A climate activist interrupts Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s keynote speech at the Yorkshire Labour Party Conference in protest against new subsidies for Drax Power Station, March 1, 2025
CLIMATE activists disrupted Rachel Reeves’s speech to the Yorkshire Labour Party Conference on Saturday, condemning new subsidies for the tree-burning Drax power station.
As the Chancellor spoke, the two protesters stood up and condemned the environmental damage caused by Drax, which claims to be sustainable, allowing it to receive billions of pounds in green subsidies, but remains Britain’s biggest carbon emitter.
A BBC investigation previously exposed Drax for sourcing wood from rare forests, yet Labour has extended its subsidies until at least 2031 — costing taxpayers an estimated £2 billion.
Rosie, of campaigner group Axe Drax, said: “Labour has once again shown that they are on the side of the lobbyists, choosing to hand billions … to Drax, which has just announced over £1bn in earnings, while slashing winter fuel payments and presiding over yet another energy bill price hike.
“Rather than funding Drax’s shareholders profits, we desperately need investment in real green energy and climate action that will bring down emissions and bills — like home insulation.”
The disruption led to Ms Reeves pausing her speech while the protesters were ejected by security staff.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves at the Labour Party Conference at the ACC Liverpool, September 23, 2024
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One of Labour’s few redistributive policies attempting to tap the immense wealth of the filthy rich — a crackdown on the abuse of non-dom status to avoid tax — is to be softened, Chancellor Rachel Reeves says, because she has been “listening to the concerns” raised by the non-dom “community.”
She won’t listen to concerns over children trapped in poverty by the discriminatory two-child benefit cap.
Or over the impact of restricting winter fuel payments when energy prices are twice what they were a couple of years ago, even when those concerns convince her own party to vote against the policy at its conference, and prompt Labour’s biggest affiliate Unite to challenge the government in court.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
Or even over the U-turn on compensating the Waspi women, despite leading Labour politicians having championed their cause for years.
Reeves’s selective approach to people’s concerns applies to the environment too, even as yet another severe storm closes schools and transport systems, and despite years of worsening floods and failing crops. Sod the science, says Reeves, growth trumps net zero.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Limiting action on the accelerating climate catastrophe to measures which don’t affect corporate profits is one reason the world continues to warm uncontrollably.
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Labour’s growth policies across the board simply turn government into a doormat for big business. Rather than publicly fund infrastructure projects in the public interest, Labour will scrap regulations to weaken rights to object to construction by the private sector.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
The same deference to the right of construction firms to do as they please applies to housing. But it is not over-regulation which stymies house-building in Britain but land-banking aimed at keeping prices high. Urban development in major cities like London and Manchester is blighted by developers’ lack of accountability to communities, as working-class neighbourhoods are driven out by construction of luxury flats designed to accumulate value, not house locals.
Keir Starmer confirms that his government is cnutier than Suella Braverman on killing the right to protest.
The question of the day is democracy versus capitalism. Defending our communities and rights as citizens means building resistance through any means we can: trades councils, People’s Assembly branches, even Morning Star supporters’ groups can be hubs to bring activists together. The future is looking ugly if we cannot unite to do that.
PENSIONER anger erupted at Labour as government figures conceded that 100,000 older people risk being pushed into poverty by the cut in winter fuel payments.
The National Pensioners Convention (NPC) renewed demands that ministers do a U-turn on the controversial cut, announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves shortly after assuming office.
NPC general secretary Jan Shortt said she was “gravely concerned” by figures included in an analysis revealed by the Department for Work and Pensions this week.
These showed that the removal of the benefit will plunge around 50,000 pensioners into relative poverty next year, and the same number again by the end of the decade.
Ms Shortt said: “We find it completely unacceptable that an extra 50,000 to 100,000 older people will fall into poverty as a result of the decision to means-test the winter fuel payment.
“The message to older people is that the government is happy to accept them as collateral damage. The government must know these older people are not the ‘broadest shoulders’ they keep saying must pay to fix the economic deficit.
King Charles III reads the King’s Speech, as Queen Camilla sits beside him during the State Opening of Parliament in the House of Lords, London, July 17, 2024
THE SNP has vowed to “sabotage” Labour’s “watered-down” House of Lords reforms with a deluge of amendments.
Labour’s House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill, aiming to exclude the last remaining 92 hereditary peers from the legislature, faces its third reading in the House of Commons today.
But SNP MP Pete Wishart has tabled amendments ranging from abolishing the institution altogether to making peers’ £342 daily allowance liable for income tax.
Pointing to the “egregious example” of £18,808 paid to private healthcare tycoon Lord Hameed of Hampstead last year, despite him playing no role and failing to vote even once, Mr Wishart argues that taxing the £20 million paid out in allowances last year could generate over £9m — enough to restore Winter Fuel Payments to more than 22,000 pensioners in Scotland.
Urging Scottish Labour MPs to “at least” back him on taxing allowances, Mr Wishart commented: “That’s the only viable option for anyone who believes in democracy.
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“The Labour Party has repeatedly broken its promise to abolish the House of Lords for more than a century and, frankly, this embarrassingly limited Bill is 114 years too little, too late.
“The undemocratic House of Lords is an archaic institution of the kind you’d find in a banana republic and it’s second only in size to the Congress of China costing taxpayers more than £200m a year.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
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So-called austerity is best understood as a massive transfer of wealth — from public to private, from the many to the few, as the fortunes of the super-rich ballooned while Britain endured the longest wage squeeze since the Napoleonic wars.
This is a grotesquely unequal country in which big banks and energy giants post the largest profits in their history, in which the richest 1 per cent own more than the poorer 70 per cent of the population put together, in which millions rely on foodbanks while the number of billionaires increased by a fifth during the Covid crisis alone.
When Reeves gives with one hand and takes away with the other — as PCS leader Fran Heathcote notes she does by offering a 1.7 per cent increase in departmental spending, while setting a 2 per cent savings target for those same departments — she cites pressure on the public finances that could be relieved easily through higher corporation tax, a financial transactions tax or a wealth tax. As Unite’s Sharon Graham notes, a 1 per cent tax on the richest 1 per cent would raise £25 billion, filling the so-called “black hole” in the budget at a stroke.
It is a choice to echo Tory hysteria over benefit fraud, when the amount lost to this is less than goes unclaimed in social security payments people are entitled to. Giving the Department for Work & Pensions power to remove money directly from bank accounts will likely increase non-take-up of benefits by people who need them but understandably fear their personal finances being exposed in this way.
And it’s a choice to hike the cost of a bus ticket by 50 per cent while maintaining a fuel duty freeze — when governments across Europe are making public transport cheaper because it is essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
