Later this year, new laws will be introduced giving anonymity to firearms officers who shoot someone, unless they are convicted. Photograph: Grant Rooney Premium/Alamy
Review into accountability soon to report as police seek greater protection from prosecution over use of force
Police want changes to the law giving them “a licence to kill”, leading rights groups have warned as the government prepares to give officers new protections from prosecution.
A government-ordered review into police accountability is expected to report within weeks. It followed fears of a walkout by angry armed officers in London after a police marksman, Martyn Blake, was tried for murder over the shooting of Chris Kaba. Blake was acquitted in October by a jury in three hours.
Police say they want the system to be fairer and protect officers who use force as part of their duties. Rights groups believe the system holding police to account is already too weak, and diluting it would “undermine public trust”.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, groups including Inquest, the Centre for Women’s Justice, Liberty and Black Lives Matter warn the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, against weakening police accountability.
“This review is less a kneejerk reaction but rather a dangerous and calculated attempt to use a high-profile case to push for less scrutiny and accountability of police actions,” they said.
“The number of cases where police officers are prosecuted for a death is vanishingly small (since 1990 there has only been one successful prosecution of an officer for manslaughter and none for murder).
An investigation found the pair had no case to answer and that the trust had breached its own disciplinary policy
Two NHS professionals were investigated and barred from their workplace for expressing interest in organising a peaceful protest in support of Palestine during their lunch break.
The therapist and nurse were accused of posing a threat to the “personal safety” of the staff at Kensington and Chelsea child and adolescent mental health service, and of “bringing the trust into disrepute” for considering the demonstration.
The pair, who the Guardian is calling Layla and Maya, were told they were to be investigated and could not enter the building they worked at before being redeployed to new NHS workplaces in London.
A three-month investigation into the pair’s conduct found they had no case to answer and that the trust had breached its own disciplinary policy in its treatment of them.
The investigator noted that, though there was no intent from the pair to bully other staff members, two staff members did feel unsafe to come into work “as an indirect result” of their intent to organise the protest.
The two professionals filed an internal grievance against the Central and North West London NHS foundation, which upheld their claim of policy breaches in their treatment.
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWREGenocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Keir Starmer confirms that he’s proud to be a red Tory continuing austerity and targeting poor and disabled scum.
WES STREETING appointed Baroness Camilla Cavendish, who previously led David Cameron’s Number 10 Policy Unit, onto the board of the Department for Health this month, saying he wanted to have “cross-party” figures of “different political persuasions” to guide the NHS.
He wants to build a “cross-party consensus” to “reform the NHS.” But what is this consensus? In 2007, when Labour’s Gordon Brown was prime minister Cavendish wrote that “the hungry maw of the NHS is swallowing more and more resources, at the expense of virtually everything else.”
Cavendish denounced the NHS as “Britain’s last big state monopoly,” complaining that “its powerful unions view any slowdown in spending growth as a ‘cut.’ And cut is a deadly word in political terms.”
Cavendish said the NHS badly needs more “innovation,” which is only possible “by introducing competition.” Cavendish said New Labour had not gone far enough down this road. She welcomed Tony Blair’s attempts to “introduce competition” by letting private providers carry out some operations, and the introduction of foundation trusts, but claimed: “Ministers are too easily persuaded that the battle is between public and private provision. They are ashamed to endorse the private.”
She was worried Brown did not believe enough in “market-based reform” of the NHS. She said the health service was “a bloated state” and argued “the writing is on the wall: a tax-funded free healthcare system is looking ever less sustainable.”
The NHS was certainly in better state in 2007 than now. However, while the idea it was bloated, overfunded and needed more privatisation might appeal to Streeting, it doesn’t appeal to Labour voters. Cavendish went on to join Cameron’s No 10 operation in 2015, when the Tory PM did indeed stick with more NHS privatisation and less NHS money.
Cavendish is expected by Streeting to sit with former Labour health minister Alan Milburn on the Department of Health board and build up a consensus for NHS reform. Both seem drawn to Cameron’s approach — accepting and accelerating New Labour’s NHS privatisation, while adding Tory spending reductions.
British chancellor Rachel Reeves has backed ‘catastrophic’ plans to build a third runway at Heathrow | Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer appear happy to pursue growth at any cost – including the destruction of the planet
Last weekend the temperature at the North Pole was 20℃ above average, taking it above ice’s melting point in what was described as “a very extreme winter warming event” by Mika Rantanen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
Four days later, things got worse still. The Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that last month was the warmest January ever recorded at 1.75℃ hotter than pre-industrial times. This is especially worrying since scientists expected temperatures to fall this year as La Nina took over from the previous year’s El Nino. We now face the worrying possibility that the impact of cooling La Ninas might be declining.
