Category: UK
After the arrest of Sarah Wilkinson on Thursday, Jonathan Cook says Keir Starmer is determined to silence critics of his — and his government’s — complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
UK Prime Minister Terrorizing Palestine Supporters
August 30, 2024
The Labour Party in Britain announced that it would not submit a brief to the International Criminal Court arguing that […]
The UK Labour Party drops opposition to Int’l Criminal Court Warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant over Gaza War Crimes
The new Labour government in Britain last week took steps to remove the ban on onshore wind farms instituted by the Conservative government, which made it possible for such projects to be forestalled even by a single objection.
New Labour Government in UK Unleashes Onshore Wind, with 61% of British Electricity now Low-Carbon
Recipients include the prime minister and his deputy, the new foreign secretary and home secretary, reports John McEvoy. The attorney general appointment, however, was surprising.
Pro-Israel lobbyists have donated to 13 out of Labour’s 25 cabinet members since they were first elected to parliament, Declassified can reveal.
The list of recipients includes Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his deputy Angela Rayner, Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
Jonathan Reynolds, who will oversee arms exports to Israel as U.K. trade secretary, is another beneficiary, alongside Labour’s election mastermind Pat McFadden, whose responsibilities now include national security.
Some of the donations were provided by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a lobby group which takes MPs on “fact-finding” missions to the region.
Britain’s latest General Election held on 4th July was nothing short of a major political earthquake that put […]
Britain’s Labour beat the Right, but Must hasten to Win Public Trust and heal Rift with own Left
Thankfully, at last when it comes to conditions in Switzerland, the Hindujas are not the only ones being placed under prosecutorial scrutiny. Last year, four domestic workers from the Philippines took legal action against one of Geneva’s diplomatic missions to the United Nations, claiming non-payment over a number of years. It was a brutal reminder that migrant domestic workers remain a seemingly endless quarry of the disposable and exploitable.
staff in the Foreign Office, I’m told up to 300, have formally raised concerns with ministers, seeking a change of course.
They are questioning ministers’ actions and policy in relation to Gaza and asking to see the legal advice they received that this is based on — advice that they have so far refused to publish, despite calls to do so from some in Parliament.
I was the first Jewish member of the Labour Party to be suspended and then expelled as part of the false‘anti-Semitism’ campaign orchestrated by the genocide supporters of the Jewish Labour Movement. Although I was the first Jewish member to be expelled I was by no means the last. Today if you are Jewish you are 5+ times more likely to be expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ from the Labour Party than if you are not Jewish. ( Greenstein)
the Labour left, including Corbyn and McDonnell, refused to recognise that Zionism was not some form of fluffy Jewish identity. It was an ideology and movement of ethnic cleansing and now genocide.
Loyal Russell-Moyle, Praises Starmer Despite Being Removed as MP for Brighton Kemptown
The entire affair is a stunning example of political entropy, a howl from an administration marching before the firing squad. With each failure, the Tories have tried to claw back respectability in the hope of appearing muscular in the face of irregular migration. They have accordingly cooked up a scheme that is not merely cruel, but one of staggering cost (each asylum seeker of the current cohort promises to cost the British taxpayer £1.8 million) and ineffectualness. Sunak, a laughably weak and unpopular prime minister, is, politically speaking, at death’s door. Despite getting the legislation through, legal struggles from potential deportees are bound to tear into the arrangements. What Britain’s judges do will prove a true test of character.
Source: When Safety is a Fiction: Passing the UK’s Rwanda Bill – » The Australian Independent Media Network
“He questioned not only our election victory, but more significantly, the right of the British people to peacefully protest against a slaughter in Gaza. … He deliberately tried to conflate protests and demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them not Muslims by the way, — he tried to make it a Muslim thing, but it isn’t a Muslim thing, … hundreds of thousands of people … demonstrating their revulsion at the slaughter in Gaza and the support for it from the British government, the British Labour opposition and the vast majority of the British media. Hundreds of thousands have marched, but millions share their revulsion.”
