A view of the Elizabeth Tower, also known as Big Ben, and the Palace of Westminster, November 5, 2023
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There appear to be no legal restrictions when it comes to buying, treating or influencing a Westminster MP, other than reporting requirements.
Which brings us to the major source of financial corruption in British politics, namely the donations, directorships and consultancies handed out by capitalist monopoly corporations and their multimillionaire directors.
The source of their wealth is the mental and physical labour performed by their workers. Yet the latter have no say when it comes to corporate donations.
Contrast this to the strict requirements placed on trade unions to seek the consent of their members by secret ballot to make political donations.
Likewise, there should be strict limits on the amount of dosh that millionaires and billionaires can dish out to their hired politicians in any given period.
Perhaps an incoming Labour government could give these matters some serious attention after July 4.
Senior Conservatives have repeatedly promoted a pothole repair machine made by a company which has donated huge sums to the party and its MPs
Conservative politicians have repeatedly promoted a pothole-repairing machine, after their party took millions of pounds in donations from the company that makes it.
Conservative Deputy Chair Jonathan Gullis told MPs in December about his local council’s purchase of the “JCB Pothole Pro”, which he described as “revolutionary”, claiming that it “fixes potholes twice as fast and at half the cost of other machinery”. He also repeated his endorsement on Facebook.
He later went on to register a £10,000 donation from the company.
Other Conservative politicians to endorse the product include the Transport Secretary Mark Harper, who took part in a photo opportunity with JCB and the Pothole Pro last October.
Harper went on to tell MPs in December that “I was lucky enough to visit JCB myself and see the Pothole Pro in action, as well as the innovative work it is doing, as a fantastic world leader in innovation, on some of its hydrogen engines for its mobile off-road machinery.”
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Boris Johnson stands on JCB machine alongside JCB chairman Lord Bramford during his visit to the new JCB Factory in India in April 2022. Photo: Ben Stansall/ AP
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Deputy Chairman Jonathan Gullis’ own endorsement of the Pothole Pro came before he declared the acceptance of a £10,000 personal donation from the company, which employs hundreds of people in his constituency.
As Byline Timesrevealed last week, Gullis accepted the donation just weeks before the company announced it would be closing its warehouse in Stoke on Trent.
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Another Conservative MP also promoted the ‘Pothole Pro’ after receiving a donation from JCB.
Last week Theo Clarke, who is standing for re-election as the MP for Stafford, posted a series of social media posts referring to JCB and its’ ‘Pothole Pro’ machine, after having previously registered a £5,000 donation from the company in 2020. She did not declare to her followers about her previous funding from the company.
There has been criticisms of the decision by some Conservative councils to purchase the Pothole Pro.
According to the Gloucestershire Live news website, Gloucestershire County Council approved a “last minute” amendment to its budget earlier this year in order to purchase a JCB Pothole Pro, worth an estimated £200,000.
Liberal Democrat Councillor David Willingham raised concerns that the purchase had not been “properly audited for probity reasons” and pointed to criticisms about the effectiveness and value for money of the machines.
Despite the high cost of the machines, the Pothole Pros do not actually fill potholes, but are merely used for preparing the holes to be filled by hand.
Graham Stringer, Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, on GB News. Credit: GB News / YouTube
It’s “a scandal” that the party continues to support Graham Stringer, campaigners say.
The Labour Party has been criticised by campaigners after a board member of the UK’s leading climate science denial group was reselected as a candidate at the upcoming general election.
Graham Stringer, a Labour MP since 1997, has been reselected as the party’s candidate for Blackley and Broughton in Greater Manchester. Since 2015, Stringer has been a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a group founded to contradict established climate science and advocate against policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The GWPF has in the past expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mis-characterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”. GWPF director Benny Peiser has said “it’s extraordinary that anyone should think there is a climate crisis”.
Staff members at the GWPF and its sister group Net Zero Watch have been given a regular platform on the right-wing broadcaster GB News in recent months, during which they have claimed that the climate emergency is simply “scaremongering”, that “net zero is doing enormous damage to the economy”, and that “the lights will go out” if we divest from fossil fuels.
“It’s a scandal that Labour is allowing Graham Stringer to stand again,” said Carys Boughton of the Fossil Free Parliament campaign group. “To keep a forthright, prominent climate denier in the fold is to suggest that the party doesn’t understand the urgency of the crisis we are facing. We need Labour to actively stand against the forces that are compromising good climate policy, be they external or within their own ranks.”
