Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall speaking to the media outside the Department for Work and Pensions in Westminster, London, December 17, 2024
LABOUR’S repeated attacks on disabled people are cynical, cruel and, in providing an excuse to legislate for ever-greater state intrusion into private citizens’ lives, a threat to all our freedoms.
Liz Kendall chases headlines with the latest gimmick (banning those found guilty of benefit fraud from driving). More sinister is the resurrection of Tory plans to make banks share information from private accounts and powers for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to seize funds without a court process.
The state already has ample power both to detect and punish benefit fraud: it can make banks share clients’ financial information if there is suspicion of fraud, while those found guilty can be jailed for up to 10 years (courtesy of Keir Starmer in a previous iteration, as director of public prosecutions egging on the then Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s war on welfare).
This is not about fighting crime. Nor even about cutting costs: benefit fraud amounts to less than 3 per cent of social security spending, and ministers say the new legislation is aimed at saving £1.5 billion over five years, an almost irrelevant sum given annual spending on social security excluding pensions is over £130bn.
It is about creating a climate of fear.
The approach echoes that toward immigration, where endless scaremongering about “small boats” obscures the rarity of such arrivals compared to immigrants who arrive legally.
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper are whipping up a moral panic about the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana who killed three children and injured ten others. I’m sorry to state the obvious, that terribly tragic as it is, it pales into insignificance compared to the thousands on thousands of children murdered in Gaza with the active support and encouragement of Starmer, Cooper and the UK Labour Party. Starmer and Cooper are escalating the issue out of all proportion. Yes it was tragic and awful that innocent young children were murdered but the perpetrator was by definition mentally ill and it wasn’t like a mass shooting event that we see abroad.
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/QILgUHrdWRE
I’m otherwise busy atm and don’t have much time to blog.
Green Party co-leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, October 2022. Image: Bristol Green Party, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Green Party Co-Leaders, Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer released a joint statement ahead of President Trump’s inauguration saying:
“We must stand up for peace and democracy in what will be a dangerous turn toward right-wing populism in the wake of Donald Trump taking office.
“The antidote to Trump in the US, and the likes of Reform in the UK, is to offer people a real hope for real positive change that will transform their lives.
“That means a new offer to people beaten down by decades of low wages, insecure work, decimated public services and a realisation that the impact of the climate crisis is all around us in the form of floods, wildfires and a devastating loss of nature.
“We need the green investment to deliver the jobs of the future – well-paid, meaningful and secure – and we need the UK government to invest properly in schools and the NHS, and stand up for international law and human rights.
“A greener future is a more just and fairer future.
“The Green Party is clear – President Trump is a misogynist, a racist, a convicted criminal and, we believe, a fascist.
“We will be pressing the Labour government to recognise that to defeat fascism, political parties that believe in democratic values must work together to keep the flame of democracy alive and show people that democratic politics can deliver real change.”
Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated and charged Donald Trump, spoke to the media on August 1, 2023. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“But for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” the report states.
The special counsel who investigated and chargedDonald Trump over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election said in a final report released by the U.S. Justice Department early Tuesday that the former president would have been convicted for “a series of criminal efforts to retain power” had he not won another White House term in November.
“But for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” wrote Jack Smith, who resigned from the Justice Department late last week ahead of Inauguration Day.
Smith pointed to the Justice Department’s view that “the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president,” a position he said is “categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind.”
The report, which Trump’s legal team sought to bury, is the first of two volumes that Smith’s team produced following the completion of its investigations into the former president’s unlawful election interference and hoarding of classified documents. Smith dropped the two cases shortly after Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
According to the Justice Department, Smith has urged that the volume on the classified documents probe not be released to the public while the case against Trump’s former co-defendants is still pending.
“Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office.”
In the newly released report, Smith detailed how Trump and his allies tried to “induce state officials to ignore true vote counts,” manufactured “fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost,” directed “an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election,” and leveraged “rioters’ violence to further delay it.”
“In service of these efforts, Mr. Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office,” the report added.
Trump responded furiously to the report’s release, ranting on social media that “Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were.”
In his introduction to the report, Smith rejected as “laughable” Trump’s claim that the investigations were politically motivated or influenced in any way by the Biden administration.
“While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters. I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters,” Smith wrote. “The facts, as we uncovered them in our investigation and as set forth in my report, matter. Experienced prosecutors know that you cannot control outcomes, you can only do your job the right way for the right reasons. I conclude our work confident that we have done so, and that we have met fully our obligations to the department and to our country.”
