Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Responding to news that energy regulator Ofgem has raised the price cap by 9.5 per cent just before the onset of winter, Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer said:
“Consumers are paying high prices for a crisis not of their making. This will be deeply worrying news for all those people already struggling to pay their bills.
“The government has said that establishing GB Energy will reduce bills in the future, which would be welcome. However, that aim will only be achieved if the government invests in improving the energy efficiency of homes too.
“We need a nationwide programme of government-backed, council-delivered home insulation starting immediately to help people keep their bills down for good.
“We also now need the government to maintain the winter fuel payments for all pensioners and end means testing so that they know they can afford to keep warm.
“We could reduce bills for the long term and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by building new homes that are easier and cheaper to heat and boosting insulation in existing homes. Insulating people’s homes means they can stay warm while using less energy, save money and produce fewer harmful carbon emissions.”
A Palestinian displaced woman by the Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip flees from Hamad City, following an evacuation order by the Israeli army to leave parts of the southern area of Khan Younis, August 11, 2024
SCOTTISH Greens slammed the SNP government today for “shameless” and “two-faced” meetings with Israeli diplomats as the slaughter of Palestinians continues.
SNP Cabinet Secretary for Constitution, External Affairs and Culture Angus Robertson reportedly met deputy Israeli ambassador Daniela Grudsky Ekstein last week to discuss “mutual interests.”
Scottish Green MSP Ross Greer hit out at his party’s erstwhile coalition colleagues.
He said: “The Israeli regime is committing genocide in Gaza.
“They cut off water and electricity, restricted the supply of everything from medicines to period products and have slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people in a 10-month campaign of relentless bombing.
“This is a shameless two-faced approach from the SNP.
“They publicly condemn Israel’s war crimes whilst holding secret meetings with its representatives to discuss so-called ‘mutual interests.’
Northern Pride in NewcastlePhoto: Neil Terry Photography
LGBT+ activists protested on Saturday against the sponsorship of Glasgow’s annual Pride celebrations by firms linked to Israel.
Hundreds of protesters including members of Glasgow Greens, the Scottish TUC and Glasgow Stop the War formed a Radical Bloc calling out Pride organisers for so-called pink washing through collaborating with companies who simultaneously sponsor the event while “directly profiting from Israel’s illegal occupation and ongoing genocide in Palestine.”
The protest took place as Pride activists staged annual celebrations in towns and cities across Britain, including at Northern Pride in Newcastle, where the banners of trade unions Unite, Unison, Royal College of Midwives and teaching unions NEU and NASUWT were raised.
The Glasgow protesters said sponsors included energy company SSE, chemical firm Merck and multinational finance company, JP Morgan.
An activist puts up a banner reading “Just Stop Oil” atop an electronic traffic sign along M25 on November 10, 2022 in London, United Kingdom. (Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images)
“Rulings like today’s set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest,” a U.N. official said.
In a decision that one United Nations official called “beyond comprehension,” a U.K. judge on Thursday sentenced five Just Stop Oil activists to a combined 21 years in prison over a Zoom call in which they discussed plans to disrupt London’s orbital M25 highway.
The sentences are believed to be the longest on record for nonviolent protest in U.K. history, The Guardian reported.
“The sentences handed to the five Just Stop Oil campaigners are utterly disproportionate,” environmentalist and author George Monbiot wrote on social media. “Four and five years in prison for peaceful protest? This is what you might expect in Russia or Egypt, not in a supposed democracy.”
“Why are we punishing the people trying to prevent disaster while allowing the oil company giants causing it to reap super profits?”
The five activists—Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin—were found guilty last week of conspiring to cause a public nuisance due to a four-day direct action protest on the M25 that Just Stop Oil ultimately held in November 2022. All of the defendants participated in a Zoom call in which they planned to recruit volunteers for the protest, which was intended to pressure the U.K. government to end oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, a policy that the incoming Labour government has now adopted. The Zoom call had been infiltrated by a Sun journalist, who shared its contents with the Metropolitan Police.
On Thursday, Judge Christopher Hehir sentenced Hallam to five years in prison and Shaw, Lancaster, De Abreu, and Gethin to four each.
🧡 The #WholeTruthFive being cheered as they leave court and are taken to prison.
⛓️ They have received 4 and 5 year prison sentences after a zoom call about a nonviolent action being planned in 2022. This is not what a functioning democracy looks like. pic.twitter.com/JKKg2f8gtb
The sentences sparked outrage from humans rights advocates and environmental campaigners.
Michel Forst, U.N. special rapporteur on environmental defenders who also observed part of the trial, said the sentencing “marks a dark day for peaceful environmental protest, the protection of environmental defenders, and indeed anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms in the United Kingdom.”
