Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
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So-called austerity is best understood as a massive transfer of wealth — from public to private, from the many to the few, as the fortunes of the super-rich ballooned while Britain endured the longest wage squeeze since the Napoleonic wars.
This is a grotesquely unequal country in which big banks and energy giants post the largest profits in their history, in which the richest 1 per cent own more than the poorer 70 per cent of the population put together, in which millions rely on foodbanks while the number of billionaires increased by a fifth during the Covid crisis alone.
When Reeves gives with one hand and takes away with the other — as PCS leader Fran Heathcote notes she does by offering a 1.7 per cent increase in departmental spending, while setting a 2 per cent savings target for those same departments — she cites pressure on the public finances that could be relieved easily through higher corporation tax, a financial transactions tax or a wealth tax. As Unite’s Sharon Graham notes, a 1 per cent tax on the richest 1 per cent would raise £25 billion, filling the so-called “black hole” in the budget at a stroke.
It is a choice to echo Tory hysteria over benefit fraud, when the amount lost to this is less than goes unclaimed in social security payments people are entitled to. Giving the Department for Work & Pensions power to remove money directly from bank accounts will likely increase non-take-up of benefits by people who need them but understandably fear their personal finances being exposed in this way.
And it’s a choice to hike the cost of a bus ticket by 50 per cent while maintaining a fuel duty freeze — when governments across Europe are making public transport cheaper because it is essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
UK Labour government’s budget by Rachel Reeves doesn’t really matter in the bigger picture. While we have Israel’s continuing genocide (genocides?) with the UK Labour government a major active participant the real big issue is the hugely devastating floods in Spain. ‘This Is Climate Change’: Devastating Flooding Kills More Than 70 in Spain.
The problem is that World governments are going to do very little to address climate change until they are forced to. It’s only getting worse since it’s not addressed despite fossil fuel industries and governments being aware for 60 years. Climate campaigners are imprisoned instead of the real climate criminals.
These measures will not affect current claimants, but they will impact those applying for the first time from next year, and anyone who comes off the benefit and then later reapplies for it or whose circumstances change
Hundreds of thousands of people with health conditions could miss out on financial support after the chancellor confirmed plans to tighten the disability benefits system.
This is an assessment which people with health conditions and disabilities undergo to determine their capability for work and if they will get an extra amount of universal credit.
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Previous figures from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) showed that 457,000 people will face lower benefits or higher work search conditions by 2028/2029 as a result of the reforms, which are expected to save the government around £3bn.
Disability charities have called the plans “devastating”. Richard Kramer, chief executive of Sense, said: “The government’s decision today is deeply disturbing for disabled people. They have chosen to continue the previous government’s harmful plans to reduce access to benefits.
“This risks undermining the wellbeing of disabled people, and the consequences could be devastating. Disabled households are living in crisis, their current welfare benefits barely cover the essentials and spiralling food and energy costs have pushed many into debt and despair.
“But instead of choosing to give disabled people proper financial support and beginning to transform lives, the government has played into the dangerous narrative that disabled people should be forced to work and tightened the work capability assessment. They did this knowing that not all disabled people can work.”
The DWP previously confirmed that the reforms will cut the number of people due to be put onto the highest tier of incapacity benefits by more than 424,000 people, equating to a loss of almost £400 every month per person.
“This contemptible measure is purely about saving money at disabled people’s expense. It will force still more disabled people into poverty,” Kramer said. “We are demanding that this dismal decision is urgently reversed. We need the government to realise that benefits are a lifeline and disabled people need more financial support not less.
A view of the damaged area after a deluge brought up to 200 liters of rain per square meter (50 gallons per square yard) in hours in towns across the region of Valencia, Spain on October 30, 2024. (Photo: Alex Juarez/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“These disasters are only getting worse, and stopping the industries and systems driving climate collapse is the only rational response,” one climate group said.
Spain’s deadliest flooding in 30 years killed at least 72 people as torrential rain slammed the eastern region of Valencia on Tuesday, with some towns recording a year’s worth of rain in a single day.
