The UK has been an active participant in Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza for the last 15 months, a new report published by the British Palestinian Committee (BPC) reveals today.
The 22-page document entitled ‘British military collaboration with Israel’ says: “The UK has not simply failed to meet its third-party responsibilities to uphold international law, including its duty to prevent genocide, but has been an active participant in Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza for the last 15 months.”
Cataloguing evidence of the “many layers of collaboration between the UK and Israel in this genocidal project”, the report details the UK’s active involvement in the Israeli arms industry, British provisions of logistical support and weapons transfers to the Israeli military, British protection of Israel’s military infrastructure, direct military intervention from the UK in Yemen to support Israel’s goals and repeated, ongoing intelligence provision from the UK to Israel via surveillance flights.
BPC Director, Dr Sara Husseini, said: “This report shows that UK complicity in Israel’s crimes goes far beyond arms sales.”
Highlighting the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s ruling that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to “plausible genocide”, Husseini added: “As the world looked on in horror, Israel continued its genocidal aggression in Gaza for a further 12 months. The UK has provided active military assistance to Israel throughout.”
This, she continued, implicates “its institutions and officials in the gravest breaches of international law.”
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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
Campaigners warn DWP proposals could be counterproductive and create a two-tier justice system
PLANS to ban benefit fraudsters from driving and seize money from their bank accounts will create a two-tier justice system that destroys innocent lives, campaigners warned today.
The elderly, disabled and hard-up families would face “totally unprecedented privacy intrusions and punishments” under proposals by the Department for Welfare and Pensions (DWP).
Employment minister Alison McGovern insisted that banning benefit cheats from driving would be a “backstop” used in “extreme” cases ahead of the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill’s introduction to Parliament today.
But director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch Silkie Carlo said: “We must be extremely cautious about the government creating a second tier justice system, reserved for people who rely on welfare, that side-steps fair hearings in courts to take away people’s funds and freedoms.
“The public and Parliament will rightly be very sceptical about empowering the government to go directly into anyone’s bank accounts to take our money and even our driving licences, least not to target the elderly, disabled and people on the poverty line whose lives could be destroyed by mistaken punishments.”
Public and Commercial Services (PCS) national president Martin Cavanagh said: “While PCS understands the government’s desire to deal with benefit fraud, it should not be their main priority right now, and these proposals will be counterproductive.
“The reality is that is public funds lost to benefit fraud are a drop in the ocean compared to revenues lost through tax avoidance and evasion. This should be the government’s focus if they are serious about boosting the economy and bringing monies into the Exchequer.
“PCS is at a loss to understand how taking away driving licenses, thereby reducing opportunities to work, can help achieve their stated aims.”
Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall speaking to the media outside the Department for Work and Pensions in Westminster, London, December 17, 2024
LABOUR’S repeated attacks on disabled people are cynical, cruel and, in providing an excuse to legislate for ever-greater state intrusion into private citizens’ lives, a threat to all our freedoms.
Liz Kendall chases headlines with the latest gimmick (banning those found guilty of benefit fraud from driving). More sinister is the resurrection of Tory plans to make banks share information from private accounts and powers for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to seize funds without a court process.
The state already has ample power both to detect and punish benefit fraud: it can make banks share clients’ financial information if there is suspicion of fraud, while those found guilty can be jailed for up to 10 years (courtesy of Keir Starmer in a previous iteration, as director of public prosecutions egging on the then Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s war on welfare).
This is not about fighting crime. Nor even about cutting costs: benefit fraud amounts to less than 3 per cent of social security spending, and ministers say the new legislation is aimed at saving £1.5 billion over five years, an almost irrelevant sum given annual spending on social security excluding pensions is over £130bn.
It is about creating a climate of fear.
The approach echoes that toward immigration, where endless scaremongering about “small boats” obscures the rarity of such arrivals compared to immigrants who arrive legally.
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper are whipping up a moral panic about the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana who killed three children and injured ten others. I’m sorry to state the obvious, that terribly tragic as it is, it pales into insignificance compared to the thousands on thousands of children murdered in Gaza with the active support and encouragement of Starmer, Cooper and the UK Labour Party. Starmer and Cooper are escalating the issue out of all proportion. Yes it was tragic and awful that innocent young children were murdered but the perpetrator was by definition mentally ill and it wasn’t like a mass shooting event that we see abroad.
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/QILgUHrdWRE
I’m otherwise busy atm and don’t have much time to blog.
Across the 2000s, a series of child sex exploitation cases affected British towns, including Telford, Rochdale, Oxford and Rotherham, scarring the lives of hundreds of children. In 2011, Times journalist Andrew Norfolk reported that networks – so-called “grooming gangs” – of largely British Asian men of Pakistani heritage had trafficked and raped hundreds of mainly girls and young women.
