Home Secretary Suella Braverman is to question the Metropolitan Police commissioner about the force’s response to incidents during a pro-Palestinian protest in London.
A video posted online appeared to show a man chanting “jihad” during a rally by an Islamist group on Saturday.
The Met said no offences were identified in the clip of the protest, which was separate to the main march.
But the home secretary wants an explanation from Sir Mark Rowley.
The meeting between Ms Braverman and the Met Police chief was already in the diary to discuss the ongoing protests and combating anti-Semitism.
But a source close to the home secretary said she would use it to question Sir Mark for his views on his force’s response to Saturday’s incident.
Conditions at a processing centre for asylum seekers who arrive on the Kent coast in small boats have been called unacceptable in a report from a watchdog that monitors the centre.
Representatives from the Independent Monitoring Boards (IMB) made a total of 85 visits in 2022 to three Home Office processing centres for small boat arrivals – Manston, Western Jet Foil and Kent Intake Unit – for its 2022 annual report into short-term holding facilities on the Kent coast. All three centres hit the headlines last year due to a variety of scandals and serious incidents.
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The report adds: “At Manston detained individuals were accommodated in marquees which we would describe as at best basic, at worst unsanitary and unacceptable.”
Western Jet Foil in Dover was subjected to a firebombing attack last November by Andrew Leak, 66, who police said was motivated by extreme rightwing terrorist ideology.
Kent Intake Unit, also in Dover, where lone child asylum seekers and families are processed after arriving on small boats, became embroiled in a row in July of this year after the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, was reported to have asked for cheerful cartoon murals for children to be painted over because they were “too welcoming”.
Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.
Many people will tell you that we have already reached the 1.5C ‘limit’ or target of increased temperature over the pre-industrial era. This is not strictly true because the target is an average. It will be passed imminently probably within a year or two but currently we are passing it on about 30% of days. Weather records are getting surpassed daily and monthly – the climate is in freefall.
Capitalists caused the climate crisis and are unwilling to tackle it. Instead of tackling it they are ramping up fossil fuel dependecy that will accelerate climate destruction. In UK, the Blue Labour Party’s policy is indistinguishable from the Conservative climate destroyers. We have to reject the Neo-Liberal Capitalists responsible for climate destruction and Keir Starmer is every bit engaging in anilingus with the fossil fuel industry as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
I expect these Neo-Liberal Capitalist shits to be deposed, the problem is how quickly, how much damage will they do before then? People will come to realise that their knee-jerk reaction of hostility to Just Stop Oil is mistaken and that they are instead their saviours. How angry are they going to be then? Individual acts targeting superyachts, private planes and excessively expensive cars are happening now. What’s going to be happening in 5 or 6 years time? It is the rich that are responsible for destroying our planet and I expect them to be held to account when many people start realising that their own and their childrens’ lives are fekked.
28 Oct 23:
Another reason that we need a new politics, that we have to ensure that neither Conservative or Starmer’s Labour are in power is that supporters of war crimes in Gaza should be prevented from being in positions of authority. They should properly be prosecuted for their complicity.
In 2022, the average global temperature was about 1.15 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the cyclical weather phenomenon La Niña recently contributed to temporarily cooling and dampening the effects of human-induced climate change. La Niña lasted for three years and ended around March of 2023.
In May, the WMO issued a report that projected a significant likelihood (66 percent) that the world would exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold in the next four years. This breach would likely be driven by human-induced climate change, combined with a warming El Niño — a cyclical weather phenomenon that temporarily heats up ocean regions and pushes global temperatures higher.
This summer, an El Niño is currently underway, and the event typically raises global temperatures in the year after it sets in, which in this case would be in 2024. The WMO predicts that, for each of the next four years, the global average temperature is likely to swing between 1.1 and 1.8 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
Though there is a good chance the world will get hotter than the 1.5-degree limit as the result of El Niño, the breach would be temporary, and for now, would not have failed the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global temperatures below the 1.5-degree limit over the long term (averaged over several decades rather than a single year).
Major fossil fuel companies are among Onward’s “corporate partners”.
Onward has had a meteoric rise. Since its inception in 2018, five of its founding advisory board members have taken roles in Conservative cabinets and its reports regularly feature in print and broadcast media.
