UK politics

My analysis of the far-right riots that erupted in the UK last week, after three girls were stabbed to death at a children’s event in Stockport, and online provocateurs spread deliberate misinformation about the attacker being a Muslim, and an asylum seeker who had recently arrived in the UK after a small boat crossing, all of which was untrue. I examine the particular role played by politicians and the mainstream media in fanning the flames of racism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, with a particular focus on Brexit, and on the shameful Tory politicians, particularly in the last five years, who waged a far-right war on immigration, proposing to send refugees on a one-way trip to Rwanda, and passing legislation that, shamefully, criminalised being a refugee or an asylum seeker. I also criticise the Labour Party for its role in fomenting Islamophobia, particularly through its unquestioning support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, and I also focus on the irresponsibility and unaccountability of social media companies, who provide platforms for dangerous provocateurs like Andrew Tate and ‘Tommy Robinson’ (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), and whose free rein to promote and amplify the far-right and their lies should have no place in any kind of responsible media landscape.

Linking to and discussing an interview with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, which I’ve published as a podcast on my YouTube channel. In the 50-minute interview, recorded on July 13, and featured on Andy’s weekly show, we spoke about the UK General Election, and my relief at being rid of the cruel, corrupt and incompetent post-Brexit Tories. However, I also expressed my doubts about the incoming Labour government led by Keir Starmer, with worries about his authoritarianism, his approach to protest (and here I discussed the recent draconian sentencing of five climate activists for a Zoom call), and his support for war in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We also spoke about the new political landscape in the UK — or England in particular — where there are now five main parties, but they are not adequately represented in Parliament because of the antiquated and unjust ‘First Past the Post’ voting system, and how we desperately need a proportional representation system to properly reflect voters’ choices. We also spoke about the release of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, after five years fighting extradition in Belmarsh, and how his release was a ray of light in an otherwise darkening world, and we also spoke about the ongoing injustices of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where 30 men are still held, 16 of whom have long been approved for release.

My response to the draconian and vindictive sentences — the longest ever handed down in the UK for non-violent protest — delivered by a British judge, Christopher Hehir, to five climate activists yesterday. Their crime? Taking part in a Zoom call to plan disruption to the M25 to highlight the climate crisis and to get the British government to commit to a ban on new oil and gas extraction in the UK. The sentences — of four and five years — are, as Michel Forst, the UN rapporteur for environmental defenders, explained, “purely punitive and repressive.” The reason Judge Hehir was empowered to deliver such punitive sentences was because of two horrendous Acts of Parliament, passed by the recently departed Conservative government, via two malignant home secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, which specifically targeted the right to protest, and essentially criminalised non-violent, mildly disruptive protest. This legislation needs to be overturned by the new Labour government, but as I explain in my article, I fear that “Keir Starmer — and Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary — fundamentally share the contempt Patel and Braverman had for any kind of protest that causes any kind of inconvenience whatsoever.” The right to engage in non-violent, mildly disruptive protest is at the heart of what separates supposed liberal democracies from autocratic regimes, and it is crucial that it is upheld in the UK, because, otherwise, those engaged in its suppression, to preserve a cosy capitalist status quo, are failing to accept that it is precisely this status quo that is killing us all, because, as I also explain, “man-made climate collapse is the greatest threat humanity has ever known, as is demonstrably true, and as is becoming ever more apparent with every passing day.”

My recent interview with Chris Cook, on his Gorilla Radio show in western Canada, about the UK’s recent General Election, and also about Israel’s horrendous prisons for Palestinians, following the release of a particular prisoner, Moazzaz Obayat (also identified as Muazzam Obayat), horribly broken by torture, who compared the prisons to Guantánamo. As I explained to Chris, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that they’re even worse.

Photos from, and my report about the ten vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and around the world on July 3, 2024, the latest in an ongoing series of monthly coordinated global vigils that began last year. The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and the next date is August 7.

My analysis of yesterday’s General Election in the UK, which, after 14 years, swept aside the Tories, and ushered in a Labour government under Keir Starmer, with a huge but disproportionate majority that didn’t reflect the number of votes received (less than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019), but rather the collapse of the Tories, finally undone after years of cruelty, incompetence and corruption, and facilitated by the sudden rise of Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK Party, which helpfully split the right-wing vote. Wonderful though it is to see the back of the Tories, and also to see noticeable successes for the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, and a number of independents including Jeremy Corbyn, power is now in the hands of Starmer and his cabinet, including his Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who secured victory despite having almost no policies that distinguish them from the Tories. I discuss my many concerns, criticising Labour’s adherence to neoliberalism, and urging it to be bold on re-nationalisation (especially of water), and expressing my shock that Starmer has so openly declared his opposition to any kind of rapprochement with the EU, even though Brexit has done more to damage the UK than anything else over the last eight years, wrecking trade, and leading to a disgraceful rise in racism, which, in the hands of the Tories’ parade of leaders in the years since, led to a morally repugnant fixation on making it illegal to be a refugee, and seeking to send asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda. I hope this anti-immigrant hostility will be abandoned, and I also hope that other draconian Tory innovations — in particular, an attempt to ban all meaningful protest, through the criminalisation of climate activism — will be ditched, although on this particular point I fear that Starmer, as the former Director of Public Prosecutions, has troubling authoritarian impulses that may not augur well for civil liberties. I also urge boldness — true boldness — on climate collapse, and end by expressing my fears for foreign policy under Starmer, most noticeably because of his uncritical support for Israel and its ongoing and unforgivable genocide in Gaza.