The GWPF is based in 55 Tufton Street, Westminster, which has housed a number of libertarian groups that are opposed to clean energy policies and climate science.
Stringer has vocally questioned climate science and policies to achieve net zero emissions. At a Battle of Ideas event in 2023, he said that the policies adopted by the UK to address emissions “make China stronger, make us vulnerable to supply chains that we have no control over, and cost large amounts of money.”
In 2014, Stringer was one of only two MPs on Parliament’s Energy and Climate Change Committee to vote against accepting the conclusion of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that humans are the dominant cause of global warming.
Stringer and Conservative MP Peter Lilley said that they did “not dispute the science of the greenhouse effect”, but that “there remain great uncertainties about how much warming a given increase in greenhouse gases will cause, how much damage any temperature increase will cause and the best balance between adaptation to versus prevention of global warming.”
Stringer also planned to join Reform UK’s Nigel Farage and Richard Tice for their launch of a net zero referendum campaign in 2022 (though he later pulled out of the event). Reform wants to scrap the UK’s 2050 net zero target, while both Farage and Tice are critics of climate science. Tice has claimed that “CO2 isn’t poison. It’s plant food”.
Speaking on GB News about his initial decision to campaign alongside Farage and Tice, Stringer said that “I’ve argued for a long time against the extra costs being placed on people to achieve net zero.”
Energy price rises triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were exacerbated in the UK – the worst hit country in western Europe – due to its over-reliance on gas. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s independent spending watchdog, has said that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Conservative peer Lord David Frost is a director of the GWPF alongside Stringer. Tory and Reform donor Terence Mordaunt is also a director of the GWPF, while Conservative politician Andrea Jenkyns is a director of Net Zero Watch.
“Labour can claim a serious commitment to environmental and climate policy. Or it can select as an MP a candidate who is on the board of a Tufton Street climate science denial think tank. But it can’t do both,” said Jolyon Maugham, director of the Good Law Project.
Labour and Climate Change
The Labour Party has this week been finalising its list of candidates for the general election, with its full slate set to be submitted on Friday (7 June) ahead of the 4 July vote.
The party has been campaigning prominently on the issue of clean power, pledging to create a state-owned renewable energy investment vehicle, GB Energy, that it says will help to “speed up and scale the deployment of new technologies”.
Labour has also said that it plans to remove fossil fuels from UK electricity production by 2030, five years earlier than current government plans, and to ban new North Sea oil and gas licences.
Reports suggest that the party views climate change as a key dividing line of the election campaign, with Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government having overseen the watering down of several net zero policies over the last year. Sunak launched the election campaign by claiming that he had “prioritised energy security and your family finances over environmental dogma”.
However, Labour has been criticised for dropping its plan to invest £28 billion a year in green infrastructure to reach net zero. On announcing that the policy would be scaled down, Labour leader Keir Starmer said that “fiscal rules come first”, adding that higher interest rates meant that financing the plan would be more expensive. The pledged investment has now been reduced to £15 billion a year.
Labour did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment, but a spokesperson previously told The Guardian: “The choice at this election is clear: a Conservative government that pollutes our rivers with record levels of toxic sewage, is led by and funded by climate deniers and fails to meet our climate and nature targets; or a Labour government that will restore nature, deliver the largest investment in clean energy in our history so we can cut bills for families, make Britain energy independent and tackle the climate crisis to protect our home for our children and grandchildren.”
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green Party, said:
“The Green Party is proud to announce that in this election we will have candidates standing in 574 seats in England and Wales.
“All over the country voters will have the opportunity to vote Green and vote for real hope and real change instead of the half measures and broken pledges on offer from The Conservative and Labour.
“We will be putting our manifesto to voters next week with practical solutions to the cost-of-living crisis, building new affordable homes, protecting our NHS from creeping privatisation and cleaning up our toxic rivers and seas.
“If elected, Green MPs will push the next government for bold action to achieve the real changes that are needed to confront the big challenges our country faces.
“This is a historic moment and the first time we’ve had this many candidates. It reflects the incredible journey we’ve been on over the past five local elections in which we’ve increased our number of councillors nearly five-fold.”