Forst added: “Rulings like today’s set a very dangerous precedent, not just for environmental protest but any form of peaceful protest that may, at one point or another, not align with the interests of the government of the day.”
Former Green Party leader and Member of Parliament Caroline Lucas called the sentences “obscene.”
“Why are we punishing the people trying to prevent disaster while allowing the oil company giants causing it to reap super profits?” she asked on social media.
Current Deputy Leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski said: “‘Conspiracy to commit a public nuisance’ is a deeply authoritarian description that should send shivers down the spine of all of us who want to live in a free society. Even worse when the real crime is consecutive governments who have played down the climate emergency.”
Campaigners and experts also criticized the trial itself, in which Hehir did not allow the defendants to present evidence about the climate crisis to explain their actions.
“Defendants should be allowed to explain why they have decided to use nonconventional but yet peaceful forms of action, like civil disobedience, when they engage in environmental protest,” Forst told The Guardian after attending part of the trial.
Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London—who Hehir did not allow the defendants to call as a witness—called the trial and verdict a “farce.”
“They mark a low point in British justice, and they were an assault on free speech,” McGuire in a statement said Thursday. “The judge’s characterization of climate breakdown as a matter of opinion and belief is completely nonsensical and demonstrates extraordinary ignorance. Similarly to suggest that the climate emergency is irrelevant in relation to whether the defendants had a reasonable case for action is crass stupidity.”
The verdict and sentencing also come amid an increasing crackdown on climate protest, both globally and in the U.K. The previous longest known civil disobedience sentences in the country were also for Just Stop Oil activists.
“The U.K. is a nightmare for climate activists from this point of view, in the sense that the sentences imposed in other countries are neither that harsh, nor that widespread,” Forst said July 12.
Greenpeace U.K.’s program director Amy Cameron said on Thursday: “These sentences are not a one-off anomaly but the culmination of years of repressive legislation, overblown government rhetoric, and a concerted assault on the right of juries to deliberate according to their conscience. It’s part of the mess the Labour government has inherited from its predecessor, and they must fix it by giving back to people the right to protest that’s been slowly being taken away from them.”
Forst also called on the new government to reverse course.
“Given the gravity of the situation, I urge the new United Kingdom government, with absolute urgency and without undo delay, to take all necessary steps to ensure that Mr. Shaw’s sentence is reduced in line with the United Kingdom’s obligations under the Aarhus Convention,” Forst wrote on Thursday.
Zionist Keir ‘Kid Starver’ Starmer. Image thanks to The Skwawkbox.
Capital Gains Tax is paid at a lower rate than Income Tax so that unearned income is taxed less than earned income: rich people who don’t even have to watch it coming in are taxed less than the hard-working families that we hear so much about. The Green Party argues that hundreds of thousands of children can be lifted out of poverty if Labour committed to equalising capital gains tax to pay to scrap the two-child benefit cap. The four newly elected Green MPs, will be proposing a reasoned amendment to the King’s Speech that includes the scrapping of the two-child benefit.
The IFS estimates that the cap will impact 2.63 million children by the end of this parliament and that scrapping the cap would cost in the region of £3.4billion – before taking into account the wider economic impact of poverty on health and welfare systems. In their recent manifesto, the Green Party estimated that making Capital Gains Tax fairer could raise £16bn, a move that would impact less than 2% of income taxpayers. This £16bn figure is supported by research conducted by Arun Advani, a tax expert at the University of Warwick, who estimated that equalising CGT and income tax rates would raise £16.7bn a year.
Green MPs will today propose an amendment to propose the government scraps the two-child benefit cap. Green Party Co-Leader and Bristol Central MP Carla Denyer, speaking on behalf of the Green group of MPs said
“I think Labour are serious when they say they want to change the country. But the change they are looking to achieve will always be hamstrung for as long as they limit their own potential to raise additional revenue to spend on frontline services. The impact of this approach is already clear. Every day we have children going hungry, unable to concentrate in school or struggling to ascertain even the very basics – this is the real world impact of child poverty. And so today we’re offering Labour a positive fairer taxation that will allow them to redistribute money from some of the wealthiest to some of the very poorest. This is a political choice that they must now make.”
Green Party Work, Employment and Social Security Spokesperson, Prof Catherine Rowett said, “Scrapping the two-child benefit cap is a moral and practical imperative. It is a matter of social, economic and racial justice. Today we have outlined one way that Labour, if they had the political will, could choose to help millions of children. And child poverty blights lives and costs millions, as generations of children are condemned to lower achievement and a lifetime of poor health. When they say there is no money, remember this is a political choice – they’re ignoring the political, social and economic costs of keeping children in poverty.”
