Bob Vylan performing on the West Holts Stage, during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset, June 28, 2025
ARE concessions to coax MPs into voting for cruel social security cuts a sign that the Starmer government is listening and learning?
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The Prime Minister demands an explanation from the public broadcaster for failing to suppress footage of crowds chanting in solidarity with Palestine at a music festival. The organisers of a peaceful demonstration in January are up in court next week for alleged breaches of police restrictions by laying flowers in memory of Gaza’s dead children in the road. The police are reviewing footage of the Glastonbury crowds, trying to sniff out behaviour they can prosecute someone for.
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The BBC, falling over itself to make amends for failing to meet Starmer’s censorship preferences, smears the singer Bobby Vylan, accusing him of “anti-semitic sentiments” for leading chants of “Death to the IDF” (Israel Defence Forces).
But to denounce an army is not to denounce a race. And given serving IDF soldiers revealed in the Israeli press just last week that the IDF is actually ordering its troops to fire into unarmed crowds of Palestinians gathering to collect food from its tightly controlled aid centres — a sick “hunger games” scenario in which over 500 Palestinians have already been gunned down — it’s understandable that feelings against this genocidal military are running high. Anyone who thinks Vylan’s chants are more “appalling” (the PM’s term) than the government’s continuing supply of arms and intelligence to facilitate mass murder has their priorities wrong.
The gravity of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s proposed Palestine Action ban cannot be overestimated. To try to head off any potential opposition by MPs, she has lumped the direct-action group with two neonazi formations, the Maniac Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement, in a single banning order.
To label a group terrorist for splashing paint on military aircraft is an outrage, one that as others have noted would define as terrorist some of Britain’s best known historical protest movements, from the Greenham Common women to the Suffragettes.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect 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.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/QILgUHrdWREUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
In response to Just Stop Oil’s announcement this morning Will McCallum, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, said:
“The history of democracies is built by groups of people like the Suffragettes, trade unionists, gay rights campaigners and anti-fracking activists who were brave enough to make themselves unpopular for a cause they believed in. With the benefit of hindsight we can see the debt we owe each of them for giving us rights and liberties, and protecting the things we care about.
“Whether you want to stand up for our planet against polluting profiteers, or save your local library from council spending cuts, the freedom to make your voice heard is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. Just Stop Oil paid a heavy price for raising their voices at a time when politicians and corporations are trying to silence peaceful protesters – in the streets and in the courts. We must not allow our hard-won right to protest to be stripped away, because it is the right that all other rights depend upon. Greenpeace and many others will continue to defend this proud tradition of taking action on issues that matter to make change possible.”
A Just Stop Oil participant getting arrested at Kingsbury oil terminal. A JSO / Vladamir Morozov image.Orcas are pleased that Rosebank and Jackdaw oil fields are blocked and say that the killer apes need to just stop oil.
Democracy is a precious, and essential part of our society. Our leadership must always be accountable to the people, and if they are not, we risk oppression. We are, without a doubt, lucky to live in a liberal representational democracy, and when the time comes to vote, we should. So why then, are people acting politically, with civil resistance, outside of this mechanism?
Over the last twelve months, thousands of people in the UK have engaged in peaceful resistance, and over a hundred (and counting) have been imprisoned. It’s not just in this country, in Canada ‘Save Old Growth’ are blocking motorways demanding no more felling of ancient trees. In France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Norway, the USA and Australia, ordinary people are resisting, disrupting transport and cultural activities – demanding that their states act to protect, not destroy, life.
They are ordinary people – coming together and acting out of love as much as fear and grief. Engaging in civil resistance, and defying a state, that while democratically elected, has proved deeply harmful. There’s no denying this harm – while the International Energy Agency has made it clear we can have no more new oil and gas development, the UK Government is ready to approve new oil fields and issue new exploration licenses, a death sentence for millions.
Our politicians say they are ‘committed to reaching net zero’. What they are actually committed to is kicking the can down the road and round the corner. Gambling on unproven or non-existent technology to reverse our dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Instead of taking action, they’re making the problem worse for another 30 years, literally pouring fuel on the fire. The UK is the home of BP and Shell who are making eye-watering profits, and enjoying tax breaks to destroy life – because “pensions”, because “jobs”, because “economic growth”.
