It’s the holy trinity of excuses. Covid/Putin/Brexit. Those are the reasons life is bad. Nothing at all to do with unregulated banking / tax relief for the wealthy / corrupt politicians / bought and paid for media. Please don’t look here, look over there. We’re here to help. Everything we do is for your benefit, trust us.
These are not my words but views expressed in one comment beneath the video. Such a perfect encapsulation of the state of Britain that I have nothing else to add:
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Update: petition for the right to strike
A message from the campaign group ‘Enough is Enough’ received today:
As prices rise and wages fail to keep pace, workers everywhere are fighting back with a wave of industrial action across Britain.
But now, their rights are under attack.
The Tory government plans to introduce new anti-trade union laws that will make it much harder to organise for better conditions at work.
If these laws pass, workers in some sectors could even be forced to work against their will. This is the biggest threat to working people in decades.
We need your help to defend the #RightToStrike.
Sign and share this petition – in your union, your workplace, with your friends and family and in your community.
Enough is Enough is launching a campaign of rallies, protests and picket line demonstrations to oppose this legislation.
We see Rishi Sunak’s proposals for what they are: an attempt to shackle workers so that the corporate elite can continue to profiteer from this crisis.
Independent journalist at Declassified, Matt Kennard, recently sat down with former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to talk about the central role played by the British military and intelligence services, the liberal media – in particular the Guardian and BBC – and the Israel lobby in the undermining his tenure through a coordinated smear campaign.
Jeremy Corbyn also speaks candidly about his successor Keir Starmer, the pushback he received to halting Saudi arms sales, and the ongoing state persecution of Julian Assange.
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A full transcript of the interview with relevant links is provided below.
Jeremy Corbyn: Thanks for coming Matt. You like the gaff here?
Matt Kennard: It’s great. It’s lovely. I grew up here incidentally so I know Finsbury Park very well.
First question is about the role of the British security services and the military establishment. The role they played while you were Labour leader from 2015 to 2020. I went through in article written in 2019, all the different instances that they were briefing to the media.
Some very sort of shocking articles to read in hindsight. One, soon after you became leader, was a serving military general saying that the army would take direct action to stop you becoming Prime Minister. Were you aware of all this action by the intelligence and military establishment while you’re a leader, and what do you think it tells you about British democracy?
JC: I was obviously aware of the articles, and we had a daily press briefing from our office which summarised all the articles that were important to us. And I also noticed that it was particularly the Daily Telegraph that often carried leading stories apparently from “sources in the intelligence services” which I was attacked or undermined from. When that story came out shortly after I was elected leader in 2015 – from apparently a serving military officer – we obviously challenged it straight away, and they said it was a rogue element: it didn’t speak for anybody else etc, etc, etc. But I thought it was a sort of shot across the bow as a warning to me saying ‘look, you might have a different view of the world’ – when I’d laid out an international strategy based on peace, based on human rights, based on democracy, based on fair trade rather than the very pro-American defence and foreign policy we’d adopted. So I knew this was going to lead to attacks and it certainly did.
It also served as a warning to a lot of our supporters just what we were up against in challenging the foreign policy establishment, and the up-till-then cosy agreement between both front benches in parliament to support the same foreign policy. So yes, was I shocked? Yes. Was I surprised? No. And I tell you what was going through my mind was Harry Perkins in [A Very] British Coup. [available to watch on Channel 4]
MK: Just to ask specifically about MI5 and MI6 as well, because there was a meeting with each institution that you had – both were leaked. The evidence about the meetings was leaked to the press. Can you talk about those meetings, and talk about the leaks? And did you feel that those two institutions were also trying to undermine your leadership of the Labour Party?
JC: I’ve had some issues with them in the past on, for example, the ‘spy cops’ inquiry that’s going on at the moment. A number of MPs were clearly under police surveillance through the ’70s and ’80s. I wasn’t an MP in the ’70s, but I was clearly under some form of surveillance throughout that time. The ‘spy cops’ inquiry is still going on. Peter Hain was labelled as well because of his activities in the anti-apartheid movement and others.
And at one stage I was offered my police file if I accepted it in its redacted or limited form. They said you can have all the information that we think you should have, but you’ve got to accept that’s all you’re going to get if you receive the file.
MK: When would this be?
JC: This would be long before I became leader. This was when the issue came up of the surveillance that MPs had been put under. I refused. I said I want the whole file or nothing. I’m not prepared to accept your idea that you can edit out what information you’ve got on me.
And the ‘spy cops’ inquiry is still going on and I have a volunteer legal representative at the inquiry on my behalf who’s following everything. And that’s the policing – that’s the police ‘spy cops’ inquiry. Which, is it the same as MI5/MI6? Not exactly, but there’s clearly a link within it.
On the meetings we had, they were obviously private meetings. We obviously prepared for them and went there. We absolutely did not inform or leak about the meeting at all to anybody. And I instructed my office that this meeting had to be treated as completely confidential and it was. It was leaked by them. And it was leaked in a way to undermine that somehow or other I’d been summoned, and given a dressing down. That was not the nature of the meeting at all.
The meeting was a discussion in which they discussed various parts of the world and various issues: none of which was new to me, none of which was a surprise to me. It was about the role of ISIS. It was about the war in Syria. It was about post-Iraq war, Afghanistan and so on. They were well aware of my views on those conflicts and very well aware of what I’d said and acted about it at the time. They acknowledged I had a different view from themselves and the government and the meetings were yeah – they were pretty frank. Were they aggressive? No.
It was an intelligent discussion. Obviously it was all recorded. Obviously it was all then leaked out as a way to be deliberately undermining of me.
The same thing happened with some senior civil servants as well. There was apparently a conference of civil servants of some sort, which a briefing was given to the media by somebody that I was mentally unstable and not fit to hold a senior office. Bear in mind I’ve been an MP for 39 years. It’s abusive. It is nasty. It is obviously completely wrong.
Jon Trickett and I then raised that with the Cabinet Secretary – he [Jon Trickett] was the shadow Cabinet Office Minister – and we had a quite long and very frank discussion with the Cabinet Secretary at the time in which he apologized on behalf of the civil service; said it was nonsense, it was wrong and I was clearly not in any bad state whatsoever, and that they would leave no stone unturned in finding out who had made these comments.
Well there’s obviously a lot of stones! And these stones are still being slowly turned over and no more has been heard of it ever since then.
And so we did challenge all of this stuff, all the time, but I have to say within the totality of political argument and debate this was dramatic, of course, but it wasn’t the only thing because any studies of the print media and the broadcast media from 2015 onwards would show a steady stream of abuse against me, against my family, against the Labour Party, against people in my constituency, and so on. And we obviously challenged as much as we could all the issues that were thrown at us. That’s what we do. But you can spend your whole life rebutting what are actually ludicrous stories.
And, you know, some of my team (Seamus Milne, James Schneider and others) would often spend a whole day rebutting one crazy story about me, after another, after another. And so I always felt that we had to hit back by going round them, hence we developed a very strong social media platform. I have 2.5 million followers on Twitter. We did that through Twitter, through Facebook, through all the other social media outlets.
But it’s also designed to sap the confidence of people who were Labour supporters. And remember, that despite all this Labour Party membership went up from two hundred thousand ultimately to six hundred thousand.
And I made it my business to be travelling the country the whole time. To be putting an alternative point of view. I didn’t make an awful lot of speeches about foreign policy. Most of my work was on social justice, economic issues and environmental issues, and I attended hundreds of events all over the country all the time, as a way of enthusing and keeping our supporters together.
Now, if I may say so, this actually had a very important effect. At the start of the surprise 2017 election. It was a surprise when it was called. I mean anybody who says they knew it was coming is the talking nonsense. Nobody knew was coming. I’m not even sure Theresa May knew it was coming till the day before she announced it. That [meant] we went from 24% in the polls to 41% in the polls during a campaign.
Why? Because of broadcasting rules which meant I had to at least have my voice heard on the media, rather than the media describing what I’d said, or hadn’t said. And we were able to enthuse and mobilise our supporters.
The worst time wasn’t when I was a newly elected leader in 2015. The worst time was the latter part of 2017–2018 when the abuse on me piled on big time. After our unfortunately not quite winning the 2017 election, and then I spoke at Glastonbury, and we had a summer in which I said to the party: ‘you’ve got to be ready for an election [because] we’re demanding an election as soon as possible; the government doesn’t have majority [and] can’t govern’. And I did a whole summer of events all over the country, straight on the back of the 2017 election. It was after that that the abuse piled on and on and on. And the abuse was echoed by some elements within the Parliamentary Labour Party [PLP}.
MK: And also within the military and intelligence establishment. In that article I saw that there was a massive pick up in attacks.
I just wanted to ask one final question on that. You said, you were aware of it – you knew these leaks were happening. What does it say about British democracy that a democratically elected leader of the major opposition party is having MI5, MI6 and the military briefing against him in the media? And that’s what we know about, there might have been other things going on. How worried should we be about the implications of that for British democracy?
JC: We should be very worried about it. First of all, I’m not the only leader that’s ever been briefed against by the intelligence services. Harold Wilson, who had different politics to me in many ways, but nevertheless was under the greatest suspicion by the intelligence services, and I very well remember the open talk about a coup against Harold Wilson in the late 1960s when he was prime minister. It’s recorded both in his book The Governance of Britain and also particularly in the diaries of Tony Benn and Barbara Castle. It’s worth looking at those things. And then Wilson was very different to me. He supported the Americans in Vietnam, probably very reluctantly, but he did, and he kept nuclear weapons, and so on.
The question of the accountability of a security services is always an interesting one. So when the Select Committee system was set up in Britain in 1970, there was a Parliamentary Select Committee appointed for all government departments, and then there was the Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliament. Now all other Select Committees, in those days members were appointed on the basis of party alignment – so there was a mirror of the strength of parties in parliament on each Select Committee – and the Chair of the Select Committee was elected by the members and obviously a Select Committee is quite powerful because it can summon any witnesses; it has quasi-legal powers in doing that, except the Intelligence Committee, which is appointed by the Prime Minister and is chaired by an appointee of the Prime Minister and still is. It’s been excluded from all the democratic processes.
Now I used to do lecturing for the civil service college on parliamentary structures, parliamentary accountability. And I enjoyed doing those lectures because it was very interesting having a discussion, usually with younger newly recruited civil servants, about the concept of democratic accountability, of public services, and where parliament fits into all this. And I’ve made a lot of statements, contributions, and so on, both at those lectures and in debates in parliament and so on, about the need for accountability of the services.
And then the question came up later of a War Powers Act, which – we drafted a War Powers Bill – Shami Chakrabarti wrote it. [It’s] very good. And the immediate question was: would this include special operations? In other words, I was saying that there had to be parliamentary approval for overseas operations by the British military, which is actually pretty normal in most democratic societies; even the USA has a as a War Powers Act. And they said, ‘well would this include special operations?’ I said, ‘yeah, of course, it would.’
Emily Thornbury supported me on that, and she raised the same question. The message I was being given was you’re overstepping the mark: you are an elected politician, but there’s a whole area of the state that you really should not be in charge of and should not be questioning. And I did ask for my own file. I’m still waiting.
MK: It wasn’t just the UK intelligence and military and political establishment that was that was working to stop you becoming Prime Minister. You must have been aware that when Mike Pompeo came in 2019 (US Secretary of State, then formerly the CIA director), he was recorded in a private meeting saying, he would do, or the US would do their quote “level best” to stop you becoming Prime Minister. What did you think when you read that? I mean that is such blatant interference in the democratic process in Britain. Not only that, it was barely covered in the media, compared to interference from other countries.
JC: We have a supine media in this country. The British self-confidence of saying we’ve got the best media in the world, the best broadcasting in the world, the best democracy in the world, is nonsense. Utter complete nonsense.
We have a media that’s supine. That self-censors. That accepts D-notices. Doesn’t challenge them. And, for the vast majority of the mainstream media, haven’t lifted so much as a little finger in support or defence of Julian Assange. And so the idea that we’ve got this brave British media; they’re always exposing the truth: it’s utter nonsense.
Even the liberal supposedly left-leading papers like the Guardian; where are they in all of this? Nowhere. Where were they kicking off about Pompeo’s remarks? Nowhere. We obviously kicked off about it, protested and so on and so on, and we’re just told it was private briefing, etc, etc, etc. It wasn’t. It was a quite deliberate message.
As one that has been a very avid student of political developments around the world – I’ve lived to see Allende elected, I’ve lived to see Allende killed, I’ve lived to see the coup in Chile, but I’ve also lived to see democracy return to Chile thanks to the bravery of the Chilean people.
And so he wasn’t alone – Pompeo in these remarks – Benjamin Netanyahu also waded in on this, and said that I must not become Prime Minister. Sorry, who has been in Benjamin Netanyahu to decide who the British Prime Minister should be?
It’s not for me to decide who the Israeli Prime Minister should be, or the American President, or anybody else for that matter. So who is he to make that kind of comment? Again, the British media just lapped it up.
Frankly many of the so-called investigative reporters in the British media are just pathetic.
MK: I agree with that.
I wanted to just [ask] this final question about this military, intelligence, Pompeo, Netanyahu theme – you mentioned Allende, and that was a CIA-backed coup which overthrew Chilean democracy in 1973. You have examples of the US-Israel killing people around the world that they don’t like.
Were you at any times worried for your safety? You were you were a kind of historic problem for the establishment.
JC: That’s past tense!
MK: [laughing] Yeah, well you obviously still are, but I mean when you were a leader, and especially after 2017 when it became a lot more real for these different interests, you were a threat; a real threat; a historic threat. Were you were you ever worried about your safety and did you have any sort of conversations about that kind of that kind of stuff?
JC: I’m probably a very difficult person to work with, because I hate being put in a silo and been cut off, And so the arguments in my office were constant about my safety.
I was more worried about the safety of my sons, my family, and so on, and my team, than anything else, and I always made sure that they were very well looked after and protected. I think it’s very easy for any public representative to cocoon themselves and cut themselves off from the people that have elected them in the first place. Very easy. You can always say security. I remember Bill Clinton once saying if I listen to all the security advice I’d never get up in the morning. I’d never do anything.
