Youth Demand protest on Labour’s campaign bus, Wrexham 15 Jun 2024.
Three Youth Demand supporters have disrupted Keir Starmer’s election battle bus. They are demanding a two-way arms embargo on Israel and for the incoming UK government to halt all new oil and gas licences granted since 2021.
At around 9:15am the group climbed onto the battle bus as it was parked up for Labour’s campaign rally in Wrexham. The group stood on the roof of the bus holding Palastinian flags and a banner reading ‘Youth Demand an End to Genocide’. They could be heard chanting “Keir Starmer you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”.
One of those taking action this morning is Jazz, 22, a support worker from Manchester who said:
“I cannot remain silent whilst our government continues to fuel genocide in Palestine and with the climate crisis. Both the Tories and Labour have shown that they don’t give a shit about those suffering in Palestine and in the global south. Their lack of humanity is disgusting.
By voting Labour you are still voting for a party that refuses to stop buying and selling weapons with Israel. We refuse to inherit a world of suffering, Labour will not get away with their inhumanity. We cannot vote our way out of this – we must act!”
Also taking action is Chester Powell, 23, a student from Leeds, who said:
The Labour Party refuses to call for an end to the buying and selling of arms with Israel, arms that are being used to enact a genocide. We can’t vote our way out of this problem so I’m taking part in civil disobedience to force necessary change.
How can I have a hope for the future when the people in power only seem to be concerned with winning the next election. I can’t have hope that either of the major parties have any interest representing ordinary people over big business. Neither seems to show any empathy for the Palestinians as they are slaughtered in the thousands, so young people like myself must show them what having a spine looks like.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (center) looks toward Pope Francis as he speaks during the G7 Leaders Summit in Fasano, Italy on June 14, 2024. (Photo: Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty Images)
“If these embattled leaders want to leave a lasting legacy, they need to heed the will of voters demanding a safe environment and climate,” one campaigner asserted.
As the Group of Seven summit wrapped up Friday in Italy, climate defenders condemned G7 leaders for their continued failure to take meaningful action to combat the worsening planetary emergency.
Taking aim at what critics called the G7 leaders’ largely empty pledge to undertake “concrete steps to address the triple crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss,” 350.org U.S. campaigns manager Candice Fortin lamented that “yet another meeting ends without real commitments to revert the situation rich countries like the U.S. put us in.”
“As COP29 approaches and the world deals with worsening climate impacts, we can’t afford to waste more time,” Fortin said, referring to the United Nations Climate Change Conference scheduled to take place in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan—a major fossil fuel-producing nation—in November. COP29 is set to be chaired by a former oil executive.
“If the U.S. wants to pride itself on being a ‘world leader,’ it needs to show how it will pay its climate debt to climate-vulnerable countries that bear the most significant climate impacts without the necessary funds for adaptation,” Fortin added.
— Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative (@fossiltreaty) June 14, 2024
While G7 governments hailed their recent agreement to phase out existing unabated coal power generation in energy systems during the first half of the 2030s, critics took issue with the policy’s timeline and banks’ continued financing of fossil fuels.
“Our leaders are not leading. In the hottest 12 consecutive months of recorded human history, our leaders are failing us,” argued Bronwen Tucker, Oil Change International’s public finance lead. “G7 countries are adopting an inadequate coal phaseout date and endorsing increased fossil gas production, sending a terrible signal at a time when countries should be focusing on accelerating the phaseout, not delaying it.”
Tucker continued:
G7 leaders can’t say they’re committed to a livable climate while expanding and bankrolling the fossil fuel industry at home and abroad. At the same time, these rich countries should not be congratulating themselves for delivering $100 billion for climate finance two years too late. Trillions are needed to cover climate damages and the G7’s finance was largely provided as loans which only worsens unjust debts.
“The G7 must end the billions of dollars in taxpayer finance still flowing to fossil fuel projects abroad and fund the buildout of affordable renewable energy on fair terms,” Tucker asserted. “If their oil and gas expansion plans are allowed to proceed, it will lock in climate chaos and an unlivable future.”
#G7Italy: COUNTER-DINNER OF THE POOR Yesterday, during the #G7 leaders' dinner, @DebtforClimate set up a "Trojan horse" in Brindisi to call out the colonial policies of the G7, International Monetary Found, and World Bank, demanding them pay their Climate Debt and #CancelTheDebtpic.twitter.com/aqorlJr5vM
— Extinction Rebellion Italia (@XrItaly) June 14, 2024
Greenpeace International climate politics expert Tracy Carty said in a statement that “if these embattled leaders want to leave a lasting legacy, they need to heed the will of voters demanding a safe environment and climate.”