Palestinian children injured in Israeli attacks on Al-Maghazi refugee camp are brought to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza on November 5, 2023. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency)
“It took a genocide that killed 15,000 children and maimed and scarred thousands more but the U.N. has finally and rightly added Israel to its List of Shame,” said one Palestinian observer.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres informed Israel on Friday that, for the first time, it is being added to the so-called “List of Shame” of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts, a decision that infuriated Israeli officials but was welcomed by human rights defenders as long overdue.
The Secretary-General Office’s annual Children and Armed Conflict report—which is likely to be released publicly later this month—has included countries and militant groups such as Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Iraq, Islamic State, Myanmar, Russia, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. This is believed to be the first time the list has included a nation hailed by Western governments as a democracy.
“It took a genocide that killed 15,000 children and maimed and scarred thousands more but the U.N. has finally and rightly added Israel to its List of Shame,” Palestinian political analyst Nour Odeh said on social media. “Arms embargo NOW!”
Israel to be listed on the UNSG's list of shame of armed forces & groups committing grave violations of children's rights.
Historic, but so, so late. So many Palestinian children might still be alive if world leaders had the courage to speak up earlier. https://t.co/mvvKywwO3o
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “the U.N. has put itself on the blacklist of history today when it joined the supporters of the Hamas murderers.”
“The IDF is the most moral army in the world and no delusional decision by the U.N. will change that,” added the prime minister, who International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan is seeking to arrest along with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes including extermination.
This year’s 2024 List of Shame will also include Hamas, which led the October 7 attack that left more than 1,100 Israelis and others dead, including 38 children. Around 30 minors were also kidnapped by Hamas, all of whom are believed to have been freed. Khan wants to arrest three leaders of Hamas, whose members are accused of extermination, rape, and other crimes.
In retaliation, Israel launched an assault and siege on theGaza Strip—now on its 244th day—killing more than 36,700 Palestinians including at least 15,000 minors, according to Palestinian and international agencies. Some children have allegedly been sexually abused and executedby Israeli troops.
More children were killed in Gaza in the first four months of the war than in four years of conflict worldwide, in what Philippe Lazzarini, who heads the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, called a “war on children… their childhood, and their future.”
There are also tens of thousands of children among the more than 83,000 Palestinians wounded by Israeli bombs and bullets in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly displaced by Israel’s bombardment and invasion, but there’s no safe place for them to go.
The Israeli blockade of Gaza and obliteration of its healthcare infrastructure have exacerbated what the U.N.’s top food official has called a “full-blown famine” in the north and widespread starvation throughout the strip. Dozens of children have starved to death.
Israel’s conduct in the war is under investigation by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in a genocide case brought by South Africa and supported by more than 30 other nations and regional blocs.
The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) calls Gaza the most dangerous place in the world for children. The perils are not only physical; the annihilation of Gaza has also wrought tremendous psychological damage upon its children, many of whom have survived multiple Israeli campaigns.
According to UNICEF, more than 17,000 Gazan children are now orphans, with some having lost their entire families to Israeli attacks. International medical workers have coined a new acronym for these children: WCNSF, or, wounded child, no surviving family.
The UN has a “List of Shame” to publicly names those who harm children in war
After more than 15,000 children have been murdered in Gaza 🇵🇸, Israel 🇮🇱 has been put on that ‘shame list’
Between 2000 and the start of the Gaza war, Israeli forces killed more than 2,300 children throughout Palestine, according to Defense for Children International-Palestine. Prior to the current war, the highest number of Palestinian children killed in one year was 546 in 2014, when Israel carried out its Operation Protective Edge invasion of Gaza.
Despite all this killing, Israel was perennially given a pass from the List of Shame.
“Including Israel in the List of Shame is an urgent necessity to put an end to its severe and horrific violations and to protect the rights of Palestinian children. It is also crucial for maintaining the integrity and credibility of U.N. mechanisms, which are at risk of erosion due to double standards,” said Radhya Al-Mutawakel, who heads the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights.
Al-Mutawakel asserted that blacklisting Israel sends “a clear message that the U.N. stands firmly for the protection of children’s rights worldwide and will not tolerate violations against them” and also conveys “that the U.N. deals uniformly with all parties involved in grave violations against children, regardless of the perpetrators’ identities or the children’s backgrounds.”
Numerous Palestine advocates said Israel’s inclusion on the list of shame underscores the urgency of halting shipments of weapons used to kill Palestinian children.
“Israel is a terrorist nation,” said British union leader Howard Beckett. “Arms embargo. Sanctions. Hague.”
