UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, addressing the UN Conference on The Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, said it was “660 days since the Israeli hostages were first cruelly taken by Hamas terrorists. There is no possible justification for this suffering.” Lammy had spent most of that time deliberately misinterpreting the Genocide Convention and insisting that no genocide was being committed.

“Our support for Israel, its right to exist and the security of its people is steadfast,” he said. Considering Israel’s massacres and other crimes against humanity since the first day of its statehood in 1948 this frequently repeated statement has never convinced anyone.

“However, the Balfour declaration came with the solemn promise ‘that nothing shall be done, nothing which may prejudice the civil and religious rights’ of the Palestinian people’…. This has not been upheld and it is a historical injustice which continues to unfold.” True, but he misquotes Balfour even here. That part of the declaration actually reads: “… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….”

The Balfour declaration also came with dire warnings. Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the Cabinet at the time, called Zionism “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”. Lord Sydenham remarked: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

Well, we know now. And it will stain Britain’s reputation forever.

Lammy continued: “Hamas must never be rewarded for its monstrous attack on October 7.” Of course, he said nothing about Israel having been continuously rewarded for its monstrous attacks on Palestinians over the last 77 years and will likely be rewarded again for its genocide.

“It [Hamas] must immediately release the hostages, agree to an immediate ceasefire, accept it will have no role in governing Gaza and commit to disarmament.” Coincidentally Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have also called on Hamas to disband. Along with a number of other countries they’ve just signed a statement saying, “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objective of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State.” Quite how this squares with international law isn’t clear, and no-one explains. It is for the Palestinian people to decide who governs their sovereign state.

Lammy: “His Majesty’s Government therefore intends to recognise the State of Palestine when the UN General Assembly gathers in September…. unless the Israeli government acts to end the appalling situation in Gaza, ends its military campaign and commits to a long-term sustainable peace based on a two-state solution. Our demands on Hamas also remain absolute and unwavering.” So what happens if Israel actually complies, or appears to comply? Does HMG then see no reason to recognise statehood? That would suit Israel very well. Note that there’s no requirement in all this for Israel to immediately end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, which is central to the whole problem. So the Starmer-Lammy proposal purposely misses the point.

Lammy maintains “there is no better vision for the future of the region than two states. Israelis living within secure borders, recognised and at peace with their neighbours, free from the threat of terrorism. And Palestinians living in their own state, in dignity and security, free of occupation.” Just a minute: how about Palestinians, whose land this is, “living within secure borders, free from the threat of Israeli terrorism and occupation”, the terrorists being (as if he didn’t know) the Israelis and their backers the US? Furthermore, UK leaders have banged the drum about a two-state solution for decades without ever describing what it would look like – especially now that Israel has been allowed to establish irreversible ‘facts on the ground’ that make a proper, workable Palestinian state almost impossible.

“The decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be managed or contained,” he says. True, and that’s been obvious for decades.

“It must now be resolved.” True, and that too has been obvious for decades.

That same day, 29 July, Prime Minister Starmer was delivering “words on Gaza” from Downing Street.

“On the 7th of October 2023 Hamas perpetrated the worst massacre in Israel’s history. Every day since then, the horror has continued.” He makes it sound like the 660 days of horror have been Hamas’s doing.

“Ceasefire must be sustainable and it must lead to a wider peace plan, which we are developing with our international partners. This plan will deliver security and proper governance in Gaza and pave the way for negotiations on a Two State Solution”. Yes, but under international law Palestinians should not have to ‘negotiate’ their freedom and independence, it’s theirs by right regardless of what other nations think or say.

“Our goal remains a safe and secure Israel, alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.” Oh dear, the same old lopsided spiel. Parity isn’t on the West’s agenda.

“Now, in Gaza because of a catastrophic failure of aid, we see starving babies, children too weak to stand: Images that will stay with us for a lifetime.” The horror is not due to “a catastrophic failure of aid” but failure over the years to end Israel’s illegal occupation and, in particular, its cruel 18-year siege and blockade of Gaza and the sickening practice of ‘mowing the grass’. The UK especially has been complicit in enabling Israel to maintain its stranglehold.

Starmer: “I’ve always said we will recognise a Palestinian state as a contribution to a proper peace process, at the moment of maximum impact for the Two State Solution.” UK governments have been saying that for years. Britain was supposed to grant Palestinians provisional statehood under its Mandate responsibilities back in 1923 and failed to do so. We’ve been ducking the issue ever since while eagerly recognising Israeli statehood with their terrorist militia and Ben-Gurion’s plan to take over the entire Holy Land by force.

“This is the moment to act,” Starmer continued. “So today – as part of this process towards peace I can confirm the UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a Two State Solution. And this includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid, and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank.” This is unbelievable vague and gives Israel endless wriggle-room. Much of the West Bank, of course, is already annexed. To give peace any kind of chance conditions must include Israel withdrawing its squatters, quitting all annexed lands and ending its illegal military occupation forthwith.

Starmer ends with the familiar mantra: “Our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal. They must immediately release all the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza.” No mention of the Israeli terrorists disarming and no ban on Likud (Netanyahu’s demented party) from any future government of Israel.

Starmer and Lammy never use the terms ‘international law’ or ‘justice’. Don’t they understand that there can be no peace without justice? Perhaps they do but won’t admit it because their friends and allies Israel and the US, for selfish strategic reasons, don’t want peace and never have.

Starmer and Lammy compromised and untrustworthy

Starmer told The Times of Israel, “I support Zionism without qualification”. Lammy has made similar declarations. The Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life state very clearly (seer ‘Integrity’): “Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.” How do they get away with it?

So it’s hardly surprising that Lammy and Starmer show no concern for the 7,200 Palestinian hostages, including 88 women and 250 children, held in Israeli jails on 7 October under appalling conditions. Over 1,200 were under ‘administrative detention’ without charge or trial and denied ‘due process’. Or the fact that in the 23 years up to October 7 Israel had been slaughtering Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1. Actual figures: Palestinians killed by Israelis 10,651 including 2,270 children and 6,656 women. Israelis killed by Palestinians 1,330 including 145 children and 261 women (source: Israel’s B’Tselem). Were they and their friends in Israel expecting Palestinians to take all that lying down?

Our dynamic duo were not so appalled by the sight of “starving babies and children too weak to stand” that they provided protection for the British-flagged aid vessel Madleen and the Handala bringing much-needed supplies to Gaza. They allowed these vessels to be hijacked in international waters, their cargo stolen and crews abducted by Israel’s thugs, just as the Mavi Marmara, the Al-Awda and other mercy ships had been similarly assaulted. Israeli piracy is the new normal in the eastern Mediterranean and Western nations don’t give a damn. The British government are more than happy, though, to instruct the RAF to fly surveillance missions over Gaza in support of Israel’s genocide programme and to continue sharing intelligence with the apartheid regime.

And if their concerns about the suffering and devastation were ever genuine, why didn’t they proposed forming a UN multi-nation intervention force to take over the Gaza crossings to ensure aid gets through as it should? They have now been shamed and their ‘no genocide’ stance utterly discredited by two of Israel’s own human rights organisations – B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – who declare that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza and its Western allies have a legal and moral duty to put a stop to it. B’Tselem’s summing-up of the situation is worth sharing:

Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives.

This is compounded by mass arrests and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, which have effectively become torture camps, and tearing apart the social fabric of Gaza, including the destruction of Palestinian educational and cultural institutions. The campaign is also an assault on Palestinian identity itself, through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps and attempts to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The term genocide refers to a socio-historical and political phenomenon involving acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Both morally and legally, genocide cannot be justified under any circumstance, including as an act of self-defense.

Genocide always occurs within a context: there are conditions that enable it, triggering events, and a guiding ideology. The current onslaught on the Palestinian people, including in the Gaza Strip, must be understood in the context of more than seventy years in which Israel has imposed a violent and discriminatory regime on the Palestinians, taking its most extreme form against those living in the Gaza Strip. Since the State of Israel was established, the apartheid and occupation regime has institutionalized and systematically employed mechanisms of violent control, demographic engineering, discrimination, and fragmentation of the Palestinian collective. These foundations laid by the regime are what made it possible to launch a genocidal attack on the Palestinians immediately after the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.

The assault on Palestinians in Gaza cannot be separated from the escalating violence being inflicted, at varying levels and in different forms, on Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank and within Israel. The violence and destruction in these areas is intensifying over time, with no effective domestic or international mechanism acting to halt them. We warn of the clear and present danger that the genocide will not remain confined to the Gaza Strip, and that the actions and underlying mindset driving it may be extended to other areas as well.

The recognition that the Israeli regime is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the deep concern that it may expand to other areas where Palestinians live under Israeli rule, demand urgent and unequivocal action from both Israeli society and the international community, and use of every means available under international law to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Those opposed to this dangerous development are invited to join the monthly vigil at the main gate of RAF Lakenheath, scheduled for this Saturday, from 12 noon to 2pm. More details here.

CND Chair Tom Unterrainer said:

“CND has been calling on the government to come clean about the return of US nuclear weapons to Britain since 2022 - with more evidence proving that RAF Lakenheath is being primed for such a mission gradually uncovered ever since.
It is completely inappropriate for the public to be finding out about such a major escalation in nuclear dangers via reports in British newspapers and the assessments of security experts. Starmer must make a public statement about this major change in Britain's security arrangements and allow for a transparent and democratic debate on this to be held in Parliament. Enough of the gaslighting and hiding behind national security - the public deserve the truth!”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Yesterday, after releasing a joint statement with France and Canada threatening “concrete actions” if Israel did not allow aid into Gaza, the UK government suspended talks on its upgraded free trade deal, summoned the Israeli ambassador, and imposed new sanctions on settlers in the occupied West Bank. While this might appear substantial for the goal of isolating the zionist state, it amounts to little more than face-saving measures.

In his speech announcing these measures, Lammy couldn’t even bear to say these words without condemning the October 7th operation and maintaining Israel’s right to commit genocide. We can’t fall for these empty measures, even if they appear to be a positive push toward some justice. In reality, they are a distraction and feign action from a government supporting Israel accelerates its genocidal attacks. Each day, as Israel commits new massacres with American weapons, it is using the RAF Akrotiri, a British military base on Cyprus to conduct surveillance flights and facilitate weapons transfers.

The government’s suspension of negotiations on its free trade agreement is misleading. This is not the existing free trade agreement in place between Britain and Israel, but a future plan to deepen relations. Known as the 2030 Roadmap, this was initiated under the previous Conservative government in 2022, and the Labour government continued them immediately after entering government in July 2024. Stopping these negotiations is a good first step, but they must end their current free trade agreement if Lammy’s words are worth their salt.

