Gdansk ship workers out on strike against the then communist regime in Poland. He became an icon and a hero. He, of course, went on to be President of the country.

Last week Lech Wałęsa wrote an open letter to Donald Trump. In case you didn’t see it, the full text of that letter is below.

There is so much I could say about the contempt I hold Donald Trump in, but I hope that all reading this would share that contempt so let me just share Lech Wałęsa’s words and be done, rather than risk my blood pressure.


“Your Excellency, Mr. President,

We watched your conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky with fear and distaste. It is insulting that you expect Ukraine to show gratitude for U.S. material aid in its fight against Russia. Gratitude is owed to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who have been shedding their blood for over 11 years to defend the free world’s values and their homeland, attacked by Putin’s Russia.

How can the leader of a country symbolizing the free world fail to recognize this?

The Oval Office atmosphere during this conversation reminded us of interrogations by the Security Services and Communist court debates. Back then, prosecutors and judges, acting on behalf of the communist political police, told us they held all the power while we had none. They demanded we stop our activities, arguing that innocent people suffered because of us. They stripped us of our freedoms for refusing to cooperate or express gratitude for our oppression. We are shocked that President Zelensky was treated similarly.

History shows that when the U.S. distanced itself from democratic values and its European allies, it ultimately endangered itself. President Wilson understood this in 1917 when the U.S. joined World War I. President Roosevelt knew it after Pearl Harbour in 1941, realizing that defending America meant fighting in both the Pacific and Europe alongside nations attacked by the Third Reich.

Without President Reagan and U.S. financial support, the Soviet empire’s collapse would not have been possible. Reagan recognized the suffering of millions in Soviet Russia and its conquered nations, including thousands of political prisoners. His greatness lay in his unwavering stance, calling the USSR an “Empire of Evil” and confronting it decisively. We won, and today, his statue stands in Warsaw, facing the U.S. Embassy.

Mr. President, military and financial aid cannot be equated with the blood shed for Ukraine’s independence and the freedom of Europe and the world. Human life is priceless. Gratitude is due to those who sacrifice their blood and freedom—something self-evident to us, former political prisoners of the communist regime under Soviet Russia.

We urge the U.S. to uphold the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which established a direct obligation to defend Ukraine’s borders in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons. These guarantees are unconditional—nowhere do they suggest such aid is a mere economic transaction.

Signed,
Lech Wałęsa, former political prisoner, President of Poland “

From: politicalarena.org/2012/01/14/lech-walesa-unveils-reagan-statue-in-warsaw/

WHY, AS A SOCIALIST, I CANNOT VOTE LABOUR IN THE FORTHCOMING GENERAL ELECTION

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News came through yesterday of one of the saddest indictments of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – Darren Williams has quit the party.

For those that don’t know Darren, he is a co-founder of Welsh Labour Grassroots (WLG) in 2003 and a continuous champion of the Left in Wales ever since. During my Corbynista years in the Welsh Labour Party, I had the pleasure of meeting him many times. He is a man of rare integrity, enthusiasm and decency. Everything Keir Starmer is not. 

His letter of resignation says everything that I would want to say about the current state of the Labour Party, but with more insight and authority than it has coming from me, so I’m sure he won’t mind me copying you all in here. He addresses it directly to Keir Starmer:

After 35 years’ continuous, active Labour membership – including time spent on the National Executive Committee, the Welsh Executive Committee, the National Policy Forum and as a Cardiff councillor – I have cancelled my direct debit today, as I can no longer bear to remain in a party that treats its members, representatives and voters with such contempt.

I have witnessed some pretty unedifying behaviour by various party leaders over the years, but you have outdone them all. Your abandonment of all the pledges on which you originally stood for the leadership was shameless enough, but you have proceeded to water down policy commitments on green investment and workers’ rights, among other areas, while failing to take a clear moral stance against the Tories’ inhuman attacks on refugees and migrants or against Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza.

And all the time you have persecuted decent socialists, suspending, expelling, driving them out of the party and besmirching their reputations, all to show that you have ‘changed the party’. Well, you have certainly done that: rules are bent and broken on virtually a daily basis, democratic decisions are ignored or overridden, and candidate selections are routinely stitched-up.

Developments over the last week have finally convinced me to give up on the party to which I have belonged for almost my whole adult life. Constituencies like my own, in Cardiff West, have had your stooges foisted upon us as candidates – people with no connection to local communities – while you have treated the likes of Diane Abbott, Faiza Shaheen and Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who have been a credit to Labour, in the most despicable fashion.

I’m sure that, even if you read this, you will be completely indifferent to my resignation, or even pleased to see the back of another troublesome leftie, but the fact is that long standing members like me are continuing to leave the party in their droves – or, at best, sitting on their hands – when you still need us to knock doors, deliver leaflets and keep the party functioning.

