Now that many people have been wakened to the plight of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, through P.J. Harvey writing a song about him that has sent ripples through the music world, I hope that ongoing efforts to secure his release will attract more support in the months to come. After all, what excuse is there for people not to be outraged that he is one of 86 men cleared for release under President Bush and Obama who are still held, and that he is part of a prison-wide hunger strike to which the authorities are responding with force-feeding?

On July 18, as Parliament shut up shop for the summer, I joined campaigners from the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign and the London Guantánamo Campaign in Parliament Square, outside the Houses of Parliament, for a last vigil before the summer recess began. I have already posted a video of an interview I undertook on the day with a representative of the PCS union (the Public and Commercial Services union), but art the time I didn’t have the opportunity to make the photos I took available, and I was then derailed by a week away.

I’m posting them now to try to help keep Shaker’s story in the public eye, and also to thank the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign and the London Guantánamo Campaign for their tireless work to try and secure the closure of Guantánamo and the release of Shaker Aamer. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s now eleven days since the House of Lords voted against a motion proposed by the Labour peer, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, which was intended to strike down regulations relating to Section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act that had caused alarm to campaigners when they surfaced in February. Following a massive grassroots campaign, featuring a petition by the campaigning group 38 Degrees that secured over 350,000 signatures, the regulations were rewritten, but those of us who fear, understandably, that the government is committed to the privatisation of the NHS remain deeply suspicious, as they were only tinkered with, and not, it seemed, sufficiently to prevent the key section, relating to an obligation in the regulations designed to put almost all NHS services out to tender, from surviving intact.

I described the outcome of the vote in an article at the time, entitled, “This was the Week the NHS Died, and No One Cares,” but below, to provide further details, I’m cross-posting the debate that took place that night, when important speeches were made by Lord Hunt, Lord Owen, Lord Turnberg, and Lord Davies of Stamford — and some important points were also made by Baroness Masham of Ilton.

There is much in the debate that will not reassure those who campaigned so hard against Section 75, and who continue to campaign to save the NHS from the government’s destructive aims — and the deluded machinations of its own senior management — but it is useful for understanding how the provision of NHS services is seen by members of the House of Lords.

However, before I cross-post the transcript of the debate, it is worth asking: what now? There has, sadly, been very little media coverage of the issues since the debate, but one useful article was published in the Guardian on April 30, written by Bob Hudson, a professor in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second part of the transcript of a Parliamentary debate that took place last Wednesday, April 24, 2013, eleven years, two months and ten days after Shaker Aamer, a British resident, arrived at Guantánamo, six years after he was told that the Bush administration no longer wanted to hold him, nearly six years after his return to the UK was first requested by the British government (under Gordon Brown), and over three years since he was officially cleared for release by the inter-agency task force that President Obama established after he took office in January 2009.

That he is still held — as are 85 other men cleared for release by the task force — is so monstrously unjust that is is unsurprising that many of the men, including Shaker, are part of a prison-wide hunger strike, which has been ongoing for nearly three months, to draw attention to their plight.

The men have been failed by all three branches of the US government — by President Obama, who promised to close the prison within a year when he took office; by Congress, where cynical lawmakers have imposed almost insurmountable obstacles to their release; and by the courts, where a handful of judges (in the DC Circuit Court) have gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the men held in Guantánamo, and have been allowed to do so by the Supreme Court. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 24, 2013, eleven years, two months and ten days after Shaker Aamer, a British resident, arrived at Guantánamo, his case was finally the subject of a Parliamentary debate. The trigger for this was an e-petition to the British government, calling on ministers to “undertake urgent new initiatives to achieve the immediate transfer of Shaker Aamer to the UK from continuing indefinite detention in Guantánamo Bay,” which secured over 100,000 signatures, through the tireless work of numerous campaigners, making it eligible for a discussion in Parliament.

Jane Ellison, the Conservative MP for Battersea, Shaker’s constituency, requested the debate, which took place in Westminster Hall, and it will, hopefully, be followed sometime next month by a full debate in the House of Commons.

Below I’m cross-posting the transcript of the debate, in which, as I explained yesterday when I posted photos from a demonstration in Parliament Square that followed the debate, the MPs who spoke made “an unassailable case for Shaker’s immediate release.”

