Over 400 disrupt operations at BAE Systems site and call for ceasefire ahead of national march for Palestine 10 Nov 2023
HUNDREDS of trade unionists disrupted operations at an arms factory in Kent today, blockading entrances and preventing workers and deliveries from entering the site.
More than 400 activists targeted a factory belonging to BAE Systems, a key weapons supplier to Israel, in protest over the country’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza.
United under the banner “Workers for a Free Palestine,” members of Unite, Unison, GMB, NEU, BMA, UCU, Bectu, and BFAWU, halted operations and called for an immediate ceasefire.
BAE Systems, the largest weapons firm in Britain, manufactures components for Israel’s F-35 stealth combat aircraft.
The fighter jets are currently being used in ongoing attacks against innocent civilians in Gaza, where the death toll has risen to more than 10,000.
Notably, the “active interceptor system,” which is used by pilots to direct and manoeuvre the aircraft, is also produced at the site in Kent.
Alexandra, a teacher and NEU member taking part in the blockade, said: “Seeing 185 schools and other educational institutions in Gaza bombed is utterly heartbreaking.
“If our government and the Labour opposition won’t support a ceasefire, as workers we will continue to take action to stop the slaughter of civilians in our name, funded by our taxes.
“The British arms industry, which is subsidised by public money, is involved in the mass killing of Palestinians.
“We’re here today to disrupt the Israeli war machine and take a stand against our government’s complicity and we urge workers across the UK to take similar action.”
Carla Denyer, Cost of Living Crisis protest, Bristol, 2 April 2022
Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer urged a massive turnout on tomorrow’s pro-ceasefire march, as “the strongest way to send a clear message that people want a ceasefire and have no time for Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s toxic rhetoric.”
She said
“This is a march to call for a ceasefire – an Armistice – that is urgently needed. The Green Party wants to see the unconditional release of hostages and the opening up of humanitarian aid to allow a dialogue about a long-term solution that ends the occupation and offers peace and security to Palestinians and Israelis alike.
“The Home Secretary’s comments are dangerous, inciting division at a time when we need to bring people together.
“Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday are national moments of reflection and must be respected. The organisers of the pro-ceasefire march have been really clear that they have no intention of disrupting Armistice Day events. Indeed, I would say that Armistice Day is a very appropriate moment for people to be calling for a ceasefire – an armistice – so that civilians in Israel and Gaza can be protected.
“The Gaza ceasefire call has the backing of the United Nations, humanitarian aid agencies, three quarters of the British public, and growing numbers of countries, including Ireland and France. Hundreds of thousands have been out on the streets peacefully calling for an end to violence.
“The Labour leadership needs to do more than stand on the sidelines. I invite them to throw their full support behind the growing call for a ceasefire.”
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Reacting to news that 2023 is set to become the warmest year on record following unprecedented October temperatures, co-leader of the Green Party, Carla Denyer, said:
“Another week, another indicator that our climate is in meltdown. News that 2023 will almost certainly be confirmed as the hottest year on record, comes just a day after the government made the totally reckless decision to push for new oil and gas licences. This represents a massive two fingers up at communities at home and abroad who are on the front line of floods, droughts and fires, and to future generations who face an uninhabitable planet if we continue with business as usual. It’s also another alarming example of the Conservatives’ allergy to evidence-based policymaking.
“This is another wake-up call – as if any more were needed – on the urgent need to transform our economy and society – ramping up cheaper and abundant renewable resources such as solar and wind power, insulating millions of homes, investing in the infrastructure for active travel, boosting public transport and changing land management practices so that nature can thrive and help to soak up the emissions we’ve released.
“Only Greens give the climate crisis the focus it needs, which is why, whoever forms the next government, we need more Green Party MPs in parliament pushing for climate action.”
Four Greenpeace activists are pictured on a Shell vessel in the Atlantic Ocean on January 31, 2023.