Under a repressive new act, British nationals could face prison for undermining London’s national security line. Intended to destroy WikiLeaks and others exposing war crimes, the law is a direct threat to critical national security journalism.
Source: UK Steps Up War on Whistleblower Journalism With New National Security Act – ScheerPost
All the way with Australia fails the pub test in Britain. But then we didn’t listen to Constitutional Recognition or Treaties. Yet we claim to be in step with the crown. How does that work?
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court in the UK has ruled that sending asylum seekers to Rwanda for their refugee status to be assessed, is unlawful.
A bit of advice for PM Sunak : offshore detention is not a solution it is a nightmare for all concerned although some host countries and dodgy politicians will make a nice little earner out of unsuspecting British taxpayers.
Source: Pass the Parcel is not a solution ! – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Precisely for its progress in the field, China is being punished by that other contender for AI supremacy, the United States. Despite some forced sense of bonhomie among the delegates, such fault lines were nigh impossible to paper over. On October 17, the US Department of Commerce announced that further restrictions would be placed on advanced AI chips along with the imposition of additional licensing requirements for shipments to 40 countries to prevent resales to China. One company, Nvidia, was told directly by the department that it had to immediately cease shipping A800 and H800 chips to the Chinese market without licensed authorisation from the US.
The UK Tory Government is acting under the advice of Tony Abbott trying to follow the “Australian Model” to gain political advantage, not do what is regarded as morally or ethically correct. Let’s also remind ourselves the UK like Australia, China, Russia, and Nth Korea has no Universal Bill of Human Rights in it’s Constitution only laws which it now wants to change. Like the Australian LNP, which wanted to rid itself of UNHRC or its Racial Discrimination Acts. Had a Bill of Rights been written both nations’ Constitutions Abbott would have had no impact.
Lord Justice Underhill underlined the lower court’s own admission that the Rwandan government was “intolerant of dissent; that there are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech; and that political opponents have been detained in unofficial detention centres and have been subjected to torture and Article 3 ill-treatment short of torture.”
As a result, Braverman finds herself at sea, struggling to find a port, or centre, to park her own, brittle dogmas. In July, she told the House of Commons that she disagreed “fundamentally” with the view of the court “that Rwanda is not a safe place for refugees.” She went on to say that her government took their “international obligations very seriously and we are satisfied that the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill comply with the refugee convention. The fundamental principle remains, however, that those in need of protection should claim asylum at the earliest opportunity and in the first safe country they reach.”
Source: Cruel Prerogatives: Braverman on Refugees at the AEI – » The Australian Independent Media Network
- “For British interests… there is no doubt that Chile under the junta is a better prospect than Allende’s chaotic road to socialism,” the foreign secretary said
- “The prospects for British business in Chile are clearly much brighter under the new regime,” Britain’s ambassador in Santiago agreed
- U.K. and U.S. officials feared Allende’s successful economic policies could be replicated throughout Latin America
This is an edited extract from Mark Curtis’ book, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, which includes full sources.
The British East India Company is back in Business
The UK government will grant hundreds of new oil and gas licences in the North Sea in a bid for energy independence, ignoring calls to stop new fossil fuel projects.
A Labour government in the U.K. under Starmer will bring no significant changes in economic or foreign policy and will make no difference whatsoever to the lives of working class people.
If dividends were taxed at the same rate as wages, that alone would bring in very many times the cost of lifting the two-child benefit cap. But that would hurt the owners of capital and be redistributive, so it is firmly off Starmer’s agenda.
Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, Wes Streeting, shadow health minister, and Starmer have no intention of attempting to bridge society’s stunning and ever-growing wealth gap.
Rather they seek to emphasise “wealth creation” and return to trickledown theory. Alongside “wealth creation” they talk of “reform”, by which they mean more deregulation and more private, for profit provision of public services.
