Prime Minister Keir Starmer during a bilateral meeting with Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, at the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, November 12, 2024
IF KEIR STARMER were serious about treating people who receive social security payments with “dignity and respect,” he would not have announced his crackdown in the Mail on Sunday, or used it to rail against “criminals” who “game the system.”
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The presumption of guilt is built into the successive wars on “benefit cheats.” It grossly exaggerates the scale of benefit fraud, feeding hostility to the social security system itself. It encourages suspicion of anyone claiming, and was certainly linked to the steady rise in hate crimes against disabled people recorded over 14 years of Tory government.
The assault on disabled and chronically ill people was among the cruellest policies of those governments.
The DWP admitted in 2015 that thousands of people passed as “fit for work” died within months; there were even cases where people starved to death after their benefits were cut, like Errol Graham, whose body was only discovered by the bailiffs sent to evict him.
Labour should be rejecting a Tory inheritance that persecutes some of Britain’s most vulnerable.
But it shows little sign of doing so, with Rachel Reeves pledging to continue Tory amendments to the work capability assessment that narrow eligibility criteria and are likely to cost disabled people hundreds of pounds a month.
ARCHITECTS OF SLAUGHTER : Jonathan Powell (right)and Alastair Campbell attend a Gala dinner to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland on April 16 2023 [dizzy: War criminal Alastair Campbell often complains about being called a war criminal.]
The British press has welcomed Keir Starmer’s new National Security Adviser without any mention of his deep, central involvement in the criminal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — but history remembers, writes IAN SINCLAIR
“THE US media’s gravest shortcoming is much more their errors of omission than their errors of commission,” William Blum, historian and fierce critic of US foreign policy, once astutely observed. “It’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies.”
Blum’s evergreen maxim very much applies to the British media, too.
Take the press response to Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently appointing Jonathan Powell to be his new National Security Adviser.
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Given the job description for his new position, amazingly, none of the five newspapers thought it pertinent to mention Powell’s central role in the illegal and aggressive invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and Britain’s subsequent military occupation. Or, for that matter, Powell’s role in Britain’s (also illegal) 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent occupation.
If we judge Powell’s political career in the 2000s using the limited, liberal framing endemic to these newspapers, his record is a disaster.
The British military interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan are now widely understood to have been catastrophes, leading to the deaths of hundreds of British soldiers. The presence of British troops in both countries energised the armed resistance.
The Taliban are now back in control of Afghanistan, and Iraq’s social fabric was torn asunder to such an extent that Isis was able to take control of around 40 per cent of the country in the mid-2010s.
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If we judge Powell’s career using a moral lens, then he arguably becomes a blood-soaked, criminal political figure. He was, after all, one of the key individuals in Blair’s inner circle in the run-up to the invasion when this cabal repeatedly misled the cabinet, parliament, media and British public.
He attended the infamous July 23 2002 meeting recorded in the leaked minutes which have become known as the Downing Street Memo.
Summarising recent talks Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, had had in Washington, the minute’s note: “Military action was now seen as inevitable” but “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
The minutes also note foreign secretary Jack Straw said the “case [for war] was thin” as “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his [weapons of mass destruction] capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”
Powell was at Blair’s side when the September 2002 dossier was compiled, with little regard for the actual evidence, to strengthen the case for war. In fact, Powell “instructed intelligence chiefs to change the … dossier to make it appear that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was much greater than they believed,” the Guardian reported in September 2003.
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[T]he ramifications of the historical record are clear. Rather than returning to Downing Street, Powell — like Blair, Campbell and Brown — should be heading to The Hague.
Original article republished from MEMO under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Simon Walters, UK Ambassador to Israel, speaks at the “International Rally – United We Bring Them Home” rally in Hostage Square on May 18th, 2024 in Tel Aviv, Israel. [ Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images]
British military personnel will be put in “harm’s way” to defend Israel against Iran, the UK’s Ambassador to Israel has declared in a stark admission that could see British forces ordered to risk their lives defending the apartheid state.
Speaking to Israeli journalists at his Ramat Gan residence, Ambassador Simon Walters made the extraordinary commitment that “the United Kingdom will be a close ally and is prepared to put its own aircraft and its own personnel in harm’s way to defend Israel.”
Walters revealed that British forces have already been actively involved in military operations supporting Israel, noting that the Royal Air Force flew alongside Israeli and US pilots during Iran’s missile and drone attack in April. “Without going into detail, on October 1, the British armed forces again played a role in trying to disrupt the Iranian attack on Israel,” Walters disclosed.
These revelations come as an Al Jazeera investigation has exposed the extent of British military support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The investigation found that the UK and the US have established an air bridge crucial for sustaining Israel’s military campaign. In revelations that are highly controversial, British forces have conducted nearly half of all reconnaissance missions over Gaza since Israel’s assault on Gaza began. Reconnaissance carried out by the UK is said to have surpassed Israel’s own surveillance operations by more than double.
