London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley. Image by Katie Chan, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license via wikimedia.
The Morning Star is calling on London Mayor Sadiq Khan to sack Met Police boss Mark Rowley
MARK ROWLEY is fast becoming a menace to democracy in Britain. The country’s most powerful police officer is daily transgressing the limits — on partisanship, on political interference, on responsibility to all citizens — which have traditionally bounded the public interventions of leading state officials.
Of course, those limits have often been honoured in the breach. But the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has discarded all appearances of impartiality and, indeed, truthfulness.
It has long been clear that he has a special animus for the Palestine solidarity movement. He has sought to restrict its demonstrations on the most specious grounds and arrest its organisers for entirely peaceful and responsible conduct.
After the most notorious of such crackdowns, on the demonstration in January 2025, Rowley hastened to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which had been pushing for protest curbs, to receive an ovation from them the very next day.
By contrast, he has consistently refused to meet the organisers of the protests. He has been zealous in arresting peaceful objectors to the Palestine Action proscription.
Now he is deploying direct falsehoods in his attempt to rationalise a still more severe crackdown. He has accused the organisers of the huge demonstrations against Israel’s genocide of repeatedly seeking to march past synagogues.
That is a lie, as Rowley knows. The campaign has never sought to march past synagogues nor protest outside them in any way. Had they done so, it would indeed have been a matter of concern.
It linked the “multidimensional economic, financial, political, security and environmental crises” engulfing the planet — and noted that the “aggressive escalation of American imperialism” is intensifying them all.
It identified the United States as “the primary threat to global peace and security,” not so much a world policeman, as it has often thought of itself, but a global gangster that bullies, steals and destroys.
It connected US aggression against Cuba and Venezuela in the western hemisphere with its violence in the Middle East, and the genocide perpetrated by its ally Israel against the Palestinians.
And it brought together grassroots organisations, trade unions, peace campaigns and youth groups on an international basis to plan co-ordinated resistance.
No festival is so international as May Day, the workers’ day, with marches in Havana and Chicago, London and Rome, Baghdad and Beijing.
Rallies took up the message of defiance everywhere. Over 100 US unions took up the call “no work, no school, no shopping” for May Day, with specific marches like New York’s highlighting the connection between corporate power and state brutality under the slogan “Amazon delivers Ice.”
The Israeli police raided youth club premises to snatch Palestinian flags ahead of the demos, fearing any show of solidarity with the victims of their state’s relentless terror. In Cuba, electricity and energy workers took centre stage, as a whole nation saluted those trying to keep the lights on and the power flowing in the face of a brutal US siege.
So it was fitting that the International Meeting of Solidarity with Anti-Imperialism, dubbed 100 Years With Fidel, called on the world to stand with Cuba just as Cuba — exporter of medical care and education, valiant ally of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, beacon of socialism on the doorstep of the world’s most aggressive capitalist power — has so often stood with the world.
It made important commitments. One, to keep promoting convoys to breach the blockade and deliver essential supplies to Cuba. This is practical solidarity, like that organised in Britain by the Cuba Solidarity Campaign through its Cuba Vive appeal.
Two, to build links between left media organisations to counter the labyrinth of lies built up by the news and opinion monopolies that dominate global communications.
Three, international mobilisation and protest. The ceasefire in Gaza — hugely inadequate and regularly violated as it is — was brought about by the global scale of protest for Palestine. Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu, “you can’t fight the world.” The US should be made to feel, through protests at embassies and pressure on governments, that to attack Cuba is to fight the world.
The US threat to Cuba is urgent — Donald Trump reiterated military threats on May Day itself. It is not something we can’t do anything about.
The US needs to know it will pay a heavy price for attacking Cuba, and that means pressure on our own government to grow a backbone. Britain votes against the illegal US blockade of Cuba every year — why can’t it stick up for its own sovereignty and protect British companies that trade with Cuba from extraterritorial US punishment, as China has just done for its companies sanctioned for trading with Iran?
As we saw in Havana, building ties across borders provides the surest defence against the world war Trump threatens, which our own rulers seem willing to join.
