Some 13 of the 31 members of Labour’s shadow cabinet have received donations from a prominent pro-Israel lobby group or individual funder, it can be revealed.
The list of recipients includes party leader Keir Starmer, his deputy Angela Rayner, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, and even the former vice-chair of Labour Friends of Palestine, Lisa Nandy, who is now shadow international development minister.
These donations were provided by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a pro-Israel lobby group which takes MPs on “fact-finding” missions to the region, and Sir Trevor Chinn, a multi-millionaire business tycoon and long-time pro-Israel lobbyist.
More than half of Starmer’s shadow cabinet are listed as parliamentary supporters or officers of LFI.
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Pro-Israel lobbying
Sir Trevor Chinn is a British multi-millionaire who has spent decades working in the motor industry, chairing such organisations as the AA, the RAC, and Kwikfit.
Chinn is also a longstanding pro-Israel lobbyist. Since the 1980s, he has funded LFI and Conservative Friends of Israel and played a leading role in groups such as Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) and the Jewish Leadership Council.
The Guardiandescribed BICOM in 2009 as “Britain’s most active pro-Israeli lobbying organisation – which flies journalists to Israel on fact-finding trips and organises access to senior government figures”.
It added that the organisation had “received nearly £1.4m in two years from a billionaire donor whose father made a fortune manufacturing arms in Israel”, referring to Poju Zabludowicz, a London-based business tycoon.
Starmer received a £50,000 donation from Chinn during his campaign for the Labour leadership in 2020 – and failed to declare this until after he’d won the election.
Declassified has found that Chinn has donated to eight other members of the shadow cabinet, including Rayner, Lammy, Reeves, Streeting, shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson, shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall, and shadow environment secretary Steve Reed.
Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay has called for next week’s King’s Speech to tackle the climate and nature emergencies.
Green Party Co-leader Adrian_Ramsay. Wikipedia CC.
Ramsay said:
“Rishi Sunak has decided when in a climate hole keep digging. Pushing ahead with new oil and gas drilling licences is an act of environmental vandalism. Especially at a time when the country is reeling from hugely damaging storms and floods, which scientists warn will become more frequent, ferocious and destructive as our planet heats.
“It seems fossil fools are driving government energy policy – pushing a false narrative that extracting more climate-wrecking oil and gas out of the North Sea will lead to energy security and lower bills. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“Green lighting energy giants to exploit fossil fuel reserves they then sell on the global market at global prices cannot provide either security or cheaper energy bills. This can only come from ramping up cheaper and abundant renewable resources such as solar and onshore wind together with a mass home insulation programme.
“That’s why Green MP Caroline Lucas has set out five Bills that the government ought to introduce to tackle the climate and nature emergencies and address the cost-of-living crisis, including a Just Fossil Fuel Phaseout Bill and a Green New Deal Bill.
“The attack on road safety measures is a further deplorable and desperate attempt to pick up a few votes through creating a culture war. But the fact that the Conservatives need to go to such extremes to create a wedge issue with Labour shows that Labour simply aren’t offering the bold alternative or hopeful vision that our communities so desperately need.
“It is clear, whoever forms the government after the next general election, we are going to need more Green MPs pushing legislation that will lead to a greener, fairer, healthier and safer country.”
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
The co-leaders of the Green Party have written to the UK government and the official opposition urging them to “listen to the people” and join international calls for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza conflict.
In a letter to both the Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, and his Labour counterpart, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Green co-leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, deputy leader Zack Polanski and Global Solidarity spokesperson Carne Ross set out how the only way to protect civilians is for the fighting to stop.
In addition, they call on both the Conservatives and Labour to throw their weight behind an “internationally arbitrated once-and-for-all settlement” so that “Israeli and Palestinian citizens can live in safety and security with their rights, at last, fully protected.”
Co-leader Carla Denyer said:
“The mass civilian suffering we have seen in Israel and Gaza has shocked the world. Over 700 civilians are being killed every day, one child every ten minutes. The dire humanitarian situation is clearly intolerable and must end.
“We cannot hear arguments about violence now somehow preventing further violence in future without shuddering. The lives of children cannot be bartered in this way.
“We are deeply concerned that neither the UK government nor the official opposition has joined international calls for a ceasefire. It is with deep regret that the Green Party feels the need to point out that at times like these, silence is complicity.