Primarily, these MPs were Jane Ellison, the Green MP Caroline Lucas, and the Labour MPs John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn and Yasmin Qureshi. Also present, and making short statements or asking questions were the Labour MPs Kerry McCarthy, Jim Cunningham, Stephen Timms, John Woodcock, Russell Brown, Gavin Shukur, Andy Slaughter and Anas Sarwar, the Conservative MP Mike Freer, Mark Durkan of the SDLP and the Independent MP Eric Joyce. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 24, 2013, campaigners calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, held a demonstration outside Parliament following a Parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall from 9.30 to 11 am. Shaker, who has a British wife and four British children, is one of 86 prisoners cleared for release by an inter-agency task force established by President Obama in 2009 but still held, and, in recent weeks, his story has finally become prominent in the mainstream British media, as he is part of the prison-wide hunger strike that began on February 6, and there are fears for his life (see my recent reports here and here).

The Parliamentary debate followed a successful e-petition, calling on the British government to “undertake urgent new initiatives to achieve the immediate transfer of Shaker Aamer to the UK from continuing indefinite detention in Guantánamo Bay,” which secured over 100,000 signatures, through the tireless work of numerous campaigners, making it eligible for a discussion in Parliament. Please note that an international petition for Shaker is still ongoing. Read the rest of this entry »

The case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, is one that has taken up much of my time since the other British residents were released in 2007 and 2009, and I feel I have got to know him through his accounts from the prison — some made available to me last year via Ramzi Kassem, one of his lawyers (see here, here and here), and, this year, since the prison-wide hunger strike began, through the accounts of phone calls with Shaker made by Clive Stafford Smith, another of his lawyers, and the director of Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity (see here and here). These feelings were reinforced last month when I met his wife and his four children at an event in Tooting Islamic Centre with Jane Ellison MP and Jean Lambert MEP.

I am delighted that the e-petition calling for the British government to take renewed action to secure Shaker’s return from Guantánamo secured 100,000 signatures last week, making it eligible for a Parliamentary debate — and I’d like to publicly thank the many, many people who worked tirelessly to secure that result. Shaker’s ongoing detention is an indictment of the indifference of the US government and the British government, because he was cleared for release under President Bush in 2007, and again in 2009 under President Obama, but is still held.

The Parliamentary debate is taking place tomorrow, Wednesday April 24, in Westminster Hall, in the Houses of Parliament, and members of the public are allowed to attend. Please do go along if you can. The debate is from 9.30 to 11am, but you will need to make sure that you have time to clear security, so an 8.30 arrival is advisable.

Afterwards, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign will be holding a demonstration in Parliament Square, from 11.30 to 2pm. Read the rest of this entry »

This photo set collects a few photos from events over the last week and a half that I haven’t included in any other sets — three relating to the ongoing campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and to bring him back to the UK to be reunited with his wife and children, and four of a “die-in” for the NHS, involving a roadblock outside the Houses of Parliament, during a protest that took place prior to a Parliamentary lobby on Tuesday.

I have been writing about Shaker Aamer’s case — and campaigning for his release —  for many years, not just because Guantánamo has been a legal, moral and ethical abomination since its creation over 11 years ago, and remains so to this day, but also because his release is so long overdue. He was first told that he would be released under President Bush, in 2007, and again under President Obama in 2009, but, disgracefully, he is still held. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, in the Houses of Parliament, a passionate and packed-out meeting took place in one of the House of Commons committee rooms, attended by well over a hundred campaigners for the NHS, at which MPs, doctors and activists spoke, and there were also intelligent contributions from the audience, as, collectively, we tried to work out how, in the short term, to resist the government’s latest plans to privatise the NHS, and, in the longer term, how to save the NHS and build a successful movement to oppose the whole of the wretched age of austerity imposed on us by the Tory-led coalition government for malignant ideological purposes; in short, in an effort to destroy the state provision of almost all services — with one exception, of course, being their salaries and expenses.

The spur for the meeting, and the rally outside that preceded it, is the government’s plan to push through privatisation of the NHS — despite explicit promises not to do so — through secondary legislation relating to Section 75 of the wretched Health and Social Care Act that was passed last year, in which almost all NHS services will have to be put out to tender by the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), the groups of GPs who will be responsible for 80 percent of the NHS budget from April 1.

Although 350,000 people recently signed a 38 Degrees petition opposing the plans (which I wrote about here), and Lib Dem minister Norman Lamb promised that the key regulations on competition in the NHS would be rewritten, the rewritten regulations have barely changed, and they still oblige the NHS to put almost all NHS services out to tender, allowing private companies to begin to devour the whole of the NHS or face legal challenges that they will probably lose, because enforced competition will have been made into a key component of the provision of NHS services. Read the rest of this entry »