The Labour Party has not only abandoned all thought of securing a capital interest for the worker in the enterprise where they work. The Labour Party has also abandoned the ideas both of state intervention in the unequal dynamic between worker and employer, and of facilitating and supporting self-organisation of Labour.
Tory anti-union legislation is to remain, and who can forget Starmer banning Labour MPs from official union picket lines?
The Labour Party in power is also not going to repeal the hostile environment for immigrants legislation, or the Tory attacks on civil liberties and the right to protest.
What precisely therefore is the purpose of the Labour Party? An extension to which question is, what then is the purpose of the next U.K. general election?
To register disgust at the rule of the Tories by voting in an alternative set of Tories?
What we had from roughly 1920 to 1990, when voting really could make a difference, is not what we have now. We live instead in a post-democratic society. By Craig Murray CraigMurray.org.uk British Labour leader Keir Starmer’s determination to use his refusal to alleviate child poverty a
Source: Craig Murray: Democracy’s Demise
We saw it under the LNP how profits were made when will we recognize water is a public not private asset? We can only save it not increase it and keep it out of private hands.
British water companies have loaded up with debt while pumping sewage into waterways, raising bills and delivering huge profits to shareholders. This can only end by the government taking water back from these corporations.
From Iran to Azerbaijan, Iraq to Nigeria, Russia to Venezuela, British foreign policy is largely captured by the global climate polluter, writes Mark Curtis. By Mark Curtis Declassified UK
Declassified recently revealed that BP has pumped Iraqi oil worth £15 billion since the U.K. and U.S. militaries invaded the country in 2003.
Governments in London and Washington long denied the Iraq war was about oil. Yet BP returned to the country in 2009 after a 35-year absence and was awarded a significant interest in Iraq’s largest oil field near British-occupied Basra in the south of the country.
Source: BP’s Wars, Coups & Dictators
Jonathan Swift, the High Court judge who has rejected Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the U.S., has a long history of working for the government departments that are now persecuting the WikiLeaks founder.
Swift, who ruled against Assange on June 6, was formerly the government’s favourite barrister.
Source: Judge Worked for Same British Government Departments That Have Pursued Assange
Murdoch has lost the war on renewables in the UK
A new study commissioned by the UK private electric utility Drax and carried out by professors at Imperial College London has confirmed that in the first quarter of this year, wind turbines in Britain generated more electricity than did fossil gas plants. This is the first time the UK got more electricity from a renewable source than from gas, and it could mark a major turning point.
Source: For First Time, Wind provided more Power than Fossil Gas for Britain, enough to Power 300 mn. Teslas
Labour is now the largest party in local government, surpassing the Tories for the first time since 2002.
Source: A Conservative Wipe-Out in the 2023 England Local Elections – CounterPunch.org
London’s many people of color seemed to have skipped this morning’s royal do.
A good word for Charles
Charles from 1993: “Britain is a multi-racial and multi-cultural society. I have already mentioned the size of our own Muslim communities who live throughout Britain, both in large towns like Bradford and in tiny communities in places as remote as Stornaway in Western Scotland. These people, ladies and gentlemen, are an asset to Britain. They contribute to all parts of our economy – to industry, the public services, the professions and the private sector. We find them as teachers, doctors, engineers and scientists. They contribute to our economic well-being as a country, and add to the cultural richness of our nation.”
Source: King Charles III as Defender of all Faiths, including Islam
He was standing before a lectern at Downing Street. The words on the support looked eerily similar to those used by the politicians of another country. According to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Stop the Boats was the way to go. It harked back to the same approach used by Australia’s Tony Abbott, who won the 2013 election on precisely that platform.
Source: Trashing Asylum: The UK’s Illegal Migration Bill – » The Australian Independent Media Network
When Culture War and Identity Politics really don’t matter and Unity is dictated by one’s relationship to work value and need and survival. Class becomes the definer of who you are not your individuality
Key points:
The strike is the biggest in the NHS’s 75-year history
Workers are asking for a rise to match inflation
The British government is urging workers to call off walkouts
Source: Britain’s NHS workers walk off job in largest strike in organisation’s 75-year history – ABC News
Take advice Australia from the UK
In the UK, housing prices are thankfully forecast to drop this year. But without a serious investment in social housing from the government, the housing crisis isn’t going to end.