It looks virtually certain that Labour will comfortably win the general election and the overdue expulsion of office of the awful Tories will be something to celebrate, but my concern is that this opportunity for lasting change will be squandered because you lack the moral and political courage to deliver the radical reform that is needed to improve people’s lives – and seem determined to alienate and antagonise so many of Labour’s natural supporters along the way.

I hope that you start to listen to the concerns that must surely be reaching you from people like me, before it’s too late.

The only thing I’d take issue with here is the last sentence; it is way too late. I’m tempted to say ‘I told you so’ (my own resignation letter just over 4 years ago: https://greenleftie.uk/2020/04/24/resignation-from-the-labour-party/ ) but then again, I was not a lifelong party member and Trade Union representative like Darren. It has taken 4 years for Darren to come to the same conclusions as me. He gave it a more than decent chance to pan out differently than I envisaged. I can only respect that. 

Darren adds some other telling words on Facebook:

With Labour almost certain to win office in a few weeks’ time, probably with a comfortable majority, I should be feeling excited about the political prospects for the years ahead. Certainly, the overdue expulsion of the awful Tories will be something to celebrate, and there are aspects of Labour’s platform – on public transport and energy, in particular – that will bring benefits if they are delivered as promised. But everything Keir Starmer has done since becoming leader – the abandonment of all his original pledges, the watering-down of key policy commitments in areas like green investment and workers’ rights, the repeated praise for Thatcher, the failure to take a principled stand against Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza – makes me pessimistic about the chances of an incoming Labour government standing up for ordinary people once the pressure is on.  

But it’s the ruthlessness of the party’s internal regime under Starmer that has been hardest to live with. Hundreds of hard-working activists and dozens of principled politicians – beginning with Rebecca Long-Bailey and Jeremy Corbyn – have been traduced, disciplined or even expelled on the flimsiest pretexts, to appease Labour’s media and establishment critics, ‘reassure’ floating voters and show ‘Labour has changed’. The party’s own rules have been bent or broken on virtually a daily basis, democratic policy decisions (e.g. in support of electoral reform) have been dismissed and selections have been routinely stitched-up. Of course, much of this has been seen in the party before, but even under Blair there was some residual respect for consistent rules and accountability and the leadership’s left critics were simply marginalised, rather than purged.

And he concludes with these word, echoing what I heard a lot of 4 years ago: “Good comrades will say that we should just keep on fighting – ‘they don’t call it ‘the struggle’ for nothing’ – and I would have agreed with them until recently, but we all have our limits, which are as much emotional as analytical.” We have both ended up jumping before the indignity of being pushed, just 4 years apart. 

‘Good comrades’ in my own local Labour Party, like my neighbour John Spanswick, who used the exact same ‘keep on the good fight’, and ‘they don’t call it a struggle for nothing’ lines, actually backed Starmer on the basis that he was best placed to win the next GE, and being in power is essential to achieving anything. Being in power also comes with bigger personal rewards and bigger platforms for big egos. To hell with the socialist agenda. John is now Leader of Bridgend Council (not long after a year swanning around as Mayor) and topping up his works pension to the tune of over £55k a year now. Nice work if you can get it! I am watching what you ‘achieve’ carefully, John!

I suspect Darren will simply abstain in the GE, as I doubt that he will be able to bring himself to cast a vote for any other party. If I’m wrong about that, then I hope he’ll come to the same conclusion as me and vote Plaid Cymru, and do so publicly. 

As a fully paid-up member of Yes Cymru, me voting for Plaid Cymru will surprise no-one anymore. I’ve resisted the temptation to join PC as I feel that I am more useful to the independence debate as a non-Welsh-speaking, English born-and-bred, non-member than as just another member of the Welsh nationalist party. My support for Yes Cymru has nothing to do with nationalism. 

Having said that, PC are still the nearest approximation to my views on offer to me. They are predominantly Left-leaning ecosocialists in my experience, as personified by the great Leanne Wood. It is real pity that she ran out of steam and is no longer at their helm. (I do have some reservations about Rhun ap Iorwerth, but hey.) I hope that the Welsh electorate wake up to what Labour has become (they largely take support for granted, which is why they have become so complacent, lazy and the polar opposite of radical). They will surely, at least, shudder away from their dalliance with the Tories, especially in places like Bridgend, and re-assert Wales as a Conservative-free zone, despite, as Darren highlighted in Cardiff West, lots of Starmerite red Tories being parachuted into Welsh constituencies. If this isn’t yet another reason to switch away from Starmer’s Labour, I’m not sure what is.

So there you have it. I would encourage all of you left-leaning folk out there to do the same thing. The only way forward for the Left in Wales is to work towards completely detaching ourselves for the Tory hegemony (blue Tories, red Tories and a few other shades of Toryism) that engulfs Westminster and that will not change, irrespective of the relative sizes of the major parties before and after the upcoming election. But I can already see another ‘I told you so’ in another 4 years time!