And so I continued with all the travelling and so on that I did, and most of it was by public transport; very few long car journeys, mostly quite short car journeys; and I’d walk around my constituency in the normal way. People in the local Labour Party and others got alarmed if they saw me walking around on my own, so they would spot me and then join me to look after me. Nice solidarity. And then on journeys obviously I had somebody with me. Did I feel for my own safety? Not really because I think if you start deciding that every corner you walk around somebody’s going to attack you, then you know you’re never going to do anything.
Did I receive some physical attacks? Yeah, and there’s been two court cases taken against the individuals. And is it a danger to be in public life? Yeah, I mean you’ve seen the MPs that have been killed, and you’ve seen the dangers that people face. But you cannot just become obsessed with your own safety and security. You’ve got to be out there with people. And so I was never prepared to be cocooned and that was it. I understand the tensions this created for my team around me because they were genuinely very worried for me. They were more worried for me then I was worried for myself, and they kept telling me that. But I’d rather be with ordinary people; chatting to people on the streets, cafes, etc.
I don’t go to pubs because I’m not a drinker, so I’m the world’s worst drinker. I don’t drink so no point. But do I feel under threat? Actually, you’re going around the country the number of people that say hostile comments or abuse is very, very few. On trains we used to sit together at one end of the train, all of us, because we – a small team, would be accompanying me when we’re travelling around the country – and actually there would be a sort of steady stream of people coming up the train saying, ‘can I have a word about this, that, the other’. So train journeys weren’t the least bit relaxing, but it was a nice way of meeting people.
MK: I just wanted to move on now to talk about Israel, because you were the first pro-Palestinian leader of a major party for a long, long time, which was controversial.
JC: Not sure I was the first one.
MK: Actually that’s a good question. Was Michael Foot noticeably…?
JC: I don’t recall Michael Foot ever saying very much about it, so I’m not sure on that one. Harold Wilson was certainly pro-Israel in the sense of supporting Israel in Six Day War and so on. And all others have been that.
My view is that I support the Palestinian people and to end the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. And what we had in our manifestos was full recognition of an independent State of Palestine.
MK: But in 2017, Al Jazeera released an undercover documentary which was quite revelatory about Labour Friends of Israel [LFI] particularly. They’d recorded a senior official in Labour Friends of Israel outside a pub saying that when Israel gets bad press they send us lines to take publicly. So effectively, I mean, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that it’s acting as a front for the Israeli embassy in some ways.
You, your party, the Labour Party took no action against LFI in the aftermath of that. There was action taken against an Israeli diplomat [Shai Masot] who said that he wanted to take down Alan Duncan: he was expelled from the country. Now the Labour Party took no action. Why was that, and do you regret that? And what do you think about the existence of something like LFI within a nominally progressive party?
JC: I’m not opposed to there being ‘friends’ of particular countries, or places all around the world within the party. I think that’s a fair part of the mosaic of democratic politics. What I am concerned about is the funding that goes with it, and the apparently very generous funding that Labour Friends of Israel gets from the, I presume, the Israeli government.
We did actually protest about the contents of the revelations by the Al Jazeera documentary. We did raise this. Interestingly, many of these allegations were then parroted against me by people in the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Friends of Israel group within the Parliamentary Labour Party.
But I also got a lot of support from obviously the Palestinian people. One would assume they would support on this and I had meetings with the Palestinian ambassador and so on, as I also met the Israeli ambassador on a number of occasions. And we then kick back against it – but I also got interestingly a lot of support from people in Israel, on the left in Israel, from the peace movement and human rights groups in Israel.
Should the party have taken more robust action against Labour Friends of Israel for its behaviour? Yes. Remember, this was at a time when many of the senior bureaucracy of the Labour Party were actively undermining me, and we now discover through the leaked documents which have been presented to the Forde Inquiry exactly what the extent of that was. And so did we underestimate this before I became leader? Yes, we did. We did underestimate it, and that is obviously something that I think any democratic party needs to think about. If you have officialdom in a party, you expect at the very least the best of civil servant standards in their behaviour. We didn’t get that.
MK: I just wanted to ask one question about the anti-semitism crisis within the Labour Party during your leadership, which was one of the most intense media campaigns I’ve ever witnessed and I’m nearly 40. So I think that probably goes for people who are older than me. How – this is a difficult question – but how much do you think that anti-semitism crisis was a result of your pro-Palestinian political position?
JC: Very largely that is the case.
I have spent my life fighting racism in any form, in any place whatsoever. My parents spent their formative years fighting the rise of Nazism in Britain and that is what I’ve been brought up doing. And when in the 1970s the National Front were on the march in Britain, I was one of the organisers of the big Wood Green demonstration to try to stop the National Front marching through. And I was part of the campaign against racism at the time of the rise the anti-Nazi league and everybody else, and we worked with AJEX, Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women. We worked with the Jewish community on that, as we worked with all the other communities: Bengali community, Afro-Caribbean community, all of them on this. We saw the fight against racism as one that affects all communities.
And somehow or other, I was accused of being anti-semitic. The allegations against me were foul, dishonest and utterly disgusting, and appalling from people who should know better and do know better. People that have known me for 40 years never once complained about anything I’d ever said or done in terms of anti-racism until I became leader of the Labour Party; interesting coincidence of timing. Disgusting allegations, which obviously we sought to rebut at all times, and I’ll be forever grateful for the support given by Jewish socialists and many Jewish members of the Labour Party all over the country, and of course, the local Jewish community in my constituency. It was personal. It was vile. It was disgusting, and it remains so. I will always spend my life defending people against racist attacks.
Look, anti-semitism was used historically against the Jewish people: Jewish people expelled from Europe; expelled from Britain; returned during the Cromwellian period; and then the anti-semitism that was written large into literature, into history, into culture, into life in Britain, was then exploited big time in France in Germany, and in Britain, and then in Germany in the worst case, and that ended up with the Holocaust. So we’ve got to be very well aware of where racism leads people to and I am very well aware of that.
MK: I agree, which makes it even more depraved how it’s been instrumentalised as an issue to destroy critics of the Israeli state. And can I just ask you quickly about that, because it was a particularly extreme in your case, but you see it again and again with people who are supporting the Palestinians. That this is a weapon which is used. They’re accused of being anti-semitic and it’s a very hard thing to fight back from because it’s used as a slur. Can you just talk a little bit about that, the tactic…?
JC: The tactic is that you say that somebody is intrinsically anti-semitic and it sticks, and then the media parrot it and repeat it the whole time, and then the abuse appears on social media, the abusive letters appear, the abusive phone calls appear, and all of that. And it’s very horrible and very nasty and is designed to be very isolating, and designed to also take up all of your energies in rebutting these vile allegations, which obviously we did. But it tends to distract away from the fundamental message about peace, about justice, about social justice, about economy, and all of that.
And I have been nine times to Israel and Palestine in my life. I’ve met many people in Israel. I supported Mordecai Vanunu who was put in prison after he’d revealed Israel was making nuclear weapons. And I have many meetings with people in human rights groups, and so on, in Israel.
Am I critical of Israel’s occupation the West Bank? Absolutely. Am I critical of the encirclement of Gaza? Absolutely. Of the settlement policy. And I will continue to hold that position and so some of the allegations then become amazing. I mean I was accused of condoning anti-semitic behaviour because I wrote a forward to the re-publication of a book on imperialism that was first published in 1903.
MK: I think it surprised a lot of people that within the media, the Guardian was at the forefront of the attacks on you. Did that surprise you, and what does it tell us about the Guardian’s role in British society and the British media?
JC: I have absolutely no illusions in the Guardian. None whatsoever. My mum brought me up to read the Guardian. She said it’s a good paper you can trust. You can’t.
After their treatment of me, I do not trust a Guardian. There are good people who work in the Guardian. There are some brilliant writers in the Guardian, but as a paper it is a tool of the British establishment. It’s a mainstream establishment paper. So as long as everyone in the left gets it clear: when you buy the Guardian you’re buying an establishment paper; when you buy the Telegraph you’re buying an establishment paper; Mail and so on. So once you’ve got past that hurdle, you can then develop a critical thinking about anything. There are many articles in the Guardian I like, and agree with, and support, but as a paper I’m not very surprised.
I had a meeting with the Guardian editorial team during the 2015 leadership campaign. It was very interesting. I was invited to the Guardian which has a sort of daily meeting (I think it’s daily may be weekly) of all the staff, who talk about news agendas and what’s going on, and so on; and then a smaller meeting of the senior editorial team. And so the meeting with the entirety of the staff was fine – a lot of young people were there. It was interesting. It was funny. It was zany, very pleasant. I was very well received, and they said, ‘okay what’s your pitch to be leader of the Labour Party?’ and I set out: anti-austerity and social justice and challenging economic inequality, and environmental politics, and international peace, and justice and so on. Some of the questions were quite tough. Fine, that’s okay. It was very respectful. It was very nice meeting.
We then had a meeting with the editorial team – a bit different. It was like I was being warned. Like I was being warned by this team of actually incredibly self-important people. It was a bit like the Today programme, which at its worst thinks it’s running the whole world; at its best is a very investigative programme. Guardian is a bit the same. And so was I surprised? No, and I’ve had to live with the behaviour of the Guardian ever since.
But the Guardian is in a unique position, because it is the paper most read by Labour Party members, is the most important in forming opinion on the centre and left in British politics and they are very well aware of that, which is why I think an analysis of the Guardian’s treatment of the time that I was leader of the party needs to be made. Because they, and the BBC had more unsourced reporting of anti-semitic criticisms surrounding me than any other paper, including the Mail, the Telegraph and The Sun.
The only paper that gave what can really call moderately fair coverage was the Daily Mirror actually. The Daily Mirror didn’t always agree with me, and said so, and would make public criticisms, but also did accept articles from me, and did accept the stuff that we sent them, and they were quite good at reporting the sort of social justice campaigns that that we put forward.
The Daily Express, which is in the same stable as the Mirror now – but I had one let’s just finish on this point – a fascinating evening: I was invited to a randomly-selected invitation-only event of readers of the Express and the Mirror in a room together, where I would take questions from them. Anyway, you could sort of very quickly tell who read the Express and who read the Mirror from the questions that came up. They weren’t seated separately, or anything like that, you could pick it up straight away. But it was actually quite good meeting. It was quite robust. I mean some of the Express questions were a bit, well, I thought slightly off-the-wall actually. But you know it was okay. I don’t mind that kind of – I enjoy that kind of political debate. I’ll take that. That’s okay. I mean MPs should be challenged. Political leaders should be challenged. Accountability is important. You can’t cut yourself off.
MK: I just wanted to ask about Julian Assange, because that also relates to the Guardian. Because obviously he was an early collaborator with the Guardian and then they’ve now turned on him massively – they’ve run a campaign against him effectively for many years now.
Can you just talk about the significance of Julian Assange being in Belmarsh maximum security prison for three years now? We’re on the eve probably of Priti Patel’s decision on whether to extradite him to the US to spend his life in a supermax prison in the desert there. What do you think Julian Assange has given to the world, and why do you think the establishment here, and the establishment in the US, is so keen to silence him forever, or leave him dead?
JC: Nelson Mandela was put into maximum security life imprisonment after Rivonia treason trial of 1964. All through the 60s and the 70s, into much later on – 80s even – Nelson Mandela was a lonely figure supported by a few people around Africa and around the world. He was not a popular iconic figure at all. He became so later on. He became the iconic figure in the fight against apartheid, and when he was released and came to British parliament, there were some amazing speeches from people who had apparently been incredibly active in the apartheid movement, but somehow or other I’d missed their participation in all the anti-apartheid activities I’ve been to. You know how it goes. That’s all right.
Julian Assange. What’s his crime? What is his crime? Julian Assange managed to collect information on what the US was doing; US foreign policy was doing; its illegal activities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and much else. In the great traditions of a journalist who never reveals their sources – very important – and he was pursued because of this. And as we know, eventually sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, but was unable to get out of it.
We then discovered that all that time in the Ecuadorian embassy, there were the charges against him from Sweden, which were eventually dropped, and there was the surveillance of him by apparently an independent security company, but in reality, it was working for the Americans.
And he was initially welcomed by the Guardian, supported by the Guardian. The Guardian published all of his stuff, and then dropped him. And have continued to drop him. And I have been on many of the demonstrations outside the courts in Britain over the last few months while he’s been his case has been brought up again and again and again about removal to the USA or not. And there’s huge numbers of media there from all over the world. One day I did interviews for about 15 broadcast medias all over the world. Where were the British? None. Not one, apart from social media. Not one.
So what is it about the British media that they cannot bring themselves to the biggest story about freedom-to-know in the world today, on their very doorstep. They could walk from their offices to the high court and get the story. No. And it says everything about the supine nature of the mainstream media in Britain.
It’s not surprising that mistrust of the print media is the highest in Europe in Britain. That the sales of all newspapers are falling very rapidly, and people make their own news through social media, which has its pitfalls and has its dangers.
And so Julian Assange is now in a maximum security prison. He’s not convicted of anything. There is no unspent conviction that he’s got to serve time in prison for. And in Belmarsh – I’ve been there to see prisoners in the past – is a horrible, horrible place, and he’s there with all the dangers to his health that goes with that. And so, yes, I do support Julian Assange, and I was very pleased when Jean–Luc Mélenchon made a very interesting statement yesterday that should the left candidates win a majority in the French national assembly he’d be welcome there.
Also Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the President of Mexico, raised the voice in support of him. Did try and persuade President Trump, just before he left office, to drop the case against Assange. And when I was in Mexico in January of this year, I took part in the mañaneras, the daily press conference that the President holds, which is quite dramatic affair, it lasts about two hours and there’s videos and films, and chat, and discussion, and so on: it’s a different form of government – and he raised the question again of Julian Assange, and made a very passionate appeal saying that Mexico would welcome Julian Assange, and would give him citizenship if he required it.
MK: Sir Keir Starmer was in your shadow cabinet and then quit during the what’s been called dubs ‘the chicken coup’. He was then reappointed.
JC: He wasn’t in the shadow cabinet at the time of the coup, he came later.
MK: I thought he was.
JC: He was a spokesperson on immigration issues, and then joined later on.
MK: So he was your shadow Brexit Secretary, which was a senior role within your shadow cabinet. Were you aware of his politics which have been evinced since he became leader in 2020, and has his move of the Labour Party to the right shocked you?
