Welcome to Andy Worthington

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.

My response to the extraordinary and unexpected news that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange has been freed from HMP Belmarsh, where he has been imprisoned for the last five years, fighting his proposed extradition to the US on entirely inappropriate espionage charges relating to the publication, with some of the world’s most prominent newspapers, of classified US files leaked by Chelsea Manning, and is en route to the Northern Mariana Islands, where he will sign a plea deal with the US authorities prior to his release in Australia as a free man. While no one with any compassion could begrudge Assange his freedom, it is, nevertheless, a devious victory on the part of the US government, which has obliged him, via the plea deal, to falsely admit that he “knowingly and unlawfully conspired with Chelsea Manning” to commit espionage against the United States by obtaining and disseminating classified national defence information. Although the deal appears to protect the precious US First Amendment, regarding the freedom of the press, shielding Assange’s mainstream media partners from being held criminally accountable for co-publishing the leaked files with WikiLeaks, which may have been the outcome had a trial gone ahead, it remains to be seen whether Assange’s plea will nevertheless have a chilling effect on journalists working with whistleblowers, who, in future, may fear working with sources exposing classified government information through a valid suspicion that they too may be held to have crossed some invisible line into espionage.

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 interview with Scottie Nell Hughes on Sovren Media about the need for the prison at Guantánamo Bay to be closed, in which I was provided with the opportunity to explain the many reasons why the prison’s closure is long overdue.

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.

My latest quarterly fundraiser, in which I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo, over the next three months, as a reader-funded independent journalist and activist, and also my ongoing detailed writing about, and analyses of Israel’s horrific genocide in Gaza.

My latest long read marking eight months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, focusing on a warning, by two UN agencies, that “over one million people — half the population of Gaza — are expected to face death and starvation by mid-July.” I also discuss how Israel’s initial rationale for monstrous colonial aggression and murder — the Holocaust, through the lens of which Israel has relentlessly portrayed itself as the only victim in world history, who, as a result, can do no wrong — has been joined, since the attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7, by an updated version of the victim scenario, in which murdering at least 40,000 Palestinian civilians (the true number may be much higher) is not even acknowledged by either Israel or its supporters in the west, for whom the lives of Palestinian civilians seem to have absolutely no value at all. I also examine the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to a ceasefire, caused primarily by Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsession with endlessly continuing the genocide, and placating his fanatical far-right ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, at least in part simply to keep himself in power, and conclude with an appeal for hostilities to end, not only to prevent imminent starvation on an unthinkable scale, but to prevent the “extermination” — to use ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s words — of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, which would be, as I describe it, “the most monstrous crime — the elimination of an entire people — that any of us have ever seen.”

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 June 5, 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 July 3.

My annual article marking the anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, 39 years ago today, when 1,400 police violently attacked and “decommissioned” a convoy of travellers heading to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival. Lamenting the demise of the festival as the last great, weeks-long unlicensed autonomous gathering in the UK, and the violence of Beanfield as a significant marker in the ongoing assault on civil liberties in the UK, I also include my memories of the festival, an account of the various forms of dissent that have continued ever since, and the various ways in which successive governments have sought to suppress that dissent, and I end by noting how, despite all these efforts, dissent cannot be eliminated, especially as so many horrors currently exist that must be fought against with all our might, most noticeably, right now, Israel’s western-backed genocide in Gaza, and, of course, the unparalleled threat posed by accelerating climate collapse.