“In light of this latest scientific evidence, it would be dangerously foolish to do anything to put our burning world in even greater danger.
“Yet that is exactly what the government is doing – determined to expand Heathrow and Gatwick airports and refusing to rule out giant new oil and gas fields at Rosebank and Jackdaw coming on stream.
“The government is sending totally the wrong signals to the markets. We need a government committed to speeding up the transition away from fossil fuels. The government must make it clear now that it will not allow new North Sea oil and gas drilling go ahead.
“We must also get serious about how we make our communities more resilient to the now-unavoidable impacts of climate change. We need our homes and our communities to be fit for the future.”
A new government bill would force banks to carry out “mass surveillance” of millions of innocent disabled people and other benefit claimants, MPs have been warned.
The measures in the bill would force banks to examine individuals’ accounts for potential breaches of benefit eligibility rules, and then pass that information to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
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Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall told MPs on Monday that the measures would force banks to provide data to “help identify incorrect benefit payments people might be getting, including fraudulently, such as if someone has too much in savings, making them ineligible for a benefit, or if they are fraudulently claiming benefits abroad when they should be living in the UK”.
But independent MP Zarah Sultana said the “algorithm-driven financial surveillance” allowed by the bill would lead to errors that would disproportionately affect disabled and older people and “those already struggling to make ends meet”, and create “a two-tier justice system”.
She said: “Even a one per cent error rate in the AI system used by banks could lead to thousands of benefit recipients being wrongly flagged, unfairly investigated and forced into lengthy appeals.”
She said the bill would allow “mass surveillance” and was “deeply unjust” and would “subject millions of innocent people – disabled individuals, carers, jobseekers, pensioners and parents – to unwarranted financial surveillance, treating them as suspects by default, simply because they receive state support”.
It would, she said, turn banks into “agents of the state”.
Another independent MP, John McDonnell, the former Labour shadow chancellor, said the government was seeking powers for a “mass surveillance exercise”.
He said: “The reason why people will feel that it is unfair is that it specifically targets people who are often in desperate need.
“If there was a group of people whose accounts we would want to monitor because there has been a history of fraud, and who have had to pay money back – some have gone to prison – it would be MPs; I was here during the expenses scandal.”
The government is hiding figures that would show how often its civil servants are making life-threatening errors when dealing with the benefit claims of disabled people, just as media reports suggest it is planning sweeping cuts and reforms.
Last Friday, The Times reported that everyone on out-of-work disability benefits could be forced to carry out work-related activity, while hundreds of thousands of disabled people could see their support cut.
The article stressed that no decisions had yet been made, but The Times is known to have highly-placed contacts within both the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Treasury, which is said to be pushing for significant spending cuts.
But just as reports suggest the government is planning major changes that could impose significant safeguarding risks for disabled claimants, and increase pressure on DWP work coaches and jobcentres, DWP has blocked the publication of updated figures that would show the number of potentially fatal errors being made by its staff.
Last month, Disability News Service (DNS) reported on the long-delayed release of figures from last April, which showed how DWP staff were making thousands of potentially fatal errors every month when dealing with the benefit claims of disabled people, particularly in relation to universal credit claims and the department’s fraud and “compliance” work.
A view of Gaza City after Israel’s destruction of it, February 4, 2025
WE CAN’T say the mask has slipped. US President Donald Trump has never masked his contempt for human rights or international law.
But the US president saying the United States will “take over” the Gaza Strip and expel all its inhabitants is a watershed moment. It is an unambiguous demand for ethnic cleansing on a huge scale.
Trump doesn’t mince words about what he sees happening to Palestinians who refuse to be driven out, saying they have to go to “some place they can live and not die.” Nor is the erasure of the Palestinians to be confined to Gaza; he moots Israel’s annexation of the West Bank too.
It hardly needs saying that if Trump wanted Palestinians to “live and not die,” he would not continue to arm the Israeli war machine that has killed them in their tens of thousands over the past year, or connive, by extending the suspension of funds to the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, at starving them of food and medicine.
The same point applies to the British government.
The mood music from Labour’s Trump apologists is that there’s nothing to see here — it’s just Trump, he says a lot of wild things. Scottish Blairite Jim Murphy says we shouldn’t take him “literally in what he says because he often has no intention of doing it.” Cabinet Minister Steve Reed says there’s no need for a “running commentary” on US presidential statements and we should give Trump credit for securing the current ceasefire.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy likewise refuses to acknowledge the US government’s extremism, saying “Trump is right” to want to rebuild Gaza — a ludicrous evasion of the central part of Trump’s proposal, which is to rebuild it without Palestinians — before reiterating support for the two-state solution.
To say Trump’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is too outlandish to take seriously ignores the brutal fact that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is already happening.
Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.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/QILgUHrdWREGenocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