JC: I appointed Keir Starmer to the shadow cabinet after my re-election as leader of the party in 2016. Remember I was first elected with 248 thousand votes. I was re-elected less than a year later with over 300 000 votes. And I explained to the Parliamentary Labour Party – not that they wanted to hear it – that I actually had a mandate from the party members. Most of the Parliamentary Labour Party believed the leader of the party should be selected by the Parliamentary Labour Party, as historically it was the case.
I wanted to reach out within the parliamentary party, so I appointed what I believe to be a balanced shadow cabinet, and expected everybody to work together within that shadow cabinet, and to behave in a proper manner. I appointed Keir Starmer to the shadow of Brexit position because of his legal knowledge and skills, and the importance of saying to the parliamentary labour party, ‘look, I understand the makeup of the PLP, this is why I’ve appointed this broad and diverse shadow cabinet.’ Did it make it easy to manage? No. Was there lots of debates within the shadow cabinet? You bet there were.
I didn’t stop those debates. I encouraged those debates and said look we’ve got to move forward on this – and come back to your early question in a second – but I have to say as we developed this very difficult position over Brexit, where we had a 60:40 split of party supporters voting remain to leave, and we had the view that we had to somehow or other bring people together – I tried to unite people around the social and economic message saying if you’re poor and up against it, however you voted, you need a Labour government that’s going to redistribute wealth and power.
Was I close to Keir Starmer? No, I’d never met him before he became a member of parliament. I obviously knew who he was. He’s a neighbouring MP. Had we had much contact? No, not really, and our conversations when he was in the shadow cabinet were largely about the minutiae of Brexit various agreements, and the many meetings that we had in Brussels with officials there including Michel Barnier. We met him on a number of occasions. So beyond that, apart from occasional chats about Arsenal football club, that was about it.
Was I aware of everything about his past? No, not really. Should I have been? Yeah, but then there are so many things one could and should be aware of that one isn’t. I noticed it when he stood for election for leader of the party, he was very clear that he accepted the 2019 manifesto and its contents, and put forward his 10 points there. Those seem to have been parked now, shall we say.
And then, the response to the HRC report, which I gave which I thought was reasonable and balanced, was met with the immediate suspension of my membership, which the media were told before I was. First I heard about it was when a journalist stopped me in the street as I was leaving the Brickworks Community Centre (it’s a community centre just near here) which I’m a trustee of, and I was told my membership been suspended, and I thought the journalist [was playing] a joke; he was winding me up. I said, ‘what?’ He said, ‘no you’ve been suspended.’ I said, ‘No, no, what are you talking about.’ But it was true.
Anyway, I obviously appealed against that and won that appeal unanimously, reinstated unanimously, endorsed by the NEC [Labour’s National Executive Committee] unanimously, and then my membership of the parliamentary party was suspended, and there’s been no process taken against me by the parliamentary party.
It makes my constituents very angry. They say look Jeremy we voted for you as our Labour MP so why…? We’ve got confidence in you. We have no problem with you. We don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, and we welcome your work as our local MP. And I’m very proud to represent the people of this community.
So was I angry about it. Yeah, of course, but I have always in politics tried to keep off the personal attack and so on and so on. It’s very tempting, but I remember saying this during the 2019 election. I said look it’s really tempting for me to have a go at Boris Johnson personally, he had a go at me personally, and it can be quite funny, it can be quite witty for the first time. Second time I think, oh god, here we go again. Third time, nobody’s listening, nobody’s interested. Politicians having to go to each other, calling each other names: it doesn’t get anybody anywhere. It don’t put bread on the table. And so it is important that we campaign on political points and political principles.
MK: Will you stand as an independent at the next election if it doesn’t get resolved?
JC: Look, I am focused on getting the whip back at the present time.
MK: So what should be the major issue in terms of UK foreign policy right now is the critical support we provide to Saudi Arabia as it launches – what it has launched since 2015 – one of the most brutal wars in modern times, which has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. It’s a brutal air war, full of war crimes including attacks on hospitals, schools, but also a naval blockade which has strangled the country and pushed millions of children to the brink of starvation.
Interestingly there was a vote in parliament, which was brought by your leadership in 2016, where a hundred of your own MPs either voted against it or abstained in calling for the withdrawal of UK support for Saudi Arabia. So could you just talk a bit about why you think there’s such a consensus across the establishment – and I’m including parts of the Labour Party in that – of support for Saudi Arabia, which is indefensible, not only because of the immediate war, but also it’s an extremist Wahhabi dictatorship which exports terrorism around the world and extremism. Why is there this consensus in the British establishment that we must support Saudi Arabia?
JC: Saudi Arabia and Britain have a very close economic, political and military relationship. It’s not new, it goes right back to the establishment of Saudi Arabia, which was a British invention in the beginning. I mean you need to read the whole history of the whole of the Middle East to realise the malevolent influence of British colonial policies within the whole region. That is well documented, but needs to be better understood. And I might just say, as an aside, one of my passions is to improve history teaching in the totality of our education system to understand the brutality of colonialism and imperialism.
Saudi Arabia is a big recipient of arms from western countries: USA, Britain, France and so on. Massive. Obviously, incredibly wealthy because of historically high oil prices going back to the 70s, and indeed their big time wealth grew over the big hike in oil prices in 73–74; the world oil crisis at that time. Major buyer of British arms. The contract that Tony Blair signed with them was massive. 2 billion, I think is the figure that was total at that time, which was massive at that time and it’s continued ever since.
Some of us have been very concerned about human rights in Saudi Arabia, and as a officer of the all-party human rights group, we’ve had many discussions about Saudi Arabia; about the executions; about discrimination; about treatment of migrant workers; about its export of terrorism around the world; and in particular the war on Yemen. And we are fuelling the war on Yemen, and indeed there are employees of British companies working in Saudi Arabia that are directing the bombing of Yemen. And Yemen is now, along with Afghanistan, the world’s worst humanitarian disaster: cholera, typhus, etc, etc. All these wholly preventable conditions [are] now rife amongst children and people in the Yemen.
And so I thought we had to have a much stronger policy on this, and so I pushed that we as a party make a declaration that we would cease all arms trade to Saudi Arabia, and I intervened to make sure that the Saudi delegation would not be welcomed as observers of the Labour Party conference. There was big pushback against that by a lot of people, and I said, ‘no, whilst they are bombing Yemen and we’re opposed to arms sales to Saudi Arabia, that stands.’
I then propose that we have an opposition day debate, where the opposition gets to choose the subject for debate and on a votable motion. It cannot be binding on a government, because it’s an opposition day motion, but it nevertheless is an important way of MPs being able to express an opinion. So I put this motion forward, which would be to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and I met with the most extraordinary levels of lobbying and opposition from Labour MPs who said, ‘it’s damaging jobs, it’s damaging major British companies: British Aerospace and others, and you cannot go ahead with this, this will cause consternation and damage within our communities and constituencies.’
I said, ‘look, I fully understand the employment implications over a long period on this, but if we’re serious about human rights, and we are, and you all are apparently, then this has to be the policy: we suspend arms sales and we protect those jobs in order to convert those industries something else.’ It does require a very big public intervention, and I made that clear to the unions, to Unite, GMB and others on that – I have to say I got a better reception in Unite than the other unions on this, but nevertheless there were obvious concerns, unions have got to represent their members. I get that. But, I also get that we are killing children in the Yemen, and so I put this policy forward on an opposition day and it was the biggest rebellion ever against my time as leader of the party.
I was appalled, saddened, disappointed by that, and it just shows how deep the pressure is of the arms trade, both on British politics, and it’s the motor force behind it all: the motor force of foreign policy is often driven by the interests of those that export arms. Look at who funds the think tanks; look at who sets up the seminars; look at who places the articles in papers saying there’s a big tension building up here. Yeah, there is a big tension in Yemen. Yes, there is a whole political history in Yemen: South Yemen, etc, Aden and so on. There’s all that there. Is there a tension with Iran? Yes, there is. We all understand that.
How do you resolve these tensions? Do you throw arms at it? Do you start another war somewhere? Do you then promote terrorism around the region knowing full well all that money spent on those arms by any one country is money not spent on schools, not spent on hospitals, not spent on housing, not spent on feeding people? The power of the arms lobby is absolutely massive in this country, in the United States, France, and in Russia, and in China, and so we have to think what kind of world would like to create.
I would have thought covid would have taught us that the danger to all of us is contagious diseases, poverty and hunger, and environmental disaster. That’s what the danger is. So why don’t we wind down the rhetoric, wind up the peace, and start supporting peace initiatives, and peace processes. All wars end in a conference. All wars end in some kind of agreement. Why don’t we cut out the middle phase and go to the end?
MK: We started Declassified in 2019 because we felt there was a lack of serious, rigorous reporting on UK foreign policy. Can you talk about the significance of the burgeoning independent media sector in Britain, and how important this is for the future of progressive politics?
JC:Declassified is very important because what you’re doing is exposing the truths. Exposing the truths about stuff that people don’t want us to know. And I think it’s important that we do that. It’s also important to challenge the way in which the mainstream media form our thinking, and it’s the growth of the technology of independent media that is so valuable to all of us that are more radical, more free-thinking, around the world.
As a young man, I was very politically active; indeed have been all my life. And I would labour the whole night through to hand print on a duplicator maybe 5 000 leaflets, and give them out the next day, and we thought, ‘wow we’re making impact!’ Social media lets you get a message to millions within seconds, or tens of millions within seconds, so everybody becomes a journalist, everybody becomes a reporter. So you then have to sift through the values or otherwise behind that, and some of it can be nonsense, some of it can be abusive and so on. But having an alternative media is very important.
So through the Peace and Justice Project we’ve set up some news clubs around the country, and these news clubs are people coming together who, yeah, they’re sceptical of both their local media regional media and national and international media, and setting up the dynamic of an alternative media. So we now have a lot of actually quite effective, robust independent media sources out on social media. They’re good, interesting. They need to cooperate together as much as they can. So that when we have big events on, we all share the same platform.
And I think it’s the development of this independent media that is so important and so critical because they can mobilise people. They can bring people together at very short notice. And I think had the independent media been as big and successful as it is now in 2003, on the eve of the outbreak of the Iraq War, we would have had even more people on those huge demonstrations. We would have been able to mobilise people in more countries, in a more effective way, particularly in the United States.
Having grown up observing the politics of the USA and this country, and being very much a part of it all, I never thought I’d see the day when somebody who calls himself a socialist would come within a whisker of winning the democrat nomination to the presidency in Bernie Sanders. How did that happen? Activism, social media and a rebirth of the whole idea of socialism.
So if I make just one last word, many people around the world call themselves socialists, and think about it and act in that kind of way. Many people around the world don’t realise they’re socialists and activists in the same way, and so through our project I don’t want us just to be defensive in saving, preventing damage, and so on and so on, to various very important services. I want us to be proactive. So we’re writing a book called Why We Are Socialists and we’re inviting anyone to contribute to it in no more than 500 words. 500 words maximum. Absolutely. 501 words don’t get printed. 500 yes. 499 definitely. And we’ve had hundreds of submissions. They’re really interesting.
People that come at it from their own personal experience. Come at it through industrial disputes, environmental campaigns, international peace campaigns, or come at it from studying history, and a more intellectual way of doing things about a sustainable world, and so on. It’s absolutely fascinating and we’re putting this book together. We’ll publish it later this year and that is, I think, the way forward. Get people to think critically for themselves. We’ve never been in an era but it’s easier to find things out. We’ve never been in an era but it’s harder to know.
Click here to read Matt Kennard’s article based around the same interview and published by Declassified on June 22nd.
There’s a chap called Tobias Ellwood who’s spent the past week doggedly promoting his latest idea to save Western civilization. “From a military perspective,” Ellwood explained during a recent speaking engagement, it’s never been more urgent to impose a “humanitarian sea corridor” off the coast of Ukraine. This would involve an outright naval intervention by NATO in the Black Sea — with the objective being to prevent Russia from seizing control of the strategically important city of Odesa. Perhaps upon commencement of this mission, Ellwood suggested, listless denizens of “The West” will finally come to appreciate the existential stakes of the conflict now before us, and “accept that we are actually in a 1938 period, but actually worse.” The double “actually” was presumably included for maximum emphasis.
Notably, Ellwood is not some random crank. He is “actually” a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom, and the chairman of the impressively-titled Defence Select Committee. In that latter capacity, he seeks to exert influence over the Defence policy of Her Majesty’s Government, which is currently led by his Conservative Party colleague Boris Johnson.
This is the opening paragraph of an alarming report by American independent journalist Michael Tracey who managed to receive an invite to a private event recently hosted by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which describes itself as “the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank”. The same piece continues:
During the private event, hosted by a Think Tank which unilaterally and hilariously decreed his comments “off the record,” Ellwood described the plan he envisaged for how this new phase of military intervention in Ukraine would unfold. It should be up to the UK to “create a coalition of the willing,” he declared — borrowing the terminology once used for countries that participated in the US invasion of Iraq, which memorably included the UK. Ellwood evidently detected no ignominy at all in this historical association.
On the subject of Ukraine, Ellwood’s view is that the UK and Europe must stop waiting around for the US to get its act together, and instead proactively initiate the kind of muscular, unapologetic military action that is currently needed against Russia. The lesson of last year’s Afghanistan withdrawal, Ellwood charged — as well as Joe Biden’s purported Ukraine-related dithering — has been to “expose America to be very, very hesitant indeed.” He explained: “I see the United States almost catching up with where, from a military perspective, a vanguard may actually go.”
Note that Ellwood’s plan certainly does not assume that the US would somehow just sit out whatever forthcoming war the UK may instigate. With the US as the real firepower behind NATO, that’s obviously not feasible. Instead, his idea would simply be for the UK to place itself at the “vanguard” of precipitating the new military action, after which the US would inevitably be engulfed as well. Time is of the essence, Ellwood contends, because China has ominously joined with Russia to set about “dismantling the liberal world order” — a development Ellwood believes will elevate the conflict to a magnitude on par with the Peloponnesian War of Greek antiquity. “China will exploit the war in Ukraine to hasten America’s inevitable decline,” he warned.
Out of these ashes, at least according to Ellwood’s apparent calculus, will rise the UK: “If we want Putin to fail,” Ellwood declared, “then we need to conclude this in months. We need to vow to press forward.” He added, “I underline how critical it is: if Odesa falls, then I’m afraid it’s going to be very, very difficult for us to turn this around.” (Note his use of the pronoun “us,” as though it should be understood that the UK is already an official combatant.)