The sanctions on a handful of people and companies in the occupied West Bank might be a generally positive step. But at a closer look, these measures are only on three people, two outposts, and two organisations. All of the 700,000 settlers occupying the West Bank in their 150 settlements and 129 outposts are illegal under international law. These very narrow sanctions then give wider justification for the illegal occupation of the West Bank, scapegoating a handful of “extreme” characters but not contending with the occupation itself. Last year, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is illegal. Once again, Britain is ignoring international law, just as it does in refusing to hand over surveillance data on Gaza to the International Criminal Court.

Britain’s recent moves should rightly be compared with the United States, which has formed the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’, a private company of US military veteran mercenaries to run an aid distribution operation, better described as a trojan horse to occupy Gaza. As Israel accelerates its genocide in Gaza, the US and Britain are attempting to conceal their role in the violence. We might see these as necessary measures for Israel to be committing what many are referring to as the final stage in the genocide.

Over the past few days, the Starmer government’s statements have given us the illusion of a change in course towards Israel. In five of the past six days, Britain has flown a surveillance flight over Gaza for Israel.

Britain has made no material change in its policy of arming Israel, providing surveillance information, and using its military base on Cyprus for weapons shipments. Therefore, not only are these statements hollow and vacuous, but they are a pernicious and sly attempt to divert attention from Britain’s role as it directly participates in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

On Sunday (May 18), Britain sent an A400M Atlas plane to Israel from RAF Akrotiri, its military base on Cyprus. This aircraft can carry up to 37 tonnes of cargo, including weapons and soldiers. Two hours later, it sent a surveillance flight over Gaza. These operations have been purposefully concealed from public knowledge, but this is clearly shifting. The only reason we know about these flights is because of the work of Matt Kennard, Declassified UK, and Genocide-Free Cyprus, amongst other groups. There clearly is mounting pressure as a result of the revelations of Britain’s direct role in Israel’s genocide, and perhaps we must recognise has a role in Lammy’s face-saving attempts.

Last week, the UK government defended its continued provision of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel, pointing to the need for “national security.” In court, they claimed “no genocide has occurred or is occurring,” that Israel is not “deliberately targeting civilian women or children.” Britain is defending Israel legally, diplomatically, and militarily. No statement can change that fact.

Israel stopped all aid trucks from entering Gaza on March 2. It has taken more than 11 weeks for the government to take any action at all. Every day, the Israeli occupation commits heinous massacres. They are even bragging that “the world won’t stop us.” And so far, they’re right.

In the face of this, we cannot despair. Palestinians in Gaza remain steadfast each day, for the 18 months of this escalation in the genocide that has been ongoing for more than 77 years. Smotrich, ‘Israeli Finance Minister’, says the “world won’t stop us”. Our leaders bought by zionism will certainly not, but the people will. We must continue our demands for a full arms embargo, an end to British surveillance flights, and the total liberation of Palestine.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nuvpreet Kalra.

Abdelfattah has spent nearly a decade in prison and now faces an additional two years of detention—despite Egyptian legal provisions that should have guaranteed his release last September. On May 20, the journalist’s 69-year-old mother, Laila Soueif, resumed a near-total hunger strike in protest.

On March 4, CPJ led a joint letter signed by 50 prominent human rights leaders, Nobel laureates, writers, and public figures, urging President el-Sisi to issue a presidential pardon for Abdelfattah.

Read the full letter in English here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The letter highlights the urgency of Abdelfattah’s case as he began a hunger strike in prison on March 1, 2025. His 69-year-old mother, Laila Soueif—a respected Egyptian professor—conducted a hunger strike for more than 150 days, which led to severe health deterioration and hospitalization. 

On March 4, CPJ led another joint letter, signed by 50 prominent human rights leaders, Nobel Prize laureates, writers, and public figures, calling on Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to grant a presidential pardon to Abd El Fattah.

Read the full letter in here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

After his meeting in the White House with a truculent Trump and JD Vance, Zelenskyy headed to London for a summit of 19 leaders, including Justin Trudeau, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Nato chief Mark Rutte. This time there were no verbal fisticuffs, and with hugs all round, Zelenskyy basked in the company of friends.

Donald Trump criticised European leaders including Sir Keir Starmer on Monday, deriding their weekend talks over Ukraine and launching a furious new attack on Volodymyr Zelensky for saying a peace deal is still “very, very far away”.

In what could be a major setback in ending Russia’s war on Ukraine, the US president fired off a tirade just as the prime minister was on his feet in the Commons insisting America was vital, sincere and indispensable in the path to peace.

Sir Keir rejected calls from MPs for Britain to shun Mr Trump and America after last week’s extraordinary ambush on Mr Zelensky in the White House Oval Office.

However, in a hint the US could be prepared to withdraw military aid to Ukraine, the president said in a social media post: “This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelensky, and America will not put up with it for much longer! This guy doesn’t want there to be peace as long as he has America’s backing.”

And in a sideswipe at Sir Keir and other European leaders, he added: “In the meeting they had with Zelensky, [they] stated flatly that they cannot do the job without the US – probably not a great statement to have been made in terms of a show of strength against Russia. What are they thinking?”

    Trump says ‘no room left’ to avoid massive tax hikes on Canadian and Mexican importsTrump says ‘no room left’ to avoid massive tax hikes on Canadian and Mexican imports

Later on Monday night, Mr Trump warned Mr Zelensky “won’t be around very long” if he did not end the war soon.

At a press conference at the White House, Mr Trump told reporters: “The deal could be made very fast. It should not be that hard a deal to make. Now, maybe somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, and if somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, I think that person won’t be around very long.”

It was a deepening of the diplomatic crisis that began on Friday when Mr Zelensky was asked to leave the White House after being bullied in front of the world’s media by Mr Trump and vice-president JD Vance.

But he appears to be at odds with the French president Emmanuel Macron about the “coalition of the willing” that Britain and France are meant to lead.

When he came to the House of Commons to outline his proposals, the prime minister received praise for his diplomacy but also a number of awkward questions about his support for Mr Trump.

Starmer updated MPs following intensive diplomatic efforts around the Ukraine crisis

Starmer updated MPs following intensive diplomatic efforts around the Ukraine crisis (PA Wire)

The SNP and Tory shadow minister Alicia Kearns called for the invitation from the King for a second state visit – which Sir Keir brandished at the White House last week – to be rescinded.

The prime minister rejected those demands and warned MPs that any solution to Ukraine and European security would need to be achieved by working “more closely” with the US president.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said the UK needs to “reduce our dependency on the United States” as he fears “that President Trump is not a reliable ally with respect to Russia”.

He told the Commons: “We’ve entered a new era, one where the United States prefers to align itself with tyrants like Putin rather than its democratic partners. We need to reduce our dependency on the United States because I say with deep regret that I fear that President Trump is not a reliable ally with respect to Russia.”

Sir Keir said: “I welcome the understanding from our dialogue that our two nations will work together on security arrangements for a lasting peace in Ukraine. I also welcome the president’s continued commitment to that peace, which nobody in this House should doubt for a second is sincere.”

He added: “Our defence, our security, our intelligence are completely intertwined, no two countries are as close as our two countries and it’d be a huge mistake at a time like this to suggest that any weakening of that link is the way forward for security and defence in Europe.”

Emily Thornberry is critical of the decision to cut the overseas aid budget

Emily Thornberry is critical of the decision to cut the overseas aid budget (PA Archive)

He also avoided answering a question about Britain’s ambassador to the US, Lord Mandelson, making statements in support of Mr Trump that defence minister Luke Pollard said did not reflect government policy. The diplomat claimed that Mr Trump’s mineral deal initiative to end the war was “the only show in town”.

Sir Keir said: “The plan is clear, we’re working, particularly with the French, I’ve had extensive conversations with President Macron over the last week, intensively over the weekend, talking to Ukraine as well, those are going on at the moment.”

In a further clash, he accused Nigel Farage of “fawning over Putin” when the Reform UK leader asked him how many British troops would be stationed in Ukraine.

The prime minister also faced a backlash from senior Labour MPs over his decision to cut the overseas aid budget to fund an increase in defence spending.

The post Keir Starmer Tries to Ride Two Horses Simultaneously appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Sebastien, who leads the #FreeJimmyLai campaign, last saw his father in August 2020 — weeks after Beijing imposed a national security law that led to a massive crackdown on pro-democracy advocates and journalists. Among them Lai, founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily.

After nearly four years in Hong Kong’s maximum-security Stanley Prison and multiple delays to his trial, the aging British citizen was due to take the stand for the first time on November 20 on charges of sedition and conspiring to collude with foreign forces, which he denies.

Lai, who has diabetes, routinely spends over 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, with only 50 minutes for restricted exercise and limited access to daylight, according to his international lawyers.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has found that Lai is unlawfully and arbitrarily detained and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called for his release.

Responding to CPJ’s request for comment, a Hong Kong government spokesperson referred to a November 17 statement in which it said that Lai was “receiving appropriate treatment and care in prison” and that Hong Kong authorities “strongly deplore any form of interference.”

In an interview with CPJ, Sebastien spoke about Britain’s bilateral ties with China, as well as Hong Kong — a former British colony where his father arrived as a stowaway on a fishing boat at age 12, before finding jobs in a garment factory and eventually launched a clothing retail chain and his media empire.

What do you anticipate when your father takes the stand for the first time?

To be honest, I do not know. My father is a strong person, but the Hong Kong government has spent four years trying to break him. I don’t think they can break his spirit but with his treatment they are in the process of breaking his body. We will see the extent of that on the stand.

Your father turned 77 recently. How is he doing in solitary confinement?

The last time I saw my father was in August of 2020. I haven’t been able to return to my hometown since and therefore have been unable to visit him in prison. His health has declined significantly. He is now 77, and, having spent nearly four years in a maximum-security prison in solitary confinement, his treatment is inhumane. For his dedication to freedom, they have taken his away.

For his bravery in standing in defense of others, they have denied him human contact. For his strong faith in God, they have denied him Holy Communion.

We have seen governments across the political spectrum call for Jimmy Lai’s release —the U.S., the European Parliament, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Ireland, among others. What does that mean to you?

We are incredibly grateful for all the support from multiple states in calling for my father’s release. The charges against my father are sham charges. The Hong Kong government has weaponized their legal system to crack down on all who criticize them.

You met with the U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently, who said Jimmy Lai’s case remains a priority and the government will press for consular access. What would you like to see Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government do?

They have publicly stated that they want to normalize relationships with China and to increase trade. I don’t see how that can be achieved if there is a British citizen in Hong Kong in the process of being killed for standing up for the values that underpin a free nation and the rights and dignity of its citizens.

