An F-15E Strike Eagle of the United States Air Force’s (USAF) 48th Fighter Wing, stationed at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, September 16, 2020
PEACE activists will camp outside RAF Lakenheath for 10 days as the Suffolk air base prepares for an “upcoming nuclear mission.”
Up to 50 members of Lakenheath Alliance for Peace set out on a three-day walk from Norwich to the United States Air Force base on Saturday and will set up camp there tomorrow until July 25 in their protest against nuclear weapons.
CND general secretary Kate Hudson said: “CND is a proud part of the Lakenheath Alliance for Peace and calls on everyone across Britain to get involved with this campaign.
“The return of US nuclear weapons to Lakenheath greatly increases the nuclear risk already faced by this country as it puts the whole of Britain on the nuclear front line.
“We call on the Labour government to explicitly refuse any US request to station their weapons of mass destruction here.”
Climate activists outside an incinerator in Aberdeen, July 13, 2024Photo: Climate Camp Scotland
SOME 100 climate activists have shut down an Aberdeen incinerator in the heart of the city’s most deprived community, Torry.
A £150 million waste-to-energy plant sited just 300 yards from a primary school and burning a staggering 150,000 tonnes of unrecycleable waste a year was brought to a standstill on Saturday as Climate Camp Scotland and local campaigners stood together on the picket line.
Demanding an end to private profiteering from pollution, the residents renewed their opposition to the plant, a joint project between Acciona Ltd, its operator Indaver UK, and Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire and Moray councils which opened, to local fury, in December despite a national moratorium on new incinerators.
Karryghan, an Edinburgh climate activist who joined the action, said: “Whether this is the Scottish government missing its ‘world-leading’ targets, or the continuing oil and gas projects from UK governments, this system makes promises but never puts words into action.
“The system that allows energy companies to make record billion-pound profits from polluting communities like Torry must be replaced. A fair world must have the interests of everyday people and their communities at the heart of it.”
UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention Michel Forst attended the trial of five Just Stop Oil supporters at Southwark Crown Court. He attended as an observer because of his serious concerns.
Prosecution of five Just Stop Oil activists over M25 protest led to chaotic scenes in court and concerns about ‘judicial persecution’
As part of his role as UN rapporteur for environmental defenders, Michel Forst has been watching proceedings against climate activists at courts across Europe.
But he may not have seen anything like what unfolded at Southwark crown court in London over the past two and a half weeks, where five Just Stop Oil activists were convicted for conspiring to cause gridlock on the M25 in November 2022.
On the days Forst visited, he witnessed three of the five defendants being arrested in court and dragged to the cells, protesters outside attempting to warn jurors they were not hearing the full case and a judge desperately trying to maintain control over his courtroom.
The judge, Christopher Hehir, had ruled that information about climate breakdown could not be entered into evidence, and could only be referred to by defendants briefly as the “political and philosophical beliefs” that motivated them – which he would tell the jury were in any case irrelevant to their deliberations.
But the defendants had other plans. They sought to turn Hehir’s court into a “site of civil resistance”, causing as much disruption as necessary to ensure that if the jury could not see their evidence on climate breakdown, then the jurors could at least be in no doubt it was being kept from them.
By the time the jury retired to consider a verdict, police had been called into court no fewer than seven times, four of the five defendants had been remanded to prison and 11 others were facing contempt of court proceedings for protests outside the courtroom.
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By the end of the trial, Whittaker De Abreu, the only one who had not represented herself, was the only defendant left in court.
As a punishment for their “persistent disruption”, Hehir slashed the time given to each defendant from one hour to 20 minutes. He further prohibited any mention of the climate crisis, the legal defences he had disallowed or the principle of jury equity – the idea that jurors can acquit based on their conscience.
As Hallam, Shaw, Lancaster and Gethin gave their speeches from behind the reinforced glass screen of the dock, they each proceeded to flout Hehir’s prohibitions, arguing they had been denied a right to a fair trial.
Hallam told jurors: “It’s blindingly obvious to us here first that you have not been given all the evidence you need. You cannot be sure of our guilt if you are not sure that you have not been given the evidence … we have received no good reason why we are not allowed to tell you what is blindingly obvious, namely what I’m not allowed to speak about. If you are not allowed to hear the blindingly obvious then it’s not a fair trial is it?”
It took just a day’s deliberations for the jury to unanimously find them guilty.
Given the recent history of UK climate protest trials, in which defendants have been sentenced to jail for merely mentioning the words “climate change”, and notwithstanding the dramatic arrests in court, Forst said he was surprised the judge gave them an opportunity to mention climate breakdown at all.
