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OK, I admit it: I’m thoroughly fed up with the Left in Britain, which largely supported the campaign to leave the EU, and is now facilitating Theresa May’s efforts to destroy our economy by following through on the outcome of the ludicrous referendum last June that saw the Leave campaign win by a small majority.

The referendum was not legally binding; its outcome was advisory, meaning that it should have been taken as the starting point for further discussion, not as an end in itself. In addition, a decision about something as seismically important as leaving the EU shouldn’t have been allowed to be dependent on a simple majority vote. Generally, a referendum on a topic this important would have required a majority to consist of over 50% of all those eligible to vote, or over two-thirds of those who voted, whereas in June’s referendum 27.9% of those eligible to vote (13m people) didn’t bother to vote, and the decision to leave was taken by 37.4% of eligible voters (17.4m people), with 34.7% (16.1m people) voting to stay in the EU.

What has particularly annoyed me today — and the reason I made the poster at the top of this article — is that the Stop the War Coalition today held a protest against Donald Trump’s recently imposed immigration ban and his proposed state visit to the UK — a worthwhile cause, certainly, but one that, noticeably, didn’t involve protesting against Theresa May, even though there is no reason to suppose that she is any less racist and Islamophobic than Donald Trump. Read the rest of this entry »

For anyone in south east London who wants to know more about Guantánamo, about what is happening there now, and about the fate of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, please feel free to come along to “Supermaxed,” an event at Goldsmith’s College in New Cross this Wednesday, December 12, 2012, which has been put together by Goldsmiths Stop the War society. The event runs from 5-8 pm, and is in the RHB Small Cinema — Room 185 in the main building (recently renamed the Richard Hoggart Building).

The event involves a screening of “The Road to Guantánamo,” the 2006 film by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, which was one of the inspirations for me to begin my investigations into Guantánamo that led me to where I am today, and also features a Q&A session with myself and Hilary Stauffer, the deputy director of Reprieve, the legal action charity headed by Clive Stafford Smith. I’m delighted to be speaking at this event, to help to spread the word about the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo and the need for those in the UK to press the British government to secure the immediate release of Shaker Aamer, and I’m particularly pleased because, to be honest, Stop the War as a whole has rarely engaged as fully with the horrors of Guantánamo, torture and indefinite detention as it should have, even though Guantánamo, the CIA’s “black sites,” Bagram, Abu Ghraib and all the other illegitimate — but supposedly legitimate — prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq were created as a direct result of the wars whose existence Stop the War was created to oppose. Read the rest of this entry »