At a Westminster event on Monday, Emily Thornberry spoke of her pride in Britain “always” realising the “importance of international law”. To this rage-bait statement she added: “But when it comes to our record on Palestine, I am afraid we have fallen well short and in doing so we have failed the Palestinian people.”
This is the same Thornberry who, while shadow attorney general, refused to say whether cutting off food, water and power to people in Gaza was against international law. Spoiler: it is. According to Thornberry, however, “Israel has a right to defend itself”.
Then, on Tuesday, former health secretary Wes Streeting told the Guardian he was “horrified by the war in Gaza”, claiming that he “did everything [he] could behind the scenes to get the government to act”, including sharing a dossier of eyewitness testimony from doctors on the ground with his cabinet colleagues.
While I really hate to sound cynical, I can’t help but wonder if there could possibly be some job openings at the very top of the party of government on the cards?
Remember that in 2023, Streeting rejected calls for a ceasefire and told those advocating for one that they needed to be “realistic”, while toeing the party line on pushing for the cowardly obfuscation of ‘humanitarian pauses’. Months later, he dubbed South Africa’s comprehensive genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) a “distraction”.
By July 2025, Streeting was privately recognising that “Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes”. But he never made a public statement, and didn’t resign his cabinet position over his government’s complicity in the genocide – in Israel’s unrelenting atrocities, the damage or destruction of every single hospital in Gaza, or the kids having their limbs amputated without anesthetic.
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South Africa’s application to the ICJ stated: “South Africa is also acutely aware of its own obligation – as a state party to the Genocide Convention – to prevent genocide.”
By contrast, the government and its senior cabinet ministers failed in every single legal obligation under treaty and international law. It has been complicit, and also – as Jeremy Corbyn’s Gaza tribunal found in March – an active participant in Israel’s live-streamed genocide.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Vote Labour for Genocide.
A supporter holds a sign outside the high court that reads ‘We are all Palestine Action’, 4 July 2025,Martin Pope/ZUMA Press Wire
He is expected to sentence four activists as terrorists.
Four Palestine Action activists found guilty of criminal damage want to remove a judge accused of bias from their case after it was revealed he will seek to sentence them as terrorists.
Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson is also the subject of a formal complaint filed by campaign group Defend Our Juries (DOJ) to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office today, alleging biased and discriminatory conduct.
The application for him to be recused from sentencing activists Charlotte Head, 29, Samuel Corner, 23, Leona (Ellie) Kamio, 30, and Fatema Rajwani, 21, will be heard on Monday 8 June.
Menon – who won his appeal against contempt proceedings – was alleged to have breached the judge’s direction that lawyers were not permitted in their closing speeches to invite the jury to acquit on the basis of conscience, a principle known as jury equity. Justice Johnson could still refer Menon to the attorney-general to decide whether to initiate contempt proceedings.
DOJ’s formal complaint against Justice Johnson, signed by more than 3,000 people including lawyers, law professors, retired police officers and magistrates, alleges that decisions taken by the judge “amount to a pattern of exceptional, biased and discriminatory conduct”.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Palestine Action joke that appeared in the UK satirical magazine ‘Private Eye’.
Report says spytech firm is ‘incompatible with UK values’.
A cross-party parliamentary committee had called on the UK government to cancel a £330m NHS contract with US military spytech firm Palantir.
A 70-page report published Wednesday said the company – whose co-founder Peter Thiel has said “the NHS makes people sick” and it should embrace “market mechanisms” – was at odds with British values and should not play a significant role in the public sector.
The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee’s report said officials should exercise a 2027 break clause in the NHS contract with the firm, which is accused of enabling severe human rights abuses by US immigration agents and Israel’s military.
“The government should… either develop an in-house replacement or seek an alternative developed by UK-owned and UK-based providers that are more compatible with UK values,” the report said.
The report also noted recent revelations that Palantir had been granted “unlimited access” to identifiable patient information via the federated data platform it is building. It demanded the government explain “on what statutory basis this was authorised, when, and by whom”.
In March Palantir was granted yet another UK government contract to analyse highly sensitive Financial Conduct Authority data.
Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham has refused to call the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza a genocide.
Asked about the violence in an interview with the Guardian, he said: “I can’t judge things of that enormity from where I am as mayor of Greater Manchester.”
He added: “But I do have concerns about the disproportionate nature of what has happened in terms of the destruction, and there has to be a full process of investigation and accountability.”
The world-leading International Association of Genocide Scholars last year declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Israel has killed at least 72,000 Palestinians there since 7 October 2023 and experts quoted by the BMJ say the actual toll is far higher.