With the most reactionary racist, climate-denialist, violence-worshipping zealots taking US imperialism on a global rampage, winning that world is not just an existential question for Cubans, but for us all.
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Communist Party of Israel MP says US-Israeli attack on Iran was based on lies and only citizens standing up for peace can stop it
THE world risks being dragged into “forever war” by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and only citizens standing up for peace can stop it, an Israeli MP warned today.
Knesset member Ofer Cassif of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) told the Morning Star that the US-Israeli attack on Iran was based on lies — and was already a smokescreen for intensified violence and ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine.
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“Netanyahu wants forever war in his own interests. He’s interested in doing anything possible to keep himself out of prison, which by definition means staying in power, and he believes as long as the death and destruction in Israel doesn’t rise too high that war will help him in elections.
“Those around him, the coalition, are racist bigots — many of them, the majority are messianic and see this as part of a divine plan, and they’re bloodthirsty all right.
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US aggression has been ramped up globally since the start of the year, and there is nothing defensive about the war in Iran. After all it was Trump himself who tore up the agreement that did exist between Iran and the West on its nuclear programme — which even the chairman of the Israeli Space Agency Isaac Ben-Israel acknowledged Tehran did not deviate from “by one millimetre.”
Last year, both Trump and Netanyahu claimed to have obliterated Iran’s nuclear programme. Eight months later they say it’s a threat again. “They lie.” Indeed, their aggression makes nuclear proliferation more likely: “The majority of experts in Israel, let alone outside it, say the harbinger of an Iranian nuclear bomb is Netanyahu.”
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[T]he CPI was right to warn Israel would use the war to accelerate ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
Even before October 7, Cassif was warning Israel intended to carry out the “decisive plan” identified by its self-proclaimed fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, which defines Palestine’s future in three options, “subjugation, expulsion and annihilation.”
Israel’s government plans to “annex all Palestinian territory without granting basic political or civil rights to Palestinians; expel all Palestinians who do not accept that fate; and kill those who try to resist.
“We saw that in Gaza — where the strategy was genocide. We see it in Israel, in fascism and the persecution of anyone who raises a voice against the government.
“And we see it in the West Bank. There is systematic ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and since the war with Iran began, it’s worse. Entire communities are vanishing.”
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/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Jeremy Corbyn, with Zarah Sultana (not pictured) speaking at a discussion on Your Party, their new political party, at The World Transformed conference, at Niamos Radical Arts Centre in Hulme, Manchester, October 10, 2025
With ‘Your Party’ holding its founding conference in Liverpool this weekend, JEREMY CORBYN speaks to Morning Star editor Ben Chacko about its potential, its priorities — and a few of its controversies too
JEREMY CORBYN says the Palestine solidarity movement is a game changer in British politics.
“The Palestine movement is absolutely huge. And like the movement against the Vietnam war of the 1960s, which had a huge impact on political thinking — the rather fossilised structure of both major parties started to disintegrate after that — it means things have to change.”
It’s one of the reasons he says the time is right for a new mass party of the left. “Your Party,” as it is provisionally known, has its founding conference this weekend.
“In my estimation at least two million people in Britain have done something about Palestine over the past 18 months — attend demonstrations, marches, meetings, sent emails, signed petitions.
“A lot of people are coming together on Palestine and at all the Palestine events I’ve been at there’s been a huge interest in the idea of a new party.”
Corbyn, meeting the Morning Star in his Westminster office, isn’t saying one issue would be enough to build a mass movement for change on — but the immense public anger at our Establishment’s complicity in a genocide is a galvanising moment.
One that comes at a time ripe for Labour to be challenged from the left.
“Labour has lost all appeal to the radical sections of the population.” And that, today, means a lot of people.
“Nobody really believes the left are going to be back in power in the Labour Party, because of the structural changes Starmer has brought in,” says Corbyn. Changes everyone knows are intended to prevent anything like Corbyn’s own 2015-20 leadership of the party happening ever again.
“Now is the time for a left party in the tradition of the labour movement. That is where I see myself. I am not leaving the labour movement. I am helping form a political party which will be part of the labour movement.