Any normalization of the relationship with China needs to be conditional on my father’s immediate release and his return to the United Kingdom.

Your father’s life story in many ways embodies Hong Kong’s ‘never-give-up’ attitude. Do you think Hong Kong journalists and pro-democracy activists will keep on fighting? What is your message to Beijing and the Hong Kong government?

I think most of the world shares his spirit. Hong Kong is unique because it’s a city of refugees. It’s a city where we were given many of the freedoms of the free world. And as a result, it flourished. We knew what we had and what we escaped from.

My message is to release my father immediately. A Hong Kong that has 1,900 political prisoners for democracy campaigning, is a Hong Kong that has no rule of law, no free press, one that disregards the welfare of its citizens. This is not a Hong Kong that will flourish.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Beh Lih Yi.

The BBC’s banner headline reporting the UK’s 4 July general election result was clear:

‘Chris Mason: “Starmer tsunami” and civility after brutality’

This alliterated nicely but gave the misleading impression that there had been a massive display of public support for Starmer. Mason’s own analysis pointed elsewhere:

‘The story of this election is one of an electorate showing a ruthless determination to eject the Conservatives.’

Indeed, the results show a mere 1.6 per cent Labour increase on Corbyn’s supposedly disastrous 2019 vote share following the most intense propaganda blitz in UK domestic political history. Moreover, the 1.6 per cent increase hides the fact that, because less people voted, Starmer actually received less votes than Corbyn did in both 2017 and 2019:

‘2017 (Jeremy Corbyn) — 12,877,918

‘2019 (Jeremy Corbyn) — 10,269,051

‘2024 (Keir Starmer) — 9,686,329’

So, while journalists are claiming a ‘sensational’ result for Labour, the reality is that the party’s total vote has fallen by 6 per cent since 2019.

The real ‘tsunami’ saw a 19.9 per cent decrease in the Tory vote and a 12.3 per cent increase in the Reform UK vote – the wave swept from right to far-right, not towards Starmer’s ‘extreme centrism’.

Peter Oborne commented:

‘Labour is set to poll about 34 percent, not even two percentage points more than Jeremy Corbyn scored in 2019 and significantly less than the 40 percent that Corbyn scored in 2017.

‘To put it another way, thanks to the second lowest turnout since 1885, scarcely 20 percent of eligible British voters support Keir Starmer’s Labour. Yet, he will end up with approximately two-thirds of all parliamentary seats.’

Remarkably for an incoming Prime Minister, Starmer’s personal vote tally declined dramatically:

‘Starmer has held the seat since 2015, but his vote share dropped by 17% after a surge in support for independent, pro-Gaza candidate Andrew Feinstein.’

Tom Mills of Aston University noted wryly:

‘If you’ve just joined us, Labour has achieved a landslide with less votes than it won in 2019.

‘Which you’ll recall was so bad that the then leader unfortunately had to be expelled from the parliamentary party.’

Real Issues ‘Virtually Non-Existent’

One of the great myths of our ‘managed democracy’ is that ‘mainstream’ journalism provides the public with the balanced information it needs to make an informed decision at election time. In reality, the ‘free press’ does a spectacular job of not talking about issues that would facilitate informed public participation.

Amazingly, one might think, in the first three weeks of campaigning for the 2001 general election, the communications research centre at Loughborough University found that there had been ‘little sign of real issues’ in media election coverage, where ‘few issues make the news’ (Peter Golding, ‘When what is unsaid is the news,’ The Guardian, May 28, 2001). Topics like the environment, foreign policy, poverty and defence were ‘all but invisible’ following the pattern of the 1997 and 1992 elections. (Peter Golding, email to David Edwards, 10 June 2001)

Or consider that, just two years into the seething bloodbath of the full-scale, unprovoked and illegal US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq, Iraq comprised just 8 per cent of media reporting during the 2005 election campaign, as compared to 44 per cent for ‘electoral process’. (See David Deacon et al, ‘Reporting the 2005 U.K. General Election,’ Communication Research Centre, Loughborough University, August 2005) Everyone knew Bush and Blair had fabricated a case for war, huge numbers of Iraqis were dying, and yet the war was still not deemed an issue by corporate media in deciding if Blair was fit to remain Prime Minister.

No-one should therefore be surprised by this comment from Des Freedman, Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, on the latest election:

‘In terms of content, the media are overwhelmingly preoccupied with the “horse race” aspect of the election – reporting on opinion polls, PR strategies and TV debates – rather than holding parties to account in relation to a broad set of policies. The Loughborough researchers found that coverage of the “electoral process” has taken up 35% of all coverage on TV and in newspapers since the start of the campaign. Adding in stories on corruption, scandals and sleaze (such as the recent betting scandal that has plagued the Tories) and you find that 42% of all coverage is related to “process” more than substantive policy debate.

‘The only policy issue that even gets into double figures is that of taxation, at 11% of total coverage.’

Yet again, media focus has been on ‘electoral process’ with ‘little sign of real issues’.

Thus, closely echoing the blanking of Iraq in 2005, Freedman notes that coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been ‘virtually non-existent’. According to Loughborough University, the categories ‘defence/military/security/terrorism’ account for just 3 per cent of total coverage, most of it focused on whether Labour and Tories are more pro-Nato.

And yet, a few days after Hamas launched its attack on 7 October 2023, Keir Starmer was questioned by Nick Ferrari of LBC on Israel’s response:

‘A siege is appropriate? Cutting off power, cutting off water?’

Starmer replied:

‘I think that Israel does have that right. It is an ongoing situation.’

In 2019, ‘mainstream’ media were far more concerned about Jeremy Corbyn having questioned the removal of an allegedly anti-semitic mural than they are now about Starmer’s stance on Israel’s authentic, ongoing genocide in Gaza. A 5 July report in The Lancet medical journal commented:

‘… it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip’.

The Guardian’s leading article in response to the election result noted merely:

‘In areas with a high proportion of Muslim voters, anger around Labour’s apparent ambivalence over Gaza saw the party lose ground…’ (Our emphasis)

Complicity in Israel’s atrocities is not ‘ambivalence’. But even if Starmer had shown ‘ambivalence’ over genocide, that would be appalling enough, would it not? And worth more than a bland comment in passing?

Another Guardian report commented:

‘Starmer has been criticised by party members for a Middle East stance that could be seen as more pro-Israel than that of the Tories. The former barrister was accused of dithering for months while Israeli bombs killed more and more people. Labour’s manifesto mentions Gaza once, on page 124.’ (Our emphasis)

This is simply false: Starmer did not ‘dither’; he expressly confirmed Israel’s ‘right’ to inflict collective punishment by cutting off power and water from 2 million civilians.

Other subjects of deep concern to the British public have been similarly blanked: health provision and the NHS accounted for only 5 per cent of coverage, while environmental issues including climate change made up a pitiful 2 per cent of total media coverage.

Comparing Treatment Of Corbyn and Starmer

In July 2015, state-corporate politics and media launched an unprecedented smear campaign to derail Corbyn’s project, peaking just prior to the 12 December 2019 election. That month, Loughborough University found that pre-election coverage of Labour in the press had been consistently ‘very negative’, while coverage of the Conservatives had been consistently ‘positive’.

Our own ProQuest database search of UK newspapers for articles mentioning ‘Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ showed how the smears massively intensified as the election grew closer:

September = 337 hits

October = 222 hits

November = 1,620 hits

On 25 November, The Times published an article by Britain’s chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, titled, ‘What will become of Jews in Britain if Labour forms the next government?’ Mirvis insisted that Corbyn should be ‘considered unfit for office’, adding:

‘I ask every person to vote with their conscience. Be in no doubt, the very soul of our nation is at stake.’

In response, high-profile journalists cast aside all semblance of impartiality. ITV’s political editor Robert Peston tweeted:

‘The Chief Rabbi’s intervention in the general election is without precedent. I find it heartbreaking, as a Jew, that the rabbi who by convention is seen as the figurehead of the Jewish community, feels compelled to write this about Labour and its leader. I am not… making any kind of political statement here.’

The BBC’s then political editor Laura Kuenssberg tweeted on the chief rabbi’s smears an astonishing 23 times in 24 hours. Kuenssberg even retweeted the following comment from chat show host Piers Morgan in response to then Labour shadow international development secretary Barry Gardiner’s refusal to field further questions on anti-semitism:

‘Wow. The breathtaking arrogance of this chump telling journalists what questions to ask. They should all ignore him & pummel Corbyn about anti-Semitism.’

Kuenssberg apparently later deleted this retweet.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald was typically forthright in responding to Mirvis’s attack:

‘This is utter bullshit.

‘The British Conservative Party is rife with anti-semitism, while there’s no evidence Corbyn is.

‘If you want the Tories to win, just say so. It’s incredibly dangerous to keep exploiting anti-semitism for naked political and ideological ends like this.’

This is just a tiny sample of the media hostility faced by Corbyn (See here and here for many more examples).

So how did our impartial, neutral corporate media’s pre-election treatment of Starmer compare? Des Freedman commented last week:

‘What we have really had during the course of the campaign is a plethora of puff pieces on Labour. Many journalists, aware that they will be dealing with a Labour prime minister from 5 July, appear all too happy to cosy up to senior Labour figures.’

That, actually, is not the reason establishment journalists are so favourable to establishment-friendly Starmer. Freedman continued:

‘So we have had a very upbeat profile of shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in the Guardian arguing that, despite her free-market commitment, she ‘carries little ideological baggage’. There is a rather sickening Guardian interview with Starmer in which we learn very little about his politics, but do find out that he doesn’t have phobias and doesn’t dream at night. And there is an utterly unrevelatory feature in the Financial Times on Starmer which characterises him as a ‘rational, diligent, ruthless’ lawyer but somehow fails even to mention his dealings with Julian Assange when he was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service.’

Despite Starmer famously scrapping every one of his 10 ‘socialist’ pledges, Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian of how the Conservatives failed to punish wrongdoing in the party because they didn’t take it that seriously:

‘Straight-as-a-die chief prosecutor Starmer will allow no such equivocation.’

After all, a salient characteristic of the Prime Minister who used fake smears to purge much of the Labour left is his ‘solid decency’. In June, billionaire Conservative donor John Caudwell supplied some detail:

‘What Keir has done, as far as I can see, has taken all the left out of the Labour Party. And he’s come out with a brilliant set of values and principles and ways of growing Britain in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist.’

