Thoughts for the day: 4 July 2025
I’m very pleased that Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn are starting a new Socialist party. I wish them and their party every success.
6.05 update
MP Zarah Sultana resigns from Labour to co-found a new party with Corbyn
Sultana lost the whip last year and she and ex-party leader want to enlist other independent MPs and campaigners
…
She said in a statement posted on X that she was “resigning from the Labour Party”.
“Jeremy Corbyn and I will co-lead the founding of a new party, with other independent MPs, campaigners and activists across the country.”
She said that “Westminster is broken but the real crisis is deeper” and the “two-party system offers nothing but managed decline and broken promises”.
She added: “A year ago I was suspended by the Labour Party for voting to abolish the two-child benefit cap and lift 400,000 children out of poverty. I’d do it again. I voted against scrapping winter fuel payments for pensioners. I’d do it again. Now, the government wants to make disabled people suffer; they just can’t decide how much.”
She urged people to “join us”.
…
See the original article at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/03/jeremy-corbyn-hints-at-launch-of-new-party-as-leftwing-alternative-to-labour
4 July 2025 1.20pm
It appears that Jeremy Corbyn has yet to comment regarding Zarah Sultana’s announcement. I don’t know what’s going on and can only speculate.
There have been false starts of a new left party before, the announcement itself is a political event signalling that there is an extent of opposition organising against shameless genocidalist Keir Starmer. I would expect that the old school Socialists like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell would prefer to stay in the Labour Party. That’s where they’ve always been, after all. Is there a plan or is it just testing the waters?
5.50pm
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2025/07/04/corbyn-zarah-sultana-party/
At 6:30pm tonight, Corbyn is due to speak at an event with independent candidate Leanne Mohamad about “Breaking the Two-Party Nightmare“. That would be an appropriate place for Corbyn to address Sultana’s announcement. So we may know a bit more by the end of the day.
6.05pm
Morning Star Editorial: Zarah Sultana: if Palestine Action are banned as ‘terrorists’ who will be next?
dizzy: I hope that Morning Star will excuse me quoting this article in it’s entirety.
Zarah Sultana speaking after a march organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, from Russell Square to Whitehall in central London, June 21, 2025This week, MPs shamefully approved the proscription of Palestine Action. Several challenged the move in the Commons. Zarah Sultana, Independent MP for Coventry South, gave an outstanding speech in condemnation. Because of the exceptional gravity of the issue, we reproduce her speech, lightly edited, here.
TWENTY-ONE years ago, a human rights barrister … defended an activist who broke into RAF Fairford trying to disable a bomber to prevent war crimes in Iraq. That became a landmark case in lawful, non-violent direct action against an illegal war. That barrister is now our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer KC. He argued that it was not terrorism, but conscience.
Fast-forward to June 20 2025: two Palestine Action activists entered RAF Brize Norton and sprayed red paint — red paint, not fire — on aircraft linked to surveillance flights over Gaza. Instead of prosecuting them for criminal damage, the Home Secretary is using the Terrorism Act 2000 to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist group.
This is an unprecedented and dangerous overreach of the state. Never before in Britain has it been a crime to simply support a group.
Palestine Action’s real crime is shutting down Elbit Systems sites that arm the Israeli military; its true offence is being audacious enough to expose the blood-soaked ties between this government and the genocidal Israeli apartheid state and its war machine.
Let us be clear: to equate a spray can of paint with a suicide bomb is not just absurd; it is grotesque. It is a deliberate distortion of the law to chill dissent, criminalise solidarity and suppress the truth.
Amnesty International, Liberty, over 266 senior lawyers and UN special rapporteurs have all opposed these draconian measures. Under this order, anyone expressing moral support for a proscribed group could face 14 years in prison. That includes wearing a badge, wearing a T-shirt, sharing a post or calling for de-proscription.
And journalists have no exemption either: there is no legal protection for reporting favourably, even factually, about Palestine Action.
