JO GRADY: “The weapons that are made are used to rain hell on earth in Palestine now”
UNION leader Jo Grady said today she “doesn’t need macho men to defend” her as TUC Congress heard that wealth and windfall taxes “won’t touch the sides” of Labour’s £102 billion annual defence spending plans.
Delegates in Brighton backed the University and College Union’s motion which warned that massively increased military spending will weaken national security by leaving less available for public services.
The motion called on the TUC to raise awareness of “the right to conscientious objection and opposition to compulsory military service.”
Artists’ Union England, rail union RMT and the National Education Union (NEU) spoke in favour while Unite, GMB, Prospect and Community opposed, urging unions not to “pit worker against worker.”
Community delegate and former Royal Marine Andrew Gutteridge said: “We want our world to be more peaceful … we instead are living in a world where strong men want to dominate others, and while those men exist it will be our armed forces who defend us.”
Ms Grady replied: “The weapons that are made are used to rain hell on earth in Palestine now.
“I was 17 when we saw the Iraq war … I don’t need macho men defending me — most of the young men I was friends with enlisted in the army and came back traumatised and wounded and have never been the same: for every story you can tell there’s a different story of trauma and misery.”
Activists project a message opposing the US’s oil-driven intervention in Venezuela, in Washington, January 8, 2026
THE “billionaires’ decade.” That is how charity Oxfam describes the 2020s, having published research pointing to the extreme — and accelerating — concentration of wealth in Britain and worldwide.
The stats alone are alarming — billionaires’ wealth grew 16 per cent in 2025, three times faster than the five-year average; in Britain, the richest 56 people own more than the poorest 27 million.
But the report goes further in pointing to the way the super rich are monopolising political power and distorting the political process, both by entering office and by controlling the media.
The administration of Donald Trump — himself a property magnate — in the United States is the most obvious example, with the close association of “tech bro” tycoons with the US government well known.
Several of these — Elon Musk and Peter Thiel being the most famous — are explicitly associated with far-right politics, and intend to use the march of digital surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence to further subordinate societies everywhere to corporate control.
US foreign policy has always served to enrich its capitalists — companies like Halliburton and Blackwater, as well of course as arms companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, made a killing from the Iraq war — but is now more openly directed to resource theft and the personal enrichment of the Trump gang and its allies.
This we see in the Big Oil summit hosted by the US president directly after his kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, with demands for corporate access to Venezuelan oil forming part of the public rationale for the outrage.
We see it too in plans to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and develop it as a Mediterranean resort, and in the creation of the so-called Board of Peace, permanent membership of which Trump has now made contingent on down payments of a billion dollars.
Sharp-eyed observers note that the new board’s charter makes no specific reference to Gaza and implies a far wider remit — “to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict” — and, with members including the head of the US-dominated World Bank and Trump’s own son-in-law Jared Kushner, may be intended to serve as a Washington-controlled alternative to the UN security council now the United States is increasingly hostile to the United Nations and the framework of international law around it.
Trump’s relations with “allies” rest on the same profit-grabbing logic. It’s why enriching US drug companies at the expense of our NHS formed a key part of his trade deal with Britain, and why British and European attempts to regulate the internet — dominated globally by US companies — draw threats of retaliation. It’s why he wants Greenland, where the extraction of energy and mineral resources is becoming more practical because of global warming.
Trump’s new world order will rest not on sovereign states acting, at least in theory, on behalf of their citizens but on undisguised corporate power. But Britain is on the same trajectory, and the interests of parasitical profiteers dominate British policy too. Only that can explain Labour’s refusal to act to bring water into public ownership in line with overwhelming majority opinion, or the stubborn persistence of wasteful outsourcing across our public services.
For the left, the great divide between the suffering public and the obscenely wealthy — the many and the few, to take the Corbyn-era slogan — needs to be the overarching narrative when we explain what is wrong with our society and how we change it.
It explains the fundamental continuity between this government and its predecessor — and can spike the guns of a far right that dances to the billionaires’ tune.
It makes the case for the expropriation of private wealth for the public good. Not just to fund services, but to protect democracy — overshadowed more than ever by the power of money.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Members of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) protest in Leeds. Photo: Neil Terry Photography
… Keir Starmer could face the biggest parliamentary revolt since the Iraq war as MPs vote on welfare cuts the government’s own figures say will push 150,000 into poverty by 2030 tomorrow.
No 10 was accused of “total desperation” as furious Labour rebels vowed to vote down the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Bill.
Celebrities joined disabled activists as they staged protests outside Parliament and across the country today against the plans to create a “two-tier” welfare system.
Disabled People Against Cuts co-founder Linda Burnip told the Morning Star: “We are very much against the paltry concessions that have been made which actually don’t seem to going to protect anyone.
“It smacks to me of total desperation, they are just flopping around changing things from one day to another.
“We are obviously not being bought off by the concessions and protests will continue and we will make sure that any Labour MPs that vote in favour of this Bill don’t get back into the Parliament at the next election.”
An Israel Defense Forces F-15 fighter takes off in this photo posted on the IDF’s website on May 19, 2025. (Photo: Israel Defense Forces)
“It would be a catastrophic mistake to be led into a war by the same neocons that claimed the Iraq war would be a cakewalk,” warned one group.