With Israel facing genocide charges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Gallant having been served arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Britain’s direct military support could expose London to allegations of complicity in international crimes. Under international law, states providing material assistance to forces committing serious violations can be held responsible as accomplices
Addressing the ongoing controversy over British arms sales to Israel, Walters acknowledged that the risk of violations of international law “is evidently present here”. He noted that UK NGOs are currently pursuing legal action against the government to force additional restrictions on arms exports to Israel, battles which the government is actively contesting in court.
The Ambassador also expressed concerns about Israel’s treatment of Palestinian prisoners, pointing out that Israel has denied Red Cross access to detainees from Gaza. “Had the Red Cross visited regularly, it would provide reassurance of the conditions, it would not only protect the prisoners,” he stated, adding that such visits would also protect guards from accusations.
Israel is accused of torture and sexual abuse of Palestinians, including rape of detainees in prisons. Famous Gaza surgeon, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, is the latest high-profile figure who was killed by Israel while in detention. Al Bursh is said to have been severely tortured. His body was left naked from waist down suggesting that he was also raped by the Israeli army.
On the situation in Gaza, Walters challenged the notion that military pressure alone could achieve Israel’s objectives. “I hear people calling for the continuation of the war until Hamas is destroyed and I think they are kidding themselves,” he said. “They are imagining an outcome that will never come.”
Walters also highlighted concerns about Palestinian rights in the illegally Occupied West Bank, particularly regarding restrictions around olive harvesting and attacks by Israeli extremists. “At the end of the day, this is an aspect of the Occupation, which many Israelis do not see and are not aware of,” he concluded.
Original article republished from MEMO under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Genocide 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/O74hZCKKdpAGenocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
EVASIVENESS on whether Britain will comply with the International Criminal Court (ICC’s) arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exposes government hypocrisy.
It underlines the crisis engulfing the Western-defined and policed “rules-based international order” and the dilemmas this poses for liberal imperialists like Keir Starmer.
Neither he nor Home Secretary Yvette Cooper can risk slamming the arrest warrant as “outrageous,” as US President Joe Biden does.
Washington has never signed up to the ICC. Its political leaders are open about being rule-makers not rule-takers, insisting other countries comply with the court’s rulings — as when Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded that every ICC member honour the arrest warrant for Russia’s Vladimir Putin — while rejecting its jurisdiction over anything the United States or its citizens do.
Britain’s role is subordinate. It belongs to the ICC and claims respect for the court’s neutrality.
Hence Cooper’s mealy-mouthed talk of “proper processes that need to be followed.” In fact, as the chair of the foreign affairs select committee Emily Thornberry acknowledges, the proper process is straightforward: “If Netanyahu comes to Britain, our obligation under the Rome Convention would be to arrest him under the warrant from the ICC… we are required to, because we are members.”
But to admit that would raise questions the Starmer government is determined to ignore. If the prime minister of Israel is a wanted war criminal, systematically starving the civilian population of northern Gaza among other crimes, how can Britain justify continued support for his war — which it continues to provide, for all the empty talk about immediate ceasefires, through arms sales, shared surveillance flight data and allowing the use of RAF bases on Cyprus to supply its military?
Genocide 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/O74hZCKKdpAGenocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Jeremy Clarkson spreads well-worn conspiracy theory that casts inheritance farm tax policy as plot to “replace farmers with migrants”.
A network of conspiracy theorists has jumped on the inheritance tax debate to fuel an anti-green “culture war”, experts say.
Thousands of farmers demonstrated in Westminster on Tuesday against the Labour government’s plans to remove an inheritance tax exemption on agricultural assets, with tractors blocking roads outside parliament.
The policy, which raises inheritance tax on farms worth more than £1 million to 20 percent from April 2026, has been criticised by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, The Green Party and others, with disputes about how many farms will be affected.
But social media analysis by DeSmog shows how the protests have also been exploited by a number of high-profile individuals and groups, spreading conspiracy theories about a left-wing government plot to take away people’s freedoms under the guise of climate action.
These include TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who has repeatedly cast doubt on the role of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions on climate change. The campaign group ‘No Farmers, No Food’, which has spread false claims about governments forcing people to “eat bugs”; the Together Declaration, which has cast doubt on the safety of life-saving Covid-19 vaccines; and Reform UK, the anti-immigration party which campaigns to “scrap net zero” and open new coal mines, were all active at the protest.
The protests have also attracted the attention of international commentators, among them Donald Trump ally Elon Musk, who shared a Guardian column defending the policy, adding: “Britain is going full Stalin.” Musk is increasingly commenting on UK politics, posting during the summer’s far-right riots: “Civil war is inevitable.”
DeSmog has contacted Clarkson, NFNF and Together for comment.
Conspiracy Theories
Jeremy Clarkson, who presents the “Clarkson’s Farm” documentary series, was a celebrity speaker at the protests, calling for Labour to “back down” on the policy and receiving widespread media attention. In a column for The Sun newspaper on 8 November, Clarkson described Labour’s centre-left chancellor Rachel Reeves as “an admirer of communists”.