The flooding sent churning muddy water down narrow streets, tossing cars, downing trees, bulldozing bridges and buildings, and trapping people in rising flood waters.
“The neighborhood is destroyed, all the cars are on top of each other, it’s literally smashed up,” Christian Viena, who owns a bar in Valencia’s Barrio de la Torre, told The Associated Press. “Everything is a total wreck, everything is ready to be thrown away. The mud is almost 30 centimeters (11 inches) deep.”
As of Wednesday morning, officials reported 70 deaths in Valencia and two in the bordering region of Castilla La Mancha. However, the death toll could rise as search and rescue operations continue amid difficult conditions, such as power outages and blocked roadways. Many people remain missing with their fates uncertain.
This includes residents of Utiel in Valencia, whose mayor, Ricardo Gabaldón, told Spanish broadcaster RTVE that Tuesday was the “worst day of my life.”
“We were trapped like rats,” Gabaldón said. “Cars and trash containers were flowing down the streets. The water was rising to 3 meters (9.8 feet).”
One person who was rescued was Denis Hlavaty, who spent the night perched on the edge of the roof of a gas station where he works.
“It’s a river that came through,” Hlavaty told Reuters, adding, “The doors were torn away and I spent the night there, surrounded by water that was 2 metres (6.5-feet) deep.”
“The fossil fuel industry increases the climate emergency, destroys the balance of critical ecosystems, and puts people’s lives in danger.”
The storm also canceled high-speed rail travel between Valencia and Madrid and Barcelona, and derailed one high-speed train near Malaga, though no one was injured.
While the rains had tapered off in Valencia by Wednesday morning, the rest of the country is not out of danger, as the storm is projected to move northeast.
“We mustn’t let our guard down because the weather front is still wreaking havoc and we can’t say that this devastating episode is over,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the nation on television Wednesday.
Even if the death toll does not rise, Tuesday’s floods are already the deadliest in Spain since 1996, when a flood near the Pyrenees killed 87. They are also the deadliest in Europe since floods in 2021 that killed at least 185.
In the immediate term, Tuesday’s deluge was caused by a phenomenon called a gota fría, or “cold drop,” a storm formed as cold air moves over the warm Mediterranean. In Spain, these kinds of storms are also commonly referred to with the acronym DANA—for Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos, or isolated high-level depression.
However, scientists observe that the climate crisis is making rainstorms like this one more extreme, as warmer air can hold more moisture to dump when conditions are right. For Europe specifically, the warming of the Mediterranean causes more water to evaporate from its surface, super-charging rainstorms.
“Events of this type, which used to occur many decades apart, are now becoming more frequent and their destructive capacity is greater,” Ernesto Rodriguez Camino, senior state meteorologist and a member of the Spanish Meteorological Association, told Reuters.
The Spanish flooding comes a little more than a month after record rainfall swamped Central Europe and Eastern Europe, in an event that scientists concluded was made approximately twice as likely and 7% more severe by the climate crisis fueled primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
“When we talk about climate change and climate emergency, it’s often perceived as an abstract concept far from our daily reality,” Eva Saldaña, the executive director of Greenpeace Spain, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this is climate change: the intensification of extreme weather phenomenons like what happened tonight, with the level of destruction greater each time. Ignoring it causes deaths that we cannot allow.”
In a post on social media, Greenpeace Spain said that fossil fuel companies including the Spanish Repsol should pay for the damages.
“DANAS are more intense every time due to climate change,” the group wrote. “The fossil fuel industry increases the climate emergency, destroys the balance of critical ecosystems, and puts people’s lives in danger.”
⛈️Las DANAS son cada vez más intensas por el cambio climático. La industria fósil aumenta la emergencia climática, destruye el equilibrio de ecosistemas críticos del planeta y pone en peligro la vida de las personas.
Extinction Rebellion Global agreed. “These disasters are only getting worse, and stopping the industries and systems driving climate collapse is the only rational response,” the group wrote on social media.
The U.S.-based Climate Defiance, meanwhile, shared images of flood-ravaged streets with dismissals often leveled at climate activists.
