Green Party Leader Zack Polanski discusses the recent Manchester attack at a synagogue and the Labour party’s consequent attacks on the right to protest against Israel’s genocide. The UK Labour government actively supports and is complicit in Israel’s genocide.
Polanski also made a speech at the Green Party of England and Wales conference yesterday, many of the videos are very long.
Labour Party members have voted to accept that a genocide is taking place in Gaza by Israel – putting pressure on the government to also do so.
Members voted to approve an emergency motion at Labour’s conference to accept the findings of the UN commission of inquiry, which nearly two weeks ago concluded Israel “has committed genocide”.
Israel has repeatedly denied this and called the report “distorted and false”.
The vote will place further pressure on the government after Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers have refused to declare a genocide is taking place.
…
dizzy: Keir Starmer’s UK government has actively participated in and been extremely supportive of Israel’s Gaza genocide.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Amnesty International UK on Tuesday urged the British government to prevent and punish Israel’s genocide in Gaza following a UN commission’s findings that Israel is committing genocide in the besieged enclave, Anadolu reports.
“We welcome the UN commission’s findings that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza – a significant and necessary moment,” Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty International UK’s crisis response manager, said in a statement.
Saying that the government “must change” its position and take action without delay, he said all states – including the UK – bear a clear and binding legal obligation to act under the Genocide Convention.
“The Government must now stop indulging in genocide denial. It must urgently fulfil its legal and moral responsibility by taking immediate, decisive steps to prevent and punish genocide,” added Benedict.
READ: Palestinian Authority President in UK: Talks to push for Gaza ceasefire, end to settler terrorism
Amnesty International also reiterated its call on the government to end all UK arms exports to Israel, support the International Criminal Court (ICC) and enforce its arrest warrants, implement International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings in full, and ban all trade with Israeli settlements.
Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has killed nearly 65,000 Palestinians since October 2023 and devastated the enclave, which faces famine.
A UN inquiry released on Tuesday found that Israel’s war on Gaza is a genocide.
“It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention,” said Navi Pillay, chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Israel is also facing a genocide case at the ICJ over its war in the territory.
READ: UK bars Israeli officers from studying at its Royal College of Defence Studies
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
…
The government’s official position of genocide denial contradicts the consensus of actual genocide scholars who dedicate their lives to the field. That includes Israeli academics such as Omer Bartov, a pre-eminent professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, who said that as a former IDF officer he agonised over reaching his conclusion: “But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognise one when I see one.”
Those who have facilitated or justified this abomination have no excuses, no place to hide. More than a year ago, South Africa’s legal team composed a dossier detailing statements of genocidal and criminal intent issued by Israeli leaders and officials: it was 121 – pages long, and is now completely out of date. There is more video footage of civilians being slaughtered and civilian infrastructure being destroyed than any other war crime as it was happening in history.
Yet not only does Britain supply Israel with those crucial F-35 components, its government refuses to describe a single Israeli act as a “war crime”, because it knows that then imposes sweeping legal obligations. Britain continues its annual trade with Israel, which last year was worth £5.8bn. Days after its tokenistic gesture of suspending trade treaty talks, Britain’s embassy in Israel celebrated the arrival of the UK trade envoy. When Britain imposed sanctions on two far-right Israeli ministers, it did so on the grounds of their “horrendous extremist language”, rather than actions, because the latter implicates the British government. They refuse to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel itself.
By proscribing Palestine Action, the government has assured that it is opponents of genocide who face being hauled before the dock in the here and now. Our foreign secretary no doubt believes that the impunity traditionally enjoyed by western leaders and Israel itself will protect him and his colleagues for ever. That assumes the winds will never change. There is no statute of limitation for complicity in genocide. Israel’s crime is not yet complete. Lammy must believe that his freedom is safe for ever: that there will be no knock on his door in five, 10, 20 years. That is quite the bet.
Noel Flay Cass, University of Leeds
If you’re thinking of buying a new electric car worth up to £37,000, the UK government has offered to knock up to £3,750 off the price. The measure adds up to £650 million in grants for people to buy EVs (electric vehicles), but as a researcher who studies transport policy and climate change, I think this money would be better spent subsidising e-bikes.
