An RAF F-35. The research also raises questions over whether the UK continued to sell F-35 parts directly to Israel. Photograph: AS1 Amber Mayall RAF/PA
The research also raises questions over whether the UK continued to sell F-35 parts directly to Israel in breach of an undertaking only to sell them to the US manufacturers Lockheed Martin as a way of ensuring the fighter jet’s global supply chain was not disrupted, something the government said was essential for national security and Nato.
The findings have led the former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell to call for a full investigation, adding it was a resigning matter if the foreign secretary, David Lammy, was shown to have misled parliament in breach of the ministerial code when he told MPs in September that much of what the UK sends to Israel was “defensive in nature”.
McDonnell said “The government has shrouded its arms supplies to Israel in secrecy. They must finally come clean in response to this extremely concerning evidence and halt all British arms exports to Israel to ensure no British-made weapons are used in Netanyahu’s new and terrifying plans to annex the Gaza Strip and ethnically cleanse the land.”
UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.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
Keir Starmer visiting the defence contractor Leonardo in Luton, 2 May 2025. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/PA
The local elections showed that voters feel betrayed. But in a party that brooks no dissent, that message isn’t getting through
The response from Labour spokespeople so far to the loss of Runcorn and Helsby – and to the election results as a whole – has been especially tin-eared. There doesn’t seem to be any understanding of the deep-seated emotion in the reaction of Labour supporters to the party’s behaviour in government over the past 10 months. There used to be talk of the need for emotional literacy in politics. What we are witnessing is a staggering level of emotional illiteracy.
Labour supporters feel deeply that their party has turned its back on them. It’s not just that they feel they are not being listened to. It’s that the Starmer and Reeves government is doing things that they believe no Labour government should ever do.
After 14 years of enduring year after year of austerity under the Conservatives, there was such a collective sigh of relief in getting rid of the incompetent, corrupt and brutal Tories. There might not have been much in the way of inspiring politics from Keir Starmer in the run-up to the election last July, but at least we had a Labour government.
The problem now is that, at times, the government is unrecognisable as a Labour government. This isn’t the traditional argument about whether the Starmer administration is behaving like old Labour or New Labour. It’s whether it’s Labour at all in the eyes of people who have supported us or would want to support us.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
If someone read out the following list of policies, which party would you think was in power? Depriving 2 million pensioners of the winter fuel allowance. Refusing to scrap the two-child benefit cap to lift nearly half a million children out of poverty. Raising tuition fees for students by more than the rate of inflation. Cutting overseas aid to the poorest people across the globe by half. Cutting £5bn from benefits for disabled people. Introducing a new round of cuts to government department spending and laying off 50,000 public sector workers.
I very much doubt even 12 months ago you would have thought that this would be the Labour party in government.
It is expected that in the spring statement, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will seek to justify this effective return to austerity by the necessity to maintain “iron” economic discipline through a rigid adherence to her fiscal rules. The chancellor’s argument will be that the world has changed, which is true, but this prompts the question: why, then, doesn’t the government’s strategy change to meet the situation it now finds itself in? Even Germany’s iron laws welded into its constitution are being adapted to the new economic realities.
Media briefings suggest that in her spring statement speech on Wednesday Reeves wants to be upbeat about Labour’s achievements so far. She is likely to cite the welcome rise in the minimum wage, but may fail to acknowledge that even working full-time on the minimum wage means a person is nearly £10,000 below the annual income, after tax, calculated by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as necessary to secure an acceptable standard of living.
In recent interviews Reeves has already claimed this year’s above-inflation rise in wages as a government success, but has failed to mention that even with this long awaited rise, wages remain so low that 37% of people having to claim universal credit are actually in work.At least she will have some big numbers to cite on investment in the NHS and infrastructure. The problem is that much of the new NHS money could be drained away by the strains placed on it as disabled people find they are unable to cope without the support that has been taken away from them. This will include elderly people without adequate physical care and younger people without mental health support.
The problem with the increase in infrastructure investment is also that the memory of the cut in Ed Miliband’s green investment budget lingers in the mind and, as Reeves has repeatedly been warned, infrastructure investment takes a long time to feed into growth on any scale in the economy, and any benefit is likely to land after the next election.
