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Youth Demand shit in Rishi Sunak’s private lake

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Youth Demand shit in Rishi Sunak's private lake 25/6/24
Youth Demand shit in Rishi Sunak’s private lake 25/6/24

As a thankyou and a parting gift to Rishi Sunak and the Tories for the last 14 years of service, a Youth Demand supporter has ‘sunk the Bismarck’ in Rishi Sunak’s lake. Youth Demand is a campaign calling for a two-way arms embargo on Israel and for the incoming UK government to revoke all new oil and gas licences granted since 2021.

At around 12:50 pm, Oliver, 21, a student from Manchester visited Rishi Sunak’s North Yorkshire mansion and ‘murdered a brown snake’ in the multi-millionaires’ lake, whilst wearing a shirt emblazoned with ‘Eat Shit Rishi’. Police arrived on the scene almost immediately and detained four people, including a press photographer, which may lead to their arrest.

Before shitting in the lake, Oliver said: 

“We have so much to thank the Tories for: from crumbling schools, shit in the rivers and a collapsing NHS; to creating a nation with more food banks than McDonalds and 4.3 million UK children living in poverty. From allowing their mates to get filthy rich from selling weapons to battle-test on toddlers in Gaza, or by drilling for more oil as the world burns – it’s quite a legacy!” 

“Yet this shit-show is set to continue with yet another party led by a pathological liar who will be taking office next. Both Labour and the Tories are content to keep shitting on Gaza, and on every future generation, by continuing weapons trading with Israel and by not revoking all oil and gas licences granted since 2021. The two party system is just two cheeks of the same arse. We deserve better! Take action at youthdemand.org.”

Youth Demand shit in Rishi Sunak's private lake 25/6/24
Youth Demand shit in Rishi Sunak’s private lake 25/6/24

A Youth Demand spokesperson said:

“From Number 10 to Number 2, let’s face it: he’s done a shit job, and the Tories are facing an electoral wipe-out. As a final goodbye, we’re issuing a ‘code-brown’ to Mr Sunak and his colleagues in government for 14 years of total failure, by delivering them some much needed moral fibre. They’ve landed us all up shit-creek and so we hope they accept these ‘gorilla fingers’ as a heartfelt gesture of our feelings towards them.” 

“But although we’ve unloaded some timber, we’re not out of the woods yet. Our political system is broken. Labour has to lose the policies from the bottom-drawer and convince floating voters by putting the skids on arms trading with Israel and flushing all oil and gas projects licensed since 2021- policies which stain the UK’s reputation. It’s a big job, but it’s time to sort shit out. Join us for a week of action in London from the 13th July, sign up at youth demand.org.” 

This mansion is one of several properties owned by Mr Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty. Murty owns a reported £400 million stake in her billionaire father’s company Infosys, which  signed a $1.5 billion deal with BP in May 2023. Sunak and Murty bought the £2 million Grade-II listed Georgian manor house in the picturesque village of Kirby Sigston, before Mr Sunak became MP for Richmond in 2015. However, this isn’t the only property in the couple’s extensive repertoire, which include a £6.6 million mansion in Kensington, London, and a vacation home in California. The couple have an estimated combined net worth of £730 million.

Last year 16 Just Stop Oil supporters were arrested outside Sunak’s London Mansion, after Louise Harris sang her chart-topping track ‘We Tried’.

Young people are sick of the shit-show. We deserve better. People from all over the country are coming together to resist. Youth Demand will be taking action in Central London from the 13th-20th July. 

Continue ReadingYouth Demand shit in Rishi Sunak’s private lake

Labour’s Otherworldly Manifesto

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Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted "I support Zionism without qualification." He's asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.

https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/52233/labours-otherworldly-manifesto

Keir Starmer’s party is set to win by a landslide, but its ambitions are simultaneously unrealistic and uninspiring

AUTHOR: Keir Milburn

“Stability is Change!” This seemingly paradoxical, almost Orwellian statement is the principal slogan of the Labour Party’s current parliamentary election campaign. Labour leader Keir Starmer used the slogan at the party’s manifesto launch, and it provides a key prism for understanding the manifesto and its weaknesses.

There is little doubt that the UK electorate is in the mood for change. The widespread, off-stated consensus in the country is that nothing works. The National Health Service is so chronically underfunded that doctor’s appointments are difficult to get and long waiting lists proliferate. The trains are shockingly expensive but utterly unreliable.

The list could go on and on, but the image most frequently used to sum up the situation comes from the failure of the privatized water services. A lack of investment in infrastructure accompanied by the looting of those companies for huge shareholder dividend payouts has led to the near constant release of untreated sewage into the UK’s river system. It flows from there onto our beaches. The British are quite literally swimming in shit!

