Irish rappers Kneecap played their largest gig tonight in Finsbury Park (Picture: Scott A. Garfitt/Invision/AP)
Irish rap trio Kneecap made their feelings towards Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer clear tonight as they led the crowd in angry chants.
Tonight, the group played their largest gig to date, taking to the stage in Finsbury Park, London, in front of 45,000 people.
They were supporting Irish band Fontaines DC, whose frontman, Grian Chatten, joined to perform their collaboration, Better Way To Live.
Fans watched on as Kneecap came out in front of a screen that said, ‘Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.’
And in typical Kneecap fashion, they weren’t shy in expressing their disdain for certain politicians throughout the night either.
On the mic, they vowed that next month will mark ‘the second time Kneecap have beat the British Government in court’.
People then echoed the Belfast group’s chants when they repeated the ‘F**k Keir Starmer’ and ‘You’re just a s**t Jeremy Corbyn’ comments made at Glastonbury the previous weekend.
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In response to the Labour leader’s calls for a ban, Kneecap shared a screenshot from his interview, writing: ‘You know what’s “not appropriate” Keir?! Arming a f***ing genocide… [sic]’.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote Labour for Genocide.
Four Youth Demand supporters have blocked Cisco’s float at London Pride to expose the US based company’s involvement in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. They are demanding that the UK government impose a total trade embargo on Israel and prosecute the corporate enablers of the genocide like Cisco for violations of international law.
Four Youth Demand supporters threw red paint over the Cisco float as it passed along Piccadilly, before sitting down in the road and gluing themselves to it, chanting “we charge you with genocide”. The Parade was delayed for about an hour while the group were removed. There were five arrests.
Today’s actions come against a backdrop of ongoing atrocities in Gaza. Since dawn today, Israel has killed another 42 Palestinians as they directed shells at schools and displaced people in tents, aimed airstrikes at private houses and shot people waiting for food.
As one of the main providers of networking hardware for the Israeli military, Cisco is potentially implicated in the mass killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them unarmed civilians. Cisco, a US-based digital communications company also provides technologies to the Israeli police and prisons, and to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory. Cisco’s networking, hardware, and servers form the backbone of the Israeli military’s surveillance and communications infrastructure which is used to track movements, map family connections, and facilitate mass surveillance and targeting of Palestinians for assasination.
This week the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese presented her latest report From economy of occupation to economy of genocide which presents detailed research revealing the complicity of private entities in international crimes connected to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the unlawful occupation across the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In particular it names tech companies including Microsoft, Alphabet and Palatir. The report states ” While political leaders and governments shirk their obligations, far too many corporate entities have profited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now, genocide. The complicity exposed by this report is just the tip of the iceberg; ending it will not happen without holding the private sector accountable, including its executives”.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.The original Fascists Mussolini and HitlerUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Keir “I support Zionism without Qualification” Starmer supporting genocide. NB: I did consider not posting this image any longer since Palestine Action has been proscribed but it would be very difficult to argue that it supports Palestine Action. “Genocide like this” refers to Starmer’s description of the genocidal actions that he’s taking “We’ve got a genocide to achieve …” It’s discussing ” … people … who oppose genocide like this …” not Palestine Action. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I support Palestine Action because that’s illegal under current laws.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and deputy leader Richard Tice. Photo: Sipa US / Alamy
The anti-net zero party has been bankrolled by oil and gas investors, aviation entrepreneurs, and those who reject climate science.
Reform UK has received more than £2.3 million from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers since December 2019, amounting to 92 percent of the party’s donations.
This week, Nigel Farage confirmed he would be returning as leader of Reform and standing in the general election, threatening to split the already fragile Conservative vote. His populist party, which campaigns to “scrap all of net zero”, claims to represent ordinary people against out of touch elites.
Yet Reform’s official register of donations reveals the party is bankrolled by rich businessmen who reject climate science or make money from polluting industries.
In the past 12 months, Reform has received £200,000 from First Corporate Consultants. The firm is owned by Terence Mordaunt, a director and former chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group.
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”. Mordaunt himself told openDemocracy in 2019 that “no one has proved yet that CO2 is the culprit” of climate change.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s top climate science body, has stated that it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”. It has also stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.
Reform has also received more than £500,000 since the last election from Jeremy Hosking, whose investment firm Hosking Partners had more than $134 million (around £108 million) invested in the energy sector at the close of 2021, two thirds of which was in the oil industry, along with millions in coal and gas.