The danger now is that the government’s standing could be irretrievably damaged as the Labour party is branded just another austerity party. This will provide the key that opens the door to the populist Reform UK. Nigel Farage’s party doesn’t need to present a rational, implementable alternative economic policy programme. It will simply go full Trump to distinguish itself from both Conservatives and Labour by portraying itself as anti-establishment, the defender and voice of the working class – while targeting immigrants, wokeism and even some corporations.
The polls and council byelection results are showing that there is a crisis of confidence in the government, reflecting the reactions and worries about recent policies among our supporters and even party members. But it is not too late to turn things around. In the very short term, a relaxing of the fiscal rules would enable the chancellor to raise sufficient taxes from those with the broadest shoulders to prevent a return to ongoing austerity.
It is not rocket science to implement a programme of marginal tax rises that would end cuts and fund the progressive policies any Labour government would aim to pursue. The list is obvious: equalising capital gains tax with income tax rates; a realistic rise in corporation tax; a financial transaction tax; the introduction of a small wealth tax on multimillionaires, called for by the Patriotic Millionaires group.
There are also many non tax measures to help people who are still struggling with the cost of living, such as fair rent controls, service charge caps, stricter controls on energy and water price rises, and reviews of food price rises to prevent price gouging. However, the spring statement and the subsequent public spending review in June should define what the long-term strategy of the government is rather than responding to the short-term political and economic mess it has created for itself. For this I urge the chancellor to look beyond just stabilising our economy and managing the existing system slightly more efficiently than the Conservative chancellors before her.
People want long-term change that provides everyone with a decent quality of life and addresses the grotesque levels of inequality in our society and the environmental crisis. Over the past 25 years, I have followed the work of Richard Wilkinson and subsequently his colleague Kate Pickett at the Equality Trust. Their detailed research has forensically revealed the impact of inequality on our society and economy. To quote the trust’s report timed to coincide with the election of the new government last year: “Biased public policies and flawed economic systems are serving a few wealthy people at the expense of the wellbeing of people and planet.”
The report went on to outline how the duty that was enacted in the Equality Act 2010 to reduce inequalities resulting from socioeconomic disadvantage could be implemented by redistribution power and wealth in our society. This includes new policy-making mechanisms that empower communities to identify and design the services to address their needs, wealth taxes to fund these, universal social security programmes and community wealth-building.
I thought and hoped, maybe naively, that this was the sort of programme that the incoming Labour government would implement. The track record of the government so far is, sadly, remarkably distant from this progressive approach. The spring statement could be the opportunity to change that narrative, not just by bridging the short funding gap with redistribution but more importantly to narrate and launch the longer term progressive path we need to achieve true Labour goals.
My remaining hope is that the chancellor will seize that opportunity, for I fear that if she doesn’t it will be impossible to recover the ground we have lost.
I am quoting the full article assuming that John McDonnell owns the copyright and intends that it is widely published. I will alter this post if asked to by the Guardian.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Palestine Actionists blockade the entrance roadway at the research centre of Israel weapons producer Elbit Systems at Filton, Bristol. Martin Pope/Reuters
Emma, a small business-owner living in Wales, said riot police raided her home without a warrant, despite having already arrested her daughter. “I was half naked [when they came in],” she said “They seized my work laptop, and my 16-year-old’s school laptop, handcuffed me and then led me away.”
Emma was kept by the police in solitary confinement for five days. “I disappeared from my family almost a week before they released me without charge and without apology, my life and my business upside down. I was left traumatised, in prison scrubs, 150 miles from my home, feeling like an animal. [My crime] was raising a young woman with a great moral compass.”
A spokesperson for South Wales Police said: “A complaint against police has been made which remains under investigation.”
Punished without trial.
Emma’s daughter is one of over 40 political prisoners identified by campaign group Defend Our Juries who have been jailed in the UK since July. The case of the Filton 18 has become emblematic of the UK’s increasingly repressive relationship with political activism. Advocates for the activists say the group is effectively being punished through the UK government’s abuse of counter-terrorism measures in a desperate bid to deter Palestine Action from targeting Elbit.
The controversy has reached parliament. In a Westminster Hall debate in December, John McDonnell MP made a rare, impassioned intervention on the Filton 18’s behalf, saying: “A number of them most probably will be proved innocent, but they’ll have served nearly two years in prison – for what? For trying to do what we’re failing to do – preventing this government supplying arms to a regime that’s killing children.”
