FORMER Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn MP has criticised the government for “making no attempt” to answer MPs’ questions over its complicity in the Gaza genocide.
A five-strong pro-Palestine group of MPs, forming the Independent Alliance parliamentary group, has asked for the government’s definition of genocide, what advice it has received over its applicability in Gaza and what it was doing to fulfil its legal obligations to prevent genocide.
In letters sent to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Foreign Secretary David Lammy and the Attorney General Richard Hermer, they also asked whether RAF Akrotiri, Cyprus, is being used as a route for weapons to be deployed in Gaza and what legal advice the government has received over its use to support Israeli military operations.
Replying to Mr Corbyn two months after the letters were sent, Middle East minister Hamish Falconer did not address the questions.
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Mr Corbyn shared a copy of The Independent Alliance’s written response to Mr Falconer on social media.
It said: “We are extremely disappointed that you’ve made no attempt whatsoever to answer any of these questions.
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“It remains unknown whether the government has refused to seek legal advice over the definition of genocide, or whether the legal advice it has received is at direct odds with the statement the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have made.”
They added that it is “particularly concerning” that the government failed to provide any detail on how it has met its obligations to prevent genocide.
“We say again: we deserve to know the full scale of our government’s complicity and participation in genocide,” it added.
UK 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/QILgUHrdWREGenocide 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/O74hZCKKdpA
FORMER Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has hit out at the Met Police over its handling of a Palestine rally in London on Saturday.
More than 70 demonstrators were arrested on suspicion of breaching protest conditions after reportedly breaking through a police line as they marched from a rally in Whitehall.
Police clash with protesters at the rally (Image: Jeff Moore/PA Wire)
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Corbyn, who sits as an independent MP, responded to a post from the Met Police on Twitter/X which said: “The group that forced its way through the police line is now held at the north west corner of Trafalgar Square.
“Anyone in that group should now disperse and leave the area. Anyone remaining in breach of the conditions, or inciting further breaches, will be arrested.”
In his response, the former Labour leader said: “This is not an accurate description of events at all.
“I was part of a delegation of speakers, who wished to peacefully carry and lay flowers in memory of the children in Gaza who had been killed.
“This was facilitated by the police. We did not force our way through. When we reached Trafalgar Square, we informed police that we would go no. further, lay down flowers and disperse.”
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This is not an accurate description of events at all.
I was part of a delegation of speakers, who wished to peacefully carry and lay flowers in memory of children in Gaza who had been killed.
This was facilitated by the police. We did not force our way through.
As the government unveils its plans for NHS patients to be treated privately in a bid to cut the waiting list backlog, former Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn says this administration is repeating the mistakes of the last
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During the general election, I stood on a platform that pledged to defend a fully public, fully funded healthcare system. We knew Labour’s decision to drop its previously held manifesto promise that “the NHS is not for sale” was no accident. We said the future of our NHS was on the line – and we were right.
This week, the government announced that private operators will receive an extra £2.5bn a year in government funding. Under their plans, the role of the private sector in providing outpatient appointments will rise by 20 per cent. Meanwhile, the secretary of state for health, Wes Streeting, refuses to rule out the involvement of the private sector in a reformed care service – a refusal he will no doubt maintain for the next four years until elderly and disabled people are finally allowed to hear his plans.
To the prime minister and health secretary, welcoming privatisation is proof of their commitment to pragmatism. “We will not let ideology… stand in the way.” To anyone who knows the reality of privatisation, their dogmatic refusal to look at the evidence is the very definition of ideology itself.
A privatised health service leads to worse quality care, higher mortality rates and a reduction in staffing. Privatisation has even been linked to higher rates of patient infections, in part because cleaning staff are typically the first to be cut in the name of efficiency. There is only one beneficiary of privatisation: investors and shareholders making money out of people’s ill health.
A wildfire near Povoa de Montemuro, Portugal, 18 September 2024. Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters
Labour seems gripped by a form of denialism. The danger is real and incremental change won’t avert it
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If our political leaders acted out of humanity, the plight of others would be enough to motivate them into action. In the absence of empathy, perhaps we need to be more direct: the climate crisis is coming for you, because it is coming for us all.