Click here to read Michael Tracey’s full report entitled “The UK is Trying to Drag the US into World War III” published on April 14th on substack.
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Michael Tracey is certainly not alone in raising concerns over the looming threat of what was until now considered absolutely unthinkable – the prospect of World War III and nuclear annihilation. Noam Chomsky recently gave two interviews and in the first he also addresses the matter head-on:
Right at this moment, you hear heroic statements by people in Congress or foreign policy specialists saying we should set up a no-fly zone, for example, to defend Ukraine. Fortunately, there’s one peacekeeping force in the government. It’s called the Pentagon. They are so far vetoing the heroic statements by congressmen showing off for their constituents about how brave they are, pointing out that a no-fly zone not only means shooting down Russian planes, but it means attacking Russian anti-aircraft installations inside Russia. Then what happens? Well, actually, the latest polls show about 35 percent of Americans are listening to the heroic speeches from Congress and advisors. Thirty-five percent say they think we should enter into the war in Ukraine, even if it threatens to lead to a nuclear war. The end of everything. The country that launches the first strike will be destroyed.
Continuing:
I don’t know if you saw it. But a couple of days ago, there was a very important interview by one of the most astute and respected figures in current U.S. diplomatic circles, Ambassador Chas Freeman. A very important interview [which is also embedded below]. He pointed out that the current U.S. policy, which he bitterly criticized, is to “fight Russia to the last Ukrainian,” and he gave us an example: President Biden’s heroic statement about the war criminal Putin—[Biden’]s counterpart as a war criminal. And Freeman pointed out the obvious: the U.S. is setting things up so as to destroy Ukraine and to lead to a terminal war.
In this world, there are two options with regard to Ukraine. As we know, one option is a negotiated settlement, which will offer Putin an escape, an ugly settlement. Is it within reach? We don’t know; you can only find out by trying and we’re refusing to try. But that’s one option. The other option is to make it explicit and clear to Putin and the small circle of men around him that you have no escape, you’re going to go to a war crimes trial no matter what you do. Boris Johnson just reiterated this: sanctions will go on no matter what you do. What does that mean? It means go ahead and obliterate Ukraine and go on to lay the basis for a terminal war.
Those are the two options: and we’re picking the second and praising ourselves for heroism and doing it: fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.
Click here to read the full article entitled “Noam Chomsky on How To Prevent World War III” published by Current Affairs magazine on April 13th based on an interview with editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson.
Here is ‘The Grayzone’ interview with retired senior diplomat Chas Freeman released on March 22nd that Noam Chomsky references above:
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The following day, Chomsky was interviewed by The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill who asked whether there is any aspect of the response by the US, Nato or the European Union that he believes is appropriate. Chomsky replied:
I think that support for Ukraine’s effort to defend itself is legitimate. If it is, of course, it has to be carefully scaled, so that it actually improves their situation and doesn’t escalate the conflict, to lead to destruction of Ukraine and possibly beyond sanctions against the aggressor, or appropriate just as sanctions against Washington would have been appropriate when it invaded Iraq, or Afghanistan, or many other cases. Of course, that’s unthinkable given U.S. power and, in fact, the first few times it has been done — the one time it has been done — the U.S. simply shrugged its shoulders and escalated the conflict. That was in Nicaragua when the U.S. was brought to the World Court, condemned for unlawful use of force or to pay reparations, responded by escalating the conflict. So it’s unthinkable in the case of the U.S., but it would be appropriate.
However, I still think it’s not quite the right question. The right question is: What is the best thing to do to save Ukraine from a grim fate, from further destruction? And that’s to move towards a negotiated settlement.
There are some simple facts that aren’t really controversial. There are two ways for a war to end: One way is for one side or the other to be basically destroyed. And the Russians are not going to be destroyed. So that means one way is for Ukraine to be destroyed.
The other way is some negotiated settlement. If there’s a third way, no one’s ever figured it out. So what we should be doing is devoting all the things you mentioned, if properly shaped, but primarily moving towards a possible negotiated settlement that will save Ukrainians from further disaster. That should be the prime focus.
Chomsky continued:
We can’t look into the minds of Vladimir Putin and the small clique around him; we can speculate, but can’t do much about it. We can, however, look at the United States and we can see that our explicit policy — explicit — is rejection of any form of negotiations. The explicit policy goes way back, but it was given a definitive form in September 2021 in the September 1st joint policy statement that was then reiterated and expanded in the November 10th charter of agreement.
And if you look at what it says, it basically says no negotiations. What it says is it calls for Ukraine to move towards what they called an enhanced program for entering NATO, which kills negotiations; — this is before the invasion notice — an increase in the dispatch of advanced weapons to Ukraine, more military training, the joint military exercises, [and] weapons placed on the border. We can’t be sure, but it’s possible that these strong statements may have been a factor in leading Putin and his circle to move from warning to direct invasion. We don’t know. But as long as that policy is guiding the United States, it’s basically saying, to quote Ambassador Chas Freeman, — it’s saying: Let’s fight to the last Ukrainian. [That’s] basically, what it amounts to.
So the questions you raised are important, interesting, just what is the appropriate kind of military aid to give Ukrainians defending themselves enough to defend themselves, but not to lead to an escalation that will just simply lead to massive destruction? And what kinds of sanctions or other actions could be effective in deterring the aggressors? Those are all important, but they pale into insignificance in comparison with the primary need to move towards a negotiated settlement, which is the only alternative to destruction of Ukraine, which of course, Russia is capable of carrying out.
Click here to watch the same interview and read the full transcript at The Intercept website.
Of course I criticize Putin for invading Ukraine, Amy. That goes without saying, because he has violated the U.N. Charter. It is a brutal war, as I said when I first started speaking. But I think that’s hardly the question, whether I condemn Mr. Putin or not. The issue is that we’re living in a world where, for a lot of people, it looks like it’s an upside-down world.
It’s not just the question of the treaties you mentioned. The United States government has not signed the international laws of the seas, and yet it prosecutes so-called freedom of navigation missions against not only China in the South China Sea, using this U.N. Charter, which it’s not a signatory of, but it has been provoking clashes with Russia in the Black Sea, in the Baltic Sea and in the Arctic Sea, again, using these so-called freedom of navigation missions.
Let’s take the question of the International Criminal Court. When special prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a file to investigate war crimes in Afghanistan — and, by the way, she was really clear: She said war crimes conducted by everybody — by the Taliban, by the Afghan National Army, by the United States, by other NATO countries, and so on. When she did that, the United States government threatened her, told her that neither she nor her family would ever get a visa to come to the United States, and so on. The U.S. put enormous pressure on the International Criminal Court to shut down that investigation. That’s incredible. This is an investigation of war crimes which are detailed in the U.S. government’s own documents, which have been released by the WikiLeaks foundation, whose founder, Julian Assange, is sitting in Belmarsh prison, is being treated as a criminal, whereas the war criminals in Afghanistan are going free and threatening, with Mafia-like tactics, the special prosecutor at the ICC.
Meanwhile, again, in an afternoon — to quote the Indian high official, in an afternoon, the United States is able to get these bodies, established by international law, which the United States is not a signatory to — the U.S., in an afternoon, is able to get them to open a file and start talking about war crimes. Over a million people killed in Iraq, and no investigation of war crimes. None. Over a million people. Half a million children killed in Iraq during the 1990s sanctions regime, not even the word “genocide.” The West is walking all over the word “genocide,” is reducing the power of an important category of an important convention, the 1951 Convention Against Genocide. This extraordinary, casual weaponization of human rights and the word “genocide” by the West is going to be something that we are going to face in the times ahead, when other countries are going to say, “Well, we can do anything if we are backed by Washington, D.C.” This is extraordinarily perilous.
And I hope people open their eyes to the very cynical way in which Washington, D.C., is approaching this terrible war taking place in Ukraine, a war that has to end with a ceasefire and negotiations. And you’re not going to easily get a ceasefire and negotiations if you’re going to loosely, as Mr. Biden did in Poland at Warsaw castle, loosely call for regime change in Russia. That is not going to help you bring people to the table, whether it’s in Belarus or it’s in Antalya, Turkey. It’s not going to bring Ukraine and Russia to the table. It’s not going to stop Russia’s war. If the Russians think that the United States has a total agenda to annihilate the Russian government, I’m afraid they are not going to get a ceasefire. You’re going to just get more atrocities in Ukraine. And that’s something that the people of the world should not stand for.
Click here to watch the same interview and to read the full transcript at the Democracy Now! website.
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Returning to Michael Tracey’s excellent piece, I find it truly astonishing how many of the formerly anti-war liberals and anti-war left are now cheerleading for Nato intervention in Ukraine and apparently unaware of the incredible threat posed by an escalating conflict between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. At a recent rally in London a representative of Unison, one of the UK’s largest trade unions, read aloud a message she’d received from the head of the Federation of Trade Unions in Ukraine which included a demand to “secure our Ukrainian sky.”
Similar calls for ‘No Fly Zone’s have been a common feature of liberal demands for “humanitarian interventions” and were used to legitimise Nato’s attack on Libya. In this instance, Nato intervention means nothing less than World War III, and yet elements within the trade union movement, across the ‘liberal media’ and the realigned Labour Party under Keir Starmer seem totally oblivious to these incalculable dangers.
Tracey writes:
Addressing a pro-war rally in London last weekend was Alex Sobel, a Labour Party MP who serves in the Shadow Cabinet of Keir Starmer, the current Opposition Leader. When I asked Sobel to clarify his policy grievance against Boris Johnson, he told me: “There’s been a lack of military assistance. And there’s been a lack of support within NATO more broadly, in terms of military assistance.” This can be translated as: Boris Johnson, NATO, and the US have not been militarily aggressive enough in Ukraine! That’s the criticism!
Expressing his reluctance to countenance any kind of negotiated resolution to the war, Sobel told me: “The Russians only understand force, they do not understand peace.” This is a weirdly common allusion to a supposed genetic predisposition of Russians that makes them inherently… warlike? Sounds very similar to when James Clapper, the top Intelligence Official in the Obama Administration, would go around intoning that Russians were “almost genetically-driven to co-opt” and “penetrate.”
Much of the UK media shares the view that Boris Johnson has exhibited insufficient “force” in his dealings with Russia. This includes The Observer newspaper — understood to be the UK’s leading bastion of respectable left/liberal opinion — which threw caution to the wind last weekend and published an official unsigned editorial institutionally endorsing “direct intervention” in Ukraine by NATO. In particular, the editorial promoted the very same naval blockade plan touted by Tobias Ellwood — the aforementioned Conservative MP who might otherwise be considered the newspaper’s ideological foe. “Declare the unoccupied city of Odesa off-limits,” the Observer editorial demands of Johnson, “and warn Russia to cease coastal bombardments or face serious, unspecified consequences.” Wariness to start World War III has now turned into a timid “excuse” for inaction, the editorial writers allege.
Continuing:
[B]ehold the recent activism of Owen Jones, the noted left-wing journalist whose “beat” appears to be a never-ending series of exhortatory instructions to some amorphous assemblage he calls “The Left.” Jones is now of the view, amazingly, that supporting the “armed struggle” of Ukraine is the only proper “anti-war” position. So here we have another “anti-war” leftist who happens to be in favor of provisioning tanks, fighter jets, missiles, and grenades into an active warzone, for the purpose of facilitating warfare. As is also the case in the US, these UK left/liberals often find it unpleasant to straightforwardly label themselves “pro-war” — so they have been forced to play word-games galore to avoid acknowledging reality. And the reality is that the policy action they’re advocating must necessarily be enacted by some combination of Boris Johnson, the US military-industrial complex, and NATO — all of whom have now been enlisted to carry out these leftists’ desired war aims.
"Anti-war" doesn't mean being "pacifist".
In the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it means opposing Russia's war of aggression – which means supporting Ukraine's armed struggle of liberation against it, and supporting a Russian military defeat.
The most vivid manifestation of this increasingly incoherent left-wing viewpoint could be observed a few days ago at the pro-war march and rally in Whitehall, the governmental corridor of Central London. I found out about the rally because it was endorsed and promoted by Owen Jones on Twitter. Upon arrival, I discovered that leading the march was another left-wing journalist, Paul Mason, who organized the action in concert with a strange Trotyskist faction called the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. “We support Ukraine’s war and demand the West provides weapons,” the group’s pamphlet declares, along with a bitter condemnation of NATO for “steadfastly refusing to fight.”
Mason had many magical moments as rally leader, but his most comical interlude was when he stopped along the march route to bellow, via bullhorn, in the general direction of the UK Ministry of Defence — shouting for the workers inside to come out and join. I asked Mason if he reckoned this was the first “anti-war” and/or “left-wing” rally in British history for which the Ministry of Defence (of a Conservative government!) was considered a natural ally — but he caustically refused to talk, instead denouncing me as a “Putin shill.” (Direct quote.) Clever guy, that Paul. Supremely confident in his convictions, surely, and quick with the novel insult.
A former employee of the BBC and Channel 4, Mason offered up an inventive rationalization for his pro-war advocacy when it was his turn to clasp the microphone that afternoon. “In a war like this, our natural demand for peace — our natural fear of military action — has to take second place,” he proclaimed. Because don’t you know, according to Mason, this particular war is actually being waged on behalf of the vaunted “Working Class”!
“It is in the interest of working class people to support Ukraine in this war,” Mason beseeched from the rally pulpit, expressing his hope to mobilize the whole of the British Labour Movement behind the pro-war cause. “I know how hard that is for many of us, who’ve stood outside here in so many other wars and said — you know, screw your hypocrisy over Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the rest,” Mason acknowledged. “It’s hard. But the only way to get arms into the hands of the Ukrainian people right now… is to keep the pressure on the government.”
So there you have it, clear as day: the object of this left-wing “anti-war” rally was to “keep the pressure” on the ruling Conservative Government… to continue ramping up weapons shipments to Ukraine. For use in… intensifying warfare. As Mason barreled forward with his speech, the Ukraine flag shimmered triumphantly in the sunlight atop Boris Johnson’s Cabinet Office, located right across the street at 70 Whitehall — a moving symbol of cross-ideological unity.