These problems are identified quite clearly in the Labour Party manifesto, but the diagnosis of their causes and therefore their solutions proves much less convincing. Labour may have a plan to win in July, but how it will govern in the interests of its voters is anybody’s guess.

…

The totality of Labour’s spending pledges amounts to just 0.2 percent of GDP, smaller even than the Conservative pledges of 0.8 percent and dwarfed by the previous two Labour manifestos, which promised 2.1 percent and 3.2 percent respectively. Even the pro-market Institute for Fiscal Studies called Labour’s plans “tiny, going on trivial”.

These policies do not point to stability, not least because they do not address the 18 billion pounds of government spending cuts that the Conservatives have already baked into the government budget going forward. The effects of implementing such cuts on government services — which have already suffered so badly under 14 years of severe austerity — makes it hard to imagine that Labour will stick to this commitment. It seems likely that money will be found to prevent the worst of these cuts through technical changes in accounting between the government and the notionally independent Bank of England.

Beyond this paddling, however, the need for investment in the UK is huge. Both public and private investment in the country has collapsed since 2008. It has the lowest business investment in the G7 and ranks just twenty-eighth out of the 31 OECD countries. In the face of this, Labour, hamstrung by self-imposed fiscal rules on bringing down government debt and pledges not to raise the main forms of taxation, are promising so little investment that their plans seem unbelievable.

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Until last February, Labour was promising to immediately strengthen workers’ rights through a New Deal for Workers, and to spend 28 billion pounds per year to decarbonize the economy through its Green Prosperity Plan. The Labour Party’s current openness to corporate funding and lobbying, including the imposition of over 30 parliamentary candidates with corporate lobbying backgrounds, has led to a dramatic watering down of these pledges. The Green Prosperity Plan has been reduced to just 3.5 billion pounds, but the form that spending will take reveals another logic or worldview which may come to the fore as crises mount.

The word “securonomics”, an ugly portmanteau favoured by shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, makes an appearance in the manifesto, introducing the idea that public investment should support and de-risk private investment in strategically key sectors. The chief vehicle for this will be a National Wealth Fund “capitalised with £7.3 billion over the course of the next parliament”. What precisely this will look like has yet to be determined, but The National Wealth Fund “will have a target of attracting three pounds of private investment for every one pound of public investment”. This is an explicit return to and acceleration of the kind of public-private partnerships that lost legitimacy in the UK during the fallout from the disastrous Public Finance Initiative under New Labour.

…

Recommended article at https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/52233/labours-otherworldly-manifesto

Continue ReadingLabour’s Otherworldly Manifesto

Labour and Tories would ‘both leave NHS worse off than under austerity’

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/15/labour-and-tories-would-both-leave-nhs-worse-off-than-under-austerity-says-thinktank

NHS emblem
NHS emblem

Analysis by leading experts the Nuffield Trust reveals that main parties’ manifestos would squeeze health spending

Labour and the Conservatives would both leave the NHS with lower spending increases than during the years of Tory austerity, according to an independent analysis of their manifestos by a leading health thinktank.

The assessment by the respected Nuffield Trust of the costed NHS policies of both parties, announced in their manifestos last week, says the level of funding increases would leave them struggling to pay existing staff costs, let alone the bill for massive planned increases in doctors, nurses and other staff in the long-term workforce plan agreed last year.

The Nuffield Trust said that “the manifestos imply increases [in annual funding for the NHS] between 2024-25 and 2028-29 of 1.5% each year for the Liberal Democrats, 0.9% for the Conservatives and 1.1% for Labour.

“Both Conservative and Labour proposals would represent a lower level of funding increase than the period of ‘austerity’ between 2010-11 and 2014-15.

“This would be an unprecedented slowdown in NHS finances and it is inconceivable that it would accompany the dramatic recovery all are promising. This slowdown follows three years of particularly constrained finances.”

The trust added that the planned funding increases “would make the next few years the tightest period of funding in NHS history”.

Sally Gainsbury, senior policy ­analyst at the Nuffield Trust and a leading authority on NHS funding, said: “They will struggle to be able to pay the existing staff, let alone the additional staff set out in the workforce plan. It’s completely unrealistic.”

…

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/15/labour-and-tories-would-both-leave-nhs-worse-off-than-under-austerity-says-thinktank

Continue ReadingLabour and Tories would ‘both leave NHS worse off than under austerity’

Jeremy Corbyn warns against Labour’s plans to ‘hollow out our NHS’

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/jeremy-corbyn-warns-against-labours-plans-hollow-out-our-nhs

Image of Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party
Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the Labour Party

JEREMY CORBYN will warn against Labour’s plans to “hollow out our NHS by continuing Tory underfunding and privatisation” at an emergency rally today.