Caudwell’s sage observations, of course, help explain the green-lighting of Starmer at the other end of the supposed media ‘spectrum’ from the Guardian. Daniel Finkelstein, otherwise known as Baron Finkelstein of Pinner in the London Borough of Harrow, commented on Starmer in Rupert Murdoch’s The Times:

‘He has pushed Corbyn out of the party, taken a robust stance on defence and supported a nuclear deterrent, abandoned almost every left-wing policy pledge he made during the leadership election and endorsed a tough policy on public spending, where once he attacked austerity.’

Finkelstein’s conclusion:

‘Starmer is bright and extremely diligent and often finds that evidence and reality push him away from his ideological starting point.’

Seeing what he wanted to see, Finkelstein noted that Starmer had run as a unity candidate for Labour but ‘came to see that this position was impossible and that the policy of the Corbynites was irresponsible’.

The verdict:

‘But as long as we don’t mind too much that he takes his time and sometimes gives a muddled first response, he will often get there in the end.’

Get where? Where the establishment needs him to be. This was captured beautifully in a compilation of two short video clips comparing two comments from Starmer: one, several years ago, saying that he would certainly not be giving interviews to The Sun newspaper; and the second, this recent declaration:

‘I am delighted to have the support and the backing of The Sun. I think that shows just how much this is a changed Labour Party, back in the service of working people.’

The standfirst of another deeply empathetic Times piece asked:

‘Friends say he’s warm, kind and funny. So why can’t he show that side to the public? Josh Glancy joined the campaign trail in search of the real Keir Starmer’

Glancy was keen to emphasise that Starmer ‘is, in many ways, a pretty normal bloke’.

Journalist Neil Clark commented on X:

‘Impossible not to notice how friendly BBC, ITV & C4 have been to Labour in this election, & the stark contrast between now and 2017 & ‘19. No real scrutiny of the party’s policies, no hostile questioning, no “Gotchas”, Starmer given a very easy ride, so different to before.’

There were no ‘Gotchas’, because the propaganda arm of state-corporate power was not trying to get Starmer. The Guardian, for example, has long featured a sub-section of its archive, titled: ‘Starmer’s Path To Power’.

The Loughborough University research notes that ‘First name only’ references to the Labour leader have increased from 4 percent in 2019 to 29 percent in 2024. Establishment-friendly Starmer is often ‘Sir Keir’, while the openly targeted Official Enemy was strictly ‘Corbyn’.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

The highest court in the world put Israel on trial, accused of the ultimate crime against humanity.

Much has happened since that decision – and all of it is even more incriminating against Israel than the evidence considered by the World Court back in January.

Tens of thousands more Palestinian civilians are dead or missing, most likely under rubble. Gaza is now a wasteland, one that will take many decades to rebuild.

Till then, the population has nowhere to live, nor institutions such as hospitals, schools, universities and government offices to care for them, nor infrastructure like functioning electricity and sewage systems to rely on.

In violation of a second ICJ ruling, Israel has invaded and repeatedly bombed Rafah, a small “safe zone” into which Gaza’s population had been herded by Israel, supposedly for their own protection.

And Israel has intensified its blockade of aid, now to the point where there is famine across much of the enclave. Children, the sick and the vulnerable are dying in growing numbers from an entirely man-made catastrophe.

Presented with so much evidence, how is the World Court dealing with Israel’s genocide trial?

The answer: it is moving at a snail’s pace.

Most experts agree that the ICJ is unlikely to issue a definitive ruling for at least a year. Until then, it seems, the western powers will continue giving Israel a licence to shed far more of Gaza’s blood – that is, to continue much further on the trajectory of a plausible genocide.

At this rate, the court will determine conclusively whether Israel is guilty of genocide only when that genocide is all but finished.

Eyes tight shut

Back in the mid-1990s, the world was confronted by another genocide, in Rwanda.

Then, the West vowed that it and the legal institutions supposedly there to uphold international law and protect the weakest should never drag their feet again, permitting a crime of such monstrous proportions to unfold without hindrance.

But 30 years on, the West is not just dragging its feet in addressing the crimes against the people of Gaza. Washington and its closest allies, including Britain, are actively arming Israel’s slaughter, and assisting with its starvation of the population.

In ruling against Israel, the ICJ would, by implication, also be finding the sole global superpower and its allies guilty of complicity in genocide.

In the circumstances, the reasons for caution at the World Court, rather than urgency, are all too obvious.

The ICJ’s sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC), showed late last month that it too was in no hurry to stop the slaughter and mass starvation in Gaza.

Whereas the World Court judges the behaviour of states, the ICC judges the actions of individuals. It is empowered to identify and put on trial those who carry out crimes on behalf of the state.

In May, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, incensed western capitals by announcing that he was seeking an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.

All five were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In Netanyahu and Gallant’s case, that included the crime of exterminating Gaza’s Palestinians, using starvation as a “weapon of war”.

In truth, the ICC swung into action very late indeed – some eight months after Israel began its war crimes spree.

Nonetheless, Khan’s decision offered a brief moment of hope to Gaza’s bereaved, destitute and starving.

While the World Court’s lengthy genocide trial offers the prospect of a remedy potentially years away, arrest warrants from the ICC pose a far more direct and pressing threat to Israel.

Once signed, those warrants would obligate all parties to the Rome Statute, including Britain and other European states, to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should they step on their soil.

Israeli media have reported on panicked army commanders worried about carrying out orders in Gaza for fear they may be charged next with war crimes.

For a moment, it looked as though Israel might have to weigh whether it could afford to continue the slaughter of Palestinians.

Superpower bullying

But the ICC’s judges agreed to lift the sword from Netanyahu and Gallant’s necks – while leaving Gaza’s women and children, the sick and elderly, exposed once again to the full force of Israel’s bombs and starvation policy.

Rather than approving, as expected, the arrest of Netanyahu and his defence minister for war crimes, the ICC caved into pressure from the United States and Britain.

It revealed that it was willing to revisit the question of whether it had jurisdiction over Gaza – in other words, whether it had the authority to put Netanyahu and Gallant on trial for crimes against humanity.

It was an extraordinary moment – and one that confirmed quite how dishonest the West’s professions of humanitarianism are, and quite how feeble are supposedly independent institutions like the ICC and ICJ when they run up against Washington.

The question of jurisdiction in Gaza and the other occupied Palestinian territories was settled by the ICC long ago. Were that not the case, Khan would never have dared to request the arrest warrants in the first place.

Nonetheless, the ICC’s judges accepted submissions, secretly made by the outgoing British government, that question the legal body’s jurisdiction powers. The UK was undoubtedly waging this campaign of intimidation against the war crimes court in coordination with the US and Israel.

Neither have standing at the ICC because they have refused to ratify the war crimes statute that founded the court.

The UK’s move was a transparent delaying tactic, relying on a piece of standard Israeli sophistry: that the Oslo Accords, from 30 years ago, did not give Palestinians criminal jurisdiction over Israeli nationals, and therefore Palestine cannot delegate that power to the ICC.

The flaw in this argument is glaring. Israel violated the terms of the Oslo Accords decades ago and no longer considers itself bound by them. And yet it now insists – via Britain – that the Palestinians still be shackled by these obsolete documents.

Even more to the point, the Oslo Accords were long ago superseded by a new legal and diplomatic reality. In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to recognise Palestine as a state.

Three years later, Palestine was allowed to become a member of the ICC. After a long delay, the court finally ruled in 2021 that it had jurisdiction in Palestine.

Since then, and again at a snail’s pace, the ICC has been investigating Israeli war crimes, including atrocities against Palestinians and the building of armed, exclusively Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory, denying the Palestinians any chance to exercise their right to statehood.

In a properly functioning system of international law, arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Israel’s top brass would have been issued years ago, long before the current plausible genocide in Gaza.

Buying time

The question of jurisdiction is no longer a matter of legal debate. But revisiting it unnecessarily does buy time, time in which Israel can kill more Palestinians, level even more of Gaza, and starve more Palestinian children.

It is just such delays that lie at the heart of the matter. It is the endless deferments of accountability that directly enabled the current genocide in Gaza.

Israel’s cynical evasions in implementing the Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s led to a growing backlash from Palestinians, culminating in the eruption of a violent uprising in 2000.

The endless postponements by western powers, led by Washington, in recognising Palestinian statehood destroyed the credibility of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians’ government-in-waiting.

The obvious futility of the Oslo process drove many Palestinians into the arms of militant rival groups like Hamas that promised to let Palestinians take back control of their fate.

The reluctance in the West to put any kind of pressure on Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories gave Israeli leaders the confidence to tighten their stranglehold: through settlement building and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and a blockade that led to the isolation and immiseration of Gaza.

Inaction in addressing Gaza’s increasingly dire conditions motivated Hamas to smash apart the status quo, one that was quietly suffocating the Palestinian population there. Hamas did so by carrying out a surprise and bloody attack on Israel on 7 October.

And the West’s refusal to intervene after 7 October opened the door to Israel’s current slaughter in Gaza, an extermination campaign designed to drive the people of Gaza out of the enclave, becoming someone else’s – ideally Egypt’s – problem.

The World Court’s delay in ruling on genocide, and the ICC’s delay in issuing arrest warrants, presage yet more, unpredictable disasters down the road.

One certainty, however, is that, through more bloodletting, Israel will be entirely unable to realise its professed goal of “eliminating” Hamas.

The most Israel can achieve by inflicting mass death and destruction in Gaza is to prove to Palestinians that Hamas is right: that Israel is unwilling to allow any form of Palestinian statehood, and has been since it belligerently occupied the Palestinian territories 57 years ago – long before Hamas even existed.

In killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israel has served as Hamas’ biggest recruiting sergeant. More young Palestinian men in Gaza are throwing their lot in with armed resistance, if only to avenge the deaths of their loved ones.

Israel’s approach is obviously self-defeating – but only if the goal is truly to live in peace with their neighbours, and not to be engaged in permanent war with the region.

Abuse to continue

Responding to the ICC’s latest delay, Clive Baldwin, a legal adviser at Human Rights Watch, observed that the UK had to end its “double standards in victims’ access to justice”.

He added: “The next government will need to immediately decide if it supports the ICC’s essential role in bringing accountability and defending the rule of law for all.”

That next government is now led by Sir Keir Starmer, who won last week’s general election with a landslide of seats based on a paltry share of the votes.

Starmer benefited massively from a split in the right-wing vote. But a near-record low turn-out and a fall in votes for Labour compared to his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, hinted at the profound lack of enthusiasm both for Starmer and his evasive platform.

Throughout his election campaign, Starmer was keen to send signals to Washington and the establishment media that – in keeping with the outgoing Conservative government’s stalling tactics – he would buy time for Israel too.

He paid a price for that at the election: he alienated many party workers and lost seats to a handful pro-Palestine candidates running as independents, including Corbyn himself, on huge swings of the vote. Several senior Labour MPs also found themselves within a hair’s breadth of losing their seats.