“I will stand up in court and fight this; and if Shell refuses to stop drilling, I refuse to stop fighting for climate justice,” one activist named in the suit said.
Oil giant Shell is menacing Greenpeace International and Greenpeace U.K. with a lawsuit that represents “one of the biggest legal threats against the Greenpeace network’s ability to campaign in its more than 50-year history,” the environmental group revealed Thursday.
The lawsuit comes in response to a protest in January in which activists boarded one of the Shell’s oil platforms while it was en rote to a North Sea oil field. Shell has given Greenpeace a choice between facing a full $8.6 million in damages or settling for a reduced charge of $1.4 million and a promise never to protest on Shell infrastructure again.
“Shell is trying to silence my legitimate demands: that it must stop its senseless and greedy pursuit of fossil fuels and take accountability for the destruction it is wreaking upon the world,” Yeb Saño, executive director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, said in a statement.
Shell claim our peaceful protest earlier this year caused $8m in damages.
Saño, who is one of the activists named in the suit, attempted to board the platform and then met it in port in Norway to protest its arrival.
“I will stand up in court and fight this; and if Shell refuses to stop drilling, I refuse to stop fighting for climate justice,” Saño continued.
The protest that triggered the suit lasted from January 31 to February 12. Four Greenpeace activists used ropes to haul themselves onto the vessel while it was moving at full speed off the Canary Islands, Reuters reported. They stayed occupying the platform until it reached Norway. The platform was set to be used in the Penguins oil and gas field in the North Sea, which has not yet started production.
“He’s trying to crush Greenpeace’s ability to campaign, and in doing so, seeking to silence legitimate demands for climate justice and payment for loss and damage.”
The platform, the Penguins floating production storage and offloading unit, was the first new vessel that Shell had sent to the northern part of the North Sea in 30 years, Greenpeace said. While the protest was ongoing, Shell announced record 2022 profits of almost $40 billion. Greenpeace wanted Shell to stop extracting new oil and gas and to pay into a loss and damage fund to help vulnerable countries respond to the climate crisis. The activists carried signs reading, “Stop drilling—start paying,” The Guardian reported.
Saño said he had a personal reason to object to Shell’s business model.
“I have lived through the devastation caused by Shell and companies like them,” he said in a statement. “Ten years ago I spoke at COP global climate talks while my brother was still missing in the fallout from Super Typhoon Haiyan. Incredibly, he survived, but he helped carry the bodies of 78 innocent people who tragically did not.”
During the occupation itself, Shell and platform builder Fluor promised to seek more than $120,000 in damages. However, in a document seen by Reuters, Shell is now demanding $2.1 million in damages related to shipping delays, security, and legal costs, and Fluor is seeking $6.5 million. The suit was filed in London’s High Court.
SHOCKING FACT: Shell made the amount it’s threatening to sue us for in 2 hours last year.
THIS is corporate greed.
Shell CAN afford to pay for climate loss and damage it causes.
“The right to protest is fundamental, and we respect it absolutely. But it must be done safely and lawfully,” a Shell spokesperson said in a statement reported by The Guardian. “Shell and its contractors are entitled to recover the significant costs of responding to Greenpeace’s dangerous actions.”
While Shell has offered to reduce the damages if Greenpeace stops protesting its infrastructure, Greenpeace answered that it would only agree if Shell promised to obey a Dutch court order to cut its emissions by 45% of 2019 levels by 2030.
Greenpeace said that negotiations between it and Shell had wrapped up and the organization had been waiting for details, or “particulars,” from Shell since November 1.
Areeba Hamid, co-executive director of Greenpeace U.K., said the lawsuit reflected the climate-polluting direction of Shell under new CEO Wael Sawan, who took the reins in early 2023. Under his leadership, Hamid said, “Shell’s abandoned any pretence of good intentions, and is brazenly embracing a sinister strategy that’s not just risky for shareholders, but completely devastating for people on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Sawan’s ditching green policies, sacking former colleagues from his renewables division, and he’s gaslit the world by claiming a retreat from fossil fuels would be ‘dangerous.'”