Yellow Dot Studios, Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay’s climate-focused media studio, also shared an image of cars dropped in piles in the street by the flood waters to call out the double-standard in how direct-action climate protests and the corporate crimes of the fossil fuel industry are punished.
Friends of the Earth Spain focused on the human impacts, arguing that urgent climate action meant “putting people’s lives, and not economic models, at the center.”
“Don’t prioritize sending people to work in extreme and dangerous conditions,” the group wrote. “It is a priority to take effective, ambitious, and urgent measures in response to the climate crisis we are living through.”
Palestinian children sit with pots near makeshift tents as they wait to receive food aid in Khan Younis, Gaza on October 28, 2024. (Photo: Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“It’ll likely see the collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza,” warned a spokesperson for the U.N. Children’s Fund.
Humanitarian groups and United Nations officials issued dire warnings Tuesday about the potentially catastrophic consequences of Israeli lawmakers’ vote to ban the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, the body primarily responsible for delivering lifesaving aid to the people of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said Tuesday that if the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is unable to operate due to the measures passed overwhelmingly by the Israeli Knesset on Monday, “it’ll likely see the collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza.”
“So a decision such as this suddenly means that a new way has been found to kill children,” said Elder.
The legislation that Israeli lawmakers passed in a 92-10 vote bars UNRWA—a frequent target of Israeli smear campaigns and military attacks—from operating or providing “any service” within “in the sovereign territory of the state of Israel.”
Israeli lawmakers also passed a measure declaring UNRWA a “terror” group, barring Israeli officials from engaging in any contact with the agency.
The Guardian noted that the newly passed measures—which are set to be implemented within 90 days—are “expected to lead to the closure of UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters and would effectively block the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza via Rafah.”
“The severing of diplomatic relations would preclude Israel from issuing entry and work permits to foreign UNRWA staff and prevent coordination with the Israeli military to permit aid shipments,” the newspaper added.
“Humanitarian actors rely on coordination with UNWRA to deliver aid and alleviate suffering. UNWRA cannot be replaced by NGOs.”
Agnès Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, warned in a statement Tuesday that the measures represent “an outright attack on the rights of Palestinian refugees.”
“It is clearly designed to make it impossible for the agency to operate in the occupied Palestinian territory by forcing the closure of the UNRWA headquarters in East Jerusalem and ending visas for its staff,” said Callamard. “It amounts to the criminalization of humanitarian aid and will worsen an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis.”
“This appalling, inhumane law will only exacerbate the suffering of Palestinians, who have endured unimaginable hardship since the horrific attacks by Hamas and other armed groups in southern Israel one year ago, and whose need for global support is greater than ever. The international community must be quick to condemn it in the strongest possible terms and exert any influence they have on the Israeli government to repeal it.”
The U.N. General Assembly established UNRWA in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba, and the agency is central to humanitarian operations in the famine-stricken Gaza Strip—a role that aid groups described as necessary and irreplaceable. According to a World Health Organization official, roughly a third of the healthcare workers assisting the polio vaccination campaign in Gaza work with UNRWA.
“UNRWA plays a critical role in serving civilians in desperate need in Gaza,” the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said Tuesday. “Humanitarian actors rely on coordination with UNRWA to deliver aid and alleviate suffering. UNRWA cannot be replaced by NGOs like IRC.”
“The bill passed in the Israeli parliament is an unprecedented attack on a U.N. agency and, if implemented, would only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe,” IRC added. “We strongly urge that this legislation is not applied. We continue to advocate for an immediate ceasefire to get aid in, to release the hostages, and to meet the growing and dire needs of the civilian population.”
Sam Rose, deputy director of UNRWA affairs in Gaza, said in a CNN interview that “the entire humanitarian system” in the Palestinian enclave “relies every minute of every day on UNRWA to deliver services to 2 million people living in the worst possible conditions.”
Implementation of the ban, Rose warned, “would be devastating for us, devastating for other aid agencies—but more importantly, for the population here that’s suffering so much.”
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that his active support and that of UK’s air force has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide.