I found that a very simple line of questioning posed to the assembled leftist demonstrators — merely asking them whether they viewed the event they were partaking in as a “pro-war” rally, or an “anti-war” rally — tended to elicit spells of bewildered anger. When asked this question, a number of the pamphleteers insisted to me that the rally was in fact “anti-war” in nature, even though they were distributing placards featuring the injunction to “Arm Ukraine” — a task which would necessarily have accomplished by the US, UK, and other governments, in conjunction with NATO. One of the chants fervently screamed on the march went as follows: “Put an end to Putin’s reign! Arm, arm, arm, Ukraine!” That’s the new mantra of the British anti-war movement! If nothing else, one has to appreciate this audacious innovation in the fluidity of language.
Chant at this left-wing “anti war” rally: “Put an end to Putin’s reign, arm arm arm Ukraine” pic.twitter.com/jOhM33Re5Q
One of the latest and most prominent victims of Keir Starmer’s purge of left-wing activists, filmmaker Ken Loach was suspended by the Labour Party last month. Recognising that it was pointless to try to challenge the decision, instead he replied on Twitter writing:
“Labour HQ finally decided I’m not fit to be a member of their party, as I will not disown those already expelled. Well … I am proud to stand with the good friends and comrades victimised by the purge. There is indeed a witch-hunt … Starmer and his clique will never lead a party of the people. We are many, they are few. Solidarity.”
'Labour HQ finally decided I'm not fit to be a member of their party, as I will not disown those already expelled. Well…' KL
— Ken Loach & Sixteen Films (@KenLoachSixteen) August 14, 2021
Ken Loach has more recently responded with an interview given to Double Down News which is embedded below with a full transcript provided beneath:
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Democracy is dead in the Labour Party. Starmer’s leadership is not interested in democracy, it’s interested in power and control. In order to maintain that control it has to get rid of its activists. Democracy, principle: everything goes out of the window; the only thing they want is control. They are ruthless.
It reveals Starmer is dishonest, because he promised unity.
[Keir Starmer at 0:20 mins:] We have got to unite our party or we won’t win.
Knowing that he would get rid of the left the moment he was in there. And also personal treachery. He stood alongside Jeremy Corbyn knowing he was going to put a dagger between his shoulder blades – that’s treachery: treachery and dishonesty. What kind of qualities are those in a leader?
Gordon Brown was described as Stalin who became Mr Bean; I think Starmer’s gone the other way… He is like a Mr Bean, but now he’s become Stalin. The only thing he’s good at, the only lesson he’s learned, is from the Stalinist tendency to control the machine, disregard everything – principles, rules, law, natural justice, truth – disregard all those and get control of the machine. Then kick your enemies out.
I mean it’s like when Trotsky was removed from the photographs. Jeremy is excised from Labour politics. It’s like photographs close in and he doesn’t exist. And the media collude in this. They know it’s a stitch up, but it is not brought out in the press because the press wants that outcome.
And that’s something else that doesn’t appear in the press at all: how many thousands have left the Labour Party? It must now, with the current wave, be approaching 150,000 I would think. Imagine if that had happened under Jeremy Corbyn. I mean the press would say: ‘Corbyn, you’re destroying the Labour Party’. It’s not even a news item.
Where’s that fake outrage that they wheel out, you know, whenever the left appears? It evaporates when the right-wing is doing something – why is that? Well, we know why… because they want the left driven out.
When Jeremy and John [McDonnell] won the leadership I think there was general underestimation of the ruthlessness of the right-wing. The first day they get in, was just take over the machinery of the party. Well, that’s what we should have done: [taken over] the machinery of the party. We were playing cricket and they were doing all-in wrestling.
In a way, when you look back it’s so obvious what they would do. They represent the interests of the ruling class. And in fact they are now the biggest obstacle to change. They are a bigger obstacle than the Tory Party.
And the idea of a broad church, of course, is nonsense. It was never a broad church. It’s ‘a broad church’ within very narrow limits. You will agree with us, otherwise you’re out.
I think the whole soft-left element in the Labour Party that just wishes life were different and won’t recognise the class war – they are in a class war within the Labour Party. The right-wing represent the interests of the ruling class [and] they are the biggest obstacle to change at the moment because the stop us confronting the real enemy.
The right-wing and the whole establishment decided that when Jeremy Corbyn became leader and John McDonnell with him, it was a mistake that they were allowed to become the leadership. And they put forward a programme that would make a serious beginning to transforming British society in the interests of working class people: common ownership; public investment; trade union rights; ending privatisation in public services, particularly the National Health Service.
And the establishment decided this is not acceptable: we need a safe Labour Party that will be there when we need a change of government. We cannot accept a change in class interest. The interests of the ruling class have to predominate, because that’s the essence of this state.
And there’s no conspiracy: people understand the steps of the dance; they don’t need to ring each other up [and] say BBC will you do this, or Guardian will you run that? They understand the dance.
So the campaign to unseat Jeremy Corbyn was begun by the Guardian. The Guardian blew the whistle, so that all the right-wing press could say, ‘well, if the Guardian says he’s got to go, we’ve got a free ride’.
The BBC joined in and the viciousness of the campaign against particularly the personality of Jeremy Corbyn was the most vile as I can remember. It was as bad as against [former NUM leader during 1980s miners’ strike, Arthur] Scargill, if not worse, because even Arthur Scargill wasn’t called a racist.
Everyone knows that is a lie about Jeremy, but they colluded in the lie. Eventually that penetrated to the people. There were people saying, ‘well, there must be something in this’. No smoke without fire. Well, of course, it had its effect as they chose [and] as wanted.
[Keir Starmer at 4:40 mins:] The attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, in that election we’ve just had, were terrible. And they came back at us on the door. They vilified him and they knew what they were doing and they knew why they were doing it.
[Robert Peston at 5:00 mins] You’ve also said, ‘each day I try to think of ways to undermine Jeremy Corbyn.
[Peter Mandelson:] I did say that yes.
[Peston:] Well, that was a mistake wasn’t it?
[Mandelson:] No, I wasn’t alone amongst people who found [his leadership] disappointing…
[Peston:] If he had had your backing, he might have done a lot better.
[Mandelson:] Well, he might have done.
And they were celebrating when Jeremy Corbyn just failed to win the election. It’s now becoming even more urgent for them to avoid a Labour Party that would make real change, because clearly Johnson will have outlived his usefulness for the ruling class quite soon.
Because he’s clearly not up to the job; he’s clearly a buffoon. I mean they’re having to apologise for him every second month. And there is always a time after a decade or so, people will feel the need for change. We’re a democracy, aren’t we? We can change. Yes, you can change, provided both parties do the same.
So there will be a need for a new face, and then it may well be the Labour Party. So it is essential to protect the class interests of those in power that the Labour Party does not challenge that class ascendancy; and Jeremy and John would have done that. That’s why the attack happened and it is why it will intensify until Starmer, or whoever replaces him, because they see Starmer as such a liability, takes over.
Starmer wants a party that is smaller [and] that has no activists to show to the right-wing they won’t change anything, and the assets of the ruling class are safe with them. Starmer wants to lead a party so that Murdoch can put his arm around Starmer and say, ‘you’re one of us – you can vote Labour now’. And deliver – this is the key thing – deliver the working class… to Murdoch, and his pals, the establishment, the BBC, the Guardian and the rest.
And then the Guardian will say: well, you could have done a little bit more Keir Starmer, you could have given a few more bob to the health service, you could have done this, you could have done that. But too late, you know.
I received a letter like many – probably thousands of people have – from the Labour Party, saying they had proscribed certain organisations that were there to support people who have been unjustly expelled. I was suspended.
Of course I support those organisations. There is a witch hunt against the left and the party leadership made the proscription act retrospectively, so if you’d ever been a member – or not even a member, a supporter, or endorsed any of these organisations – then you were expelled yourself.
I mean that’s not normal, I understand, in the law that you make misdemeanours, now a crime, and you’re guilty if you ever did it in the past. Laws don’t act retrospectively in that way.
However, Starmer has no regard for due process, he has no regard for natural justice; he is simply concerned with expelling the left. So I’ve decided to take no part in this charade, and I didn’t give them the satisfaction of a reply.
You have to treat these attacks as a badge of honour. If they come for you, it shows they rate you. So I think that’s how we have to look at it: ‘yes come on, you know, abuse us!’ Because you just reveal who you are. It’s water off a duck’s back to me. We have nothing to worry about; they’re the ones who should be in the dock.
So I’d say to anyone – and particularly the comrades in Young Labour – wear it as a badge of honour. They’re bastards. Don’t give them the time of day.
If I were Jeremy I would say, ‘I’m not coming back, I’m going to hold you to account from the backbenches: you’re going to see what leadership really is. You are no Labour Party leader. There will be no party of people under your leadership.’ I’d hammer him. I wouldn’t want to go back in: I’d hammer him as an independent.
I think that those in the Labour Party have got to fight every inch, you know occupy them, hold them to account. But do it in the knowledge that the media probably won’t report you.
I mean the Jewish members, who are now four or five times more likely to be expelled than non-Jewish members for claims of anti-semitism – Jewish members who have fought anti-semitism all their life – I mean it’s so bizarre, you couldn’t make it up. Doesn’t get a mention… Just don’t mention them – just exclude them.
So the right-wing of the Labour Party have nothing to say. You know what you’ve done and why you’re doing it. You know your own dishonesty. I’m glad I don’t live with your conscience.
To the good members of the Labour Party I’d just say just look to the facts really: just base it on the evidence. Peaceful coexistence doesn’t work. The broad church doesn’t work. You’ve seen the dishonesty. You’ve seen the treachery. You’ve seen the scurrility of alleging racism to people who are the least racist in our society. Show your disgust at what you’ve seen.
Whether you’re in or out, be part of a broader united movement that really stands for truth and honesty, and the interests of working class people.
The hope lies in people’s determination to fight back, but that determination will only last so long. The mass movement that Jeremy and John built – because it was the biggest party in Western Europe with nearly 600,000 members – that was a cause of hope. Now this destruction by Starmer and co and by the media and the right-wing [of] the Labour Party; this destruction is killing that hope.
So we’ve got to act fast. I say it’s a critical moment – it really is a critical moment.
There’s no only those people who’ve left the Labour Party or who’ve been driven out, there’s people from the green movement, young people, absolutely overwhelmed by the prospect of the destruction of the planet – quite rightly – the whole anger of people in the neglected regions is still there. And it turns to apathy, it turns to cynicism, it turns to alienation, and a belief that politics has nothing to offer.
There’s a huge political vacuum. We know from history, if the left doesn’t articulate for these people, their issues, the right-wing will. And we’ve seen elements of that before: hence the fall of old working class areas to the Tories. This is a political vacuum.
This is the biggest challenge to the left in my lifetime. (That’s a long time.) So who’s going to answer it?
I think we need a number of things… a new political party would be suicide at the moment, but we do need a political movement across the whole left: inside the Labour Party and outside. It’s got to be ready to become a party when the time is right.
The unions are key. They have financial clout, they have political clout. Serious trade unions, who say, ‘right, these are the interests of our members; Starmer will not represent them.’ And on that basis [of] the interests of their members, we’re going to develop a whole left movement. Otherwise, we fragment.
And who’s going to step forward, I don’t know. It needs two or three. I don’t believe in great heroes, but we need a collective leadership that people will recognise and identify with, and we unify the left the way Jeremy did when he led the Labour Party. And we need that unity again.
The Socialist Campaign Group MPs have got to face the choice. They either present us with a credible political path to reclaim the Labour Party – can they do it? – I haven’t heard them. I haven’t heard their path. How do you do it now when you have no access to the machine [and] your supporters are being driven out? How are you going to reclaim the party now? If you can’t then how do you represent the independent interests of the working class? How do you represent them?
If you have no answer [then] you’ve either got to get out or you have to find another solution, because otherwise people are leaving. They will fragment. And at this critical moment when you have this mass of people [who have] just been driven out of the party, where are they going to go? If we miss this opportunity I think it’s a very black outlook.
The mass media are our enemy. They’ve declared war and we know whose interests they represent.
This is what Donald Trump has said in a Twitter stream† today:
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
Mail-In Voting is already proving to be a catastrophic disaster. Even testing areas are way off. The Dems talk of foreign influence in voting, but they know that Mail-In Voting is an easy way for foreign countries to enter the race. Even beyond that, there’s no accurate count!
New York Mail-In voting is in a disastrous state of condition. Votes from many weeks ago are missing – a total mess. They have no idea what is going on. Rigged Election. I told you so. Same thing would happen, but on massive scale, with USA. Fake News refuses to report!
Investigative journalist Greg Palast is a specialist in election fraud who actually reported for the BBC on the US elections during the Bush years. He has also written for the Guardian and Rolling Stone magazine. This is what Palast told Between The Lines’ presenter Scott Harris during an interview back in April this year:
According to an MIT-Caltech study, which is the gold standard for reviewing absentee ballots, they conservatively calculated 22 percent of mail-in ballots are never counted. Twenty-two percent — well over one out of five. Now, if it were random, it obviously wouldn’t affect the election. But it’s overwhelmingly young voters, voters of color. That means we’ll have 25 million votes lost in November. Twenty-five million ballots will be lost. You’re gonna have millions and millions and millions of people who will never get their ballot, or there’ll be sent the card “Do you want an absentee ballot?” They’ll never get that card. If you’re a student, you moved from one dorm room to the next. If you’re Hispanic, you’ll get a card in English, that looks like junk mail and you throw it away and you’re gonna lose your vote.
It’s overwhelmingly young people, voters of color, and low-income people‚ in other words, Democrats who will be losing their votes by the millions with mail-in ballots. And it’s especially true in the swing states where the GOP has control of the system, how people vote, etc. We just saw this in the extreme in Wisconsin where the GOP legislature refused to delay the election to June 9 as requested by the (Democratic) governor and requested by the governor’s order. And the U.S. Supreme Court has basically said, “Yeah, if you don’t send in your ballot or show up to vote – and how do you do that? Your vote doesn’t count.” But that’s a dry run for November. So if we go to all-in for mail-in balloting, unless we do something to fix this system, it’s as good as over.
Click here to listen to the broadcast or read a full transcript of the interview on Greg Palast’s official website.
The seminal MIT study, Losing Votes by Mail, warns that 22% – more than one in five ballots – never get counted. https://t.co/64xTBSh6WC
And here is Palast last week offering an updated review of the ‘seminal MIT study’, Losing Votes by Mail:
According to the MIT study, most of the millions of absentee ballot lost are because one in nine voters never receive their ballot or it is received too late. Again, the “late” ballots are overwhelmingly slow-mailed to voters of color.