“We urge both the government and the Labour Party to listen to the British people, three-quarters of whom want an immediate ceasefire.”
In the letters, the Green Party sets out how war crimes have been committed by both sides since Hamas’s horrific attacks on 7 October.
Green Party Co-leader Adrian_Ramsay. Wikipedia CC.
Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said:
“The awful attacks committed by Hamas on 7 October were brutal violence, and the hostages must be released unconditionally, but the horrific attacks we saw on that day cannot justify military actions that break international law.
“There is no military route to long-term safety and security for the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, as they both deserve. Instead, there must be a political settlement, based on the requirements of international law and beginning with an end to the occupation.
“The UK government should push for an internationally arbitrated once-and-for-all settlement that fully ends the occupation of Palestinian territories including East Jerusalem, in accordance with the requirements of international law.
“It used to be the case that international law was the basis of UK government policy, and the positions of both Conservatives and Labour. It is deeply troubling that this seems to have been forgotten by both government and opposition. Such an abandonment will do long-term harm to Britain’s already-questionable reputation as a defender of the international rules-based order.”
Trauma surgeons treat an injured man after Israeli bombardment, at the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on October 21, 2023 (Photo: Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images)
Fresh demands for a major increase in humanitarian aid and an end to the bombing came as Gaza’s only cancer hospital shut down due to a lack of fuel.
As the World Health Organization warns of an “imminent public health catastrophe” in Gaza amid Israeli attacks on medical workers and infrastructure, doctors and other frontline medics said Wednesday that only an immediate cease-fire would give them a fighting chance to save countless lives.
Responding Wednesday to the shutdown of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital—Gaza’s only cancer treatment center—due to lack of fuel and damage from Israeli airstrikes, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “no words can describe our concern for the patients who have just lost the only possibility to receive lifesaving cancer treatment or palliative care.”
Tedros added: “I urge and I plead—for full medical and fuel aid access NOW! The more we wait, the more we put these fragile lives at risk.”
The WHO chief’s plea came a day after Christian Lindmeier, a spokesperson for the Geneva-based United Nations agency, warned that “an imminent public health catastrophe… looms with the mass displacement, the overcrowding, the damage to water and sanitation infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said Tuesday that “child deaths due to dehydration, particularly infant deaths due to dehydration, are a growing threat.”
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called Gaza a “graveyard” for children, more than 3,600 of whom have been killed by Israeli bombardment, with another 1,000 minors reported missing, according to Palestinian and other officials.
Israeli forces have attacked numerous hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and medical workers, including the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital and al-Hilu Hospital. The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday that the bombardment that damaged al-Hilu “endangers the lives of women in the maternity wards and medical staff.”
According to an “urgent call for protecting healthcare workers in Gaza” published Tuesday in the British medical journal The Lancet, Israeli forces have attacked 57 medical facilities since launching the war on Gaza on October 7, killing 73 workers—including doctors, nurses, paramedics, and others—as of October 24. Sixteen of the medical personnel were killed while on duty.
We spoke with @GhassanAbuSitt1, a doctor who is operating inside Gaza – he's fearful of what is to come if fuel runs out in hospitals.
As Israel’s bombardment of Gaza exacts a heavy toll on overwhelmed medical workers and infrastructure in the besieged strip, frontline medics like Dr. Noureddein al-Khateeb—a 38-year-old resident doctor in the emergency department at the Nasser Medical Center in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis—say they are living “in a constant state of threat and fear.”
“It’s constant fear on top of the exhaustion we’re experiencing,” al-Khateeb toldThe New Humanitarian on Wednesday. “But one shouldn’t think of that too much. I can’t. If I do, I won’t get any work done.”
Al-Khateeb added that “we’re also afraid for our families’ safety, but what can we do?”
Inside Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, healthcare workers suffer trauma, burnout, and loss Medical staff must wrestle with the fear of not knowing if it will be their own loved-ones who are the next victims of Israeli airstrikes. https://t.co/PkxItCBDNl
Dr. Mohamed Abu Mousa, a radiologist at Nasser, said one of the few trips he’s made outside the hospital since Israeli bombardment began was to bury his 7-year-old son after he was killed in an October 15 Israeli airstrike on their family home.