Hosking previously told DeSmog: “I do not have millions in fossil fuels; it is the clients of Hosking Partners who are the beneficiaries of these investments.”
Since December 2019, Reform has also received £465,000 from Christopher Harborne, owner of AML Global, an aviation fuel supplier with a distribution network that includes “main and regional oil companies”, according to its website. Harborne is also the CEO of Sheriff Global Group, which trades in private jets.
Aviation emissions accounted for eight percent of the UK’s annual greenhouse gas emissions before the pandemic, according to the government’s Climate Change Committee.
In response to DeSmog’s request for comment, Harborne posted a lengthy statement on the AML Global website. He said: “I am not a climate science denier and … I do not seek to influence any government through donations or lobbying regarding their policies on climate change or in favour of corporate interests.”
Harborne added that “there is overwhelming scientific evidence that human activity and in particular the use of hydrocarbons as an energy source is accelerating climate warming due to the greenhouse effect.”
Reform has also received more than £1.1 million in donations from Richard Tice, a property millionaire and the party’s leader until this week. Tice has now become the party’s chairman.
In addition (and not included in the overall figures for this analysis), Reform has received more than50 loans collectively worth around £1.4 million from a company called Tisun Investments, which is owned by Tice, since the start of 2020.
Tice is one of the UK’s most prominent climate deniers, his presenting role on the right-wing broadcaster GB News to attack net zero policies and the science behind them. Tice has claimed that “there is no climate crisis” and expressed the view that “CO2 isn’t a poison. It’s plant food”.
DeSmog has also revealed that the governing Conservative Party has received £8.4 million since December 2019 from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and individuals who have expressed or supported climate science denial.
“No political party should be taking any money from fossil fuel interests whatsoever,” Caroline Lucas, until recently the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, told DeSmog.
Reform’s Climate Science Denial
Reform’s platform on climate change conforms to the views and business interests of its major donors.
The party’s manifesto falsely claims that “scientists disagree as to how much” humans have had an impact on global warming.
A number of climate consensus studies conducted between 2004 and 2015 found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of experts agree that humans are responsible for climate change. A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.
Reform wants to develop new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, open onshore fracking sites across the country, end the windfall tax on oil and gas companies, and “restart opencast coal mines using the latest cleanest techniques”.
The party has campaigned for a referendum on the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target, and supports scrapping the policy entirely.
Farage himself also has a long history of opposing green reforms and criticising established climate science.
Speaking on GB News in August 2021, Farage said that he was “very much an environmentalist” and that he couldn’t “abide things like plastics in our seas, pollution in our rivers.” However, on the issue of climate change, he added: “What annoys me though, is this complete obsession with carbon dioxide almost to the exclusion of everything else, the alarmism that comes with it, based on dodgy predictions and science.”
Reform’s only MP, Lee Anderson, who defected from the Conservative Party in March, has repeatedly attacked the government’s net zero policies, arguing in February 2024 that a net zero UK “wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to the Earth’s atmosphere”.
Anderson is also a vocal backer of new oil, gas, and coal extraction in the UK. In 2022 he supported the government’s decision to approve a new coal mine in Cumbria – the UK’s first new coal mine for 30 years.
A Reform UK spokesman said: “Climate change is real, Reform UK believes we must adapt, rather than foolishly think you can stop it. We are proud to be the only party to understand that economic growth depends on cheap domestic energy and we are proud that we are the only party that are climate science realists, realising you can not stop the power of the sun, volcanoes or sea level oscillation.
“The deniers are those who continually gaslight the public into thinking you can stop these powerful natural forces. We must use the energy under our feet, rather than send our money and jobs abroad.”
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.
Each is the main political subject in their country, and one is the main political subject in the world. Each rode the populist wave in 2016, campaigning for the other. In 2024 the tandem surfers remounted on to an even greater breaker. Yet, though nothing has happened to suggest that bromance is dead, neither Donald Trump nor Nigel Farage publicly now speak of the other.
Trump’s presidential campaign shared personnel with Leave.eu, the unofficial Brexit campaign. Farage was on the stump with Trump, and his “bad boys of Brexit” made their pilgrimage to Trump Tower after its owner’s own triumph in the US election. Each exulted in the other’s success, and what it portended.