These are facts that are widely known in the UK and have been the subject of multiple investigations. The 2014 Jay report found that authorities had been slow to act, sometimes for fear of being accused of racism.
Police had in some cases blamed victims, criminalising children as prostitutes. Alexis Jay, who also led the 2022 independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, has noted the “appalling and lifelong effects” of abuse on victims.
Elon Musk – the billionaire owner of social media platform X and incoming lead on US government efficiency – has, it seems, just found out about this devastating national scandal.
In a series of posts on X, Musk politicised these crimes to denounce Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “evil”, and to call for a new general election in the UK. He also reposted the anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, calling for his release from prison where he is serving 18 months for contempt of court.
Musk portrayed Robinson as campaigning to expose the “truth” about grooming, as though the story had not been subject to widespread investigation, media coverage and public debate.
Of course, women’s rights within our criminal justice and political systems desperately need to be improved. But, Musk is no cheerleader for women and there is no evidence that he is “genuinely incensed” by child sexual exploitation.
Musk has not shown an interest in women’s rights or sexual abuse before. If he had, he might not have accepted a job in the administration of Donald Trump, a man found liable for sexual abuse.
Musk’s newfound interest evidently isn’t in all sex offences – apparently just those perpetrated by “Muslim men” against white women. He has not shown any obvious interest in cases where Muslim women were also abused, nor does he have much if anything to say about abuse perpetrated by white men.
He appears to support women’s protections when they are politically useful to him in fanning division – a common far-right tactic.
Musk has supported far-right actors, reinstating Tommy Robinson to X in November 2023, just in time for him to organise a mass rally at the Cenotaph in London, stoking division and, as I noted at the time, threatening democracy. He has also recently written in support of Germany’s anti-Islam party the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and hosted its leader Alice Weidel in live discussion on X.
By publicising the UK’s “grooming gangs” scandal, Musk has aligned himself with a gendered narrative: it is men’s duty to protect women – even when it means breaking rules or using force. This gender binary – strong men must be ready to use force to protect weak women, especially from hostile alien men – is the core narrative of patriarchal, nationalist, ultra nationalist and also Nazi groups.
It is highly racialised – only vulnerable white women matter – and it relates to class, in that it regards white, liberal women as betraying working-class girls. Musk has singled out Labour safeguarding minister Jess Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” and “wicked witch”, thereby putting her at risk.
Exploiting women victims, protecting patriarchy
The recent attack on Phillips reveals Musk’s call to protect women for what it really is: a means to protect powerful men. Feminist women are understood as fair targets, because they challenge a gender order in which men have natural dominance.
Patriarchy protects (some) men by positioning men’s role as leaders and fighters, protectors and providers, for nation and family, wives and children. This is protection without care, which is gendered as feminine, and weak. It is protection as a means of control.
Musk is not in a position of moral authority regarding either protection or care. Before his takeover, social media platform Twitter appeared to care for workers, prioritising health and wellbeing.
The ethos of X is the opposite: Musk has gutted staff numbers, and transformed workplace practices aimed at safeguarding both employees and users. He now promises to do the same across the US government as head of efficiency in the Trump administration.
Social media has always been a space in which women are at risk of both personal and structural misogyny; these harms are amplified through Musk’s approach to X. Musk has sought to amplify the voices of influencers who decry women’s rights.
Musk has reposted Andrew Tate, who police in the UK have linked to an epidemic of misogyny and violence against women, and who has faced charges of rape and sex trafficking. He has allowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes to use X to promote the phrase “your body, my choice”. There is no real protection here, no care – only white men’s control of women.
Race to the bottom
Where Musk leads, others follow. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has recently ceded fact-checking to the “community”, and noted the need for a more “masculine” and “aggressive” corporate culture. Zuckerberg also ended the company’s diversity equity and inclusion policy, which minorities rely upon for some degree of workplace protection.
In an age of strong-man politics, where young men are choosing role models from a marketplace of competing masculinities, hypermasculinity wins. Young men aged 18-29 voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the US elections, supported by men’s rights activists in the online “manosphere”. Musk knows this.
Musk has money and social media power, but he is a “tech bro” – a “nerd”. Exploiting the horror of British child sexual exploitation scandals has enabled him to attempt to assert himself as a protector of women – a hero of the forgotten.
He has amplified a far-right political position, and the voices of far-right actors he believes embody this, like Robinson. But Musk has no moral authority to speak on the protection of women, or on care more generally.
Those British politicians cynically lauding Musk’s apparently protective stance on women to attack the government – and the UK’s parliamentary democracy – should recognise this is nothing but hypocrisy. And, from that perspective, Musk has no authority to dictate the political agenda on girls’ and women’s rights in Britain, or anywhere else.