Amid these developments, British chancellor Rachel Reeves has backed plans to build a third runway at Heathrow, which climate campaigners warn would be “catastrophic”, and reports have emerged that she is also poised to support the opening of the giant Rosebank oilfield in the North Sea, which energy secretary Ed Miliband has described as “climate vandalism”.
Reeves’ drive for economic growth at the expense of the planet is a far cry from the strong green agenda that the Labour Party seemed to favour ahead of last year’s general election.
Labour’s apparent change of heart unfortunately coincides with Donald Trump taking office in the US. The climate science community is now braced for the impact of Trump’s newly appointed Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, running a coach and horses through the US foreign aid programme.
Trump’s administration has also already started removing or downgrading mentions of climate change from federal government web pages – a sign that we are in a worse position than a decade ago after the 2015 Paris climate summit, when there were indications that the dangers of climate breakdown were at last being appreciated at higher political levels.
Now, one of the world’s leading climate specialists, professor James Hansen of Columbia University, says that the international target agreed upon at the Paris summit of limiting global temperature rises to 2℃ is “dead”. The pace of global heating had been “significantly underestimated”, he explained.
The fossil carbon states and corporations with their coal, oil and gas markets, meanwhile, are more certain about their prospects and happy to promote their wares with enthusiasm. There were 2,500 oil, gas and coal lobbyists at the 2023 Dubai COP28 climate summit, four times as many as attended the previous year in Egypt.
If forced onto the defensive, fossil fuel giants have several options. One is to move the focus away from mitigation to adaptation, another is to boost the potential of carbon capture and storage, and yet another is geoengineering.
Then, if all else fails they can fall back on direct air capture; removing carbon from the air once it is dispersed in the atmosphere, rather than as it is emitted. In other words, we should accept the likelihood of an “overshoot” of carbon emissions and hope that future technologies can save the day!
None of these scenarios has any current relevance as none can be developed in anything remotely like the time available given the speed of climate breakdown. There has to be urgent political change at the highest level to engage in emergency decarbonisation.
At a lower level, there is some good news at least. The cost of producing electricity from renewable sources is continuing to fall and the whole process of embracing renewables could accelerate if just one or two countries demonstrated just how quickly change can come.
The UK is in a hugely favoured position to do so, having huge scope to expand land-based wind and solar power as well as offshore wind. That should be one of the British government’s two absolute priorities, the other being a rapid programme of home and workplace insulation.
Further moves would be an immediate tightening up of house building regulations requiring much higher levels of insulation together with grants and loans for home environmental improvements. Transition to electrical vehicles should be accelerated along with much expansion of public transport.
Changes in agriculture must be brought in to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, with methane emission control frequently being overlooked. Air and marine transport must also be subject to far greater emissions control. Any plans to expand existing airports must be abandoned as nonsensical, and subsidies for oil and gas production should be transferred to renewables.
All this, and much more, would cost money, and a lot of it, but there is plenty of that around, readily available from many sources including rigorous control of tax evasion and avoidance, together with new wealth taxes. If climate breakdown is recognised for what it is, the greatest threat to UK security, then the entire ‘defence’ budget should be rethought in this light. More than this, any government that recognises the challenge facing every one of us would see the need to borrow to help fund the response.
So, what of Labour so far? Regrettably, there is little to applaud despite the efforts of a rather isolated few on the front benches and a handful of backbenchers such as Clive Lewis. The party’s brave words of a year ago are difficult to find and Labour is now about growth at almost any cost – destruction of the planet included. The lobby brigade is winning.
Even carbon capture and nuclear power are now hailed by the Labour government as part of the answer even though the first is unproven and the second will take decades to bring in while we only have years, not decades, to make the change.
Perhaps Labour will come to its senses as climate disasters accelerate but it is now a party that has lost any sense of mission. It has forgotten its history, how a Labour government of the late 1940s took on seemingly impossible tasks and succeeded in many respects against the odds. Can the party change now? Perhaps, but don’t hold your breath.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
Green Party Co-leader Adrian Ramsay. Wikipedia CC.
Green MP and party co-leader Adrian Ramsay has urged the government to divert planned new subsidies for the privately owned wood-burning Drax power station to a national home insulation scheme.
Adrian Ramsay said “Drax is a green energy scam, burning trees – some imported from ancient forests from as far away as Canada – subsidised by the taxpayer.
“The billions of pounds worth of subsidies run out in 2027, but the government is expected to try to renew them next week, turning taxpayer money into profits for a private company, instead of using the money to fuel a green energy revolution.
“Drax has benefitted from over £6 billion in subsidies since 2012 and neither taxpayers nor the environment can afford a penny more.
“The money should be used to help fund a national scheme of home insulation that would cut people’s energy bills and help to reduce energy use.
“Green MPs and Peers will be pressing the government to end this subsidy scandal and invest people’s money where it will make a real difference to them.”