Trump duly proposed giving the UK ambassadorship to the United States to Farage. Instead, Farage became not merely MP for Clacton, but leader of the first insurgent party to potentially reset Britain’s electoral calculus since Labour broke through in 1922.
Then, Labour’s challenge was to replace the Liberals as the alternative party of government. It took two years. Reform UK could replace the Conservatives in four.
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Trump, meanwhile, has achieved what in Britain has either been thwarted (Militant and the Labour party in the 1980s) or has at most had temporary, aberrant, success (Momentum and the Labour party in the 2010s): the takeover of a party from within. Farage has been doing so – hitherto – from without.
At one of those historic forks in a road where change is a matter of chance, after Brexit finally took place, Farage considered his own personal leave – to go and break America.
The path had been trodden by Trump-friendly high-profile provocateurs before him: Steve Hilton, from David Cameron’s Downing Street, via cable news, now standing to be governor of California; Piers Morgan, off to CNN to replace the doyen of cable news Larry King, only to crash, but then to burn on, online. Liz Truss, never knowingly understated, has found her safe space – the rightwing speaking circuit.
But Farage remained stateside. He knew his domestic platform was primed more fully to exploit the voter distrust that his nationalist crusade had done so much to provoke.
The Trump effect
Genuine peacetime transatlantic affiliations are rare, usually confined to the leaders of established parties: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. One consequence of the 2016 political shift is that the US Republicans and the British Conservatives, the latter still at least partially tethered to traditional politics, have become distanced.
During the first Trump administration, and even in the build up to the second, it was Farage who was seen as the UK’s bridge to the president. But today, at the peak of their influence, for Farage association can only be by inference, friendship with the US president is not – put mildly – of political advantage. For UK voters, Trump is the 19th most popular foreign politician, in between the King of Denmark and Benjamin Netanyahu.
There is, moreover, the “Trump effect”. Measuring this is crude – circumstances differ – but the trend is that elections may be won by openly criticising, rather than associating with, Trump. This was the case for Mark Carney in Canada, Anthony Albanese in Australia, and Nicușor Dan in Romania.
Trump’s second state visit to the UK will certainly be less awkward for Farage than it will be Starmer, the man who willed it. Farage will likely not – and has no reason to – be seen welcoming so divisive a figure.
Farage and Trump were pictured together during the latter’s visit to his golf course in South Ayrshire in 2023 but didn’t do any public events together. Alamy
Starmer has no choice but to, and to do so ostentatiously. It is typical of Starmer’s perfect storm of an administration that he will, in the process, do nothing to appeal to the sliver of British voters partial to Trump while further shredding his reputation with Labour voters. Farage would be well served in taking one of his tactical European sojourns for the duration. Starmer may be tempted too.
Outmanoeuvring the establishment
Reflecting the historic cultural differences of their countries, Trump’s prescription is less state, Farage’s is more. The Farage of 2025 that is. He had been robustly Thatcherite, but has lately embraced socialist interventionism, albeit through a most Thatcherite analysis: “the gap in the market was enormous”.
Reform UK now appears to stand for what Labour – in the mind of many of its voters – ought to. Eyeing the opportunity of smokestack grievances, Farage called for state control of steel production even as Trump was considering quite how high a tariff to put on it. Nationalisation and economic nationalism: associated restoratives for national malaise.
Aggressively heteronormative, Trump and Farage dabble in the natalism burgeoning in both countries – as much a cultural as an economic imperative. Each has mastered – and much more than their adversaries – social media. Each has come to recognise the demerits in publicly appeasing Putin.
And Reform’s rise in a hitherto Farage-resistant Scotland can only endear him further to a president whose Hebridean mother was thought of (in desperation) as potentially his Rosebud by British officials preparing for his first administration.
Given their rhetorical selectivity, Trump and Farage’s rolling pitches are almost unanswerable for convention-confined political opponents and reporters. These two anti-elite elitists continue to confound.
Unprecedentedly, for a former president, Trump ran against the incumbent; Farage will continue to exploit anti-incumbency, despite his party now being in office. Most elementally, the pair are bound for life by their very public near-death experiences. Theirs is, by any conceivable measure, an uncommon association.
Farage’s fleetness of foot would be apparent even without comparison with the leaden steps of the leaders of the legacy parties. His is a genius of opportunism. That’s why he knows not to remind us of his confrere across the water.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
