In the past decade, more than 29,000 people have either died or disappeared trying to cross the Mediterranean. Each had a name, a face and a story. Each life was a miracle to those that loved and depended on them — and each death a stain on the collective conscience of those who have criminalised human beings just trying to survive. Politicians across Europe know that their hardline immigration policies will not stop people making the treacherous journey across the Channel. That’s not the point. Their intention is to whip up hatred, division and fear.
To many in our political class, mass death at sea is simply the price of grown-up ‘pragmatism’. Conservative and Social Democratic governments alike tell us this the only way to stave off the rise of the far-right: the AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, Vox in Spain, the Swedish Democrats, to name a few. However, governments who embrace anti-migrant rhetoric do not neutralise the far-right — they only legitimise them and embolden them.
In Tribune
The power of capital is such that it’s not only individuals whose lives are shaped by it. It has a coercive influence over governments as well. Fujitsu, despite its complicity in the Post Office Scandal, has continued to run the Post Office’s computer systems without any penalties. It is claimed that it would be too expensive to sack them. They continue to be given government IT contracts as there is little in procurement law to stop them being awarded them on the basis of bad behaviour in the running of previous contracts.
The people in charge of such companies often have close personal relations with those in government, having gone to the same schools or universities and belonging to the same social circles. They can relate to each other, but not to the lives of working-class people. They look after their own and show no evidence of really caring for ordinary people like those whose lives have been destroyed by the Post Office.
Is there any evidence that things have been learned as a result of the Post Office scandal? I do not believe so. The dangers created when powerful multinational companies are allowed important roles within the public sector have not been addressed. The Post Office Scandal shows that they can operate in ways that damage working class lives with little meaningful accountability to the public.
Council housing, once the bedrock of the housing system — providing secure and cheap tenure — is in shockingly short supply. According to the National Housing Federation, 1.6 million households are languishing on the waiting list — more than the number of households in the North-East — while all of England only managed to deliver a pitiful 8,900 council homes in 2021-22. Only 2,500 of these were for social rent, the traditional rent level for social housing, with the remainder at higher-cost tenures.
In the same period, the UK also sold off or demolished around 20,000 social homes, with 14,000 council homes sold off under the Right to Buy scheme. Over the years, Right to Buy has led to some 3 million homes being lost from the social housing stock. With millions in need of secure and affordable homes, rebuilding the council stock is a vital step — perhaps the most vital — in confronting the housing emergency. Council housing offers secure, lifelong tenancies and rent levels far below that of the private sector and most Housing Association properties, with the homes remaining in public hands, owned by us.
Amid this backdrop of depleted social housing, Sadiq Khan unveiled his ‘Right to Buy Back’ scheme in 2021, which has subsidised London councils to purchase homes from the private sector for use as council housing. This has allowed for former private sector homes to be added to the council housing stock, so long as the homes meet or are brought up to the Decent Homes Standard. In its first year, the scheme managed to facilitate the purchase of 1500 homes — a long way from what is needed to meet the city’s social housing needs, but almost as many council homes as were built across the rest of England last year.
On Monday, MPs will mark the UDHR’s anniversary by gathering for a candlelight vigil, under the title ‘Parliamentarians for Peace.’ How ironic that the majority have given the green light to some of the most appalling levels of death and destruction we have witnessed in decades.
[…]
Across the board, our political representatives are showing monstrous hypocrisy in their commitment to a document they show no signs of respecting. As we speak, our government is attempting to circumvent international law in order to implement its assault on the rights of refugees. And they are emboldened by an opposition front bench that refuses to make the moral case for the right to asylum. The Tories have not ‘failed’ on immigration because they have ‘lost control of the borders’. They have failed because they have proven incapable of protecting the human rights of those seeking a place of safety. Refugees are not political pawns to be debated and disempowered. They are human beings, whose hopes and dreams should not be sacrificed to appease the right-wing press.
Every day for the last six weeks, journalists in Gaza have shown inhuman strength and bravery reporting from the frontlines. Journalists are losing their lives at four times the rate of the enclave’s general population. Since the start of the war, nearly fifty journalists have been killed by Israeli forces. That’s almost one every single day. Two are unaccounted for and at least a further six are missing. More journalists have died since the beginning of this violence than in the last twenty years.
At the same time, many journalists have been displaced from their homes, and are now living in tents around Khan Yunis. Collectively, they have lost around 1,000 family members.
This is the price they pay for doing their jobs, for documenting Israel’s ongoing devastation of Gaza, and for showing evidence of its war crimes to the outside world. Israel does not want the world to witness their atrocities.
Israel has freely admitted to destroying communications systems in Gaza ahead of their intense bombing campaigns. Israeli airstrikes have targeted and completely or partially destroyed the headquarters of several media outlets, including al-Ayyam newspaper, Gaza FM radio, and Shehab news and Palestinian news agency Ma’an, among others. The targeting of journalists is itself a violation of international law.
An address from the should-be-prime-minister:
I deplore the targeting of all civilians. That includes Hamas’ attack on 7 October, which I have repeatedly condemned in in Parliament, in print and and at every demonstration that I have attended. And that includes that Israeli response; there is no meaningful sense that the Israeli army is avoiding civilian casualties when it drops 25,000 tonnes of bombs onto a tiny strip of land populated by 2.2 million people. If we understand terrorism to describe the indiscriminate killing of civilians, in breach of international law, then of course Hamas is a terrorist group. The targeting of hospitals, refugee camps and so-called safe zones by the Israeli army are acts of terror too; and the killing of more than 11,000 people, half of whom are children, cannot possibly be understood as acts of self-defence.
We should not entertain questions from those who have no interest in applying this basic consistency. We should stand up to those who insist on seeing some people as innocent civilians and others as collateral damage. And we should reject hectoring from those whose questions serve to justify the horror unfolding before our very eyes. Ultimately, we do not just have a responsibility to end the bloodshed. We have a responsibility to stop bloodthirsty voices from dictating the terms of debate, and to push back against cynical attempts to distract us from our urgent goal: bringing about an immediate ceasefire.
Last month, Israel arrested over 2,000 Palestinians, subjecting them to degrading treatment that amounts to torture. The failure of our governments to demand the release of these hostages exposes their rank hypocrisy.
Two years ago, I was proud to be elected as a Labour councillor for Notting Dale, the ward in North Kensington, London, where I grew up. Since then, I have had the privilege of serving the community here and acting as deputy leader of the Labour group. Yesterday, I submitted my resignation from the party following Keir Starmer’s appalling statements, which amounted to the endorsement of war crimes committed by Israel against civilians in Gaza.
It is absolutely correct to unequivocally condemn the killing of innocent civilians on both sides. Instead of adopting this highly uncontroversial position, Keir Starmer chose to provide disturbingly one-sided support for Israel even as it was committing what he, as a former human rights lawyer, must have known to be war crimes.
I don't think Jeremy wrote the headline for this.
We should condemn the targeting of all civilian life, no matter who does it. That this is apparently controversial is testament to the depravity of a media and political class that shuts down, distorts and denounces calls for peace. The heinous attacks on civilians in Israel by Hamas were utterly deplorable.
This cannot justify the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, who are paying a price for a crime they did not commit. All human life is equal. Why is it so difficult for our politicians to be consistent in this basic moral principle?
This is the question that many people in this country are asking when they express solidarity with the Palestinian people. They are not expressing support for Hamas. To deliberately conflate the two is a disgusting, cynical and chilling attempt to further erode our democratic rights, and wilfully ignores a very basic demand: to stop the killing of innocent people.