“Taxing the billions of dollars in profits of the fossil fuel industry to fund climate action at home and abroad could be their stake in history and a win for people and planet,” Carty continued. “G7 leaders need to seize the moment ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Baku and show they will lead the transition away from fossil fuels and build trust they will significantly increase climate finance support to developing countries.”
We are in the middle of a general election campaign in UK. Labour Party Deputy Leader Angela Rayner made these remarks in mid February 2022. She made these statements – calling for innocent people to be killed and harassed by police, calling for human rights to be totally disregarded. She was then and continues to be Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. It is totally correct that these remarks are highlighted and discussed now. She is representing the Labour Party in the most senior position except one when making these remarks. Keir Starmer, leader of the UK Labour Party is often referred to as a human rights lawyer. WTF? Do these Fascists really think that they’re fit to govern?
Deputy Labour Party Leader Angela Rayner calls for police to kill and harass innocent people.
I have conducted a great deal of independent research into the London explosions of 7 July 2005 and the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005. While not all of it has been published, I am confident that I have an excellent understanding of these issues and what actually happened. I would expect to have a far better understanding that Angela Rayner although Keir Starmer may actually have been involved in the cover-ups.
24 June 2024.
To clarify: I’ve found a Morning Star article from 2022 that indicates that Angela Rayner made these comments in late January 2022. The sequence would therefore be 1. Angela Rayner makes these comments in late January 2022. 2. I post on the issue 15 Feb 2022. 3. Dianne Abbott – then elected as an MP, not technically an MP currently since Parliament is in recess – raises the issue so that the media pays attention.
1/12/24 I’ve realised that the significance of this is that the Labour Party are going out of their way to attack me yet again. [ed: … and while hiding yet again.]
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer at the Mornflake Stadium, home to Crewe Alexandra while on the General Election campaign trail, June 13, 2024
From muzzling Palestinian rights to embracing austerity and outsourcing the NHS, Labour’s ‘tough choices’ always seem to hurt normal people while sparing wealthy donors — that’s why I am running to unseat Keir Starmer on July 4
…[T]he Labour Party launched its election manifesto — a dispiriting Thatcherite promise to continue endless austerity, soaring inequality and forever wars.
I announced my bid to become the independent MP for Holborn and St Pancras three weeks ago. Then, I was convinced that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party would offer little to improve the lives of this constituency’s amazing and diverse communities, or meaningfully restrain Israel’s genocide of Gaza. Having read this manifesto, I am more convinced than ever.
Starmer’s election campaign has traded on a series of stock phrases, all of which are profoundly misleading. Starmer promises to bring about “change,” but repeats tired economic shibboleths of the George Osborne variety.
He also claims to have remade the party “in the service of the working people.” In fact, the party is financially reliant on donations from big business and billionaires and its MPs rake in donations from the private-sector companies who circle the NHS.
The party’s long-feted New Deal for Working People is so disappointing that the party’s largest affiliated union, Unite, has refused to endorse the Labour Party manifesto.
But the most galling of all of the current Starmerisms is his invocation of “tough choices.” Starmer deploys the line to explain why the country cannot afford to pull half a million children out of poverty by ending the two-child benefit cap: a decision now confirmed by the manifesto.
Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, Starmer sadly explains, has made it impossible for the sixth-richest country in human history to lift children out of poverty at a cost little under £2 billion a year, a relatively measly sum in a country with a GDP of £2,274 trillion.
As the Labour Party manifesto makes clear, there have been plenty of hard choices made by the party — but all of them to the detriment of the poor and to the benefit of the mega-rich and big business.
Starmer makes the “tough choice” not to substantially increase funding the NHS, to end child poverty or reverse the swingeing cuts of the last decade; but only because he fails to make the “tough choice” to tax billionaires marginally more, even though the 10 richest people in the country are now richer than they have ever been.
…
I’m especially angry that the Labour Party, like the Tories, has promised to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP: a real-term £7bn a year increase by 2029. This is almost double the entire £4.7bn a year the party intends to spend on its Green Prosperity Plan to tackle the imminent existential threat of climate change.
What sort of security does this really buy? The party’s offer on Palestine is, frankly, an outrage; the manifesto speaking out of both sides of its mouth. So while it recognises that “Palestinian statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people,” it then makes Palestinian statehood contingent on a meaningless word salad.