“But the little latitude they had to mention climate change was in the meantime emptied of its very meaning by the fact that, overall, the jury was told to ignore most of it,” he added.
Green Party’s co-leader and Bristol Central MP Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
In the wake of unfounded reports that Ed Miliband will announce a ban on new drilling in the North Sea, Green Party co-leader and MP for Bristol Central, Carla Denyer, has urged the energy secretary to do just that, and “send a clear signal to the fossil fuel industry that they have no future in the UK.” Denyer said:
“It didn’t take long for the right wing press to come out waving the banner for the fossil fuel industry together with the usual round of scare stories about a dent to the economy and tax revenues if we don’t continue to burn oil and gas. Those cheerleading for oil and gas corporations must not be allowed to derail us from the path towards a green transition. That is where our future prosperity and thousands of good new jobs lies. We need to seize the opportunities that greening the economy will bring.
“This is a test to see how brave and bold Labour will be and whether they will send a clear signal to the fossil fuel industry that they have no future in the UK. Ed Miliband certainly should ban all future licences for new North Sea oil and gas fields, and do so immediately.
“The Green Party would like to see him go further by revoking the licence for Rosebank which has the potential for producing around 500 million climate-wrecking barrels of oil. We would also like to see a carbon tax on polluters to help drive the transition to cleaner and cheaper renewable sources of energy.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is seen at the NATO 75th anniversary summit in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2024. (Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images)
“We are asking this government for leadership and to take a just decision, for the sake of Palestinians in Gaza who are living through ‘hell on Earth,'” said six rights groups.
A week after the British Labour Party won control of the United Kingdom’s government, six rights organizations called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to bring the country “back from the brink” and restore its “credibility on the international stage” by ending its military support for Israel.
“The Labour Party now has the chance to start restoring some credibility by ensuring the U.K. abides by international law, thereby extricating the U.K. from the indelible stain of complicity in Israeli crimes that deeply shock the conscience of humanity,” wrote the British Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and Al-Haq, based in Palestine.
The groups wrote the letter with the support of the International Center of Justice for Palestinians, War on Want, the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Addressing Starmer along with newly appointed Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Secretary of State for Business and Trade Jonathan Reynolds, the groups reminded the prime minister that following his election, he promised Britons that the “sunlight of hope was shining once again” after 14 years of Conservative rule, and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to say there is a “clear and urgent need for a cease-fire.”
“Calls for a cease-fire are evidently not enough, in particular when the U.K. is arming one party to the conflict,” wrote the groups, pointing out that earlier this week Palestinians in northern Gaza reported that recent bombing there has “matched October 2023 in its intensity—with levels of destruction not witnessed since World War II, nearly all civilian infrastructure is completely destroyed.”
“We are asking this government for leadership and to take a just decision, for the sake of Palestinians in Gaza who are living through ‘hell on Earth,'” they wrote. “The world should have put an end to their unimaginable suffering a long time ago. Labour must suspend, revoke, and refuse all arms licenses for Israel now.”
The U.K. licensed about £859,381 ($1.09 million) of weapons to Israel in the last three months of 2023, as the Israel Defense Forces relentlessly attacked Gaza and blocked nearly all humanitarian aid, leading to what 10 independent United Nations experts this week said is now famine across the enclave.
“The new Labour government’s calls for a cease-fire are meaningless while it continues to arm Israel. British weapons have killed too many Palestinians,” said GLAN lawyer Charlotte Andrews-Briscoe. “This government knows that the only lawful and moral decision is to stop arming Israel. Britons have voted for change: This government must deliver that change.”
On social media, GLAN amplified a video posted by Starmer on Sunday in which he pledged to “restore politics as a force for good.”
“We are calling on Keir Starmer to put these words into action,” said the legal group.
— GLAN | Global Legal Action Network (@GLAN_LAW) July 12, 2024
When the war on Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people ends, said the groups, Starmer’s government must expect that there will be “a reckoning in which Israel will be found to have committed mass atrocities.”
But the organizations called on Starmer—who, months before he called on Netanyahu to agree to a cease-fire, said Israel had “the right” to withhold power and water from Gaza—to see that ending military support for Israel “is not only the legal obligation of the U.K., it is a moral obligation.”
“Schoolchildren will learn about this period for years to come, just as we have all learned about past genocides and wondered how they could be allowed to happen,” reads the letter. “Will they read about a new Labour government that acted with respect for the sanctity of all human life?”
Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