Burnham became a member of Labour Friends of Israel in 2015 and during a Labour leadership bid the same year described the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel as “spiteful”.
He also promised to make Israel his first state visit if he won – calling the country a “democracy that has a long history of protecting minorities and promoting civil rights”.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Vote Labour for Genocide.
Good News: Our Grandchildren Will Starve, Not Our Children
The most extreme climate scenarios are off, according to scientists in the conservative IPCC. However, the Godfather of Climate Science says otherwise.
Good news from The Times: our grandchildren will starve to death rather than our children. The new worst case is just 3.5C. Phew.
Firstly, let’s remember what a 3.5C world actually means.
Mass food system collapse, particularly in the Global South.
Vast areas of Africa, South and West Asia will become uninhabitable within the lifetimes of people already born. Translation: billions will die from impending poverty and disaster.
That is what this headline is supposedly reassuring us of.
Secondly, this report is not telling the truth about the science because it is based on outdated models. Even Trump jumped on it to advance his end-times fascist agenda.
To understand why both Trump and the Times are deeply wrong about where we are heading, let’s turn to the godfather of climate science, James Hansen, and look at one of his latest papers on climate sensitivity.
In May 2025, Hansen published a paper on Earth’s albedo (the reflectivity of solar radiation bounced back into space). Over the past 25 years of precise satellite data, Earth’s albedo has declined by 0.5%, leading to an increase of 1.7 watts per square metre of absorbed solar energy. Hansen describes this as a BFD (Big Fucking Deal), and he is right. That single number, in forcing terms, is equivalent to an additional 138 parts per million of CO2.
Clouds reflect sunlight back into space. Fewer clouds, or thinner clouds, means more solar energy reaches the surface and stays there. As the planet warms, evidence now shows that cloud cover is decreasing and, crucially, that this decrease is itself a response to warming. In other words, warming reduces clouds, which in turn cause more warming, which further reduces clouds. This is what climate scientists mean by a feedback loop, and this one is a fucking big one.
And a big cloud feedback means the planet is far more sensitive to CO2 than the IPCC’s standard figures suggest. The IPCC’s best estimate for climate sensitivity — the amount of warming you get from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 — is 3°C. Hansen’s three independent lines of evidence (of which the albedo data is one), all point to 4.5°C. The difference between 3°C and 4.5°C is the difference between devastation and extinction.
The corporate media has barely engaged with this work, and when it has, it has often cast doubt on its truth. At the end of the climate sensitivity paper, Hansen notes:
“Criticisms of the Acceleration paper in the media did not address the physics in our three assessments of climate sensitivity. Instead, criticisms were largely ad hoc opinions, even ad hominem attacks. How can science reporting have descended to this level? Climate science is now so complex, with many sub-disciplines, that the media must rely on opinions of climate experts. Although there are thousands of capable scientists in these disciplines, the media have come to depend on a handful of scientists, a clique of climate scientists who are willing, or even eager, to be the voice of the climate science community. But are they representative of the total community, of capable scientists who focus on climate science?”
The Problem of Fragmented Science
A key problem of scientific understanding is that it requires slicing reality into manageable chunks. Take “the doubling of CO2.” The slice aids understanding but paradoxically kills it too. Attending to the part deflects attention from the whole. Space. Time. The full arc of what’s coming.
So when Hansen and colleagues write that climate sensitivity for doubled CO2 is 4.5°C, and that sensitivity as low as 3°C is excluded with greater than 99 percent confidence — they stop there. Slice completed. No return to the whole. No wonder the media shrugs. So what.
Here’s the whole.
Doubling CO2 means going from 280ppm to 560ppm. We’re at 420ppm now. At current trajectory — roughly 40ppm additional per decade — we hit 560ppm around 2055. That’s 4.5°C by roughly 2060. Not 2100. 2060. Hansen also shows Earth’s albedo has already darkened by 0.5%, an extra 1.7 W/m² of absorbed solar energy. The system is already running hotter than the models admit.
Time doesn’t stop at 2060. At those temperatures, natural feedbacks (clouds, ice, permafrost) accelerate. There is no equilibrium, only continuation.
Above 5°C, effective human extinction is locked in. We are on that path.
Facts alone don’t move humans. Emotion does. We are human, after all. So the headline that would actually communicate the whole truth? “We are all going to die, you fucking idiots.”
In my recent paper with the 4 Billion Dead team, we examine what an All Systems Approach could look like to counter this fragmented thinking.