He wrote: “I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan. They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms. But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.”
The comments echo alarmist claims made in the Netherlands since 2019 that the government is using green policies to take land from farmers in order to house asylum seekers. Far-right parties have won major election victories in the country in part thanks to the public anger expressed in farmers’ protests.
Clarkson has commented on farmers’ protests in the Netherlands and Germany. In January he wrote a piece for The Times titled: “Apparently it’s far-right to grow food.” DeSmog has reported on how farmers’ protests on a range of issues have been “hijacked” and blamed on green policies.
Clarkson’s claims also echo the “Great Reset”, a post-Covid conspiracy theory which claims that the World Economic Forum (WEF) and other international “elites” are using green policies to impose a socialist dictatorship on the world.
These claims have also been promoted by ‘No Farmers, No Food’ (NFNF), a campaign group which had a significant presence at Tuesday’s protests.
As DeSmog reported in February, the group is run by PR executive and GB News pundit James Melville and backed by the Together Declaration, a climate denial and conspiracy theory group set up in 2021 to oppose Covid-19 lockdowns.
In January, NFNF shared a post on X which said: “Farmers stand between us and WEF’s desire for us to ‘EAT BUGS, own nothing and be happy’.” The same month, Melville shared a post which read: “Farmers across Europe are mass protesting the globalists trying to crush them. Between Bill Gates, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] & the WEF, we’re going to have no private farmland left. They want you eating bugs.”
Earlier this week Melville posted that “farmers are the lightning rod in so many key battles that determine our way of life”, including “the net zero debate”. He added: “It’s probably the most important fight for the very fabric of British society right now.”
Clarkson has also written columns in The Sun this month attacking Labour’s energy policies and mocking prime minister Keir Starmer’s attendance at COP29, the UN climate summit taking place in Azerbaijan, as “virtue signalling” and “a complete waste of time”.
In 2021, Clarkson told the Sunday Times that he bought his £4.25 million farm, Diddly Squat, in order to avoid paying inheritance tax. When asked about this by the BBC at the protest on Tuesday, he said the question was “classic BBC”, and that the real reason was that he wanted to “shoot pheasants”.
Anti-Net Zero Agenda
Attending the protests was Alan D Miller, a businessman who founded the Together Declaration in August 2021. At Tuesday’s protest he was photographed alongside Clarkson, who was holding a placard which read: “With Our Farmers #Together”.
Miller posted a video of himself on GB News on X with the caption: “the obsession with net zero has far too much virtue signalling & far too little open honest transparent debate.”
As DeSmog reported in May, research by the cross-party think tank Demos found that Together was responsible for all online posts attacking low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) in 2023. In the same year, the group published an open letter which said, “We have no confidence in the process for ensuring ongoing safety of the Covid-19 vaccines”.
In 2023, Together also launched its “No to Net Zero” campaign which attacked the premise and implementation of net zero, saying that the targets are based on “wildly exaggerated fears about the future” and that “modern industry and farming are not what is killing us, it is what is keeping us alive.”
The farmers’ protest was supported by Ben Pile, Together’s “cabinet member for net zero”, who posted on X that farmers should “please remember that no part of the UK’s green agenda is your friend. All of it is intended to deprive you of your livelihood, one way or another. That is its design.”
Pile is a climate crisis denial blogger who has falsely claimed that “the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is neither as strong nor as demanding of action as is widely claimed”.
This wing of the farmers’ protest was also supported by Reform UK, the right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage MP. In a post on X, the party’s official account, used the NFNF slogan: “All the Reform MPs are at today’s farmers protest in Westminster. We are sending a message. No farmers, no food.”
A YouGov poll published this week found that just one in three Reform voters believe in man-made climate change.
Farage was also interviewed by Miller at the demonstration. In a video posted on X by Together, Farage called for similar farmers’ protests “in every market town in the country” and warned that these policies could cost Labour 100 seats in parliament.
Culture War
Labour has staunchly defended the inheritance tax plans, which it says will affect only 500 of the UK’s 209,000 farms.
Environment secretary Steve Reed said it was “only right” to ask the “wealthiest landowners and the biggest farms to pay their fair share”, citing the “£22 billion fiscal hole” inherited from the Conservative government.
However, Tom Lancaster, a land, food and farming analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), argues that the policy is likely to do more harm than good.
“The risk of this tax reform is that it distracts from the government’s climate and nature objectives, angering the very farmers we need to deliver these goals,” he told DeSmog.
“It’s hard to argue that the long-term costs of damaging their relationship with farmers to such an extent is worth the relatively small amount of money that it will raise, and it is also clear that in rushing the reform, they have missed an opportunity to use APR [Agricultural Property Relief] to further wider aims on the environment and tenancy reform.”
He added that the policy had been helpful for political opportunists. “The way these reforms have been handled – sprung on farmers after all the signals were to leave the reliefs alone – is also a gift to those who would seek to ferment a culture war in farming,” he said.
“There is nothing so appealing to a culture warrior as a betrayal narrative, and this gives them that on a plate.”