Onward, which describes itself as “a modernising think tank” with “bold and practical ideas for the centre right”, was ubiquitous at Tory conference in Manchester this week. It hosted two dozen fringe sessions, and it will be out in force at Labour conference in Liverpool this weekend.
While Tufton Street’s free market think tanks refuse to declare their donors, Onward is something of a novelty on Britain’s right-wing think tank scene – twice a year it publishes names of anyone who contributes £5,000 or more (although the value of donations is not declared, nor what the funding is for).
Fossil fuel giants Shell and BP are members of Onward’s “business network”, where for £12,000 (plus VAT) members get invites to networking opportunities, briefings and previews of reports.
Onward has been vocal on energy issues. It has called for the Tory government to apply windfall taxes on renewables rather than oil and gas giants and has proposed diversifying “energy supplies through greater use of oil and coal in the short term”.
Last week, another Onward donor, Equnior, received government approval to develop the Rosebank oil field in the North Sea.
Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer said that it’s “a huge concern to see that a think tank with so much influence right at the heart of the government and the opposition is funded by fossil fuel companies”, adding that “we need to get fossil fuel funding out of politics”.
Onward said it does not accept corporate sponsorship of research reports, noting that it published a report last week making the case for government to go further and faster on decarbonisation.
In all, Onward lists more than 20 “corporate partners”, including Al Altep Holdings Inc, a New York-registered holding company controlled by Len Blavatnik, according to 2021 US filings. Blavatnik made his fortune trading commodities in post-Soviet Russia and topped the Sunday Times Rich List in 2021.
Al Altep Holdings has donated millions of dollars to both Republicans and Democrats in the US, including GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Another company owned by Blavatnik previously donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee.
Blavatnik, a dual US-British citizen, is best known in the UK for his sponsorship of the Tate and the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. He has not made political donations in the UK, but he has funded the influential conservative think tank Policy Exchange.
Blavatnik did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Unparalleled Branding Opportunities’
Onward’s disclosures give a rare insight into how a think tank’s funding pool grows. Five years ago, Onward had only a handful of backers, including some charitable foundations and the Tory-linked public affairs firm WPI Strategy.
By 2021, the think tank had more than a dozen corporate partners, including Amazon, energy giant SSE, the National Union of Farmers, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
The think tank has also received funding from leading Conservative funders, including mega-donors such as current party treasurer Graham Edwards, former Tory CEO Sir Mick Davis, and IPGL Limited, which is owned by Conservative Foundation board member Lord Michael Spencer.
Onward is well plugged into Tory circles. Conservative MP Neil O’Brien was a co-founder – along with former Theresa May staffer Will Tanner – and the think tank’s current director, former journalist Sebastian Payne, has put himself forward as a Conservative general election candidate.
At Conservative conference, Onward advertised drinks reception sponsorship deals for £30,000 that would give “unparalleled branding opportunities” at an event “for around 200 MPs, special advisers, journalists and industry leaders. It includes a speech from a senior Cabinet minister and remarks from our partner.”
But Onward has been building bridges with Labour, too. Onward’s pre-conference promotional material includes Labour MP Lucy Powell MP saying: “I think Onward are a fantastic think tank”.
At Labour conference, Onward is offering “partnering opportunities” that include funding a private roundtable “led by a senior MP or shadow minister”, priced at £17,500.
Responding to questions about its funding, an Onward spokesperson said that the think tank “is committed to openness about our funding.
“We are a not-for-profit organisation and rely entirely on the generosity of our network to support our research programme”.
This article was originally published on Peter Geoghegan’s Substack, Democracy for Sale. [a subscription site]
People take part in a ‘March For Palestine,’ in London on October 21, 2023, to “demand an end to the war on Gaza.” (Photo by Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images)
The large-scale demonstration in the U.K. occurred as paltry levels of humanitarian aide were finally allowed through the southern border of Gaza, but nowhere near enough given the scale of death and destruction.
Organizers and participants said hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets of central London on Saturday to demand an immediate cease-fire in Gaza as the Israeli military continued its bombardment of the besieged enclave a full two weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
Organized by a coalition that includes the Solidarity Campaign, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Stop the War Coalition, Muslim Association of Britain, Palestinian Forum in Britain, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the march also called for Israel to “end its occupation of Palestinian land and apartheid rule over the Palestinian people.”