I spoke to an African-American voter who requested ballots for her family 45 days before the Georgia primary—and her husband’s ballot arrived on June 10. The Georgia Primary was June 9. Unsophisticated voter who screwed up? Hardly, this is Andrea Young, voting rights attorney and Executive Director of the ACLU of Georgia.
If they can shaft voting rights attorneys out of their vote, others don’t stand a chance.
One of the main reasons voters don’t get their ballots is that, in the past two years, 16.7 million voters have been purged, erased from the voter rolls and most don’t know it. It could be you. I can tell you it was me: I looked up Greg Palast on my Secretary of State’s website (you should all do that) and it said, “No such voter.”
And that’s how Trump Stole 2020—and 2016. The big swing state of Ohio, from 2012 to 2016, swung from a big Obama victory …to Trump. WTF?
One secret of the Ohio’s flip to red is that the Republican Secretary of State in the month before the 2016 presidential election, simply refused to send absentee ballot application cards to 1,035,795 voters, those on the absurdly, inaccurately named “inactive” or “mover” lists. Voters lost their rights—without notice. The purge list was 2-to-1 Democrat.
With 16.7 million voters erased from the registration rolls in the past two years, millions will say, Where the hell is my ballot? Sorry: they’ll be S.O.L. (Google that.)
The Palast Investigations team went through several purge lists and we found that one in seven African-Americans and one in eight LatinXand Asian-American voters in these states were on the hit lists.
You can call it a “flawed” system, but it’s a fraud system, American Apartheid.
Click here to read the full article on Greg Palast’s official website.
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Additional:
On August 15th, Greg Palast was invited on RT’s Keiser Report. He talked to Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert about how vote suppression schemes are pushed by both parties, especially Republicans who have knocked millions of people off the voter rolls in the past few years – black American males being the most likely to be challenged for ID at the voting booth, while many new residency requirements deliberately target students. They also discussed related issues covered in his new book, How Trump Stole 2020, including meme warfare, hanging chads, banana republics’ and failed voting apps, and finally look at ways to ‘steal the election back’:
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Update: The SECRET Purpose of Trump’s Threat to Delay the Vote
In response to Trump’s tweets, Greg Palast and Zach D. Roberts wrote the following:
In America, elections aren’t stolen like they’re stolen in some right-wing fever dream of a movie. There’s no military junta marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, no back alley assassinations like in an episode of House of Cards, no Russians needed.
They’re stolen in the back rooms of power by men in Brooks Brother suits, they’re stolen using Excel spreadsheets, they’re stolen by votes simply not being counted. […]
Now three months away from the next Presidential election, Donald Trump is sending out missives to his base: He’s whipping up his army of Boogaloo bozos in Hawaiian shirts into a frenzy over fraudulent mail-in votes. No, we won’t get a million bogus ballots from Bolivia, but the facts don’t matter.
So what’s the point? The point is not to intimidate voters; no one’s scared of these Trumpito pinheads. Rather, the point is to place “poll watchers” who will challenge every single mail-in vote. This is what they did in Michigan (See Michigan Michigass) to prevent the counting of 75,355 ballots in Detroit—and that gave Trump a “victory margin” of 10,000 to take Michigan and the White House.
Michigan 2016 will be USA 2020 unless we take back our ballots.
Click here to read the full article also published on July 30th
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Further update: The ‘Friday night massacre’ of US postal service
On August 10thDemocracy Now! ran a report asking whether Trump is sabotaging the US postal service ahead of the election to derail mail-in voting:
Democratic lawmakers in Washington are accusing the Trump administration of sabotaging the United States Postal Service ahead of November’s election, when a record number of votes are expected to be cast by mail. On Friday, the nation’s new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy shook up the leadership of the agency in a move that critics say will give DeJoy more power. Twenty-three Postal Service executives were reassigned or fired in the restructuring.
Prior to becoming postmaster general, DeJoy was a top Republican donor. He had donated more than $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Fund and had been in charge of fundraising for the 2020 Republican National Convention.
Since taking office, DeJoy has instituted a number of cost-cutting measures that have slowed down the delivery of the mail. There’s now a days-long backlog of mail across the United States. This comes as President Trump continues to attack mail-in voting, claiming the post office can’t handle an increase in ballots. Democratic Congressmember Gerry Connolly of Virginia accused DeJoy of engaging in, quote, “deliberate sabotage to disrupt mail service on the eve of the election.” Democratic Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon criticized restructuring of the agency.
Rep. PeterDefazio: Today we had the Friday night massacre. He fired all the senior service postal executives, the people who have run the day-to-day operations of the post office. This is nothing less than Donald Trump and his political cronies trying to steal the election by blocking or delaying vote-by-mail. Trump has sued states to try and block vote-by-mail. That won’t work. But he’s going to try and stop the mail from being delivered. This is outrageous.
Amy Goodman spoke with Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, who told her:
First, let me just say this: Anything, any policy that slows down the mail runs counter to everything a postal worker stands for, and we’re completely opposed to these policies that are delaying mail. And we’ve let this new postmaster general know that, and we’ve done it with vehemence. […]
Now, the Friday night or the Friday massacre, I’m more focused on the policies than who’s running what and who’s assigned to what. And I think that’s where we have to look. The most significant thing, Amy, on Friday, in my opinion, was the new postmaster general was absolutely silent on the most pressing issue facing the public U.S. Postal Service, and that is Congress coming through with stimulus financial relief due to the impact of the pandemic on the Postal Service. So, the House of Representatives has passed $25 billion of COVID-related relief to get us through this emergency. Normally there’s no taxpayer dollars. This is one exception. It’s now in the hands of the Senate and this administration. It’s an ask of the Postal Board of Governors, a unanimous ask. In March, Congress and this administration took care of the private side to the tune of over $500 billion. It’s about time that Congress took care of the public side, including the United States Postal Service. And there was absolute silence on that key question facing the people this country right now in terms of what’s going to happen to their public postal services.
Asked whether he thought President Trump was “trying to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service in the lead-up to the election”, Mark Dimondstein replied:
Well, I think we can let President Donald Trump speak for himself on this question. On June 28th, Amy, the Office of Management Budget of the White House put out, in writing, a proposal to privatize — i.e. break up — the Postal Service and sell it to private corporations, where they can then make private profit. And, of course, whether people get postal services at all will then depend on who they are, where they live, and how much it would cost, if they can even get services at all, because somebody would have to then be able to make or want to make a quick buck. So, it’s in writing. It is their plan.
So we’re very concerned that any policies that undermine and degrade service to the people of this country have a goal of undermining the public support for the Postal Service. You can’t privatize a public Postal Service that people trust, people love. Ninety-one percent of the people of the country, in a recent Pew Research poll, rated the post office favorably, at 91%. It’s the most popular brand, the number one brand, during this COVID pandemic. That’s an indication of how much people appreciate the role of postal workers, how much people trust it. So, the only way you can get to privatization is if you undermine people’s confidence and support in the institution. And anything that slows down the mail does that.
Click here to read the full transcript on the Democracy Now! website.
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Update:
On September 11th, author and former political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton, Dr Naomi Wolf spoke with Daniel G Newman (author of “Unrig”) and Greg Palast (“The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and “How Trump Stole 2020”) about the challenges voters —and the very institution of U.S. democracy — face in the upcoming election:
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†The contents of Trump’s Twitter stream can also be read below:
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
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Mail-In Voting is already proving to be a catastrophic disaster. Even testing areas are way off. The Dems talk of foreign influence in voting, but they know that Mail-In Voting is an easy way for foreign countries to enter the race. Even beyond that, there’s no accurate count!
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New York Mail-In voting is in a disastrous state of condition. Votes from many weeks ago are missing – a total mess. They have no idea what is going on. Rigged Election. I told you so. Same thing would happen, but on massive scale, with USA. Fake News refuses to report!
The following statement has just been released by Stop the War Coalition:
Last night the Trump administration took us to the brink of war with Iran. According to the New York Times, the order to attack communications and military bases, including missile installations, was sent out and operations begun. Planes had taken off and ships were in position to attack. Shortly before the attack was due to start, it was cancelled.
All this points to the extreme danger presented by the current crisis. The fact that the top US foreign policy decision makers – Trump, Pompeo and Bolton – are all committed to a policy of confrontation with Iran is not an accident. It reflects the balance of opinion across Washington that a hard line is necessary with the Islamic Republic. This policy – most obviously expressed in the scrapping of the nuclear deal with Iran last year – can only reinforce the position of hardliners in Tehran. It means too that there are powerful forces in Washington that are looking for the pretext for war and will seize any opportunity for an attack.
A war with Iran would have incalculable consequences, greater even than the disastrous war on Iraq in 2003. In these circumstances, the anti-war movement must mobilise now to pressure our government to publicly oppose Washington’s recklessness and demand that military action is ruled out.
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Action you can take:
Join the Stop the War PROTEST on Wednesday 26th June at 5:00 pm outside Downing Street
Take part in the nationwide campaign day on Saturday 29th June:
Protest, petition or set up a stall. The need to campaign against a war on Iran is urgent. Do what you can in your local area to pressure our government to call for de-escalation and explicitly rule out military options against Iran.
Contact Stop the War Coalition (office@stopwar.org.uk or 0207 561 4830) with details of your actions and StWC will post them.
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Why the Risks of War with Iran are Real | Chris Nineham
Neither the US nor Iran really wants war we are told, because the reality of such a conflict is too horrific to contemplate. But the Gulf tanker crisis and the US response shows that we are alarmingly close to open hostilities. It is true that there are voices in the US defence establishment calling for restraint. It appears to be the case too that the Iranian government is operating on the assumption that the US doesn’t want a war. But there are several reasons why such assumptions are not a sound basis for judgement.
First, some do want military action against Iran. And they really are not marginal players. They include notably the US’s two main allies in the Middle East and the two most senior foreign policy officials in the US government. The governments of Saudi Arabia and Israel have been putting a strong case for action against Iran for some years. The US and its Western allies are closer to these countries governments than they have ever been.
John Bolton, who as National Security Advisor is the last man in any meeting with the President, is famously an advocate of war against the Islamic Republic. But Secretary of State Pompeo is equally hawkish. As a Republican Tea Party member of Congress from 2011 to 2017, he regularly called for regime change in Iran. In 2014, Pompeo demanded the Obama administration break off the talks that led to the Iran nuclear deal. He even called instead for launching airstrikes, saying fewer than 2,000 bombing sorties could take out Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
No surprises then that Pompeo’s response to the attacks on tankers in the Gulf has been to insist without credible evidence that Iran is responsible and throw in a highly questionable list of alleged recent Iranian atrocities for good measure. On top of the last round of tanker attacks these include an assault on the Green Zone in Baghdad not previously linked to Iran and a bombing in Afghanistan that has actually been claimed by the Taliban. Listening to his statement it was hard not to be reminded of the adrenaline pumped pronouncements in the run up to war in Iraq.
Donald Trump’s impulsive foreign policy style is hardly reassuring in this situation. His record of provocative action includes threatening North Korea with a nuclear strike, dropping the ‘Mother of All Bombs’ in Afghanistan and surprise missile blitzes in Syria. But such confrontational and unpredictable behaviour isn’t just a quirk of personality. Despite Trump’s apparent isolationist rhetoric during his election campaign, America First policy has in practice meant less concern with multilateral institutions and an increased belligerence in key areas.
The general view in Washington is that Barack Obama’s strategy of projecting US power through proxies and drone warfare, stressing alliances and power balancing, failed to deal with the national humiliation in Iraq and Afghanistan or to rise to new challenges. Hence arms spending has been ramped up, and confronting Russia and Chinese influence has been flagged as the central concern. Faced with growing military challengers the administration’s approach is essentially to take them on and win.
The Iran policy has been developed in this context. Scrapping the nuclear deal and tightening sanctions on Iran are chiefly designed to inflict regime change but are also meant as a signal of a new bullishness in the Middle East and beyond. The results have been disastrous. The Iranian currency has plummeted, imports have been badly effected and living standards have fallen sharply. Last month’s ending of the oil exemptions has brought things to crisis point. Oil exports, by far Iran’s biggest earner, look like halving this month compared to last. Even in the short term, this is extremely damaging. Far from encouraging domestic opposition to the regime, most commentators agree this economic warfare is strengthening anti-western feeling and pushing the regime towards retaliation.
In the last few days Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but rejected the invitation he apparently carried from Trump saying “I do not consider Trump as a person worth exchanging any message with and I have no answer for him, nor will I respond to him in the future.”
War with Iran is closer than it has ever been. Just like in the run up to war in Iraq, there is a very powerful Washington lobby who think it is sound policy. In general, the Washington foreign policy establishment is on a rebound from the perceived timidity of the Obama years, in particular the situation with Iran is becoming tenser by the day. War can be avoided but the anti-war movement needs to be active and organised.
Click here to read the same article posted by StWC on Monday 17th.
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Alternative action you can take:
Pass the StWC resolution at your local party or trade union branch:
This branch notes:
That the US is on the verge of war with Iran, escalating a dangerous situation in the Middle East to the brink of a regional war.
That this is part of the policy of regime change advocated by John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, Trump’s two senior foreign policy officials.
That the wars pursued by our government, following the US’ lead, have been opposed by the majority of the population who want to see a change in UK foreign policy.
That the so-called special relationship has helped to tie Britain to a failed and damaging foreign policy.
This branch believes:
Rather than falling in line with the Trump administration’s dangerous brinkmanship, the British government should be calling for restraint and de-escalation and explicitly ruling out military options.
That Britain needs a new, independent, foreign policy based on co-operation and diplomacy. That such a policy would end the waste of billions of pounds that would be better spent on welfare, education and the NHS.
That the anti-war movement has played an important role in creating anti-war opinion in this country and strengthening the movement is essential to achieving a change in foreign policy.
This branch resolves:
To demand the government opposes military action on Iran.
To affiliate to Stop the War Coalition.
To oppose future foreign military interventions by the UK government.
After Thursday’s vote for Brexit, it is now vitally important that the political left is able to find cohesion and to mobilise. Fortunately, the British Labour movement has an exceptional leader. Jeremy Corbyn is a politician of honour and integrity.
However, within 24 hours of Brexit, the knives were out for Corbyn once again when former members of Blair’s cabinet, Dame Margaret Hodge and Ann Coffey, submitted a motion calling for a vote of no confidence in a letter to the Parliamentary Labour Party chairman, John Cryer.