In November, United Nations observers wrote to the head of the UK Mission to the UN in Geneva, Simon Manley, about the case. The activists appear to have been arrested under counter-terrorism legislation “for conduct that appears to be in the nature of ordinary criminal offences and does not appear to be genuinely ‘terrorist’ according to international standards”, the observers said. In late January, the government responded saying it would not be appropriate to comment while criminal proceedings are ongoing.
The measures taken against the Filton 18 are an escalation from the British state, especially with regards to Palestine Action. For four years, actions by those associated with the group were prosecuted using non-terrorism related charges, meaning they were released on bail before their trial. “[But now that] they’re being tagged and held in remand in connection to terrorism, suddenly the courts are very cautious of giving bail,” said Simon Pook, a lawyer at Robert Lizar, the firm defending the Filton 18. Pook spoke with Novara Media in general terms, not specifically about the Filton 18.
“When people are arrested under terrorist legislation, they are held in a remand space that is separate from the standard criminal cell. It’s very sterile and intentionally isolating, detaining you in confinement for up to seven days in what I view to be an immensely tortured position,” said Pook.
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For Pook, there’s a concerning continuity between the overzealous anti-protest laws brought in by the previous Tory administration and the current Labour one. “Our civil liberties are in grave danger under the current process that is labelling activist groups as terrorist suspects, as first rolled out by the Conservatives and now Labour,” he said.
While the Filton 18 languish in prison being treated like terrorists, they will not be charged for terrorism, per se. The CPS intends instead to argue a “link with terrorism”. This loose “link with terrorism” charge is a new development in the UK’s legal landscape, but one that echoes the mistreatment of the Irish community in the 70s, 80s and 90s. “It’s a very chilling moment,” said Pook.
“I remember when the UK government called the Irish a ‘suspect community’. They were labelled as terrorists through similar processes we’re seeing today, detained at airports and ferry ports under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The UK government is moving us to the point where activists are suspects, criminalising the rights of protest. This causes me grave concern.”
Pook also points to the lobbying power of the arms and fossil fuel industries – and the geopolitical interests attached to those mammoth sectors. “If the government wants those industries to develop, they’ve got to curtail opposition to it.”
Freedom of Information disclosures show that in recent years, Elbit held multiple meetings and conversations with UK ministers and the attorney general’s office (AGO), which oversees the CPS. (The AGO told Novara Media: “We do not provide a running commentary on who the AGO holds meetings with or how many.”)
Donald Trump shows off a letter from King Charles that Keir Starmer has just handed him, Washington, 27 February 2025. Photograph: ABACA/REX/Shutterstock
We need a ‘coalition of the willing’ capable of bringing together those in Europe and the global south. Britain should facilitate that
There are only so many times Donald Trump can be offered a state and royal visit to temper his political tantrums. With his latest attacks on Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the halting of aid to Ukraine, it’s already clear that not even the offer of a bed for the night at Balmoral has worked.
The silver lining of the Trump experience over the past fortnight is hopefully that it leads to a more realistic appraisal not just of the implications of the re-election of this narcissistic, bullying, corporate thug, but an understanding of the role the US has played over generations. Trump and his gang members JD Vance and Elon Musk are just the ugliest of faces of the US global policy pursued for a century at least.
In 1992 Noam Chomsky published a bestselling booklet, What Uncle Sam Really Wants. A read of Chomsky may help Labour’s policymakers overcome their apparent naivety so worryingly displayed in the constant references to the special relationship between the UK and US.
Trump’s “America First” policy is simply a more blatant articulation of the role the US has pursued globally since at least the second world war.
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There is an opening now for a much greater and more longer-sighted “coalition of the willing” capable of bringing together those in Europe and the global south to create the alliances and institutions needed to pursue the political and economic agenda that the US now resiles from.
This includes an economic cooperation agenda not based upon tariffs and protectionism for the wealthy, but one that is mutually beneficial and tackles both the grotesque inequalities between north and south and the common threat of the climate emergency.
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Unwise and immoral plans to cut British overseas aid, undermining soft power, are a legacy of a sort, but how much better it would be to see our prime minister using our influence and heft to bring together all those who want to discuss and construct a world reordered without the malign influences of Trump and China. That really would be a place in history worth having.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
