UK Labour Party Shadow Foreign Secretary repeatedly heckled at a speech to the Fabian Society over his and the Labour Party’s support for and complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza.
Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy was repeatedly heckled over the UK Labour Party’s support for and complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza. He repeatedly said “Change through power, not through protest”. Does he mean that the Labour Party needs to be in power? It makes no difference does it? They don’t need power to oppose and resist genocide. I’m doing it FFS! Labour party official policy is support for and complicity in Israel’s genocide. You can’t get much more of a cnut than that.
Keir Starmer gives a keynote speech marking the four-year anniversary of the 2019 election, at Silverstone Technology Park, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, December 12, 2023
LABOUR will recognise a Palestinian state when it gets permission from Israel to do so, Sir Keir Starmer has announced in his latest abandonment of progressive international commitments.
Ditching a policy dating back a decade to Ed Miliband’s leadership, the Labour leader has announced that the party in government will no longer join nearly 140 other countries around the world in recognising the state of Palestine.
According to a report in the Jewish Chronicle, Sir Keir said at the weekend that “recognition has to be part of a process, and an appropriate part of the process.”
What that meant was spelt out by shadow foreign office minister Wayne David, who said Labour would “recognise the state of Palestine at a point which will help the peace process once negotiations between Israel and Palestine and the others are taking place.”
Calling Labour’s previous position of recognition of Palestine independently of any supposed peace process “T-shirt politics,” Mr David elaborated that recognition had to come to “fruition in a way which is acceptable to the state of Israel.
People demonstrate outside the constituency office of Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, in north west London, during a Palestine Day of Action demonstration, November 18, 2023
THAT there is a sense of inevitability about Keir Starmer’s abandonment of Labour’s commitment to recognise a Palestinian state should not diminish outrage at the move.
Ditching the pledge, first made under Ed Miliband’s leadership of Labour, is all of a piece with the party’s unequivocal support for imperialism under Starmer’s leadership.
It comes as other policies — to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia or to give MPs a vote before Britain undertakes military action — are also junked in a bonfire of progressive demands.
But the abandonment of a commitment to join 139 other countries around the world in recognising the state of Palestine is particularly brutal and cynical.
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In this situation to abandon a policy Labour has championed for a decade is not to assist the cause of peace, it is to green-light Israeli aggression.
Protesters block Westminster Bridge during a Free Palestine Coalition demonstration in central London, January 6, 2024
PALESTINE campaigners responded with fury today after peer and former Labour MP John Woodcock said protest organisers should foot the bill for policing their demonstrations.
As thousands once again thronged the streets of towns and cities across Britain demanding an end to the slaughter in Gaza, Mr Woodcock, now known as Lord Walney, the government’s independent adviser on “political violence and disruption,” made the call for police costs to be dumped on organisers in a review carried out for the Home Office.
He specifically targeted protests by Palestine supporters who have campaigned tirelessly against Israel’s murderous actions for three months.
The Stop the War Coalition (StWC) accused Lord Walney of attempting to end “hundreds of years of the right to protest” and said it was the police themselves who chose to mobilise thousands of officers for the protests.
Stop the War co-convener Lindsey German told the Morning Star: “This is just the latest scheme to stop the demonstrations.
“The government, the police and Lord Whatever should be clear that the demonstrations will continue as part of our democratic rights.
“We completely reject the idea that we should be paying for the police. We do not ask the police to turn out. We police our demonstrations ourselves.”
BRITISH democracy is under attack. The threat comes not from foreign bogeymen but from our own overbearing state.
Lord Walney — as hard-right ex-Labour MP John Woodcock renamed himself after his ennoblement for services against Jeremy Corbyn — wants to ban protests, at least if they aren’t bankrolled by the rich.
The demand that protest organisers meet the cost of policing demonstrations is as dangerous as it is dishonest.
Woodcock claims “disorder” at Palestine demos justifies billing the organisers.
In fact the mass peace demonstrations (which Woodcock, who called on the public to vote for Boris Johnson in 2019 to dash prospects of a socialist government, terms “anti-Israel marches”) have been strikingly peaceful.
Clashes with police, where they have occurred at all, have taken place away from the main demonstrations and certainly beyond the reach of the organisers’ stewards. They have been rare, with most arrests taking place for allegedly hateful speech or signage rather than violence or vandalism.
It adds insult to injury that Lord Walney advises the Home Office to start charging people to protest when the most serious recent disorder on our streets featured far-right hooligans incited to mob the Cenotaph on November 11 by the then home secretary herself.
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Palestine demos are huge because Westminster is at loggerheads with the people it claims to represent. There is a gulf between the government and opposition’s endorsement of Israel’s murderous war and the popular demand for peace.
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Woodcock was made a lord precisely for betraying his party to help defeat that movement, something Lord Rooker (another ex-Labour MP) described as a “national service.” He was tasked by the serial liar he backed for PM with advising the British state on how to stop such movements arising again.
Starmer’s project is to reconcile a turbulent people to a system that neither represents nor serves them. It’s a restoration project, an attempt to put a decade of political unrest behind us and reconcile the ruled to their rulers.
That explains the horror of “protest” politics, the paranoid vetting of candidates for public office and the determination to return decision-making to a narrow professional caste, whether by preventing ordinary party members from choosing their representatives or by establishing new fiscal oversight bodies to stop elected politicians departing from Treasury and Bank of England orthodoxy, however disastrous that orthodoxy is proving.
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His authoritarian instincts, visible in his harsh record as director of public prosecutions, have been on full display as a Labour leader who meets every dissenting voice with silencing orders, bans on debate, suspensions and rigged disciplinary procedures.
Britain is on this trajectory already: Tory governments since 2019 have dramatically curtailed protest rights, while state and corporate censorship are getting worse.
But Labour’s complete commitment to that agenda — and Starmer is on record saying he will maintain Tory policing laws — is a threat the left has yet to take seriously enough. Capitalism in Britain now maintains itself through the steady dismantling of our democratic rights.
Starmer’s appeal for an end to class conflict may be couched in the language of reconciliation but its reality means disarming citizens and working-class organisations oppressed by an ever more authoritarian state. It is a project that must be resisted to the hilt.
The Tory Party has spent an “unprecedentedly large figure” in the last month on advertising for Rishi Sunak’s Facebook page leading to a huge surge in followers, a transparency organisation has found.
Political transparency group Who Targets Me said Rishi Sunak’s spending on his own Facebook page in December was an “unprecedentedly large figure for a UK politician outside of an election period”.
Sunak appeared to buy more adverts in the last three months than Keir Starmer has in the three years and eight months he’s been Labour leader, which Who Targets Me stressed was a reminder of how digital campaigns are set to influence general elections in 2024.
Spending on Rishi Sunak’s Facebook page topped £42,000 in two weeks, with just over £9,000 spent on Meta adverts on 30th December alone and an additional £11,000 on New Year’s Eve.
According to Who Targets Me, the advertisements brought Sunak’s page a total of roughly 6 million impressions from December 25th to 31st. This has led to the page growing by nearly 100k in followers in the last month, making it now bigger than the main Conservative page, and Keir Starmers. However the official Labour Party page still has a fair hundred thousand followers more.