“We must challenge the ‘triopoly’ of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems on political, social, environmental and economic thinking. They all believe in austerity, they all believe in market economics, they’re all running away from addressing the environmental crisis and on social justice issues.
“Labour had a ‘loveless landslide’ just over a year ago in the election. A spectacularly low vote for a party moving into government.” Corbyn points out that, while “we didn’t win either election, I fully appreciate that,” the highest Labour votes at general elections this century were both under his leadership, in 2017 and 2019. An important reminder that the idea socialist policies are unpopular at the ballot box is a media-manufactured myth.
Since coming to power Starmer’s government has been “disastrous. Maintaining the two-child benefit cap [finally lifted a day after we spoke], trying to take away the winter fuel allowance, attempting to remove personal independence payments from disabled people.”
On housing, he slams Labour’s refusal to take on the private rental sector or stand up to for-profit builders, who have a stranglehold on construction and resist efforts to include social and council housing in new builds.
He also ties the government’s decision to ramp up military spending to “effective cuts to every other area of public spending.” The government claims it’s increasing spending on the NHS, but he points out that two hospitals near him in north London are cutting spending by £20 million — and all over the country similar cuts are taking place across hospital trusts.
The increased military budget covers “a new generation of nuclear weapons and for the first time since the 1960s airborne nuclear bombs being stationed in Britain. There is no agenda for anything other than war.” And back to the trigger issue, Gaza: “A Labour government has carried on selling arms to Israel while a genocide is going on.”
The appetite for a party that will challenge all this is obvious. But a lot has changed on the British left since Your Party was first announced in July. Most notably, under a new leader, Zack Polanski, the Greens have shifted dramatically left and exploded in size, with many of those joining believed to be from the same 800,000 people who expressed interest in Your Party. Is another left party needed in that context, and isn’t the left becoming a crowded field?
“I want to be part of a socialist party — one fundamentally about social and economic transformation. I agree with a lot of what the Greens say, especially on environmental issues, and will work with them. Just last night I was working with the Greens on an amendment to the English Devolution Bill.
“But this is at root about public ownership and workers’ control.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.Vote Labour for Genocide.
Staff arrive at BBC Broadcasting House in London after BBC Director-General Tim Davie resigned, November 10, 2025
THE Tory and Tory-government-appointed director general of the BBC, has resigned. Sir Tim Davie may well be pleased to be knocked off his perch given the miserable time he has had dealing with the problems that beset our principal state-affiliated media organisation.
The proximate cause is a leaked internal memo which presented a Panorama documentary as making it seem as if Donald Trump directly called for the Maga assault on the US capitol [capital] that marked the end of his first term as president.
BBC bosses have the unenviable task of maintaining the elaborate fiction that the organisation is a paragon of journalistic integrity and unwavering objectivity while policing successive waves of criticism. This comes from both a left, which for reasons of state is necessarily marginalised in the coverage of political affairs, and an insurgent right that, despite its impeccable patrician leadership, has chosen to present itself as the representative of a disgruntled citizenry.
Another pressure comes from Israel’s hit squad in public life, who keep the BBC under pressure to present the genocidal apartheid state as an ordinary democracy fighting a “normal” war through relentless accusations of anti-semitic bias.
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In this particular moment the BBC has become the the target of our government circles which, in a manner entirely consistent with their supine relationship to the United States, is acting in conformity with Trump’s prejudices and prerogatives as leader of the “free world.”
It is indeed true that the Panorama clip in question elided two parts of Trump’s speech into a single framing of the Capitol riot he enabled. That it spoke to a wider truth that more accurately represented what Trump, thinks, schemed for and actually did is deemed unimportant if it is necessary to appease the US president.
No-one with an alert and critical mind will fail to make the comparison with the way the BBC represented and reported upon the efforts of Jeremy Corbyn when leader of the Labour Party, and subsequently. These too included the selective editing of his remarks to present them in a particular light.
Soldiers attend an event marking International Workers’ Day at Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Square in Havana, Cuba, May 1, 2026
Staff arrive at BBC Broadcasting House in London after BBC Director-General Tim Davie resigned, November 10, 2025