Numerous questions surround the new government policy. Might people who can afford a new car buy one anyway, without the 10% discount? Might car dealers simply reduce the discounts they offer by a similar amount? Given the 20% VAT on an EV, doesn’t a sale actually result in a 200% immediate return for the government? And isn’t this mainly a bung to car manufacturers and company fleets?
The grants come on top of financial assistance for replacing cars, vans, taxis and motorbikes with electric options, announced in February – £120 million in total, including £500 grants for e-motorbikes. But almost no subsidies are available for two-wheeled, pedal-assisted EVs: e-bikes and e-cargo bikes.
The main financial help for buying e-bikes is the cycle to work salary-sacrifice scheme. The employer buys the bike and then instalments are deducted from a participant’s pay before tax, but the scheme’s eligibility is limited to employees on standard payroll tax (PAYE workers) whose sacrifices don’t drop their pay below minimum wage.
This also excludes those who are out of work, the low-paid, the self-employed and retired, arguably people who might benefit most from an e-bike.
We know that e-bike owners replace lots of trips and miles driven by cars. We also know the upfront cost of around £2,000-£3,000 is a barrier to more people owning one, despite e-bikes being much cheaper than cars.
Estimates of annual carbon savings from e-bikers avoiding car trips vary, from as little as 87kg CO₂ in a 2016 study to 394kg in research published the following year. Estimates published in 2020 and 2023 put the annual climate dividend at 225kg and 168kg of CO₂ respectively – roughly in line with emissions for one person making a return short-haul flight.
These might seem small savings compared to the tonnes of CO₂ that an EV can save. However, e-bike incentives would have two big advantages.
First, policies that encourage active travel, including cycling, have been assessed by the government multiple times to determine the payoff from investment. It turns out that they have huge benefit to cost ratios – 9:1 on average (internationally it’s 6:1).
Conservatively, policies to encourage cycling pay back £5.50 in social benefits for every £1 invested. These benefits are largely savings for the healthcare system. In a project I worked on, in which we lent e-cargo bikes for free to 49 households in Leeds, Brighton and Oxford for several months, e-cargo bike users cycled up to three times more than non-users in our surveys.
E-cargo bike borrowers also reported mental-health benefits on top of satisfaction at being able to combine fitness with functional everyday trips, which were longer than they would attempt on a conventional bike. The cargo bikes especially helped with combining trips – commutes with shopping and school runs, for instance – meaning that more than 50% of trips and miles replaced car usage.
Second, e-bike incentives can be designed to appeal especially to the lower-paid, who have been found to use their e-bikes more than wealthier buyers, which would also replace more car trips. The highest of a sliding scale of means-tested incentives in a Canadian study attracted poorer first-time e-bike buyers with existing high car-use.
This reaped average annual carbon savings of 1,456kg for those in receipt of the maximum CAN$1,600 (£868). As the authors suggest, these incentives may have helped low-income households realise their preferences for less dependence on cars.
But how many drivers want to drive less? According to research that groups people into camps based on travel preferences, up to 50% of travellers in the UK are “malcontented motorists” and “active aspirers” (to travel differently).
Our research also found that guilt, or trying to minimise car use, was a major motivator for nearly all of our participants. While the government has funded free e-(cargo) bike trials like ours, the main cycling organisations we talked to pointed out that use would “fall off a cliff” when the trial ends because of the cost barrier. Those who would struggle to buy one were back in the same position as before.
A government evaluation of free e-bike loans concluded they were poor value for money, but it tracked purchases made soon after with a tiny response rate. Our project followed up after a year and found 20% of our borrowers had bought an e-cargo bike. Trial loans and grants together might achieve even more.
The new EV grant money could provide nearly 750,000 e-bike or e-cargo bike purchase-incentives the size of the Canadian ones, which could lead to annual carbon savings of 1.125 million tonnes of CO₂, according to the weekly average savings they found in that group.
Given the conservative benefit to cost ratio of 5.5:1 from such a UK scheme, this investment could also reap more than £3.6 billion in social benefits – especially from a fitter car-dependent population. There would potentially be a massive boost to the struggling UK e-bike and e-cargo bike market as well.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.
Noel Flay Cass, Research Fellow in Energy Demand Behaviour, University of Leeds
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.