Without urgent action, “once-in-a-generation” events – the flooding of New York subways, the typhoon-like winds sucking people out of their apartments in China, the forest fires – will become the new routine of daily life. Politicians abandoned the goal to stop climate breakdown many years ago. We have a much more basic demand: to stop climate breakdown entering a new phase of existential disaster.
That means avoiding certain “tipping points” that would put humanity on an irreversible path to catastrophe. The collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, for example, would disrupt the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and west Africa. Permafrost thaw would generate an irreversible release of carbon dioxide. And the loss of the Greenland ice sheet would result in disastrous runaway melting.
Few politicians deny that human-made global heating is real. Instead, our government peddles a different – more insidious – kind of denialism. One that moves away from a disbelief in the climate crisis, and toward a belief that incremental change can fix it.
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This government is not just failing to stand up to fossil fuel giants. It is failing to confront the economic system that empowers them. The richest 1% are responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, yet our government still refuses to bring in wealth taxes to reduce inequality. Unless the government has the courage to rewrite the rules of our ecocidal economy, its climate targets will soon become yet another broken promise.
A planet cannot be cooled by warm words; we need fundamental change, now. A Green New Deal would invest in publicly owned renewable energy and water. It would create millions of green jobs. It would promote sustainable farming based on the principles of agroecology. And it would kickstart an economy based on human need, not corporate greed.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
A Palestinian girl is in shock after surviving an Israeli bombing of an UNRWA school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza, Palestine on July 14, 2024. (Photo: Salama Nabeel Eaid Younes/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The world’s failure to protect Gaza’s children is a moral failing on a monumental scale,” said one advocate.
Amid a relentless Israeli onslaught that has wrought monumental physical and psychological destruction in Gaza, a report published this week revealed that nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believe their death is imminent—and nearly half of them want to die.
The Gaza-based Community Training Center for Crisis Management, supported by War Child Alliance, surveyed more than 500 Palestinian children in Gaza last June and found that 96% of them fear imminent death, 92% are not accepting of reality, 79% suffer from nightmares, 77% avoid discussing traumatic events, 73% display signs of aggression, 49% wish to die because of the war, and many more “show signs of withdrawal and severe anxiety, alongside a pervasive sense of hopelessness.”
“This report lays bare that Gaza is one of the most horrifying places in the world to be a child,” War Child U.K. CEO Helen Pattinson said in a statement. “Alongside the leveling of hospitals, schools, and homes, a trail of psychological destruction has caused wounds unseen but no less destructive on children who hold no responsibility for this war.”
In a first of its kind report, our Gaza based partner Community Training Centre for Crisis Management asked injured, separated and disabled children and their caregivers about the toll of the ongoing war on their lives. Their answers are devastating but sadly not a surprise.1/5
Israel’s 434-day assault on Gaza—which is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case—has left tens of thousands of children dead, maimed, missing, or orphaned and hundreds of thousands more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened. Doctors and others including volunteers from the United States have documented many cases in which they’ve concluded Israeli snipers and other troops have deliberately shot children in the head and chest.
“The harm caused to Gaza’s children goes beyond statistics. Behind every number is a name, a life, and a future that is being extinguished before it can even begin,” Iain Overton, executive director of the U.K.-based group Action on Armed Violence, said in response to the new report.
“The world’s failure to protect Gaza’s children is a moral failing on a monumental scale,” he added. “We must act decisively and compassionately to ensure that these children’s voices are heard and their futures protected.”
In October, the U.K.-based charity Oxfam International said that Israel’s yearlong assault on Gaza has been the deadliest year of conflict for women and children anywhere in the world over the past two decades. A year ago, the United Nations Children’s Fund called Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.” Earlier this year, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres for the first time added Israel to his so-called “List of Shame” of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts.
“The international community must act now before the child mental health catastrophe we are witnessing embeds itself into multi-generational trauma, the consequences of which the region will be dealing with for decades to come,” Pattinson stressed. “A cease-fire must be the immediate first step to allow War Child and other agencies to effectively respond to the intense psychological damage children are experiencing.”
Addressing the complicity of allies like the United States, Germany, and Britain, who provide weapons and diplomatic cover for Israel, progressive U.K. parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn wrote on social media in response to the new report, “Every single supplier of arms to Israel has blood on its hands—and the world will never forgive them.”
