ROME, Oct 19 (Reuters) – Jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will become an honorary citizen of Rome by early next year following a vote this week by its local assembly, the city’s former mayor Virginia Raggi said on Thursday.
Assange, 52, has been in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison since 2019 and is wanted in the United States over the release of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables in 2010.
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Other Italian cities have taken similar steps. The northern city of Reggio Emilia granted Assange citizenship last month, while Naples is set to follow shortly.
If extradited to the United States, Assange risks a sentence of up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison.
Perhaps, there was a time when governments declared war on poverty. After all, no economy can flourish whilst masses are in poverty and can’t buy the goods and services produced by businesses. Now, the British state has declared war on low and middle income families.
The squeeze on workers has reduced their share of the gross domestic product (GDP), in the form of wages and salaries, from 65.1% in 1976 to around 50% at the end of second quarter of 2023. Between1980 and 2014, real GDP growth averaged around 2.2% per year and the economy has grown sporadically since then. However, most people have seen little benefit of that growth.
One study estimates that “if wages had continued to grow as they were before the financial crash of 2008, real average weekly earnings would be around £11,000 per year higher than they currently are – a 37 per cent lost wages gap”. The real average earnings are unchanged since 2005.
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The war on the poor cannot provide economic or social stability. It has destroyed lives and inhibited social development. The institutions of government need to listen to saner voices, trade unions and non-governmental organisations to build a fair and just society through redistribution, higher public investment and by freeing themselves from the shackles of neoliberal economics.
Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.
There has been widespread bewilderment and anger after former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has a history of lying and who trashed Parliament, was appointed as a ‘democracy adviser’.
Johnson, who was booted out of office after lying about Covid lockdown parties in Downing Street, trashing the very rules his own government had set, and who prorogued parliament, violated parliamentary codes, lied repeatedly, partied in lockdown and handed government contracts to Tory cronies, has been appointed to the advisory board of the International Democracy Union (IDU).
The IDU is a global centre-right group chaired by Stephen Harper, the former prime minister of Canada, whose stated goal is the promotion of “democracy and centre-right policies around the globe”.
On Tuesday the group announced: “The IDU is excited to announce that PM Boris Johnson has joined our Honorary Advisory Board”.
Human rights groups say UK is ignoring its own rules on arms exports after hundreds of Palestinians killed
Campaigners block the road in East London outside the DSEI arms fair Photo: @CAATuk / Twitter
The UK government has no plans to suspend arms sales to Israel, despite human rights campaigners warning its exports have been used to kill civilians, openDemocracy has been told.
The UK has approved millions of pounds worth of licences for military equipment to Israeli forces since 2015. They include components for F-35 fighter jets, which can deliver ground strikes and have been recently pictured in social media posts from the Israeli Air Force.
In response to Hamas’ attack on Israel which killed hundreds of civilians, Israeli forces have fired thousands of bombs into Gaza since 7 October. As of yesterday, 2,750 Palestinians have been killed and 9,700 wounded in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza strip, according to the Palestinian health ministry. This figure was given before an attack on al-Ahli Arab hospital that reportedly killed 500 people.
Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, warned last week that “Palestinians are in grave danger of mass ethnic cleansing”.
openDemocracy asked the Department of Business and Trade if it would suspend and review its export licences for arms to Israel in light of the reported civilian killings. In response, the department said the licences were “under continual review” but there were “no immediate plans to stop arms export licences to Israel”.
Emily Apple, media coordinator for the Campaign Against the Arm Trade, said: “It is disgusting that the Department for Business and Trade is refusing to suspend and review arms licences to Israel given the mounting evidence of war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza.
“UK industry is responsible for 15% of the components used in the F35 stealth combat aircraft that are being used in airstrikes, and the UK is therefore complicit in war crimes committed by the Israeli government.”
Any UK company wishing to export military goods to other nations must apply for a licence to do so. The government has a number of criteria that must be met before licences can be granted.
One of the criteria is to “not grant a licence if [the department] determines there is a clear risk that the items might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law”.
Officials are also told not to grant licences if there is a “likelihood that the items would be used in the territory of another country other than for legitimate purposes including national or collective self defence”.
The campaign group Palestine Action, which has taken direct action in the UK against Israeli arms company Elbit, said it was “no surprise” that the UK government is continuing to allow arms exports.
“Numerous weapons factories, including ones owned by Israel’s largest weapons firm, continue to operate on our doorsteps, who market their weapons as “battle-tested” on the captive population of Gaza,” a spokesperson for the group said.
The UK has in the past paused export licences in response to reports that its criteria may have been breached.
In 2019, the then foreign secretary Dominic Raab suspended arms exports to NATO ally Turkey after it invaded Syria, on the grounds that it risked worsening the humanitarian crisis in the country.
The UK revoked some arms licences to Israel in 2009 after hundreds of Palestinians were killed in airstrikes by Israeli forces. During the 2o14 conflict, the government warned it would suspend licences again if hostilities continued, but ultimately did not go-ahead with the decision.
The decision to continue supplying arms to Israel comes after MPs and campaign groups raised concerns about a growing lack of transparency from the government over exports licences.
In October, an enquiry led by MPs found that despite pledges from the government to improve transparency “progress has been limited” and that “there is a worrying lack of openness and data on compliance”.
The Campaign Against the Arms Trade told openDemocracy that there is a “disturbing lack of transparency over arms sales to Israel”.
“The UK government has hidden behind exemptions and refused to supply CAAT with data regarding recent exports by Elbit subsidiaries, and a large proportion of UK sales are hidden by open export licences where it is impossible to monitor the amount of weapons sold,” it said.
Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, urged the government to reverse its decision to continue supplying Israel with arms.
“The UK’s arms export system is based on the principle of avoiding a clear risk of British weapons being used to commit serious violations of international law. There’s mounting evidence that Israel’s military conduct in Gaza during the last week has included indiscriminate attacks which have killed and injured large numbers of Palestinian civilians.
“The government needs to follow its own rules and urgently suspend export licences for all arms transfers to Israel that risk being used to commit further unlawful attacks.”
Andrew Cooper is standing for the party in Tamworth.
With two by-elections set to take place this Thursday following the resignation of two Tory MPs, this week is a crucial test for Rishi Sunak ahead of the next general election.
Yet one of the Tory by-election candidates, Andrew Cooper, who is standing for the party in Tamworth is revealed to have posted a chart telling parents who can’t feed kids to ‘f*** off’, causing yet another headache for the Tories.
The story, first reported in the Mirror, reveals that in 2020 Cooper posted on Facebook a diagram drawn in pen on a piece of paper asking the question: “Can you feed your kids?” It said that those who have subscriptions for TV services such as Sky, as well as mobile phone contracts or get their nails done should “f*** off”. The diagram suggested that parents who do none of these but do not work should also “f*** off”.
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Andrew Cooper prospective Tory MP for Tamworth’s diagram telling parents to feck off