“Now he’s trying to crush Greenpeace’s ability to campaign, and in doing so, seeking to silence legitimate demands for climate justice and payment for loss and damage,” Hamid continued. “We need this case to be thrown out and for Shell to be regulated by the government because it’s clear Sawan is hell-bent on profit, regardless of human cost.”
Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange protest outside London’s Old Bailey court on September 7, 2020 as his fight against extradition to the U.S. resumed. (Photo: Richard Baker/Getty Images)
“The bottom line is that journalism is not a crime,” said Rep. Jim McGovern. “The stakes are too high for us to remain silent.”
Imploring the Biden administration to “not pursue an unnecessary prosecution that risks criminalizing common journalistic practices,” a bipartisan group of 16 U.S. lawmakers have signed a letter dated Wednesday to President Joe Biden urging him to end the attempted extradition of Julian Assange and drop all charges against the jailed publisher.
“Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, faces multiple charges under the Espionage Act due to his role in publishing classified documents about the U.S. State Department, Guantánamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” states the letter, which is led by Reps. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). “He has been detained on remand in London since 2019 and is pending extradition to the U.S., having lost his appeal of the extradition order in the courts of the United Kingdom.”
Assange—who suffers from physical and mental health problems including heart and respiratory issues—published materials, many of them provided by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, exposing U.S. and allied war crimes, including the “Collateral Murder” video showing a U.S. Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians, the Afghan War Diary, and the Iraq War Logs.
“Deep concerns about this case have been repeatedly expressed by international media outlets, human rights, and press freedom advocates, and members of Congress,” the lawmakers wrote. “In April of this year… members of the House argued to Attorney General Merrick Garland that ‘every day that the prosecution of Julian Assange continues is another day that our own government needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home.'”
The new letter has been signed by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Paul Gosar (R-Az.), Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Matthew Rosendale (R-Mont.), and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
In a message last month inviting congressional colleagues to sign the letter, McGovern and Massie explained that their goal is”to strongly encourage the Biden administration to withdraw the U.S. extradition request currently pending against Australian publisher Julian Assange and halt all prosecutorial proceedings against him as soon as possible.”
McGovern said last month in a statement to The Intercept that “the bottom line is that journalism is not a crime.”
“The work reporters do is about transparency, trust, and speaking truth to power,” he added. “When they are unjustly targeted, we all suffer the consequences. The stakes are too high for us to remain silent.”
The new letter follows last month’s official state visit of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, an Assange supporter who raised the jailed journalist’s case with President Joe Biden, insisting that “enough is enough.” A cross-party delegation of Australian lawmakers also traveled to the U.S. ahead of Albanese’s visit in an effort to pressure the Biden administration “to cease its pursuit and prosecution of Julian Assange.”
A delegation of Australian lawmakers arrived at the US DOJ in Washington DC last week to push for the freedom of Julian Assange, an Australian citizen@MaxBlumenthal spoke to the MPs about their campaign for Assange's release and to @GabrielShipton about his brother's condition pic.twitter.com/Dn3EU2cc7w
Imploring Americans to put themselves in Australian shoes, former Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce told reporters after meeting with U.S. officials during the lawmakers’ trip: “Imagine if the Australian government said, ‘Hey you in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, as far as we’re concerned, you committed a crime, and you’re going to Canberra where we’re going to send you to jail for 175 years,‘ you’d be up us like a rat up a drainpipe.”
According to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his freedom since he was arrested on December 7, 2010. Since then he has been held under house arrest, confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in London’s notorious maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, where he is now.
Julian Assange is a political prisoner, and the sole reason he remains a political prisoner is because the White House remains afraid of his voice.
If fully convicted of the Espionage Act charges, Assange—who fathered two children with attorney Stella Morris, whom he married last year, while holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy—could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.