But then, Corbyn was always the people’s choice, and still is…
Within just 12 hours, a 38 Degrees petition sending a vote of confidence has already reached more than 120,000 signatures.
I very much encourage others to sign the petition:
Angela Smith, Stephen Kinnock, Ben Bradshaw, Siobhain McDonagh, Helen Goodman along with the reliably treacherous Chuka Umunna have since jumped on board the anti-Corbyn bandwagon. Peter Mandelson is also prowling in the wings.
On the other hand, a joint statement from 12 union leaders, including the general secretaries of Unite, Unison and GMB, is warning of “a manufactured leadership row” and correctly asserting that this is “the last thing Labour needs”:
The Prime Minister’s resignation has triggered a Tory leadership crisis. At the very time we need politicians to come together for the common good, the Tory party is plunging into a period of argument and infighting. In the absence of a government that puts the people first Labour must unite as a source of national stability and unity.
It should focus on speaking up for jobs and workers’ rights under threat, and on challenging any attempt to use the referendum result to introduce a more right-wing Tory government by the backdoor.
The last thing Labour needs is a manufactured leadership row of its own in the midst of this crisis and we call upon all Labour MPs not to engage in any such indulgence.
Len McCluskey, General Secretary, Unite the Union
Dave Prentis, General Secretary, UNISON
Tim Roache, General Secretary, GMB
Dave Ward, General Secretary, CWU
Brian Rye, Acting General Secretary, UCATT
Manuel Cortes, General Secretary, TSSA
Mick Whelan, General Secretary, ASLEF
Matt Wrack, General Secretary, FBU
John Smith, General Secretary, Musicians’ Union
Gerry Morrissey, General Secretary, BECTU
Ronnie Draper, General Secretary, BFAWU
Chris Kitchen, General Secretary, NUM
Click here to read the statement at LabourList.org
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Asked if he will resign, Mr Corbyn, who campaigned on the losing Remain side, said: “No, I’m carrying on.
“I’m making the case for unity, I’m making the case of what Labour can offer to Britain, of decent housing for people, of good secure jobs for people, of trade with Europe and of course with other parts of the world.
“Because if we don’t get the trade issue right, we’ve got a real problem in this country,” he told Channel 4 News.
On Monday [June 27th], Labour left group Momentum organised an impromptu rally in London in support of Jeremy Corbyn on the eve of a debate tabling a motion of no confidence in his leadership. Many thousands turned out in support, and hundreds more joined similar rallies in Newcastle and Manchester.
Speaking at the rally in London, alongside Corbyn were Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Dennis Skinner. Corbyn called for a “politics of unity” to fight austerity and said, “We’re absolutely the spirit of hope—not the spirit of despair”.
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Additional: a letter to my own MP
In light of today’s [Tuesday 28th] vote of no confidence, I emailed the following message to Paul Blomfield, Labour MP for Sheffield Central — I’m sure you can improve it or write something better, but in any case I would like to encourage as many readers as possible to get in touch with their own constituency MP to express their disappointment regarding the current and repeated undermining of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
Here is the letter… (please feel free to reuse it in any form):
I am absolutely sickened and disgusted by the actions of the 170+ Labour MPs who appear determined to tear the party to pieces. And in common with the majority of trade union leaders, I too regard this “manufactured leadership row” and today’s deplorable vote of no confidence as an act of gross negligence. Jeremy Corbyn has the democratic support of the grassroots membership as well as union backing, and given that post-Brexit we now have an absentee government, it is more crucial than ever that the party shows solidarity and functions as an opposition. This is a time for party cohesion and stability, not for squabbling.
If the MPs are unable to support Corbyn at this time then I honestly believe they should act more honourably and step down altogether; resigning from the party and, should they choose an alternative political allegiance, fighting to recapture their old seat in a bielection.
Kind regards,
James Boswell
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Further update: a reply from Paul Blomfield
I have since received a prompt response [Wednesday 29th] in the form of what appears to be a standard letter as follows:
Thanks for writing to me regarding Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. It’s helpful to have people’s views, and they have been very mixed. I’ve received strongly made arguments for and against Jeremy’s leadership, so let me set out mine.
Last Thursday’s referendum was a momentous decision that will have huge consequences for our country and our continent. Responding to it, and acting to heal the divisions that have been created by the way the ‘leave’ campaign used the issue of immigration, must be our top priority. We must also vigorously expose them on the lies that they told – which are already unravelling – as I did today in challenging David Cameron at PMQs.
In this context, I deeply regret that Labour is facing a leadership crisis and am keen that we should resolve it quickly. Although I did not support Jeremy for the leadership last year, I have been consistently loyal to him and served in his front bench team until I lost my job as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn last Sunday, when he was sacked.
I have backed Jeremy publicly from the day of his election, and welcomed the opportunity his leadership provided to develop new policies to address the growing inequality in our country, together with the other challenges we face. I also welcomed his commitment to a new approach to policy-making within the Labour Party, although I regret that little has changed.
Many people who have written to me have criticised Jeremy’s approach to Labour’s campaign to remain in the EU and I do share those concerns. It isn’t the reason we will be leaving the EU; that responsibility lies with the Tories. But Jeremy and his team fell well short of providing the leadership that Labour and the people we represent needed for the biggest decision the country faced in a generation.
As well as campaigning relentlessly in Sheffield, I was a member of the national ‘Labour Remain’ campaign team, chaired by Alan Johnson. This was Labour’s official campaign, but Jeremy’s office failed to attend our fortnightly meetings and obstructed the campaign on many occasions. I was also angry when MPs were sent a post-referendum briefing from Jeremy, which asked us in press interviews to recognise the contribution of Gisela Stuart and Kate Hoey (who uncritically worked alongside Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage) as “prominent campaigners” on the EU.
But the concerns go beyond the referendum and they are not about Jeremy’s politics – indeed our policies are broadly unchanged from those on which we fought the last election under Ed Miliband. They are about his ability to lead the Party effectively and they come from across the Party, including from many of those who supported him – as you can see from this for example.
Jeremy is a decent man with strongly held values. I share many of his ambitions for the sort of country we want. However I cannot honestly say that I believe he is the best person to achieve those ambitions, and to lead the Labour Party into Government. Jeremy has opened up debate, but the Party was founded to win power for working people. That means convincing the country that our leader could be the next Prime Minister in an election that we may face very soon. I simply don’t believe that Jeremy could do this. So when faced with yesterday’s vote of confidence, I could not support him continuing in the role. I think that we need a fresh leader who can unite the Party and the country for the difficult times ahead.
Thanks again for getting in touch.
Best wishes,
Paul
The trouble is that Paul Blomfield and the rest of these Labour rebels appear to be under the delusion that they own the party. So rather than working on behalf of the members and the unions who back the party, all of whom overwhelming support Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, they have instead taken it upon themselves to disregard the democratic mandate and behave as a thoroughly undisciplined rabble. Here then is my own rather terse response to Blomfield’s automated reply:
Dear Paul,
Given the circumstances facing the country I regard your position as entirely reckless and incomprehensible. If the Conservatives, a broken party, are gifted the next election then it will be thanks to you.
Irish MEP Luke “Ming” Flanagan visits the TTIP reading room where he can read texts that have already been agreed on – in the language of the EU this constitutes “democratic oversight”. He is not allowed a camera or tape recorder:
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The agreement we have secured means that the EU Member States will fully support the European Commission’s recent trade strategy. Central to this strategy are ambitious and comprehensive trade deals that will substantially boost the UK’s growth and economic security. […]
Concluding all the trade deals already underway could ultimately be worth in total more than £20 billion a year to UK GDP. These include the UK’s top trade priority: an agreement between the EU and the US (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), which alone could add £10 billion to UK GDP.1
Taken from “The Best Of Both Worlds”; the government policy document that explains Cameron’s negotiated deal with the EU. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) features centrally in the new arrangements.
The first point to note in the extract reprinted above is that a claim that TTIP “will substantially boost the UK’s growth and economic security” is certainly bogus. Long-term economic projections of any kind are notoriously unreliable under the best of circumstances, but here we have a far from impartial assessment. Indeed, as its title “The Best of Both Worlds” makes blatant, this is a sales pitch.
Embedded below is an excellent short film produced by wikileaks about the American-led “free trade agreements” collectively known as the 3Ts: namely Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the lesser known Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). Quite literally everyone should watch this film:
In reality, these treaties have little to nothing to do with facilitating trade in any ordinary sense, but enable a greater transfer of power away from democratic government and into the hands of the unelected corporatocracy. Operating at their heart is a parallel judicial system known as the Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which is conducted on the basis of secret tribunals open solely to the transnational corporations (our governments do not have access).
This legal arrangement permits companies to sue states for anything that adversely affects their profits. Thus, under the rules of TTIP (the precise details of which remain as a closely guarded secret), national governments will lose jurisdiction to a kangaroo court that sits in judgement of all impediments to profit-making. Paring back regulations under the guise of “free trade” will thereby rig the market still more in the favour of a few special interests.
Such a thoroughgoing dismantlement of regulations has tremendous ramifications both for individuals and for our communities. It threatens the environment, our education system, healthcare (the NHS is especially endangered) and even privacy. In short, if ratified the 3Ts will impact the lives of all of those who live in signatory nations (and that includes nearly all developed countries). The EU is committed to signing two of these treaties – TTIP and also TISA.
Here are a few extracts from a detailed analysis of TTIP published by Der Spiegel International and entitled “Corporation Carte Blanche: Will US-EU Trade Become Too Free?”:
Lori Wallach had but 10 minutes to speak when she stepped up to podium inside Room 405 at George Washington University, located not too far away from the White House. Her audience was made up of delegates currently negotiating the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union.
They had already spent hours listening to presentations by every possible lobbying group — duty bound to hear myriad opinions. But when Wallach, a trade expert for the consumer protection group Public Citizen, took the stage, people suddenly started paying attention. The 49-year-old Harvard lawyer, after all, is a key figure in international trade debates.
“The planned deal will transfer power from elected governments and civil society to private corporations,” she said, warning that the project presents a threat of entirely new dimensions. [bold emphasis added]
The same article, which was published more than two years ago, then outlines how TTIP will impact our societies:
After the third round of negotiations, an unusually broad alliance of anti-globalization groups, NGOs, environmental and consumer protection groups, civil rights groups and organized labor is joining forces to campaign against TTIP.
These critics have numerous concerns about the treaty – including their collective fear that the convergence of standards will destroy important gains made over the years in health and nutrition policy, environmental protection and employee rights. They argue the treaty will make it easier for corporations to turn profits at the public’s expense in areas like water supply, health or education. It would also clear the path for controversial technologies like fracking or for undesired food products like growth hormone-treated meat to make their way to Europe. Broadly worded copyrights would also restrict access to culture, education and science. They also believe it could open the door to comprehensive surveillance. 2
Click here to read the full article in Der Spiegel.
More recently [Feb 22nd], the Guardian published an article exposing how “TTIP deal poses ‘real and serious risk’ to NHS, says leading QC”:
The controversial transatlantic trade deal set to be agreed this year would mean that privatisation of elements of the NHS could be made irreversible for future governments wanting to restore services to public hands, according to a new legal analysis.
The legal advice was prepared by one of the UK’s leading QCs on European law for the Unite trade union, which will reveal on Monday that it has been holding talks with the government about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal between Europe and the US.
Unite believes the government has been keeping Britain in the dark over the impact of the deal and argues the NHS should be excluded from the trade deal. The government dismissed the idea that TTIP poses a threat as “irresponsible and false”.
TTIP would give investors new legal rights, which extend beyond both UK and EU law as well as NHS contracts, according to Michael Bowsher QC, a former chair of the Bar Council’s EU law committee who was tasked by Unite to prepare the advice.
Bowsher said he had concluded that the deal poses “a real and serious risk” to future UK government decision making regarding the NHS.
“We consider that the solution to the problems TTIP poses to the NHS – and which is likely to provide the greatest protection – is for the NHS to be excluded from the agreement by way of a blanket exception contained within the main text of TTIP,” Bowsher said. 3
Click here to read the full article published in the Guardian.
I disagree, however. Ad hoc exclusions are entirely insufficient. TTIP is so dreadful that we should fight to stop it clean in its tracks.
Voting to remain, gives assent to Cameron’s negotiated EU agreement as summarised in the “The Best Of Both Worlds” policy document and everything contained within it. Since TTIP is central to the agreement, a vote to remain will then be reinterpreted as a signal of our tacit approval to go ahead with TTIP.
If, on the other hand, we vote to leave the EU, then this automatically keeps Britain out of TTIP and potentially nips TTIP in the bud altogether. There are, of course, other “trade deals” in the pipeline, and we need to be committed to blocking them all. First and foremost though, the target must be TTIP.
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Additional:
On May 3rd, Press TV invited Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Secretary of US Treasury, to debate with Sean O’Grady, the Finance Editor of The Independent over TTIP and the other “free trade agreements”:
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1 From paragraph 2.62–3 on p. 23–24 of “The Best Of Both Worlds: the United Kingdom’s special status in a reformed European Union”, published by UK government in February 2016 to “satisf[y] the duty to provide information set out in section 6 of the European Union Referendum Act 2015”.
We note with great concern that UK and US troops are scheduled to participate in joint military exercises in Ukraine in July as part of NATO’s Rapid Trident manoeuvres. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Its participation in military exercises by a nuclear-armed alliance with a first-strike policy can only further destabilise the country.
We call on the British government to urge the US and other NATO governments to cancel the Rapid Trident exercise, and to give a plain and public undertaking that Britain will not participate.
Initial signatories:
Lindsey German, convenor of Stop the War Coalition
Kate Hudson, general secretary of CND
Caroline Lucas MP
Jeremy Corbyn MP
John Rees, Stop the War Coalition
Baroness Jenny Tonge
Ken Loach, film and TV director
Mark Rylance, actor
Miriam Margolyes OBE actor
Michael Rosen, author and broadcaster
Salma Yaqoob, former leader of the Respect Party
Andrew Murray, chief of staff for Unite union
The National Stop the War Coalition has managed to raise the government e-petition above despite it being rejected on initial application. Within hours of the government releasing our censored petition, thousands signed up to say No to Nato military exercises in the Ukraine.
