SIR KEIR STARMER has been concealing the truth over Diane Abbott’s exclusion from Labour in Parliament, it was revealed today.
BBC Newsnight reported that the party probe into Ms Abbott’s offence — a brief newspaper letter for which she immediately apologised — finished last December.
She has since remained without the Labour whip entirely at the discretion of chief whip Alan Campbell, who is appointed by and answers to the Labour leader.
Yet Sir Keir has repeatedly claimed that the decision on Ms Abbott’s future — she cannot stand in the general election for Labour without the matter being resolved — was nothing to do with him.
This has now been exposed as a falsehood. The fact that Britain’s first black woman MP has remained suspended to the point where her career may be terminated has been a decision of the Labour leadership.
Ms Abbott has long ridiculed Sir Keir’s hands-off pretence, tweeting last week that the situation was “everything to do with him.”
IT is no surprise that so many big business leaders have come out in support of the Labour Party.
It reflects two things. One is the banal fact that Labour looks like winning, and it does corporate leaders no harm at all to be able to say “I backed you at the election” when sitting down opposite ministers in a couple of months’ time to beg for assistance of one sort or another.
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Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves have bent over backwards to place themselves in the service of monopoly capitalism.
That has been reflected in their rhetoric, pledging the “most business-friendly government” in British history, which is a very high hurdle, but is a clear indication of their aspiration.
Sometimes this is extended by a commitment to be “pro-worker and pro-business” as if there were never a conflict between the two.
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As Unite’s Sharon Graham says, Labour’s New Deal for Working People now “has more holes than a Swiss cheese.” One can only hope that unions will be able to plug some of those gaps in Labour’s manifesto negotiations.
But the pro-capitalist turn goes much wider than safeguarding the bosses’ sacred right to exploit labour. It has permeated all aspects of the Starmer-Reeves approach.
The 120 signatories to the Labour-backing letter will have noticed that their corporation tax rate is not going to rise under Reeves.
They will have noticed that there is to be no wealth tax — of the kind Starmer once promised — under the impending Labour dispensation.
They will have noticed that outside a railway sector already under semi-control by the state, there is to be no extension of public ownership.
And they have noticed that despite the campaign slogan of “change” in fact Labour is offering nothing of the sort, but rather “economic stability.” That might have marked a point of divergence from the excitable Liz Truss but it hardly differs from Rishi Sunak, whose election boast is that he has restored — economic stability.
Britain’s chief prosecutor has blocked an attempt to serve visiting Israeli politician Tzipi Livni with an arrest warrant for war crimes, stemming from her time as Israel’s foreign minister.
The decision Thursday by Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer comes weeks after Britain revised its law on universal jurisdiction.
The revised law allows British courts to prosecute foreigners accused of crimes against humanity, wherever they were committed. But such prosecutions require the consent of the director of public prosecutions.
Labour Party leader Keir Starmer speaks during his visit to the Backstage Centre, Purfleet, for the launch of Labour’s doorstep offer to voters ahead of the general election, May 16, 2024
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On the economy, Labour offers only a commitment to “stability” based on austerity-style control of public spending and a hope that growth will nevertheless appear.
Establishing a publicly owned clean energy company, GB Energy, is all that remains of the radicalism of Sir Keir’s 10 pledges when seeking the Labour leadership.
Other ”first steps” include setting up a grandiose border security command to halt Channel boat crossings to outflank the Tories and a crackdown on “anti-social behaviour.”
Sir Keir told his audience that even these “first steps” could take two full terms in office — 10 years — to fully implement.
That makes their modesty still more striking. One pledge is to recruit 6,500 new teachers when 40,000 leave schools each year, equating to one-fifth of a new teacher each for Britain’s schools.
On the NHS, a first step commitment to provide 40,000 more appointments each week is equivalent to just a 2 per cent rise.
All this was welcomed by Lord Cameron’s friend, Boots chief executive Seb James, who particularly praised Labour’s “sensible fiscal measures.”
It was less welcome to Labour left organisation Momentum, which decried the party’s lack of radicalism.
A spokesman said: “These fixes fall desperately short of the bold policies needed to fix the Tories’ broken Britain.
The far right is set to piggyback on agricultural discontent to capture votes in June.
A large blue billboard stands outside a park in the town of Conegliano in northern Italy. On the left, a man pops a vast cricket into his mouth. On the right, are the words, “Let’s Change Europe before it changes us” – and the dates of the upcoming elections.
The poster – an advert for the country’s radical right party Lega per Salvini Premier – refers to a conspiracy theory that has swept across Italy in the last 18 months. Elites in Brussels are planning to replace meat with bugs and are using environmental regulations to do so, or so the theory goes.
As millions of voters across the EU prepare to head to the polls from 6-9 June, conspiracy theories and misinformation on food and farming could pull voters towards the far right and parties opposing climate-friendly laws.
In the face of this onslaught of misinformation, DeSmog is launching a new series that investigates misleading claims and their impact on climate policy in the farming sector.
Over the next two months DeSmog will monitor the spread of misinformation across the continent, working in seven different languages. We will look to identify false claims and uncover who is spreading these narratives online.
Agriculture accounts for 11 percent of carbon emissions in the EU, and has contributed to plummeting bird and bee numbers. But tackling the sector’s harms has become one of the most divisive issues on the continent, with tractors blocking highways across Europe during demonstrations this year.
The protests – attended by thousands of farmers in several countries – reflected a wide range of concerns, from unfair food prices to calls for protection from increasingly extreme weather. Yet this complexity was barely represented in the media where demonstrations were cast as opposition to environmental measures.
Far-right groups also weaponised the protests. In January, Jordan Bardella, lead EU candidate for France’s National Rally (formerly National Front), accused the country’s President Emmanuel Macron of pursuing “the death of agriculture” while Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s far-right party Vox, wrote to Macron demanding an end to “aggressions” against Spanish producers, who he described as “victims” of EU policy.
In the eyes of its critics, green reforms agreed in the last EU term would destroy farming. Plans to cut chemical use and make farmers protect natural habitats would lead to monumental job losses, they claim. The same arguments are used by agricultural corporations that stand to lose out if green reforms are enacted.
The most extreme opponents, including radical right think tanks and hardline farming groups, see green reforms as part of a plan by Brussels bureaucrats to control the industry and “grab land”.
These claims, however, contradict the facts: last year, more than 6,000 scientists said that such nature-friendly measures were “the cornerstone of food security and human health”.
The policies that are currently being attacked aim to tackle climate breakdown – the biggest threat to producers across the EU, who are already feeling the effects of global heating. A “staggering portion” of the continent has been exposed to high drought risk in recent years, according to the European Drought Observatory, leading to widespread crop losses.
Right-wing and far-right groups stand to make massive gains from stoking these tensions. A recent study by the EU’s Committee of the Regions showed that discontented rural areas could be a major source of votes.
This series will shine a light on those candidates that are weaponising false claims for electoral gain.