That may explain why Labour officials lost no time emphasising that Starmer had called Netanyahu to talk tough with him and was distancing himself from the previous government’s efforts to openly run interference for the US and Israel at the ICC.

According to a report this week in the Guardian, Starmer is expected to drop the current move to stall at the ICC over issuing arrest warrants.

Important decisions remain, however. Will Labour quickly restore funding to Unrwa, the UN refugee agency that is best placed to tackle the Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza? And will it halt arms sales?

But most crucial of all, will it recognise Palestine, sending a signal both to the ICJ and ICC and to Israel that a ruling protecting the Palestinians from genocide will be enforced by a major western power and close ally of Washington’s?

No good signs

Back in January, days before the World Court announced it was plausible that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza, Starmer quietly tore up the Labour Party’s long-standing policy on recognising Palestine as a state.

More than 140 other countries have already recognised Palestine, including recently Spain, Ireland and Norway.

Instead, Starmer declared that Palestine could only come into being once Israel agreed to such recognition. In other words, Israel – the serial abuser – will be the one to decide whether it will ever end its serial abuse of the Palestinian people.

Starmer, let us note, made his name as a human rights lawyer.

Next, in the final stages of the election campaign, Starmer’s aides briefed The Times of London of a further obstacle in the way of recognition of Palestinian statehood.

The paper reported that Starmer would refuse to recognise a Palestinian state until he had received the blessing of the United States, reportedly to avoid the risk of a diplomatic falling out. Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state.

Such a delay would once again reassure Israel that it can do as it pleases to the Palestinians.

And as should be all too clear by now, buying time for Israel means allowing it to carry out a genocide in Gaza and intensify ethnic cleansing policies begun decades ago.

Tissue of lies

Starmer’s own political trajectory suggests an uncomfortable truth about international power politics. The closer western leaders move to power, the more pressure they feel to do Washington’s bidding – and that invariably means casting aside principle.

Devotion to Israel – and a willingness to abandon the Palestinians to the death camp Gaza has become – has been one of the major conditions of entry into the West’s power club.

During the election campaign, Starmer passed that test with flying colours. Which is why he – unlike his predecessor – received an easy ride from the British establishment, including its public relations arm, the corporate media.

Ultra-rich donors, including those with close ties to Israel, have been lining up to throw money at Starmer’s Labour party, at the same time as membership numbers have plummeted.

The reality is that we live in a world where the powerful pay lip service to human rights and international law, a world where they profess to aid the weak even as they assist in their slaughter.

Oppression flourishes, obscured by their empty promises and endless dithering.

For three decades, the West has advertised its benevolence and humanitarianism. It has launched invasions and waged wars supposedly to protect the weak and vulnerable – from Kosovo to Ukraine, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya. Democracy and women’s rights have supposedly been the West’s watchwords.

But in truth, as Gaza demonstrates only too clearly, those claims were a tissue of lies. It was always about treating the world as a giant chessboard, and one where Washington’s right to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” was the driving principle, not protection of the weak.

Talk of humanitarianism was there to obscure a deeper, more savage truth: might still makes right. And no one is stronger than the US and those it favours.

The Palestinians, unlike Israel, have no weight in the international system. They are denied an army, and have no warplanes. They are denied control over their borders and their airspace. They have no real economy or currency – they are entirely reliant on the goodwill of Israeli financial institutions. They have no freedom to move from their slivers of territory, their ghettoes, unless Israel first agrees.

They cannot even stop Israel from bulldozing their homes, or arresting their children in the middle of the night.

No one on the international stage, least of all governments in Washington and London, really needs to take account of Palestinian interests.

Abusing Palestinians comes at minimal political cost. Protecting them would offer few tangible political gains. Which is precisely why their abuse continues day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.

We live in a world of deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith. Britain’s new prime minister has shown he is already an arch-exponent of those dark political arts. Listen not to what he says, but watch closely what he actually does.

• First published in Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The post The Banality of Sir Keir Starmer appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tony McKenna.

Photograph Source: Chatham House – CC BY 2.0

“I support Zionism without qualification”.

– Keir Starmer, statement to Jewish News, February 2020

“Israel must always have the right to defend her people”.

– Keir Starmer, October 2023

To use a Britishism, the Labour party leader Keir Starmer has got his knickers in a twist over the Israel-Hamas conflict.

At the end of the recent Labour Party annual conference, Starmer gave a round of media interviews. On LBC radio the politician who had been a human rights lawyer said something that would have landed him in the proverbial soup with his teachers in an Intro to Law class: “Hamas’ actions are terrorism and Israel has the right to defend herself”. He added: “Israel has the right” to withhold power and water from Palestinian civilians. “Obviously, everything should be done within international law”.

Withholding power and water from noncombatant civilians amounts to a collective punishment forbidden by international law, so Starmer’s rider that “everything should be done within international law” was moot and downright contradictory.

As his own party began to protest at the Zionist Starmer’s dishonesty, it took him several days to come up with a lame clarification: ‘It is not and never has been my view that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines”.

Meanwhile, Israel was bombing Gaza to smithereens, and posters went up in Labour areas with significant Muslim electorates, naming Labour councillors who were toeing Starmer’s line on Gaza and calling on local voters not to vote for these Starmerites in forthcoming elections.

Starmer has not called for a ceasefire or truce (as the UN has done), instead backing humanitarian “pauses” to help aid reach Gaza. He said through a spokesperson that such “pauses” would make humanitarian support possible “without stopping Israel taking action to disable the terrorists who attacked them in the first place”.

This ”softly softly” approach towards Israel has split Labour down the middle. Around 20 town and city councilors have left the party in protest at Starmer’s failure to call for a formal ceasefire. In Oxford, Labour lost control of the city council when 9 of its councilors resigned from the party. Three senior Labour figures—Sadiq Khan (London mayor), Andy Burnham (Manchester mayor), and Anas Sarwar (Scottish Labour leader)– called for a ceasefire.

In Westminster, 39 Labour MPs, including shadow minister Imran Hussain, signed a parliamentary petition calling for an “immediate de-escalation and cessation of hostilities”, while dozens of Labour MPs have said publicly they want a ceasefire. Starmer toeing the line taken by the US, EU, and the Tory government may be too much to stomach.

Starmer, renowned for his tin-ear when it comes to politics, attempted to defuse the situation by holding a virtual meeting between his leadership team and Labour council leaders.  He also went to a mosque in South Wales, where he tweeted a demand for the return of hostages. Stung by this evidence of Starmer’s real priorities, the mosque issued a statement repudiating his views on Gaza. Starmer then made his third U-turn after an ITV interview, in which he denied supporting Israel’s right to cut off water and food (a lie), and by issuing an open letter to councilors in which he said with palpable insincerity how much he felt the plight of the Palestinian people, before repeating his call for a “humanitarian pause” in the bombing, something which the prime minister Rishi Sunak had already done a few hours before.

Starmer is in something of a dilemma.

Nearly all the above-mentioned Labour politicians represent areas of the “red wall” with large Muslim electorates that Labour needs to win back in the next election if it is to beat the Tories. Starmer has shed a boatload of members (over 200,000 of them and their fees) since becoming leader, and has attempted to overcome the ensuing financial shortfall by pandering instead to wealthy donors, many of them Zionists. Several of his colleagues have followed suit. Pleasing Zionist donors does not go down well with Muslim voters, while condemning Israel in order to retain the Muslim vote alienates Starmer’s Zionist donors.

Starmer, like Biden, insists that “Israel has the right to defend itself”. On the specific matter of international law, this is not a legal right. Israel, an aggressor because of its two-decade-long siege/blockade of Gaza, cannot claim “self-defense” to justify its violence against armed resistance to this illegal siege/blockade. When a Nazi claimed that Germany attacked Russia in “self-defense” during WW2, a judge at the Nuremberg Tribunal said:

“One of the most amazing phenomena of this case which does not lack in startling features is the manner in which the aggressive war conducted by Germany against Russia has been treated by the defense as if it were the other way around. …If it is assumed that some of the resistance units in Russia or members of the population did commit acts that were in themselves unlawful under the rules of war, it would still have to be shown that these acts were not in legitimate defense against wrongs perpetrated upon them by the invader. Under International Law, as in Domestic Law, there can be no reprisal against reprisal. The assassin who is being repulsed by his intended victim may not slay him and then, in turn, plead self-defense”. (Trial of Otto Ohlendorf and others, Military Tribunal II-A, April 8, 1948)

This principle– an aggressor can’t legally claim “self-defense” as a justification when it exacts reprisals on those who resist the aggressor– is central to international law.

Starmer’s problem over Gaza blends into a wider predicament—opinion polls indicate consistently that voters loathe the Tories, but don’t at the same time love Starmer and his party. Equivocating over Palestine-Gaza is not likely to help his cause.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Labour plumbed new depths earlier this month when it conceded that, in power, it would maintain the government’s cap on child benefit, restricting financial help to the first two children in a family.

The cap, one of the Conservatives’ most socially regressive measures, was denounced as “heinous” and “obscene” by shadow cabinet ministers after it was introduced. Even Starmer called it “punitive” when he was trying to win over Labour members in the 2020 leadership vote.

Hundreds of thousands of children and their families are reported to have been driven below the breadline since the benefit cap came into effect in 2017.

No other country in the world has a similar policy. But in Britain, punishing children is now a bipartisan issue.

It is just one of many progressive policies Starmer has ditched in recent months: from funding tuition fees to ending the so-called “bedroom tax”.

The proffered excuse is always the same: that Britain cannot afford to care for its most vulnerable citizens. Or as Shadow Culture Secretary Lucy Powell put it: “There just, frankly, is no money left.”

And yet at the same time, Labour is tearing up its pledges to raise government revenue by increasing income tax on the rich and by imposing a windfall tax on tech firms.

Popular insurgency

Strangely, too, Labour has promised it will continue the government’s policy of spending billions on shipping weapons to Ukraine, to perpetuate a war that is killing Ukrainians and Russians alike and chiefly benefits the arms industry.

Underscoring quite how low a priority caring for children at home now is for Labour, compared to fighting a proxy war abroad, Starmer repeatedly chuckled at a conference last week as he discussed the “hard choice” he had taken on child benefit.

Notably, he was sitting alongside Tony Blair, a former leader remembered both for refashioning the party as “New Labour” in the 1990s – to snatch the centre-right ground from under the Tories’ feet – and for launching a criminal invasion of Iraq alongside the United States in 2003.

Starmer has been actively rehabilitating Blair’s image within the party, as well as leaning heavily on figures such as Peter Mandelson, Blair’s former chief adviser.