“We don’t have the luxury of pausing to grieve,” he told The New Humanitarian. “The heartache is immense, but the wounded are endless. We have to keep going.”
Conditions are dire inside Gaza’s hospitals, which are running out of or low on fuel, medicines, equipment, and other essential services and supplies.
“We’re operating on children without anesthetics,” Léo Cans, who heads the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) mission in Palestine, toldCNN Tuesday. “We don’t have morphine for them.”
"Doctors are distressed. They are calling us crying…by the horror they are seeing…This has to stop. We're operating on children without anesthetics. We don't have morphine for them."
On Wednesday, MSF international president Dr. Christos Christou said in a video published on social media that “we’ve seen and heard the stories of the hell being unleashed on Gaza” as “helpless people are being subjected to horrific bombing” and “families have nowhere to run or hide.”
Christou continued:
So many people need help. What medical staff can do is just a drop in the ocean compared to the immense needs. Our teams working in Gaza are exhausted and terrified. Our staff tell us that pregnant women can’t get to hospitals to deliver. People are stuck under the rubble of shelled-out buildings. Children are having limbs amputated while lying on the floor.
“An immediate cease-fire is the only way the people of Gaza can find safety and the essential aid they urgently need,” Christou asserted. “The bombing, the all-out assault, needs to stop now… As a human being, I beg—stop the bombing and allow people in Gaza to live.”
The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday afternoon that at least 8,796 Palestinians—including nearly 2,300 women and over 3,600 children—have been killed in Israeli attacks, while around 23,000 other people have been injured.
We cannot vote for the re-election of a U.S. president who enables Israel’s campaign of mass starvation, bombardment, and murder of Palestinian civilians.
As an anti-Zionist Jew and a lifelong Democrat, I have signed a public statement that bluntly declares, “We will not vote for Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential elections if he continues to support Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of the more than 2 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.”
In signing this statement, I join with over 1,000 Arab, Muslim, Jewish, Christian and allied U.S. voters who have signed the statement to express our disgust with the horrifying policies being embraced by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. As the statement goes on to say, “We cannot vote for the re-election of a U.S. president who enables Israel’s campaign of mass starvation, bombardment, and murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” Please check it out and join me in signing.
Biden’s actions in blindly supporting Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with the plan to give Israel another $14 BILLION in military aid, are the last straw.
In addition to always having voted for Democrats, I have also volunteered for and donated money to many Democratic campaigns. In primary campaigns, I have focused my support on brave candidates like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush. I have done so, not only because of their support for Palestinian rights, but for their overall progressive positions on many issues that I am concerned about. But all too often, I have had to bite my tongue and vote for a Democrat as the least worst candidate in a general election. However, enough is enough. The administration has gone too far by failing to protect Palestinian civilians from a continuing genocide. It is now time to step up and tell the Democratic Party that nominating Biden and Harris for 2024 is both a losing strategy and an act of great immorality.
I too mourn for the many civilians who have been killed in Israel and Gaza, and I demand that all war crimes be vigorously prosecuted. As my late mother often said, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” yet too many elected leaders ignore Israel’s brutality while condemning the Palestinian victims. Indeed history is clear that for the last 75 years, Israel has been exempted from responsibility for its frequent violations of Palestinian rights, as it uses lethal violence to confiscate Palestinian land and hand it over to Israeli Jews.
We know that Hillary Clinton lost because many Democrats didn’t come out and vote. Biden and Harris won because many of us progressives held our noses and voted for them as the only alternative to former President Donald Trump. However, Biden’s actions in blindly supporting Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with the plan to give Israel another $14 BILLION in military aid, are the last straw.
While elected officials like Biden, Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Nancy Pelosi spout Zionist talking points, many Americans are demanding an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. In a recent Data for Progress poll, 80% of Democrats and 66% of likely voters want the president to call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. A CBS News poll showed that 53% of Democrats oppose sending more weapons to Israel, and 70% support U.S. aid to Gaza.
America’s elected leaders supported apartheid South Africa’s crimes for far too long, and the same can now be said about today’s Democrats as they continue to ignore Israel’s crimes. It is time for all Democratic voters to make it clear that only a significant change in Biden’s approach to Palestine can enable him to earn our votes in 2024. Please join me and over 500 other voters who have declared that we cannot vote for Biden in 2024 if he continues to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