The former Labour leader will join healthcare workers and campaigners outside Archway Tube station in his Islington North constituency, warning that “more austerity and privatisation is not the answer” to the NHS crisis.

His intervention comes two days after the launch of the Labour manifesto, which failed to rule out cuts to the health service and dropped the party’s previous promise that the “NHS is not for sale.”

Mr Corbyn is standing as an independent against Labour candidate Praful Nargund after being blocked from representing the party, which has now expelled him.

At the rally, the lifelong socialist is expected to say: “Unlike Labour and the Tories, I do not believe the expansion of the private sector is the answer to the NHS crisis.

“I’m proud to have spent my life campaigning with my community for universal public healthcare. With your support, that is what I’ll continue to do.

“In Islington North, we have a message to anybody looking to promote private healthcare: keep your hands off our NHS.”

…

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/jeremy-corbyn-warns-against-labours-plans-hollow-out-our-nhs

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Continue ReadingJeremy Corbyn warns against Labour’s plans to ‘hollow out our NHS’

Andrew Feinstein: what’s wrong with the Labour manifesto

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Andrew Feinstein is challenging Keir Starmer by standing as the independent candidate for Holborn & St Pancras.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/andrew-feinstein-whats-wrong-labour-manifesto

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer at the Mornflake Stadium, home to Crewe Alexandra while on the General Election campaign trail, June 13, 2024

From muzzling Palestinian rights to embracing austerity and outsourcing the NHS, Labour’s ‘tough choices’ always seem to hurt normal people while sparing wealthy donors — that’s why I am running to unseat Keir Starmer on July 4

…[T]he Labour Party launched its election manifesto — a dispiriting Thatcherite promise to continue endless austerity, soaring inequality and forever wars.

I announced my bid to become the independent MP for Holborn and St Pancras three weeks ago. Then, I was convinced that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party would offer little to improve the lives of this constituency’s amazing and diverse communities, or meaningfully restrain Israel’s genocide of Gaza. Having read this manifesto, I am more convinced than ever.

Starmer’s election campaign has traded on a series of stock phrases, all of which are profoundly misleading. Starmer promises to bring about “change,” but repeats tired economic shibboleths of the George Osborne variety.

He also claims to have remade the party “in the service of the working people.” In fact, the party is financially reliant on donations from big business and billionaires and its MPs rake in donations from the private-sector companies who circle the NHS.

The party’s long-feted New Deal for Working People is so disappointing that the party’s largest affiliated union, Unite, has refused to endorse the Labour Party manifesto.

But the most galling of all of the current Starmerisms is his invocation of “tough choices.” Starmer deploys the line to explain why the country cannot afford to pull half a million children out of poverty by ending the two-child benefit cap: a decision now confirmed by the manifesto.

Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, Starmer sadly explains, has made it impossible for the sixth-richest country in human history to lift children out of poverty at a cost little under £2 billion a year, a relatively measly sum in a country with a GDP of £2,274 trillion.

As the Labour Party manifesto makes clear, there have been plenty of hard choices made by the party — but all of them to the detriment of the poor and to the benefit of the mega-rich and big business.

Starmer makes the “tough choice” not to substantially increase funding the NHS, to end child poverty or reverse the swingeing cuts of the last decade; but only because he fails to make the “tough choice” to tax billionaires marginally more, even though the 10 richest people in the country are now richer than they have ever been.

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I’m especially angry that the Labour Party, like the Tories, has promised to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP: a real-term £7bn a year increase by 2029. This is almost double the entire £4.7bn a year the party intends to spend on its Green Prosperity Plan to tackle the imminent existential threat of climate change.

What sort of security does this really buy? The party’s offer on Palestine is, frankly, an outrage; the manifesto speaking out of both sides of its mouth. So while it recognises that “Palestinian statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people,” it then makes Palestinian statehood contingent on a meaningless word salad.

“We are committed to recognising a Palestinian state as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution with a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign state.”

So much for an inalienable right, which requires Israel to feel “safe” before Palestinians get statehood — just as Israeli leaders claim that Israel will only feel safe when Gaza is cleansed of its citizens because there are “no uninvolved.”

This offer significantly dilutes the party’s previous commitment to recognising Palestinian statehood on the first day of government — something first brought in by Ed Miliband, appearing in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos. If there was any hope that Labour would be any better than the Tories on Gaza once in power, this should dispel it once and for all.

Both the Lib Dems and the Green Party, by comparison, have committed to immediately recognising Palestine. The Labour Party now joins the ignominious company of the Tories and Reform in refusing to do so.

…

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/andrew-feinstein-whats-wrong-labour-manifesto

Continue ReadingAndrew Feinstein: what’s wrong with the Labour manifesto