The ugliness of Labour’s new iteration derives from more than the fact that Starmer has been frantically purging the party of anything that might smack of the socialist-lite agenda of Jeremy Corbyn, his predecessor.

Corbyn’s election by the wider membership as party leader in 2015 unleashed a political transformation that left the party bureaucracy and parliamentary party reeling.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, many of them disillusioned with a British politics that had for decades offered them no meaningful political choice, hurried to sign up for a Corbyn-led party.

Soon Labour’s membership had rocketed to more than 560,000, making it the largest party in Europe. It presaged a grassroots movement that threatened to take politics out of Westminster’s rarified corridors and initiate a popular, street-level insurgency against austerity.

That danger needed to be neutralised – and Starmer, knighted at the age of 52 for services to the British state as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, proved to be just the man for the job.

As well as effectively ousting Corbyn from Labour, he set about abusing, alienating and persecuting the left-wing membership.

Coffers dry up

The latest victim is Jamie Driscoll, the North Tyne mayor who has been barred from standing for re-election as a Labour candidate – apparently because he is seen as too left-wing and has been a success in his job. The danger is that he makes Starmer look like a sell-out.

Within a couple of days of setting up a crowdfunder, Driscoll had built a war chest of more than £100,000 to run as an independent.

To get a flavour of why Labour has no place for a politician like Driscoll, who persuasively argues that it makes both financial and moral sense to implement kinder, fairer policies, watch him take on former Blair adviser and Starmer loyalist John McTernan on Newsnight.

Since Starmer took charge of Labour three years ago, party membership has plummeted, with the left departing in droves. According to Labour’s own figures, more than 170,000 had quit by last summer.

A shrunken, insular party is just how Starmer and his advisers want it. It puts Labour’s most reactionary elements firmly back in charge.

But that comes at a cost – quite literally.

Under Corbyn, Labour’s finances were the healthiest they had been in decades. In 2017 alone the party raised nearly £56m – £10m more than the Tories – much of it from the swollen ranks of new members. In the 2019 general election year, Corbyn’s Labour was able to outspend the party of the rich.

But as Labour has moved rightwards, with members exiting en masse and major unions reducing their funding, the party’s coffers have dried up. Labour is said to be near-broke.

If Labour can’t, or won’t, rely, as Corbyn did, on the dues of ordinary people – whether unionised workers or party members – it must turn instead to a handful of donors with deep pockets. In other words, it must go cap in hand chasing the same tainted money, from the City and big business, as the Tory party.

Which is exactly what Starmer has been doing.

This month Bloomberg, a financial sector news agency, reported that Rachel Reeves, Labour’s shadow chancellor, had sent out invitations to Tory donors in the City, wooing them with the offer of a “one-on-one breakfast meeting”.

Earlier this year, Starmer and Reeves made the rounds of the World Economic Forum at Davos, rubbing shoulders with global business leaders to persuade them that Labour would be more aggressively pro-business than Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a former hedge fund manager.

Already two former Tory party donors, Kasim Kutay and Gareth Quarry, have switched sides to Labour. Others appear ready to follow suit.

Hostage of Big Business

Labour’s move to the right is not simply, as many assume, a reflection either of Starmer’s natural political instincts, or of an opportunistic need to court the supposed “Red Wall” voters who deserted the party in 2019 over Brexit.

There is nothing tentative or temporary about the shift, whatever commentators at Britain’s liberal-left Guardian newspaper claim. After opposing Corbyn at every step, its leading columnists have been endlessly indulgent of everything Starmer does.

Martin Kettle compared Starmer’s approach to the “rope-a-dope” strategy of boxer Muhammad Ali, when he encouraged an opponent to exhaust themselves before he landed a knockout punch. Kettle’s implication is that once Starmer has won voter’s trust, and the next election, he will be ready to show Labour’s more progressive face.

Polly Toynbee made a similar case. “Lack of boldness”, she argued, is the price Starmer must pay to win, before he changes tack in power. Or as she wrote: “Without doubt [Starmer and Reeves] will do, as [Blair’s] New Labour did, far more than they dare promise while tip-toeing towards the finishing line.”

But such analyses ignore the elephant in the room. Starmer has consciously chosen to make Labour hostage once again to the interests of big business rather than party members. He has intentionally stripped out the already fragile democratic structures in Labour to allow a tiny clique of the super-rich to dictate party policy.

He has reduced the political fight in Britain to one about who will promote the fastest “economic growth”. He is doing so in an already turbo-charged, neoliberal capitalist system in which decades of an obsessive pursuit of growth have driven the world to the brink of climate catastrophe.

This was Blair’s playbook. The former Labour leader made it his priority – in an economic era very different from our own – to court the business community. Some called it the “prawn cocktail offensive”, and it was viewed as the key that unlocked Labour’s landslide victory in 1997.

Top of the list in Blair’s charm offensive was Rupert Murdoch, the tycoon whose media empire often boasted it decided who served as prime minister. Blair wormed his way into the Murdoch family’s affections so effectively that he was later asked to be godfather to one of Murdoch’s children.

Bound into inaction

Toynbee and others point out that, in government, Blair promoted far more generous policies than he ever dared to let slip while leader of the opposition.

But that was the late 1990s, a boom time for business. There was still enough cash sloshing around the global economy for Blair’s private finance initiatives – giving corporations the chance to extract profit from public services – to paper over the cracks, at least until the crash of 2008.

Today, big business won’t offer Starmer the deal it gave Blair. In these reduced times, corporations will be looking to bleed profits from the economy as aggressively as they can. Starmer is chaining himself to the demands of a tiny wealthy elite in the dying days of “business as normal”.

Once in power, Starmer will be just as enslaved to the demands of the corporate elite as he is now, while “tip-toeing to the finishing line”. As prime minister, he will be as much of a disappointment as he is leading the opposition – probably more so.

The disillusionment he has awakened among Labour Party members will spread to the broader electorate.

A prime minister whose hands are permanently bound to inaction and indifference by the dictates of the billionaire class, who is unable to offer an alternative to 13 years of Tory austerity, is a leader who will end up fuelling the very street-level insurgency he was supposed to avert.

Starmer has told us who he truly represents. It is time to stop the wishful thinking and listen.

• First published in Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Tariq Ali and Jeremy Cornyn at an anti-Trident rally in Trafalgar Square, 2016. Photo: Garry Knight.

Anyone in the run-up to 2019 who dared even suggest that the "Labour anti-Semitism" imbroglio was being exaggerated and manipulated for political purposes was vociferously smeared as being an anti-Semite themselves by the entire UK press, with the Guardian very much in the tooth-baring vanguard. Meanwhile, as was later revealed (yes, conveniently later), numerous Labour centrists were working diligently to undermine their own party and ensure the election of the Blairites' preferred candidate: the Eton-Oxford Tory thug Boris Johnson. And BoJo won.

More

The post Corbyn, Starmer and Labour’s Descent appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chris Floyd.

Former U.K. Labour chief Jeremy Corbyn—a member of Parliament who represents the Greater London constituency Islington North—called out Leader Keir Starmer this week for barring him from running with the party in the nation's next general election.

In a move that outraged progressives worldwide, Corbyn was suspended from Labour in 2020 over allegations of antisemitism, which the leftist contested. Starmer said Wednesday the party had changed "and we are not going back, and that is why Jeremy Corbyn will not stand as a Labour candidate at the next general election."

Corbyn responded on Twitter that "ever since I was elected as a Labour MP 40 years ago, I have fought on behalf of my community for a more equal, caring, and peaceful society. Day in, day out, I am focused on the most important issues facing people in Islington North: poverty, rising rents, the healthcare crisis, the safety of refugees, and the fate of our planet."

"Any attempt to block my candidacy is a denial of due process, and should be opposed by anybody who believes in the value of democracy."

"Keir Starmer's statement about my future is a flagrant attack on the democratic rights of Islington North Labour Party members. It is up to them—not party leaders—to decide who their candidate should be," he argued. "Any attempt to block my candidacy is a denial of due process, and should be opposed by anybody who believes in the value of democracy."

Also taking aim at the Tories now in power, Corbyn charged that "at a time when the government is overseeing the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation, this is a divisive distraction from our overriding goal: to defeat the Conservative Party at the next general election."

"I am proud to represent the labor movement in Parliament through my constituency," he continued. "I am focused on standing up for workers on the picket line, the marginalized, and all those worried about their futures. That is what I'll continue to do. I suggest the Labour Party does the same."

\u201cKeir Starmer is a dishonest politician who serves the British oligarchy and has no respect for democracy. His aversion to Jeremy Corbyn \u2013 who stands for opposite values \u2013 is no wonder. But to stop him from representing his constituents is a travesty.\n\nOur solidarity with Jeremy.\u201d

— DiEM25 (@DiEM25) 1676537971

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said that "few leaders around the world have shown the same commitment to the many, to every single minority, to every decent and worthy campaign against the oligarchy as Jeremy Corbyn has. Labour is all the poorer now that Starmer, seeking to impress the oligarchy, is expelling Jeremy."

Corbyn's statement did not address whether he will seek the seat as an independent, but many anticipate a bitter battle if he does.

Noting that Corbyn has been backed by the grassroots group Momentum since his 2015 campaign to lead the Labour Party—which he did for nearly five years—The Guardian reported Wednesday:

Asked whether he would put Momentum "on notice," Starmer said: "Well, I have many powers and duties and responsibilities in the Labour Party, but that one is not for me, I'm afraid. But look, whatever group or individual in the Labour Party, I think the message from this morning couldn't be clearer."

A Momentum spokesperson said on Wednesday: "Labour is a democratic socialist party—it's written on our membership cards. This party does not belong to one man alone—it belongs to its members and trade unions."

"It should be for Labour members in Islington North to decide their candidate. That is their democratic right."

In a separate analysis for The Guardian Wednesday, deputy political editor Jessica Elgot wrote that if the "former leader capitalizes on huge local support to stand as an independent, party allies and supportive MPs face a dilemma."

"Many on the Labour left still want to keep the party as a broad church where they can fight on issues like nationalization, student fees, trade union rights, and fair pay," she explained. "The question now is whether supporting the leader that first inspired many of them will cost them their ability to influence Labour in government."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Madeleine Sumption, Peter William Walsh.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Kate Osamor.

The Forde Inquiry largely confirms the disturbing picture presented by the earlier leaked report, finding that Corbyn’s team, backed by a left-wing membership that favoured his democratic socialism, was pitted against right-wing party bureaucracy and a parliamentary party both committed to maintaining the neoliberal priorities of New Labour set by former leader Tony Blair.

