Keir Starmer’s 100 spy flights over Gaza for Israel | Matt Kennard investigates
F-35 components sent to Israel from Royal Air Force base
https://www.declassifieduk.org/f-35-components-sent-to-israel-from-royal-air-force-base/
Declassified UK Exclusive: Parts for Israel’s most advanced fighter jet have been secretly shipped from a British military base during the assault on Gaza.
Reported in partnership with Irish news site The Ditch
F-35 fighter jet parts have been secretly transported to Israel from a British air force base in Norfolk, it can be revealed.
At least seven arms shipments have been sent from RAF Marham to Israel’s F-35 airbase at Nevatim since the Gaza bombing began.
Two of the deliveries took place this summer shortly after Keir Starmer became UK prime minister.
The information is contained within cargo documents reviewed by The Ditch and Declassified.
The documents show that the UK government has not only been approving F-35 export licences to Israel, but actively facilitating their transportation through British military sites.
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Campaign Against Arms Trade’s Sam Perlo-Freeman told Declassified: “The F-35 plays a major part in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and brutal bombardment and invasion of Lebanon”.
He added that “the UK is not only licensing the supply of spare parts, but actively using UK military assets to facilitate their delivery. This makes UK ministers and potentially even military personnel complicit in war crimes”.
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https://www.declassifieduk.org/f-35-components-sent-to-israel-from-royal-air-force-base/
ed: If you’re not seeing the video it shows current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer responding to Green Party MP Carla Denyer at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Starmer refuses to describe Israel’s Gaza genocide – which he, his government and the UK’ s military are actively participating in – as a genocide.
This Labour budget is austerity by another name
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/31/this-labour-budget-is-austerity-by-another-name
Jeremy Corbyn, MPs and politicians from the Green party, Plaid Cymru and others respond to the budget.
Labour’s first budget punishes the “working people” they claim to support. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves promised to deliver real change to the electorate, after 14 years of Tory rule. This week, they have broken that promise. This budget is austerity by another name.
While we welcome the government’s decision to invest in school and hospital buildings, it is extremely disappointing that these investments have been undermined by a swathe of public sector cuts, cruel attacks on the worst off, and a dogmatic refusal to redistribute wealth and power. These are not “tough choices” for government ministers, but for ordinary people who are forced to choose between heating their home and putting food on the table.
Labour is raising defence expenditure to 2.5% of GDP while telling us there is no money to lift 250,000 children out of poverty. This is a lie. There is plenty of money – it’s just in the wrong hands. The richest 1% in the UK hold more wealth than 70% of Britons. By refusing to impose a wealth tax, this government has chosen to force vulnerable communities to pay the price for years of economic failure, instead of making the richest pay their fair share. Labour’s first budget shows us whose side they’re on.
Years of austerity and privatisation have decimated our public services and pushed millions into poverty, disproportionately impacting women, people of colour and disabled people. Making millions of children, working, retired and disabled people poorer damages our entire economy and stretches our public services. An austerity economy is a false economy.
We, along with nearly 100 progressive Independent and Green politicians across the country, are calling on the Labour government to: 1) introduce wealth taxes; 2) abolish the two-child benefit cap and stop attacking welfare recipients; 3) reverse cuts to winter fuel; 4) restore the £2 bus cap; and 5) invest in a Green New Deal.
We refuse to believe that child poverty, mass hunger and homelessness are inevitable in the sixth largest economy in the world. A progressive movement is growing up and down the country, demanding a real alternative to this race to the bottom between Labour and the Tories, which has seen the new government perpetuate decades of austerity and rampant corporate greed.
The Tories’ collapse allowed Labour to come to power with the lowest vote share ever won by any single-party majority government. Labour haemorrhaging votes to progressive independents and Greens in their heartlands should be a lesson to this government: you are wrong to believe that progressive voters have nowhere else to go. Our movement is growing every day – and you ignore the demand for a real alternative at your peril.
Jeremy Corbyn MP Independent, Carla Denyer MP Green party co-leader, Adrian Ramsay MP Green party co-leader, Sian Berry MP Green party, Ben Lake MP Plaid Cymru, Ann Davies MP Plaid Cymru, Liz Saville Roberts MP Plaid Cymru, Llinos Medi MP Plaid Cymru, Zack Polanski Green party deputy leader and London assembly member , Leanne Mohamad Independent candidate for Ilford North, Jamie Driscoll Former North of Tyne mayor, Andrew Feinstein Former ANC MP and Independent candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, Leanne Wood Former leader, Plaid Cymru, Beth Winter Former Labour MP for Cynon Valley, Hilary Schan Chair, We Deserve Better and Independent councillor in Worthing, Anthony Slaughter Wales Green party leader
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/31/this-labour-budget-is-austerity-by-another-name
This blog has previously experienced copyright take down notices. I am republishing this letter in full on the basis that the original authors have and retain rights of copyright and that they have indicated that they wanted it published by submitting it to the Guardian newspaper.
Morning Star: The good, the bad and the ugly in the Labour Budget
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-good-bad-and-ugly-labour-budget
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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 keep children in poverty with the two-child benefit cap, to pick pensioners’ pockets with the winter fuel payment cut and to continue Tory “reform” of the work capability assessment — estimated to cost over 400,000 people with mobility or mental health problems over £400 a month.
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.
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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-good-bad-and-ugly-labour-budget