We don’t have long to build a strong campaign against military exercises in July that will see UK troops deployed in the Ukraine. Please help us by sharing the petition with your friends and contacts.
Sign the petition the government tried to ban. Let’s collect as many signatures as possible and stop this dangerous escalation of war.
Saturday’s anti-cuts march in London attracted more than 150,000 people, which makes it one of the bigger protests I’ve ever been part of and certainly worthy of greater media coverage. With the economic destruction of European nations like Greece, Spain and Portugal already so well advanced, the need for mass protest across the whole of Europe and the rest of the western world having never been more urgent. So these relatively large numbers are still disappointing. I had anticipated that perhaps a million or more might be marching along the streets of London at the weekend – as there had been ten years ago when we marched against the Iraq War – but sadly no.
My conclusion, therefore, is that the people of Britain either didn’t get sufficient notice that a major protest was taking place (and one of my friends told me that the event wasn’t particularly well publicised), or couldn’t be bothered, perhaps because they’ve given up all hope of ever changing anything, or, and most depressingly, are actually opposed to the objectives of the march itself. Those in the latter category remaining convinced that ‘we just need to take our medicine’ like good little boys and girls, whilst leaving everything to the clever men who understand the system better, trusting that as they inflict injury after injury, this process of deliberate evisceration might somehow, presumably as a side-effect, rescue us from the jaws of recession. Which is a manifestly deluded hope, of course, firstly because it mistakes depression for recession (and many have known since well before the crash of 2008 that the world was on the imminent brink of a global depression), but also because it is in contradiction to all the evidence provided by failures abroad. ‘Austerity’ having rescued no country from this worsening crisis, but only serving to sink them ever deeper into trouble.
Even the Nobel Prize winner and former chief economist at the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, came out with a statement last week pointing to the obvious failure of the current ‘austerity programme’ in Europe:
“Spain and Greece are in depression, not recession. That impact was brought about by austerity” with the countries now trapped in a vicious cycle of spending cuts and slumping growth, he said.
Stiglitz, who served as a senior advisor to former US president Bill Clinton, was speaking on the eve of a key two-day summit of EU leaders in Brussels that will seek to address the eurozone crisis.
“Austerity is bringing Europe down and diminishes chances of making things work — it is the wrong measure,” said the Nobel laureate, who is a professor at New York’s Columbia University.1
Unfortunately, however, there are many who will continue to fail to understand that the so-called ‘austerity’ now being imposed throughout our continent and beyond, is the major cause of our accelerating death spiral into the grinding teeth of a total global depression. ‘Austerity’ being a policy that those holding significant positions of power must already have known would be disastrous for the simple reason that such methods have failed so many times before, and in places as far afield as Chile, Argentina, South Korea, as well as in all corners of Africa. But then it all depends what one means by ‘failed’ I suppose. What fails for the ordinary people generally serves the finance oligarchs very nicely don’t you know.
What the small turnout showed then, is that sadly a great many in Britain (as elsewhere) are still bewitched by those guys in their pin-striped suits pulling their strange levers and twiddling their incomprehensible knobs on the top floor offices of the hedge funds and within such megabanks as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. Still ignorant, or else strangely oblivious, to the scale of the fraudulent means by which these same financial elites have saturated the world with their odious debt. Debts being used to hold us to ransom: menacing all of our nations with the threat that if ever their own well-deserved demise should actually occur, then the repercussions would be so serious as to result in the ruin of all of us. “Too big too fail”, no longer a slogan, but thanks to unquestioning media propagation, an inculcated factoid.
Again, I cannot believe that playing the suicide card has worked so well for the bankers, nor that remarkably few of the general public are yet to appreciate just how successfully these same financial giants have inveigled themselves into the highest positions of public office, placing their own puppets Lucas Papademos and Mario Monti directly into the governments of Greece and Italy, whilst former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, Mario Draghi settled in as president at the European Central Bank. The self-proclaimed ‘masters of the universe’ more or less openly ruling the world these days, which is why the crisis goes on and on and gets ever worse.
And the money-changers who now swivel in and out of power via the revolving doors of their own convenience have no interest whatsoever in saving the folks at home. Their own funds are safely offshore in any case and when the paper currencies begin to collapse as they sooner, rather than later, inevitably must, they won’t be worrying about this either, because their own stash of wealth will have been converted into more solid and stable forms, by, primarily, turning their assets into gold and silver and real estate. At this moment they lie to you, of course (but then they always did and always will), continuing to pretend that gold and silver are poor investments and using every possible means at their considerable disposal to artificially hold the prices down. But only the foolish still listen to what these people say, the ones who speak for Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, instead of wisely judging on the basis of what they actually do. And if you look, you will discover that the leading financial players are suddenly buying heavily into gold because they know what’s coming, and they also know that what’s coming is coming soon enough.
Here’s an example from an article entitled “Rothschild bullish on gold as central bankers get out of their depth”, which was published by Investment Europe in late July:
Equity markets cheered after Mario Draghi promised recently to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro, but Rothschild Wealth Management believes this was just another sign of central bankers “moving further into uncharted territory”, and that gold could benefit as a result.
Dirk Wiedmann (pictured), head of investments at RWM, said the precious metal could not be manipulated by central bankers, in contrast to paper currencies. He therefore called the environment “extremely positive for gold”, although he cautions investors in it should expect a volatile summer.2
And here’s another entitled “Billionaires Soros, Paulson Bet Big on Gold” taken from ABC news and published in August:
Once again John Paulson is choosing to heavily invest in gold and fellow billionaire George Soros is making a similar bet.
According toBloomberg News, Paulson & Co. and Soros Fund Management bumped up exposure to SPDR Gold Trust to 21.8 million shares and 884,000 shares, respectively. Paulson & Co. now has 44 percent of its$24 billionfund exposed to bullion.3
So if you do not already feel the pinch of ‘austerity’ then please believe me that you soon will, and that when it comes, that pinch will tighten until it becomes a deathly hold. ‘Austerity’ not really being an intended remedy at all, but, and as it always has been, the underlying aim of the neoliberal ideology. The savaging of public services, the oppression of workers and the privatisation of whole states simply being the well tried and tested methods which the bankers have long used to build their empires, although in former times the use of these approaches being mostly restricted to places faraway. The imposition of ‘austerity’ making nations ripe for exploitation and ready to be enslaved.
Right now, those same financial elites have, and whether by accident or design, manufactured the perfect storm, and with it comes their greatest opportunity to consolidate what is already enormous power, and this time in order that they may wield it with the same nefarious intent much closer to home. Which is the real reason that this latest crisis will have no end, or at least no end until we are collectively prepared to stand tall and say very loudly that enough is enough. Some kind of organised programme for mass dissent being our last chance of averting the total destruction of society that will otherwise inexorably follow in the wake of further rounds of banker bailouts and imposed ‘austerity’.
I had therefore felt a very urgent need to go to London for Saturday’s protest, travelling down the M1 with four friends from Sheffield who had also decided that it was vitally important to publicly express their own dissent. We did this in good humour, and as it transpired, also in good time, arriving at Hyde Park to hear some of the speeches at the rally – something I’ve never managed on any previous marches, and an indication again that the turnout wasn’t as spectacular as at those earlier protests. But then, as one of my friends pointed out along the way, there were other reasons to doubt that our journey to London would achieve very much on this occasion. The police presence being so low profile and non-confrontational, she surmised, and in reply to my own musings, presumably because the protest itself was a more or less officially sanctioned affair.
And indeed, Saturday’s protest was so significantly endorsed that one of the speakers at the rally turned out to be none other than the right honourable leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband – and we had got there just in time to hear some of what he had to say. This is what we heard:
And you know [the government are] not just incompetent, their old answers don’t work any more. Trickle-down economics, cutting rights at work – David Cameron calls it ‘the sink or swim society’ – you don’t build a successful country with sink or swim, you do it by building one nation. And that is what a Labour government will do.
So far so good, I suppose, but unfortunately this was just a sweetener, his clever way to rally the traditional Labour ranks against the common Tory enemy. So here’s what Ed Miliband said next:
Now, of course, there will still be hard choices. And with borrowing rising not falling, I do not promise easy times.
You know, it’s right that we level with people, that there will still be hard choices. I’ve said that whoever was in government right now, there will be cuts, but this government are cutting too far and too fast.
Many in the park applauded, buoyed on by his words of condemnation for the incompetent incumbents in Whitehall, whilst wanting to show solidarity with the old party. Alongside the faithful, however, many hundreds of others booed and heckled.
I was one of those who booed Ed Miliband, and I am very proud to have done so. For these are nothing but weasel words. Polite but utterly insincere justification for further ‘austerity’ and all dressed up within that old Thatcherite garb of ‘there is no alternative’. Such words prove only how sold-out Ed Miliband and the Labour Party still remain, and as such deserve nothing but our outright contempt.
My friends and I had already left before Miliband went on to explain how his future Labour government would “end the privatisation experiment in the NHS and [we] repeal their NHS bills” and before his entirely hollow “pledge” to small businesses “that instead of a country that serves its banks, we will have once again banks that serve this country”. Even if we’d stayed longer, we would still not have heard him apologise, as he should, for New Labour’s important role in enabling the NHS to fall into private hands, whilst meanwhile permitting the banks to entirely run amok during more than a decade in government.
Our premature departure also meant that we hadn’t, at least, had to suffer his wretched and totally over-worked ‘one nation’ finale – and if you decide to listen to his speech on the embedded video below, then tell me if you don’t, like me, hear his voice audibly distort, almost as if in mimicry, to become indistinguishable from the bleating insincerity of Tony Blair – and I can almost hear the voice of Tony Blair as I read the transcript back again:
One nation is a country in which those with the greatest shoulders bear the broadest burden. One nation is a country where we give hope to our young people again. One nation is a country where we defend and improve institutions like our National Health Service. One nation is a country united not divided. A future that works. A future that Britain builds together.
He might just as well have included mention of the need to go “Back to Basics” and calls for “the Big Society”, before closing with “because you’re worth it”, or something else equally as vacuous. But the final straw for our own little party was when he told us all how he was so tremendously committed to “tax[ing] the bankers’ bonuses”. And not, as he should have proposed, to putting a significant but fair sales tax on the enormous volume of their market manipulating high frequency transactions. Nor to securing any of the unpaid taxes protected by the multitude of convenient offshore havens, the majority of which are, of course, British dependencies. Nor even to prosecuting any of those involved in what we now know – and with the revelations surrounding the fixing of Libor, know beyond all doubt – to be nothing less than a vast criminal racket. And finally, no mention whatsoever of any need for a cancellation of debts, something which must happen if only because the debts are simply unpaidable, as they always have been. In short, Miliband proffered no hope and made plain simply by omission that he has no real interest in bringing any kind of justice at all, social or otherwise.
Yet I remain glad that I made the effort to join in the demonstration, and if only because, as this entirely avoidable and still potentially reversible crisis deepens into greater chaos, and as the British people are slowly gripped by the same despair that those in Greece, Spain and Portugal are already feeling, it will help me again to salve my own conscience. For when all are wondering why we couldn’t have prevented our lemming-like march over the precipice, many will also turn to wonder why they themselves had not done more, or acted sooner, and if only by learning what’s actually going on, or by spreading the message, or more simply by standing firm and saying no. If only more had tried, they will realise too late, we might actually have saved ourselves…
And if you are wondering what kinds of remedies might truly be effective if we are to save ourselves from a fate worse than Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese and others are already suffering, then I refer you to my many earlier posts, and especially to those categorised under neoliberalism, debt cancellation and “austerity measures”. Perhaps the most succinct combination of analysis and suggested alternatives having been put together in this one.
Oh, and here is Ed Miliband selling himself as the new Benjamin Disraeli:
Click here to link to the official October 20th protest website.
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Additional:
The anti-cuts campaign continues on November 17th with a Unite the Resistance national conference in London. The list of speakers are as follows:
Mark Serwotka – PCS general secretary
Hind Adb-al-Gawad Ibrahim – Independent Union of Local Development Information Centre Workers Egypt
Karen Reissmann – Unison NEC
Mike Mansfield QC – campaigning barrister
John McDonnell – Labour MP
Matt Wrack – FBU general secretary
Ian Hodson – BFAWU president
Kevin Courtney – NUT deputy general secretary
Zita Holbourne – a PCS executive member and joint chair of BARAC (Black Activists Rising Against Cuts)
Owen Jones – author of “Chavs – the Demonisation of the Working Class”
Karen Reissmann – Unison NEC member
They will also be joined by an unnamed South African miner who has been involved in the bitter struggle against British-owned mining firm Lonmin.
Although I do not ordinarily publicise events taking place in other countries, I feel that it is worth making an exception in the case of the UFAA – United Front Against Austerity campaign which begins with its inaugural conference next weekend in New York. Here are more details:
When:
Saturday, October 27, 2012
12:00 pm — 6:00 pm
Where:
Walker Auditorium / INN World Report
56 Walker Street
New York, NY 10013
One and one half blocks south of Canal Street, between Church & Broadway
Purpose:
To organize an effective opposition to the impending austerity offensive; agitate to shift the burden of the economic depression onto Wall Street oligarchs; and to build momentum toward a genuine political revolution of, by and for the people.
Participants will hear proposals from distinguished speakers, engage in floor debate, and vote on vital strategic matters. The UFAA intends to build on Wisconsin and Occupy — with decisions, demands and action.
Speakers:
Cindy Sheehan — Antiwar Activist
Webster G. Tarpley — Author, historian and economist
Dr. W. Randy Short — SCLC, University of Virginia
Don DeBar — Founder, Community Progressive Radio
Anthony Monteiro — African-American Studies, Temple University
Dr. Jay Arena — Professor of Sociology, College of Staten Island, CUNY
Eric Lerner — Popular science writer and Occupy Wall Street activist
Rev. Edward Pinkney — Benton Harbor, Michigan activist (via Skype)
Murrell Brooks — Political Science, Virginia Wesleyan College
Eric Draitser — Independent journalist, StopImperialism.com
Bruce Marshall, moderator — former Congressional candidate, Green Party of Vermont
We will also play pre-recorded messages from:
Amelia Boynton Robinson — Civil rights leader
Yanis Varoufakis — Political economist, Greek SYRIZA coalition
Glen Ford — Radio host, Black Agenda Report
Stephen Lendman — Research Associate, Center for Research on Globalization
David Swanson — Activist, blogger and author
wall of controversy 