Party staff saw one of their main tasks as finding pretexts to expel Corbyn supporters, in what they termed “trot busting” and “trot hunting” exercises. Those same senior staff exhibited “deplorably factional and insensitive, and at times discriminatory, attitudes” towards Corbyn supporters.

Since Corbyn’s departure, there has been a mass exodus of members disillusioned with the direction the party has been taking. Forde, who was commissioned by Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, to investigate those turbulent years, proposes ways to heal divisions that have threatened to tear Labour apart.

He criticises what he calls a “monoculture” and “groupthink” at head office that has left the party’s senior staff unrepresentative of the membership and has damaged Labour’s “overall effectiveness”.

Despite its ambitions, however, the 138-page report is unlikely to ease tensions in Labour. Its resolute both-sidism spreads the blame around equally, and in the process ensures no one will be satisfied.

Media firestorms

But Forde’s seeming even-handedness is, in fact, a continuation of factionalism by other means. The report’s implausible premise is that Corbyn and a handful of staff in the leader’s office wielded as much factional power as the combined might of Labour HQ, the parliamentary party and the entire media establishment. Each side was apparently equally obstructive and uncooperative; each fed the other’s political paranoia.

That misrepresents the true balance of power in Labour – and the reason why Corbyn spent his years as leader permanently on the defensive, battling internal revolts and media firestorms.

Forde castigates a Labour culture prone to leaking to the media, as though Corbyn and his team had someone – anyone – to turn to in the establishment media who would take their side.

The Blairites, by contrast, had the willing ear of journalists for any story that could be spun against Corbyn. The leaks were entirely one-sided and often devastating, representing Corbyn as shambolic and feeble-minded, a traitor, a national security threat, an antisemite, and much more. There was no meaningful counter-narrative available, outside the margins of social media.

Forde’s complaint that the leader’s office and party HQ duplicated each other’s functions and failed to develop trust sounds ludicrously divorced from the reality faced by Corbyn’s team. They found themselves at war with the party bureaucracy and had little choice but to insulate themselves from internal sabotage.

The report at least recognises that problem, even if it fails to give it proper weight. In parentheses, Forde notes, for example, that Labour staff secretly misappropriated members’ money to fund “campaigns supportive of sitting, largely anti-Corbyn MPs” while withholding funds from “campaigns for pro-Corbyn candidates in potentially Tory winnable seats”.

In the 2017 election, Corbyn could have ended up at Number 10, had he won seven knife-edge Tory seats.

Elephant in the room

But even more egregiously, Forde largely ignores the elephant in the room: that with Corbyn gone, the civil war did not peter out. It intensified.

Starmer, far from trying to find middle ground between Labour’s left and right, has actively stoked the fires on one side only. The “broad church” Forde espouses as the way forward for Labour has been repudiated by Starmer at every turn.

Not only has Starmer effectively forced Corbyn permanently out of the party and exiled his predecessor’s few allies to the backbenches, but he has also driven the Labour Party as a whole firmly back to Blairite territory. Left-wing members are being aggressively purged or made so miserable in the new environment that they leave.

Forde’s both-sides equivocations allowed a Labour spokesman to respond with the patently preposterous claim that Starmer “has made real progress in ridding the party of the destructive factionalism and unacceptable culture that did so much damage previously and contributed to our defeat in 2019”.

The reality is that Starmer has done precisely the opposite. Even with a firm grip on the leader’s office, the party bureaucracy, the front bench and the parliamentary party, the Labour right is still not satisfied. It wants to eradicate any chance of the left-wing membership ever having influence over party policy again.

Starmer has demonstrated the true meaning of “factionalism”: that the right will permanently treat the left as unwanted interlopers, and refuse any ideological compromise. That is the same power dynamic that existed when Corbyn was leader. It is just that now, with the leader’s office in the right’s pocket too, the imbalance of ideological forces arrayed against the Labour left is far harder to ignore.

Implausible both-sidism

The same lacuna can be found in the Forde report’s analysis of Labour’s “antisemitism problem”. Starmer has stepped up the crackdown on left-wing members on the basis of a supposedly continuing concern about the prevalence of antisemitism in Labour’s ranks – a claim at the heart of the Labour right’s efforts to discredit the left under Corbyn.

Notably, the Forde report concedes that antisemitism was used for factional advantage by the party’s right to damage the left. He notes: “Some anti-Corbyn elements of the party seized on antisemitism as a way to attack Jeremy Corbyn.”

In that regard, Forde quietly echoes Corbyn’s statement nearly two years ago that antisemitism in Labour was “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents”. When Corbyn made that assessment, Starmer used it as a pretext to expel him from the parliamentary party.

Given the toxic legacy of the furore over antisemitism in the party, it was presumably no easy matter for Forde to acknowledge its weaponisation by the right. Chris Williamson, a Labour MP and Corbyn ally, was expelled from the party for saying much the same.

Perhaps understandably, Forde seeks to soften the blow – again resorting to an unconvincing both-sidism – by arguing that the left was factional about antisemitism too. Corbyn’s supporters, he writes, “saw it simply as an attack on the leader and his faction – with both ‘sides’ thus weaponising the issue and failing to recognise the seriousness of antisemitism, its effect on Jewish communities and on the moral and political standing of the party”.

In the report’s telling, this counter-“weaponisation” relates to two supposed failings in the left’s approach: a denial that Labour suffered from antisemitism and insensitivity towards Jewish groups’ concerns about antisemitism.

But this entirely misses the role antisemitism has played in Labour’s civil war and why it continues to be so radioactive. In effect, Forde reproduces the very factionalism he castigates everyone else for.

Setting a trap

It was the Labour right that claimed the left denied there was antisemitism in the party. It set a trap for those on the left who questioned whether it was right to treat anything more than softball criticism of Israel as antisemitism, as Williamson, among others, discovered to his cost.

In fact, there was widespread recognition on the left that antisemitism was to be found in Labour. The left’s argument – supported by evidence – was that Labour’s antisemitism “problem” was no worse than that found in wider British society, and far less of a problem than the Conservative Party’s much-less-discussed racism against both Jews and Muslims.

The left did not deny antisemitism. They denied its characterisation as an exceptional problem in Labour. Given that the evidence supported them but was always ignored in media coverage, the left came to the view that the Labour right’s insistence on raising antisemitism at every opportunity was designed to damage Corbyn and the left, not to fight antisemitism.

Forde simply muddies the waters by defining the left’s resistance to its own vilification by the right as an equivalent factional “weaponising” of antisemitism. He also ignores the fact that the left had a particular grievance about how antisemitism was being redefined by the party’s right – backed by pro-Israel lobby organisations and establishment media – to conflate criticism of Israel, or even support for Palestinian rights, with hatred of Jews.

The Labour left’s concern was with the bad faith of the actors promoting the narrative of a Labour “antisemitism crisis” under Corbyn. Notably, Forde agrees that this was indeed the case: that antisemitism was used by the right to settle factional scores. But he then seems to deny it as a defence for those who were targeted maliciously – including the many Jewish members who found themselves expelled or suspended as antisemites after criticising Israel.

‘Debilitating inertia’

Forde’s bogus both-sidism ultimately leads to an implausible – if not absurd – conclusion. He acknowledges that the Labour right’s covert efforts to subvert Corbyn by weaponising antisemitism – and the backlash from the Corbyn camp – contributed to damaging the party’s “moral and political standing”.

He recognises that party HQ secretly channelled funds to candidates not on the basis of how winnable a seat was, but on the basis of whether the candidate was opposed to Corbyn. WhatsApp message chains revealed internal sabotage, such as “a deliberate go-slow by certain members of staff designed to frustrate the efforts of a colleague from an ‘opposing faction’ [Corbyn’s] to promote the party’s wider interests”.

The report describes a “debilitating inertia, factionalism and infighting, which then distracted from what all profess to be a common cause – electoral success”.

And then, after amassing all this evidence, Forde concludes that it was “highly unlikely” the very public damage inflicted on the party leadership by the Labour right cost the party the 2017 election. That, remember, was when Corbyn came within some 2,000 votes of winning outright and produced the biggest leap in Labour’s share of the vote since 1945.

In Forde’s assessment, “the two sides were trying to win in different ways”. But the “two sides” did not have an equal mandate to fight and win the election. The Labour bureaucrats were unelected officials. Corbyn had been chosen as leader by the party membership and it was his left-wing platform that was supposed to be presented to the electorate by his officials in the best light possible. Anything less was a willful subversion of the democratic process.

What the Labour right did was not fight the election “in a different way”, as Forde suggests. They staged an internal coup that made the Labour Party internally dysfunctional and outwardly look increasingly ill-equipped to form a government. By the 2019 election, Labour was in open disarray.

That year’s humiliating defeat gave Starmer the chance to step in as the unity candidate who promised to restore calm and find common ground between the left and right. The reality is that Starmer deceived the membership. Once elected, he made himself little more than a battering ram for the Labour right.

The truth that Forde dare not admit is that under Starmer, the factionalism his inquiry so excoriates is far worse – and party democracy a more distant prospect than ever.

• First published in Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

A few weeks earlier, the police fined Johnson – the first of several such penalties he is expected to receive – for attending a series of parties that broke the very lockdown rules his own government set. And the election took place as news broke that the UK would soon face recession and the highest inflation rate for decades.

In the circumstances, one might have assumed the opposition Labour Party under Keir Starmer would romp home, riding a wave of popular anger. But in reality, Starmer’s party fared little better than Johnson’s. Outside London, Labour was described as “treading water” across much of England.

Starmer is now two years into his leadership and has yet to make a significant mark politically. Labour staff are cheered that in opinion polls the party is finally ahead – if marginally – of Johnson’s Tories. Nonetheless, the public remains adamant that Starmer does not look like a prime minister in waiting.

That may be in large part because he rarely tries to land a blow against a government publicly floundering in its own corruption.

When Johnson came close to being brought down at the start of the year, as the so-called “partygate scandal” erupted with full force, it was not through Labour’s efforts. It was because of relentless leaks presumed to be from Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former adviser turned nemesis.

Starmer has been equally incapable of cashing in on the current mutinous rumblings against Johnson from within his own Tory ranks.

Self-inflicted wounds

Starmer’s ineffectualness seems entirely self-inflicted.

In part, that is because his ambitions are so low. He has been crafting policies to look more like a Tory-lite party that focuses on “the flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly”, as an internal Labour review recommended last year.

But equally significantly, he has made it obvious he sees his first duty not to battle for control of the national political terrain against Johnson’s government, but to expend his energies on waging what is becoming a permanent internal war on sections of his own party.