Source: The Housing Crisis Will Persist Even If Housing Prices Fall
State-sponsored piracy has been a UK tradition since the British East India Company
The U.K. stripped the assets of a foreign state and transferred them to political actors engaged in regime change, John McEvoy reports. The result has been a form of collective punishment for people in Venezuela. By John McEvoy Declassified UK In late December, Venezuela’s leading opposition
In late December, Venezuela’s leading opposition parties voted to oust Juan Guaidó as “interim president” and dissolve his parallel government.
This was clearly not the ending the U.K. government had in mind.
Four years ago, the British government made the bold decision to recognise Guaidó as Venezuelan president and proceeded to facilitate his legal battle to seize roughly $2 billion of gold held in the Bank of England.
Indeed, the U.K. government insisted at every turn that it recognised Guaidó — and not Nicolás Maduro — as Venezuelan president. In turn, Guaidó’s lawyers argued that he was authorised to represent and control the assets of the Central Bank of Venezuela held in London.
Throughout this time, Guaidó paid his U.K. legal costs by drawing on millions of dollars of his country’s assets originally seized by the U.S. government. In other words, Guaidó tried to seize Venezuelan state assets with looted Venezuelan state assets.
Meanwhile, it seems certain that the Foreign Office also used a significant amount of public funds to sustain its backing of Guaidó.
Now that Guaidó has been ousted, the legal argument for transferring the gold to the Venezuelan opposition has effectively disintegrated. Despite this, the gold remains frozen in the Bank of England, with no clear resolution in sight.
When the UK abandoned fair play and helped destroy an individual and proved their principles a myth
New information raises further concerns about the politicisation of the WikiLeaks founder’s legal case.
Source: UK Government Deployed 15 Staff on Secret Operation To Seize Julian Assange – scheerpost.com
But, she said on Twitter: “A law that doesn’t allow Scotland to choose our own future without Westminster consent exposes as myth any notion of the UK as a voluntary partnership & makes case for (independence).”
Stumbling from crisis to crisis, the country is on its third prime minister of the year. Energy bills have skyrocketed by 96 percent since last winter, and rent has shot up by as much as 20 percent, while inflation — which currently stands at 12.3 percent — has been predicted to rise as high as 18 percent by the first few months of 2023.
This is happening in a country which was the first in Western Europe to register 200,000 deaths from the coronavirus and has already been subject to brutal austerity measures that have wrecked the social fabric.
Source: Strike Wave Rocks Britain
Without hesitation, the UK Tories fucked the Republic of Ireland as well with Brexit isolating it from much easier trade routes in and out of the country.
Britain’s economy shrank by a less severe than expected 0.2 per cent in the three months to September, according to official data which is likely to represent the start a lengthy recession.
Source: UK economy shrinks as recession risk looms – Michael West
Wealthier than the King
Former UK chancellor Rishi Sunak has become the United Kingdom’s third prime minister in seven weeks after his rival Penny Mordaunt withdrew from the Conservative Party leadership contention.
Sunak becomes PM during a period so fractious it has required Wikipedia to put together a disambiguation page for the phrase “2022 United Kingdom government crisis”, and with the Tories lagging more than 30 percentage points behind the Labour Party in the polls.
Rishi Sunak will be the first non-white, non-Christian prime minister of the United Kingdom. What else do we know about the man?
The sudden departure of Britain’s new Prime Minister has valuable messages for the watching world, as Alan Austin reports.
Source: Brits facing ever-worsening poverty can be mightily thankful Liz Truss is going
Boris Johnson has returned to the United Kingdom as he considers an audacious attempt to win a second term as prime minister only weeks after he was forced to step down.