A stable climate is not a competing policy demand to be set against pensions, transport, or public sector funding. One provides the basis for everything else, there simply isn’t a contest. Our predicament is almost comically simple – either we stop the destruction of the global systems that enable ordered civil society to work or we lose everything we value, our traditions, our cherished landscapes and, crucially, democracy. There are no free and fair elections on a burning earth.
In 2019 the MoD published a report outlining what is coming if we don’t immediately reduce carbon emissions – “increased conflict over diminishing natural resources”. That’s code for war. War over food and water – and we know what war looks like, flattened cities, dictator warlords, child traffickers waiting on borders, tortured grandfathers – it’s being documented once again in Europe.
So what has happened in the UK to protect against this future? Traffic on the M25 has been disrupted, London bridges closed, oil terminals have been blockaded and occupied, football matches interrupted. Inept radio hosts have sparked viral memes about growing concrete and inspired themed stag nights. Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, XR and Stop HS2 have been painted on both the Left and Right as an eco-mob, eco-fascists, as selfish, naive and childish. But perhaps the most damaging criticism is that they are anti-democratic.
It’s as if every right and freedom we enjoy has been handed to us by a benign government. As if the Suffragettes never smashed windows, as if the race riots never happened, as if Stonewall simply wrote letters, as if those demanding disability rights didn’t chain themselves to railings and buses, as if the poll tax was scrapped due to reasonable debate and discussion or waiting politely for a chance to vote. Change requires citizens to stand up and resist harmful governments, it is part of democracy.
Resistance has nothing to do with “protest”. Protest is when you express your disapproval. You do not express disapproval when murderous governments engage in an act condemning the world to go over 1.5C in the 2030s – a death sentence for small island states and millions in the global south. Pakistan today demonstrates what we face – 33 million people impacted by floods and agriculture decimated.
We know what to do. It’s what the Suffragettes did, it’s what the Civil Rights movements did, it’s what everyone does when the inalienable right to life and a livelihood are violated. We engage in non-violent civil resistance.
What we must do now is block and disable the cogs of the machine. This is not a “tactic” – it is an act of self respect, an act of solidarity, an act of love and necessity.
We must resist now or we will look back with longing at all we have lost. The last 250 years of sacrifice and tears expended by generations to create decent societies is about to be snuffed out in the blink of an eye. The word betrayal does not cover the reality of what is going on. All our traditions, all our values, all that we claim to stand for is about to be lost.
It’s not about winning. It’s about doing what has to be done. Those who fought fascism in the 20th century, those who are fighting the oil companies across the global south, those fighting the Russians in Ukraine, they act because they know someone has to stand up.
The next generations are watching us. Can you feel the weight of billions of children yet to take their first breath? They are saying “Are you mad? Get out there, and stop this – or you condemn us forever”.
dizzy: 1. I submit that we exist in a plutocracy rather than a democracy. 2. I couldn’t find the MoD article containing the quotation “increased conflict over diminishing natural resources”. I suspect that it existed but is no longer published openly. There are plenty of official reports making similar points and it is a reasonable statement. For example the WORLD DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2011, ‘Resource Scarcity, Climate Change and the Risk of Violent Conflict’ Alex Evans, Center on International Cooperation, New York University, September 9, 2010 makes similar claims. Edit: Despite that article being a very wooly academic paper, I think that it does make that claim
Although the conflict risk posed by climate change and resource scarcity will almost always be better understood as a ‘threat multiplier’ than as a sole cause of violent conflict, a range of potential linkages between climate, scarcity and conflict risk can nonetheless be identified, whether through intensifying existing problems, or through creating new environmental problems that lead to instability.
USAID (2009). Climate Change, Adaptation and Conflict: A preliminary review of the issues. CMD Discussion Paper no. 1, October 2009
Bob Vylan performing on the West Holts Stage, during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset, June 28, 2025