That has required gutting Labour of large parts of the membership that were attracted by his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, a democratic socialist who spent his career emphasising the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism.

To distance himself from Corbyn, Starmer has insisted on the polar opposites. He has been allying ever more closely with Israel, just as a new consensus has emerged in the human rights community that Israel is a racist, apartheid state.

And he has demanded unquestioning loyalty to Nato, just as the western military alliance pours weapons into Ukraine, in what looks to be rapidly becoming a cynical proxy war, dissuading both sides from seeking a peace agreement and contributing to a surge in the stock price of the West’s military industries.

Broken promises

Starmer’s direction of travel flies in the face of promises he made during the 2020 leadership election that he would heal the internal divisions that beset his predecessor’s tenure.

Corbyn, who was the choice of the party’s largely left-wing members in 2015, immediately found himself in a head-on collision with the dominant faction of right-wing MPs in the Labour parliamentary caucus as well as the permanent staff at head office.

Once leader, Starmer lost no time in stripping Corbyn of his position as a Labour MP. He cited as justification Corbyn’s refusal to accept evidence-free allegations of antisemitism against the party under his leadership that had been loudly amplified by an openly hostile media.

Corbyn had suffered from a years-long campaign, led by pro-Israel lobby groups and the media, suggesting his criticisms of Israel for oppressing the Palestinian people were tantamount to hatred of Jews. A new definition of antisemitism focusing on Israel was imposed on the party to breathe life into such allegations.

But the damage was caused not just by Labour’s enemies. Corbyn was actively undermined from within. A leaked internal report highlighted emails demonstrating that party staff had constantly plotted against him and even worked to throw the 2017 election, when Corbyn was just a few thousand votes short of winning.

With Brexit thrown into the mix at the 2019 election – stoking a strong nativist mood in the UK – Corbyn suffered a decisive defeat at Johnson’s hands.

But as leader, Starmer did not use the leaked report as an opportunity to reinforce party democracy, as many members expected. In fact, he reinstated some of the central protagonists exposed in the report, even apparently contemplating one of them for the position of Labour general secretary.

He also brought in advisers closely associated with former leader Tony Blair, who turned Labour decisively rightwards through the late 1990s and launched with the US an illegal war on Iraq in 2003.

Instead, Starmer went after the left-wing membership, finding any pretext – and any means, however draconian – to finish the job begun by the saboteurs.

He has rarely taken a break from hounding the left-wing membership, even if a permanent turf war has detracted from the more pressing need to concentrate on the Tory government’s obvious failings.

Flooded with arms

Starmer’s flame-war against the left has become so extreme that, as some critics have pointed out, both Pope Francis and Amnesty International would face expulsion from Starmer’s Labour Party were they members.

The pope is among a growing number of observers expressing doubts about the ever-more explicit intervention by the US and its Nato allies in Ukraine that seems designed to drag out the war, and raise the death toll, rather than advance peace talks.

In fact, recent views expressed by officials in Washington risk giving credence to the original claims made by Russian President Vladimir Putin justifying his illegal invasion of Ukraine in late February.

Before that invasion, Moscow officials had characterised Nato’s aggressive expansion across Eastern Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union, and its cosying up to Ukraine, as an “existential threat”. Russia even warned that it might use nuclear weapons if they were seen as necessary for its defence.

The Kremlin’s reasons for concern cannot be entirely discounted. Two Minsk peace accords intended to defuse a bloody eight-year civil war between Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities in eastern Ukraine, on Russia’s border, have gone nowhere.

Instead, Ukraine’s government pushed for closer integration into Nato to the point where Putin warned of retaliation if Nato stationed missiles, potentially armed with nuclear warheads, on Russia’s doorstep. They would be able to strike Moscow in minutes, undermining the premise of mutually assured destruction that long served as the basis of a Cold War detente.

In response to Russia’s invasion, Nato has flooded Ukraine with weapons while the US has been moving to transfer a whopping $40bn in military aid to Kyiv – all while deprioritising pressure on Moscow and Kyiv to revisit the Minsk accords.

Nato weapons were initially supplied on the basis that they would help Ukraine defend itself from Russia. But that principle appears to have been quickly jettisoned by Washington.

Last month, US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin declared that the aim was instead to “see Russia weakened” – a position echoed by Nato former Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The New York Times has reported that Washington is involved in a “classified” intelligence operation to help Ukraine kill senior Russian generals.

US officials now barely conceal the fact that they view Ukraine as a proxy war – one that sounds increasingly like the scenario Putin laid out when justifying his invasion as pre-emptive: that Washington intends to sap Russia of its military strength, push Nato’s weapons and potentially its troops right up against Russia’s borders, and batter Moscow economically through sanctions and an insistence that Europe forgo Russian gas.

The existential threat Putin feared has become explicit US policy, it seems.

Fealty to Nato

These are the reasons the pope speculated last week that, while Russia’s actions could not be justified, the “barking of Nato at the door of Russia” might, in practice, have “facilitated” the invasion. He also questioned the supply of weapons to Ukraine in the context of profiteering from the war: “Wars are fought for this: to test the arms we have made.”

Pope Francis, bound by formal Vatican rules of political neutrality, has to be cautious in what he says. And yet Starmer has deemed similar observations made by activists in the Labour party as grounds for expulsion.

The Labour leader has clashed head-on with the Stop the War Coalition, which Corbyn helped found in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The group played a central role in mobilising opposition to Britain’s participation, under Blair, in the 2003 illegal invasion of Iraq.

Stop the War, which is seen as close to the Labour left, has long been sceptical of Nato, a creature of the Cold War that proved impervious to the collapse of the Soviet Union and has gradually taken on the appearance of a permanent lobby for the West’s military industries.

Stop the War has spoken out against both Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and the decades-long expansion by Nato across Eastern Europe that Moscow cites as justification for its war of aggression. Starmer, however, has scorned that position as what he calls “false equivalence”.

In a commentary published in the Guardian newspaper, he denied that Stop the War were “benign voices for peace” or “progressive”. He termed Nato “a defensive alliance that has never provoked conflict”, foreclosing the very debate anti-war activists – and Pope Francis – seek to begin.

Starmer also threatened 11 Labour MPs with losing the whip – like Corbyn – if they did not immediately remove their names from a Stop the War statement that called for stepping up moves towards a diplomatic solution. More recently, he has warned MPs that they will face unspecified action from the party if they do not voice “unshakeable support for Nato”.

Starmer has demanded “a post 9/11” style surge in arms expenditure in response to the war in Ukraine, insisting that Nato must be “strengthened”.

He has shut down the Twitter account of Labour’s youth wing for its criticisms of Nato.

In late March he proscribed three small leftist groups – Labour Left Alliance, Socialist Labour Network, and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty – adding them to four other left-wing groups that he banned last year. Stop the War could soon be next.

Starmer’s relentless attacks on anti-war activism in Labour fly in the face of his 10 pledges, the platform that helped him to get elected. They included a commitment – reminiscent of Pope Francis – to “put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice”.

But once elected, Starmer has effectively erased any space for an anti-war movement in mainstream British politics, one that wishes to question whether Nato is still a genuinely defensive alliance or closer to a lobby serving western arms industries that prosper from permanent war.

In effect, Starmer has demanded that the left out-compete the Tory government for fealty to Nato’s militarism. The war in Ukraine has become the pretext to force underground not only anti-imperialist politics but even Vatican-style calls for diplomacy.

Apartheid forever

But Starmer is imposing on Labour members an even more specific loyalty test rooted in Britain’s imperial role: support for Israel as a state that oppresses Palestinians.

Starmer’s decision to distance himself and Labour as far as possible from Corbyn’s support for Palestinian rights initially seemed to be tactical, premised on a desire to avoid the antisemitism smears that plagued his predecessor.

But that view has become progressively harder to sustain.

Starmer has turned a deaf ear to a motion passed last year by Labour delegates calling for UK sanctions against Israel as an apartheid state. References to it have even been erased from the party’s YouTube channel. Similarly, he refused last month to countenance Israel’s recent designation as an apartheid state by Amnesty and a raft of other human rights groups.

Last November, Starmer delivered a fawningly pro-Israel speech alongside Israel’s ultra-nationalist ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, in which he repeatedly conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

He has singled out anti-Zionist Jewish members of Labour – more so than non-Jewish members – apparently because they are the most confident and voluble critics of Israel in the party.

And now, in the run-up to this month’s local elections, he has flaunted his party’s renewal of ties with the Israeli Labor party, which severed relations during Corbyn’s tenure.

Senior officials from the Israeli party joined him and his deputy, Angela Rayner, in what was described as a “charm offensive”, as they pounded London streets campaigning for the local elections. It was hard not to interpret this as a slap in the face to swaths of the Labour membership.

The Israeli Labor party founded Israel by engineering a mass ethnic cleansing campaign, as documents unearthed by Israeli historians have confirmed, that saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from their homeland.

Israel’s Labor party has continued to play a key role both in entrenching illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territories to displace Palestinians, and in formulating legal distinctions between Jewish and Palestinian citizenship that have cemented the new consensus among groups such as Amnesty International that Israel qualifies as an apartheid state.

The Israeli Labor party is part of the current settler-led government that secured court approval last week to evict many hundreds of Palestinians from eight historic Palestinian villages near Hebron – while allowing settlers to remain close by – on the pretext that the land is needed for a firing zone.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper concluded of the ruling: “Occupation is temporary by definition; apartheid is liable to persist forever. The High Court approved it.”

Labour’s ugly face

The ugly new face of Labour politics under Starmer is becoming ever harder to conceal. Under cover of rooting out the remnants of Corbynism, Starmer is not only proving himself an outright authoritarian, intent on crushing the last vestiges of democratic socialism in Labour.

He is also reviving the worst legacies of a Labour tradition that cheerleads western imperialism and cosies up to racist states – as long as they are allies of Washington and ready to buy British arms.

Starmer’s war on the Labour left is not – as widely assumed – a pragmatic response to the Corbyn years, designed to distance the party from policies that exposed it to the relentless campaign of antisemitism smears that undermined Corbyn.

Rather, Starmer is continuing and widening that very campaign of smears. He has picked up the baton on behalf of those Labour officials who, the leaked internal report showed, preferred to sabotage the Labour Party if it meant stopping the left from gaining power.

His task is not just to ensnare those who wish to show solidarity with the Palestinians after decades of oppression supported by the West. It is to crush all activism against western imperialism and the state of permanent war it has helped to engineer.

Britain now has no visible political home for the kind of anti-war movements that once brought millions out onto Britain’s streets in an effort to halt the war on Iraq. And for that, the British establishment and their war industries have Sir Keir Starmer to thank.

• First published in Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Michael Chessum.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.