Source: Boris Johnson supporters say he has the numbers for a comeback
No sensible person will be seeking the office. But the Tory Party is riddled with the insensible. Sunak is likely to recontest. The leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, is also a contender. Even Johnson, who did more than most to denigrate the office, is contemplating a return. For the moment, the lettuce won out. At the very least, it deserves a run.
Source: Exit Liz Truss; Enter Lettuce – » The Australian Independent Media Network
British Prime Minister Liz Truss has quit after just 44 days in the job — sparking a new leadership contest for the fifth Conservative prime minister in just over six years.
The premiership of Liz Truss has effectively been over for days, perhaps even weeks, but cruelly she’s yet to be put out of her misery. It is coming, there’s no doubt. And for everyone’s sake, it should really hurry up.
Source: A day like no other as Liz Truss’ reign goes from absurd to outright ridiculous
Britain’s new finance minister Jeremy Hunt has signalled further reversals from Prime Minister Liz Truss and said the PM has made mistakes as she battles to keep her job.
Just over a month into her term, Ms Truss fired Kwasi Kwarteng as her chancellor of the exchequer on Friday (local time) and scrapped parts of their controversial economic package.
With opinion poll ratings dire for both the ruling Conservative Party and the prime minister personally, many of her own lawmakers are asking, not if, but how Ms Truss should be removed.
Ms Truss has turned to Mr Hunt to help salvage her premiership less than 40 days after taking office.
The move and Mr Hunt’s decisive statements have led political commentators to question ‘Who’s in charge?’ and whether the prime minister has killed her own authority.
UK Prime Minister Liz Truss has fired her finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng and scrapped parts of their economic package in a desperate bid to stay in power and survive the market and political turmoil gripping the country.
Source: UK PM sacks Kwarteng, company tax to rise – Michael West
Never underestimate the power of failure.
As the Liz Truss disaster show demonstrates, the next pitfall is probably just around the corner. The UK Prime Minister has shown, along with her distinctly oblivious Chancellor of the Exchequer, how to balls up the economy in the shortest timeframe imaginable.
Source: Liz Truss’ speech does little to assuage abysmal approval ratings
Barely into her prime ministership, Truss has laid the basis for its demise. When she and her party return to Westminster, the sense of vultures circling will be palpable. While recent years tell us that polls are nonsensical excursions of fancy, rarely to be trusted, it is hard to sense that the current figures are off. Should they remain at their current levels, a massacre at the ballot box is in the making.
Source: The Liz Truss Disaster Show – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Truss is a YO-YO PM
Treasury chief Kwasi Kwarteng announced a U-turn over an unfunded tax cut unveiled just days ago that proved unpopular even with his Conservative Party.
Source: UK Scraps Tax Cut For Wealthy That Sparked Market Turmoil | HuffPost Latest News
UK’s Truss proves to be a Yo-Yo
Oil jumped as OPEC+ considered reducing output at its upcoming meeting while the pound swung higher after the UK government said it would reverse a controversial tax cut that had roiled British markets.
LNP’s Angus Taylor a senior Liberal’s reply:
No. This is not [due to come in] until 2024. We want to see growth. We can provide the services that Australians need. And so … we do want to see the tax cuts come through. They’re very different from the UK tax cuts.
We haven’t seen anything like the reaction from the markets that we saw in the UK. So I think drawing that analogy, which I know some in Labor are doing, I think, is very inappropriate. They are not the same thing.
Source: Pound jumps after UK reverses tax cuts – Michael West
Australia won the last election. Why hasn’t the UK, US, Sweden, Italy, Brazil and so many more turned back the right-wing tide?? Only 900 attended the CPAC conference in Melbourne. So Albo should set a global example and make Australia a beacon of what can and needs to be done moving forward.
‘As wages fall while profits soar, our message is clear… We are here to win.’
Source: ‘Enough is Enough’: Hundreds of Thousands March Across the UK
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