“We are committed to recognising a Palestinian state as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution with a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign state.”
So much for an inalienable right, which requires Israel to feel “safe” before Palestinians get statehood — just as Israeli leaders claim that Israel will only feel safe when Gaza is cleansed of its citizens because there are “no uninvolved.”
This offer significantly dilutes the party’s previous commitment to recognising Palestinian statehood on the first day of government — something first brought in by Ed Miliband, appearing in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos. If there was any hope that Labour would be any better than the Tories on Gaza once in power, this should dispel it once and for all.
Both the Lib Dems and the Green Party, by comparison, have committed to immediately recognising Palestine. The Labour Party now joins the ignominious company of the Tories and Reform in refusing to do so.
A photograph from the battle of Kohima, in north-east India, during World War II
We have long struggled for black and Asian Allied soldiers to be properly acknowledged in Europe’s commemorations — but now a worse travesty is upon us, as Russia’s crucial role is purged from the record, writes ROGER McKENZIE
…
President Putin took part in the commemoration of the 60th D-Day anniversary in 2004 and again, 10 years later, for the 70th anniversary — but he was not invited to this one.
The USSR, of which Russia was a key part, lost around 25 million people in the fight against Nazi Germany. But even this until recently undisputed fact is now under challenge.
In fact, the Red Army caused 80 per cent of all WWII German military losses and themselves lost 30 times more people than Britain, France and the US combined.
The Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad is cited by many experts as being the decisive turning point in World War II. Between 150,000 and 250,000 Germans are estimated to have died at Stalingrad.
For Nazis, Stalingrad was not the battle that exacted the highest death toll, but the psychological impact of the battle was immense and was decisive in winning the war. It occupied and depleted massive Nazi resources which paved the way for the eventual Allied victory.
Over half a million Soviet soldiers and civilians died in the Battle of Stalingrad, among them numerous civilians. But that clearly was not enough to be invited.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, on the other hand, was in attendance — as he always seems to be at pretty much anything. I now expect to see Zelensky at any event where a photo opportunity exists but the fact that he is invited to a commemoration of an event about the defeat of the Nazis is particularly insulting given the number of Nazis in his own forces and his applause in Canada last year for a veteran of a Waffen SS brigade that fought in Ukraine.
But the Russians are not the only ones that have been deliberately written out of history. The role of black people of African or Asian descent has continually been discarded.
…
More than 134,000 travelled from other colonies, including some 10,000 from the Caribbean to help defeat the Nazis. Only when casualties began to mount during the war were black people enlisted to join the fighting or become part of the Merchant Navy.
But there was no suspension in the standing orders of racism. Caribbean men joining the Merchant Navy were paid around one-third of the wages that white sailors were paid.
…
Around two and a half million fighters came from India to support the war effort. About the same time as the D-Day landing Indian, Gurkha and African soldiers fought the historic but little talked about — at least in Britain or the US — battles in Kohima, in north-east India.
These battles fought alongside British soldiers were among some of the toughest in the war and helped to turn the tide against the Japanese. Not for nothing did many of the troops who fought in battles in India and what is now Myanmar during the war call themselves “the Forgotten Army.”
I think they are probably wrong. I don’t think they were forgotten. I believe they were ignored because much of the fighting was carried out by black people. The Battle of Kohima and Imphal was the bloodiest of World War II in India, and it cost Japan many of its most elite fighters.
None of this seems to matter though to those that continue to hide the contribution made by people of African and Asian origin to the victory over the Nazis. We know the erasure of the role of the Red Army in World War II is being carried out for a different purpose.
The leaders of the Western powers can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the massive sacrifice of the Soviet people lest it demonstrate the skill and bravery of its soldiers and the refusal to be defeated by the seemingly invincible Nazis.
It is also part of the inexorable lurch towards a conflict with Russia as Nato ramps up the warmongering rhetoric that could lead to World War III and the catastrophic nuclear destruction of the planet.
Western powers seem far more willing to associate themselves with the Nazis surrounding the leadership of Ukraine and to hobnob with the likes of fascist-inspired Italian leader Giorgia Meloni.
I wonder how fast they will move for a photo opportunity should the far-right Marine Le Pen win the National Assembly election later this month or the next French presidential vote.
They say that history is written by the winners. Well, it seems not all the winners count. This means we must all call out the continued drive to rewrite history.