The demonstration began at Marble Arch, weaving its way through central parts of the city before ending at Downing Street, where a mass rally was held.
While many in the streets put the number of demonstrators in the hundreds of thousands, other outlets put the number closer to 100,000.
“As a Palestinian who’d like to return home one day, as a Palestinian who has brothers and sisters in Gaza, and family, I wish we can do more but protest is what we can do at the minute,” one marcher toldReuters.
Large Palestine solidarity protests all over the UK today: London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and many other cities, despite torrential rain in some areas.
Organizers tell me there were more than 300,000 in London: largest ever for Palestine, they say.
At a smaller protest in Cardiff, Maggie Morgan, from the local affiliate of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, explained to the BBC that demonstrators in the UK were “taking to the streets as a show of solidarity to the people of Gaza, to show our support for them, but also to make the government listen, and say ‘not in our name,’ we’re not having this.”
On Friday, protests against the assault on Gaza—which has already claimed over 4,000 lives and thousands more injured—were seen across the Middle East, from Cairo in Egypt, with specific demands to open the Rafah Border to allow refugees out and humanitarian supplies, to Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Indonesia, and beyond.
“We want the border to be opened immediately so aid can reach people in Gaza,” one protester in Cairo’s Tahrir Square told a correspondent with the Middle East Eye.
Beautiful scenes in #London right now – hundreds of thousands marching through the rain to show international solidarity with #Gaza and the Palestinian people. ✊
The Rafah crossing was finally opened on Saturday, but only 20 trucks of supplies were allowed to enter Gaza, an amount described by the Associated Press as “a trickle” compared to what aid experts say is necessary.
Cindy McCain, the executive director of the World Food Programme, toldAl Jazeera in an interview that 20 trucks were simply inadequate given the scale of the humanitarian disaster Palestinians and others trapped in Gaza now face.
“The situation inside Gaza is dire. Not only is there no food, there is no water, electricity, or fuel. And that combination is not only catastrophic but can lead to more starvation and disease as well,” McCain explained. “We’ve got to get more trucks in.”
Medical agencies and other relief workers on the ground have said that the absence of fuel in Saturday’s convoy means that hospitals remain on the verge of collapse.
“Without fuel entering the Gaza Strip to support generating electricity, thousands of Palestinian lives are at risk of death in hospitals, ” said the Palestine Red Crescent Society in a statement. “Ambulance will no long be able to save lives. Bakeries will no longer be able to provide bread. It shall leave the population without potable water, and risk outbreak of diseases.”
In #Gaza, “without electricity, many patients will die… It is vital to get the hospitals back up and running. To do that, regular ceasefires must be guaranteed for medicines and fuel to be brought in.”
In a dispatch on Saturday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, who heads the UN agency mandated with administering humanitarian assistance and protection in Gaza, said the ongoing assault by Israel has put the lives of everyone inside the territory at great risk.
“For the past two weeks, the war has continued unabated,” said Lazzarini. “In the Gaza Strip, relentless air strikes and bombardments, coupled with evacuation orders issued by the Israeli Forces, have displaced nearly 1 million people and caused the death and injuries of far too many civilians.”
He continued: “Civilians—wherever they are—must be protected. The life of all civilians, the integrity of all UN facilities and premises, as well as civilian infrastructures, including hospitals, must be shielded from harm and protected at all times under international humanitarian law.”
With global condemnation directed at Israel for what international legal scholars have warned may be overt acts of genocide and collective punishment in response to Hamas’ attack, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on Saturday, speaking from Cairo, said, “The people of Gaza need a commitment for much, much more—a continuous delivery of aid to Gaza at the scale that is needed.”
Guterres further demanded a humanitarian cease-fire to rescue Gaza from what he called “a godawful nightmare.”
And Lazzarini added, “Let me be clear: protecting civilians in times of conflict is not an aspiration or an ideal; it is an obligation and a commitment to our shared humanity. I echo the calls from the UN Secretary-General on all parties to reach an urgent humanitarian ceasefire. This is the only way out of this mayhem; any other way will plunge Gaza—and the world—deeper into fathomless, dark depths.”
