The song uses the tune of the 1974 Mud classic Lonely This Christmas, which also topped the charts at number one when it was first released.
The parody version goes: “It’ll be freezing this Christmas, without fuel at home, it’ll be freezing this Christmas, while Keir Starmer is warm. It’ll be cold, so cold, without fuel at home, this Christmas.”
The song then uses a clip of Starmer saying: “She told me that she doesn’t get out of bed till midday because she doesn’t want to turn the heating on.”
[dizzy: That’s Labour Socialist MP John McDonnell wearing the red tie.]
Disabled activists have questioned why a Labour-run department was in the high court this week defending cuts proposed by the last government which would cause “human suffering” among hundreds of thousands of claimants of out-of-work disability benefits.
They spoke during a vigil outside the Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday (pictured) as disabled activist Ellen Clifford and her lawyers from Public Law Project were preparing to challenge the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) over a “rushed and disingenuous” consultation on plans to tighten the work capability assessment (WCA).
The plans were announced in the 2023 autumn budget, and would see more than 400,000 disabled people losing out on £416 a month by 2028-29, with many also facing strict new conditions and the risk of benefit sanctions that could see them lose even more money.
Clifford says the changes would be “cataclysmic for Deaf and disabled people in the UK and would push many into destitution”.
Labour’s work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, has promised to make the savings promised by the Conservatives, who pledged to cut spending by £2.8 billion in the four years to 2028-29 by tightening the WCA.
Kendall said the government would make these savings by “bringing forward our own proposals”, but she has yet to rule out the WCA changes.
Tracey Lazard, chief executive of Inclusion London, told Tuesday’s vigil that it was “incomprehensible that the new Labour government is picking up these plans and seemingly running ahead with them in glee”.
Palestinians mourn over the bodies of civil defence workers victims of an Israeli army strike in the Nuseirat camp, at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, December 16, 2024
GAZA’S death toll from Israel’s 14-month attack has topped 45,000 people, health officials said today, as a United Nations-run school housing displaced people was targeted.
Israeli forces bombed the UNRWA-run Ahmed bin Aziz School in southern Khan Younis on Sunday evening, killing at least 20 people, including six children.
…
The Israeli military said that it had “conducted a precise strike on Hamas terrorists who were operating inside a command and control centre embedded within a compound” that had served as a school in Khan Younis.
It did not provide evidence.
The attack followed the targeting of a school in northern Beit Hanoon that killed 43 people and another on a civil defence site that killed Al-Jazeera journalist Ahmed al-Louh and five rescue workers.
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Gaza’s Health Ministry said that 45,028 people have been killed since October 7 2023, in the besieged strip and 106,962 have been injured.
It said that the real toll could be significantly higher as thousands of bodies remain buried under rubble or in areas that medics cannot access.
Israeli troops and military vehicles cross in and out of Syria through a gate in the boundary fence near the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights on December 15, 2024. (Photo: Mati Milstein/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Turkey’s foreign ministry condemned the plan as “a new stage in Israel’s goal of expanding its borders through occupation.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would move to expand settlements in the occupied and illegally annexed Golan Heights, exploiting the collapse of the Assad government to further entrench its control of Syrian land.
Netanyahu said in a statement Sunday that “strengthening” the Golan Heights is synonymous with “strengthening the state of Israel” and declared that “we will continue to hold onto it, make it flourish, and settle in it.”
According to Netanyahu’s office, the Israeli government “unanimously approved” the prime minister’s push to double the settler population in the Golan Heights.
There are currently dozens of Israeli settlements housing roughly 20,000 people in the territory, the bulk of which Israel unlawfully annexed in 1981 after occupying it during the 1967 war.
Israel’s settlement expansion plan sparked outrage from countries in the region, with Turkey’s foreign ministry condemning the decision Sunday as “a new stage in Israel’s goal of expanding its borders through occupation.”
The foreign ministry of Saudi Arabiaaccused Israel of “sabotaging” Syria’s “prospects for restoring its security and stability.”
“The kingdom reaffirms that the occupied Golan is Syrian, Arab land,” the ministry added.
Israel’s military has wasted no time advancing on Syrian territory in the wake of Assad’s fall. As Drop Site noted over the weekend, “Israeli tanks have advanced into villages and towns in Syria’s Quneitra governorate, across from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, damaging streets, cutting down trees, and destroying electricity poles.”
“Israel ordered residents to evacuate their homes. When many refused, Israeli forces destroyed water supply networks and power lines in an attempt to force them out,” the outlet added.
On Saturday, as The Guardian reported, “Israel struck dozens of sites in Syria overnight with airstrikes” after the Israeli defense minister announced the country’s forces “would remain for the winter on Mount Hermon—known to Syrians as Jabel Sheikh—in positions they occupied last week.”
Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of the rebel group that helped drive Assad from power, denounced Israel’s “uncalculated military adventures” but said that “the priority at this stage is reconstruction and stability, not being drawn into disputes that could lead to further destruction.”
“Syria’s war-weary condition, after years of conflict and war, does not allow for new confrontations,” he said.
Israel’s push for settlement expansion in the Golan Heights comes amid the country’s large-scale, catastrophic assault on the Gaza Strip, which Israeli forces are preparing to occupy indefinitely.
President-elect Donald Trump’s return to power in the United States is expected to embolden the far-right forces in Netanyahu’s government that are seeking to return settlements to Gaza and annex the West Bank.
Netanyahu said in a video statement that he had “a very friendly, warm, and important discussion” with Trump late Saturday about the future of the Middle East.
“I said we would change the Middle East and we are doing so,” the prime minister said. “I discussed with President-elect Trump the need to complete the victory.”
A photo taken on December 15, 2024 shows residents sitting among piles of debris of metal sheets and wood after homes were destroyed by the cyclone Chido that hit France’s Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte. (Photo: Kwezi/AFP via Getty Images)
“You feel like you are in the aftermath of a nuclear war,” said one resident. “I saw an entire neighborhood disappear.”
Undocumented migrants living in informal settlements in the French territory of Mayotte were among those whose lives and livelihoods were most devastated by Cyclone Chido, a tropical cyclone that slammed into the impoverished group of islands in the Indian Ocean over the weekend.
Authorities reported a death toll of at least 20 on Monday, but the territory’s prefect, François-Xavier Bieuville, told a local news station that the widespread devastation indicated there were likely “some several hundred dead.”
“Maybe we’ll get close to a thousand,” said Bieuville. “Even thousands… given the violence of this event.”
Mayotte, which includes two densely populated main islands, Grande-Terre and Petite-Terre, as well as smaller islands with few residents, is home to about 300,000 people.
The territory is one of the European Union’s poorest, with three-quarters of residents living below the poverty line, but roughly 100,000 people have come to Mayotte from the nearby African island nations of Madagascar and Comoros in recent decades, seeking better economic conditions.
Many of those people live in informal neighborhoods and shacks across the islands that were hardest hit by Chido, with aerial footage showing collections of houses “reduced to rubble,” according toCNN.
“What we are experiencing is a tragedy, you feel like you are in the aftermath of a nuclear war,” Mohamed Ishmael, a resident of the capital city, Mamoudzou, told Reuters. “I saw an entire neighborhood disappear.”
Bruno Garcia, owner of a hotel in Mamoudzou, echoed Ishmael’s comments, telling French CNN affiliate BFMTV: “It’s as if an atomic bomb fell on Mayotte.”
“The situation is catastrophic, apocalyptic,” said Garcia. “We lost everything. The entire hotel is completely destroyed.”
Residents of the migrant settlements in recent years have faced crackdowns from French police who have been tasked with rounding up people for deportation and dismantling shacks.
The aggressive response to migration reportedly led some families to stay in their homes rather than evacuate, for fear of being apprehended by police.
Now, some of those families’ homes have been razed entirely or stripped of their roofs and “engulfed by mud and sheet metal,” according to Estelle Youssouffa, who represents Mayotte in France’s National Assembly.
People in Mayotte’s most vulnerable neighborhoods are now without food or safe drinking water as hundreds of rescuers from France and the nearby French territory of Reunion struggle to reach victims amid widespread power outages.
“It’s the hunger that worries me most. There are people who have had nothing to eat or drink” since Saturday, French Sen. Salama Ramia, who represents Mayotte, told the BBC.
The Washington Postreported that Cyclone Chido became increasingly powerful and intense—falling just short of becoming a Category 5 hurricane with winds over 155 miles per hour—because of unusually warm water in the Indian Ocean. The ocean temperature ranged from 81-86°F along Chido’s path. Tropical cyclones typically form when ocean temperatures rise above 80°F.
“The intensity of tropical cyclones in the Southwest Indian Ocean has been increasing, [and] this is consistent with what scientists expect in a changing climate—warmer oceans fuel more powerful storms,” Liz Stephens, a professor of climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, told the Post.
People living on islands like Mayotte are especially vulnerable to climate disasters both because there’s little shielding them from powerful storms and because their economic conditions leave them with few options to flee to safety as a cyclone approaches.
“Even though the path of Cyclone Chido was well forecast several days ahead, communities on small islands like Mayotte don’t have the option to evacuate,” Stephens said. “There’s nowhere to go.”