Israel is likely preparing to bomb Iran even as the Trump administration works toward a nuclear deal with Tehran, stoking fears of Iranian retaliation against U.S. military bases and other American or allied sites in an already inflamed region, and prompting calls for urgent diplomacy to avoid war.
U.S. and European officials told Western media Thursday that Israel is preparing to unilaterally attack Iran as negotiations between Washington and Tehran draw closer to a preliminary framework for an agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear development. The government of fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes any such deal.
“If this escalates, innocent lives will be caught in the crossfire in Iran and across the region.”
American intelligence agencies have periodically concluded over the past two decades that Iran—which has not started a war since the 19th century but supports proxy attacks on Israel—is not developing nuclear weapons.
While President Donald Trump—who has repeatedly threatened to bomb Iran if a nuclear deal is not reached—has publicly opposed an Israeli attack on Iran, numerous observers are warning that Tehran and its proxies would very likely view the U.S. as complicit in any such action.
“If Israel does strike Iran in the next days or hours, and even if they do so in defiance of Trump’s warnings, the likelihood that the Iranians will perceive it as an independent act by Israel in defiance of Trump is essentially zero,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said Wednesday on social media. “There is no plausible deniability.”
Vahid Razavi, an Iranian American advocate for human rights and ethics in technology and founder of ParentsPlea.com, told Common Dreams Thursday that “Israel will only attack Iran with the support and blessing of the United States.”
“The ‘good cop/bad cop’ game that Trump and Israel are playing in the region is a distraction,” Razavi added. “There is no substantial difference in U.S. and Israeli policy toward Iran.”
Iran has threatened an “unprecedented response” if Israel attacks.
“In case of any conflict, the U.S. must leave the region because all its bases are within our range, and we will target all of them in the host countries regardless,” Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh said Thursday during a televised address.
Nasirzadeh’s remarks followed a Wednesday threat by an official from Ansar Allah that the Yemeni rebel group also known as the Houthis is “at the highest level of preparedness for any possible American escalation against us.”
“Any escalation against the Islamic Republic of Iran is also dangerous and will drag the entire region into the abyss of war,” the unnamed official toldNewsweek.
The Trump administration stands accused of war crimes in Yemen amid an escalation of the decadeslong U.S. bombing of the country as part of the so-called War on Terror. Successive U.S. administrations also backed a Saudi-led war on Yemen that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, while Israeli and British forces have bombed the country since 2024 in retaliation for Houthi missile attacks on Red Sea shipping and Israel.
Last October, Iran launched a limited missile strike on Israel in response to the assassinations of Hassan Nasrallah, who led the Lebanon-based resistance group Hezbollah, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. This prompted retaliatory Israeli attacks on targets in and around Tehran, including the headquarters of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The prospect of another Israeli attack on Iran prompted the U.S. on Wednesday to order the evacuation of some diplomats from Iraq and call for the voluntary departure of American military families from the region.
Meanwhile, numerous observers stressed the need for a diplomatic resolution to avoid a wider war in the Middle East—and possibly beyond.
The Iran nuclear crisis is resolvable through diplomacy, not a bloody war. It would be a catastrophic mistake to be led into a war by the same neocons that claimed the Iraq war would be a cakewalk.
There’s time for diplomacy – but hardline demands must give way to compromise. https://t.co/uNFNWr7LGR
“We must face the reality: if this escalates, innocent lives will be caught in the crossfire in Iran and across the region, and at home there may be new, dire threats to the civil liberties of our community,” the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said in a statement Thursday.
“We are working to ensure our leaders hear us loud and clear: We need diplomacy, not catastrophe,” NIAC added. “We are organizing multiple actions in the coming days against a potential war and in support of peace and ask for your support to fuel this vital effort.”Former Democratic Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner succinctly said Wednesday: “No war with Iran. No war, period.”
A tent camp for displaced Palestinians is set up amid destroyed buildings in the west of Al-Shati camp, west of Gaza City, March 3, 2025
LAUNCH a full public inquiry into Britain’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, left MP Jeremy Corbyn has told the government.
The former Labour leader has written to Keir Starmer warning that he will be working with colleagues to “pursue all avenues to establish a public, independent inquiry into the UK’s involvement in Israel’s military assault in Gaza.”
This probe should “establish exactly what decisions have been taken, how these decisions have been made, and what consequences they have had,” he said.
Mr Corbyn’s move comes as pro-Palestine campaigners face a growing police clampdown, with several summoned for police interview over purported offences at January’s Gaza demonstration.
The letter to the Prime Minister cites the precedent of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war which, though protracted, eventually laid bare the sheer extent of deception undertaken by the Blair government regarding the 2003 aggression.
…
“Britain has played a highly influential role in Israel’s military operations,” Mr Corbyn writes, “including the sale of weapons, the supply of intelligence and the use of RAF bases” in Cyprus.
“Many of us have repeatedly raised objections over the continued sale of F-35 components. We have repeatedly asked for the truth regarding the role of British military bases.
“And we have repeatedly requested the publication of legal advice behind the government’s currently unknown definition of genocide. Our requests have been met evasion, obstruction and silence, leaving the public in the dark,” he added.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
JO GRADY: “The weapons that are made are used to rain hell on earth in Palestine now”