Let us not forget what is happening in Gaza, where the real crimes are being ignored: hospitals bombed, children starved, and tens of thousands of people killed. Palestinian children now suffer more amputations per capita than children anywhere else on Earth.
Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice, and the Israeli Prime Minister faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, yet the government’s response is to criminalise solidarity and to continue exporting lethal F-35 jets that are decimating Gaza.
We also have to understand the history of this country and what built our democracy: the tradition of civil disobedience that includes the suffragettes, without whom I would not have the vote, let alone the privilege of being here as an MP.
Even those who oppose Palestine Action’s tactics must recognise the vast gulf between criminal damage and terrorism. If this order passes, what and who is next — climate protesters, striking workers, feminists in the street?
Already we have seen a wider crackdown on our civil liberties — musicians censored, journalists arrested, and demonstrators, including MPs sitting here, harassed — and now this government want to use anti-terror laws to make peaceful protest itself a crime. If our democratic institutions functioned as they should, none of this would be necessary.
If this proscription passes, we have to understand that no campaign will be safe tomorrow. We have to recognise that this will go down as a dark day in our country’s history … People will ask, “Which side were you on?” and I stand with the millions of people who oppose genocide, because I am one of them. I oppose the blood-soaked hands of this government trying to silence us. So I say this loudly and proudly: we are all Palestine…
Deputy Speaker intervened here with “Order!”
John McDonnell calls for grassroots leadership challenge to Starmer government
The original article at the Guardian is recommended. I can’t help missing important parts by only quoting excerpts.
John McDonnell: Starmer and co are trashing Labour’s legacy. We must take back control of our party – before it’s too late
The suspended Labour veteran John McDonnell has called for a grassroots leadership challenge to the Labour government, warning that unless party members, unions and MPs “stand up and assert themselves to take back control of our party”, Labour risks losing not just its power: “We could lose a party.”
The former shadow chancellor accused Keir Starmer’s government of “callousness and political incompetence”, criticising its hesitance in abolishing the two-child limit on benefits, and what he calls a “brutal launch of an attack on benefits of disabled people”.
Writing for the Guardian five decades after joining Labour as a young trade unionist, McDonnell said the movement he had devoted his life to had “instigated a series of policies that fly like a knife to the heart of what we believed the Labour party above all else stood for when we joined the party”.
…
“Unless the party members, our affiliated unions and members of the parliamentary Labour party stand up and assert themselves to take back control of our party, in the next period, in the Labour party’s history we may not just lose a government, we could lose a party”, he said.
The original article at the Guardian is recommended. I can’t help missing important parts by only quoting excerpts.
Thoughts of the Day 6 May 2025
We haven’t had Dr. Carole Buckley for a very long time.
I’m getting it because of this, because I’m a political activist, because I’m a Socialist.
This is how it works.
I made a complaint that Dr. Carole Buckley had hypnotised me against my will and without my consent. I think that this was 2016, look in the archives.
I had a mental health assessment in 2016/2017 or so. The mental health nurse was a drunken alcoholic inadequate. I consented to the assessment because he said that everything would be shared with me. He shat on me. I complained but all I can do is avoid these cnuts in future.
I go to a hospital and say that I suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and Dissociative Amnesia (DA). Since I have mental health issues there is a safegarding duty. Not only can the hospital find no mention of DID or DA but they come across serious lies by Dr. Carole Buckley that increase hostility towards me 200%. Instead of being safeguarded, I’m persecuted. A hospital security guard said to me “I don’t like you.” WTF is that? The point is Carole Buckley has to lie otherwise she has no right to hypnotise me without my consent and against my will. She filmed me while I was hypnotised but it’s easy enough to say I want you to say this …
There is no evidence of course, only Carole Buckley’s lies. “While under hypnosis he confided that …”
I would like the evil sow prosecuted and locked up. That’s unlikely to happen unfortunately.
ed: Has she done it to others? Is she a serial cnut?