My report about ‘Restore Nature Now’, a massive march and rally in London on June 22 calling for the urgent protection of bio-diversity, which was initiated by the beloved environmentalist Chris Packham, but which, because it was family-friendly and non-confrontational, was almost completely ignored by the mainstream media, unlike the global coverage days before, when two Just Stop Oil activists sprayed harmless cornstarch-based orange paint on Stonehenge, and were compared to ISIS. Although catastrophic climate collapse is already happening — and much earlier than the warnings made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018, when we were warned that we had until 2030 to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 to keep alive the prospect of a liveable planet — climate protest is in a parlous state, either sidelined or ignored when it is peaceful, like ‘Restore Nature Now’, or subject to hysteria and hyperbolic outrage when it involves even the mildest disruptive forms of direct action, along with the almost certain prospect of arrest, and possibly prison sentences, because of draconian laws passed in recent years aimed solely at climate protestors. Reviewing the last three decades of climate protest, I conclude that direct action remains the best way to try to effect change, but I struggle to understand how it can be undertaken when it faces increasingly draconian responses from government, and continued indifference or psychopathic hostility from the media and from the bitter and twisted ‘armchair warriors’ of social media. We truly seem to be living in the most demented end times imaginable, just a few years away from major collapse, and yet still encouraged to consume like never before, not to question the insanity of our leaders’ inaction, nor to question their psychically broken response — not dealing with the threat, but instead transferring all our energies into hideous proxy wars, in Ukraine and in Gaza, while our leaders prop up a neoliberal model that is so broken that ordinary people, confused and angry, are everywhere retreating into the false comforting arms of fascists with their dangerous explanations that the blame lies entirely with “the other”: immigrants, Muslims, and, increasingly I fear, everyone on the left. This is not a comforting time to be alive, and those of us with functioning brains, and with empathy, need to start working together like never before to create genuine solidarity as our civilisations collapse and the far-right become ever more empowered.

To mark the summer solstice at Stonehenge, I recollect my experiences at the last Stonehenge Free Festival, before its violent suppression at the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, when I visited the stones after staying up all night. My experiences of the festival and the stones left a deep impression on me, which, in the ’90s, encouraged me to undertake several long-distance walks through southern England’s ancient landscape, for a book that, eventually, materialised instead as ’Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion’, my unique social history of Stonehenge, published 20 years ago, and still in print. I also reflect on the militarised exclusion zone that existed on the summer solstice at Stonehenge until 2000, when a court ruling led to the reopening of the stones for what is unromantically called ‘Managed Open Access’, when crowds are allowed in for 12 hours, and I also reflect on the latest example of conflict at Stonehenge: a truly absurd comparison between Just Stop Oil and ISIS, after JSO activists sprayed harmless cornstarch-based paint on the stones two days ago.

My thoughts on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Labour Party and the forthcoming General Election in the UK, in response to some commentators stating that Labour should be boycotted in its entirety, because of the unconditional support for Israel demonstrated by Keir Starmer and other members of the shadow cabinet. In response, I’ve compiled a list of around 60 Labour MPs who are worth voting for, based largely on the rebels who defied the whip and voted for an SNP amendment in November calling for an immediate ceasefire, and who include all of the remaining left wingers in Starmer’s centre-right pro-Israel Party. I’ve also compiled a second list of around 60 MPs who don’t deserve your vote. These include Starmer himself and, mostly, members of the shadow cabinet, shadow junior ministers, whips and other members of the Party machinery who are all members of Labour Friends of Israel, and who have not shown any signs of dissent from the Party’s overall support for Israel, despite the International Court of Justice, in January, issuing “provisional measures” against the State of Israel on the basis that it was engaged in a “plausible genocide”, and, more recently, Karim Khan KC, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announcing his intention to seek arrest warrants — for war crimes and crimes against humanity — for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders.

Marking seven years since the Grenfell Tower fire in west London, in which 72 residents of a tower block of social housing died because of cost-cutting and profiteering, facilitated by central government and the local council, and in which almost the entire building industry — and especially the manufacturers of insanely flammable cladding materials — were complicit, I invite you to reflect on my conclusions seven years down the line, as, still, no one with responsibility for the safety of tenants has been held accountable for their deaths, that it represents a prime example of what I call cannibalistic capitalism, or economic terrorism, whereby our lives are, at best, secondary, and, at worst, irrelevant, to the all-consuming greed for profits of the corporations and the politicians who ought to be responsible for our safety. Examining the housing crisis in its entirety, I note how this cannibalistic capitalism is so rapacious that it also includes those who have bought into the notion of a property-owning democracy, as the cladding scandal also involves numerous private new-build projects, and I point out how it also extends to the privatised water industry, and to the greatest crisis facing all of us: the runaway climate collapse that is already happening, but which those wedded to cannibalistic capitalism (the politicians, the corporations and, for the most part, a servile media) are doing all they can to ignore or to sideline. I conclude by asking how, with a General Election just weeks away, in a broken system that can only enshrine a corrupted party in power, anyone with any sense cannot conclude that what is actually needed is a revolution.