Will abandoning left-wing voters backfire for Keir Starmer?

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Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

Labour leader’s reluctance to differ from Tories on policy or Gaza sets stage for progressive independent candidates

Keir Starmer has moved Labour to the right – leaving left-wing voters without a political home  | Belinda Jiao/Getty Images

Almost all of Britain’s pollsters agree: the Labour Party is heading for a massive victory in this year’s general election, while Rishi Sunak’s Tories are set for a historic defeat. But there is another, far less talked about shift underway, which could see a wave of independent left-wing MPs elected.

Most polling firms expect Labour to win a majority of more than a hundred seats. A ‘poll of polls’ by political forecasting website Electoral Calculus suggests the party is on course for a 200+ majority.

These polls could all be wrong, but little seems to shake them. There is some evidence, though, of another trend that is yet to be reflected in the polls: Keir Starmer’s unwillingness to set out any clear policy differences from the Conservatives may be backfiring.

One area likely to cause the Labour leader trouble is his position – or lack thereof – on Israel’s war on Gaza.

Several polls in recent months have indicated that around 70% of people in the UK want an immediate ceasefire, and there are weekly demonstrations in towns and cities across the country in support of Palestinians. Organisers of a march in London last week estimated that up to 400,000 people had gathered to demand an end to the violence.

These protests receive minimal coverage in the mainstream media, bar senior Conservatives labelling the peaceful crowds as ‘hate mobs’. The government maintains strong support for Israel, continuing to sell arms and share intelligence with the country, as well as allowing it to use RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus as a support base – a position Labour has largely agreed with.

This leaves a huge gap in political representation, at least from the biggest two parties, for swathes of people nationwide.

It was in this opening that former Labour MP George Galloway – who was kicked out of the party in the 2000s after objecting to the UK entering the Iraq war – was elected as an independent MP for Rochdale last month, following a campaign that centred the need for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Another gap in political representation has been created by Starmer’s remodelling of the Labour Party, which has been sanitised to ensure it poses little or no threat to the political establishment. The majority of his policies so far appear to be a continuation of the status quo, suggesting little will change if the party wins the forthcoming election.

In contrast, so bold and progressive were the policies of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, that the higher echelons of the Labour Party and the wider political and media establishment were determined to get rid of him from the offset.

A leadership challenge was mounted against him in the summer of 2016, little over a year after he was elected the party’s leader. Corbyn won comfortably – a fact I found unsurprising, having seen first-hand how he could pull a crowd of more than a thousand people to a hurriedly arranged event half a mile from a city centre.

Internal party opposition to Corbyn surged following his re-election, again backed by the mainstream media. When then Tory prime minister Theresa May called an election in 2017, many anticipated she would win a landslide victory that would consign ‘Corbynism’ to the outer margins.

Instead, Corbyn and his Labour manifesto struck a chord with many voters. Labour gains resulted in a hung parliament, to the horror of the political establishment, which worked to eliminate this threat from the left over the following two years.

After Labour lost the 2019 general election, Corbyn resigned and Starmer moved the party rightwards – prompting tens of thousands of its members to desert it as a result. Their votes are now up for grabs, and left-wing independents are hoping to win them.

Take a meeting in London just last weekend, scarcely reported on except by socialist paper The Morning Star. Two hundred of Labour’s former parliamentary candidates, councillors and supporters gathered to develop an alternative to its current stance on Gaza and other issues.

A sense of the mood at the event was best summed up by Tyneside’s independent socialist mayor Jamie Driscoll, who quit Labour after the party decided not to select him to run again for the north-east mayoral election in May.

In a video message played at the meeting, Driscoll said: “In the next election, both parties will have the same manifesto and the same rich donors pulling the strings.”

similar event is planned in Blackburn next month – just one part of a much wider movement that will likely see independent left-wing candidates standing against Labour candidates in many seats in the general election.

This is already being seen in England’s upcoming local council elections, where clusters of non-party, progressive candidates are working together in many parts of the country. In Blackburn, for example, every ward will have an independent left-wing candidate standing, as will all six wards in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Early indications suggest similar trends in Merseyside and parts of London.

The accepted political wisdom in the UK is that once a general election is called, voters tend to revert to the usual pattern of voting. But if independent candidates were to pick up substantial numbers of votes in the local elections, even taking some council seats, it could indicate a political shift that means this wisdom will not apply this year.

This may seem unlikely but there is undeniably a political vacuum waiting to be filled – and a sense that something is afoot in British politics that is simply not being recognised.

Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

Status Quo, again and again and again and again
Continue ReadingWill abandoning left-wing voters backfire for Keir Starmer?

Where Labour and the Tories got their money from in 2023

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Original article by Ethan Shone republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak saw donations to their respective parties increase significantly last year
 | Leon Neal & Carl Court/Getty Images

Labour’s cash from private donors now dwarfs donations from unions, while the Tories got their biggest bung ever

Britain suffered a bleak economic landscape in 2023, with wages stagnant and costs rising across the board, but political donors and the parties they give to seem to have been unimpacted. All parties declared more than £93m in total compared with £52m in the previous year. And the cash looks set to keep pouring in ahead of the general election, which could take place as soon as May – although our money is on a November poll.

The Conservatives received the most donations by far, raking in £44.5m in cash, compared with Labour’s total of £21.6m, £6m for the Liberal Democrats, £610,000 for the Green Party and £255,000 for Reform – who now have their first MP in the form of ‘Red Wall Rottweiler’ Lee Anderson. The SNP registered only £76,000 cash donations in 2023, with £50,000 from the estate of a donor who passed away some years prior.

In addition to this, parties received non-cash donations – for things like premises, staff costs, sponsorship, consultancy services and more – worth £4.2m in total. Other regulated recipients like Labour Together, The New Conservatives, Labour First, and the Carlton Club Political Committee, took in £2.5m – these are campaigning organisations affiliated to political parties but legally separate from them, and often provide financial support to a particular faction within a party.

We’ve had a closer look at some of the underlying trends behind the numbers and picked out a few key points to look out for in the months ahead, based on what these donations tell us about the state of play in the two main parties.

Labour’s reliance on companies and individuals over trade unions

Much has been made of Labour’s increasingly close relationship with big business and the wealthy under Keir Starmer. Supporters of the party leadership argue that Labour has to be able to compete with the spending power of the Conservatives in the general election, and so has to look beyond the traditional funding source of the trade union movement toward people and businesses with deep pockets. Critics, however, might suggest that the interests of the trade union movement and the interests of those with the deepest pockets may not accord.

The concern among those of the latter view is that, as donations from the wealthy come to represent a larger proportion of the party’s war chest, there could be a shift in policy in that direction. Dark Arts has already reported on the access and influence enjoyed by corporate lobbying firms who employ Labour candidates to connect their clients with senior party figures. I’ve also written for openDemocracy about the millions that have poured into the party from bankers and financiers under Starmer. And our analysis of donations data for 2023 shows another potentially concerning trend for those worried about a corporate takeover of the party.

Of the £21.5m in cash received by the party in 2023, just £5.9m came from the trade union movement, compared with £14.5m from companies and individuals – a huge increase on the previous year, and indeed more than in the three previous years of Keir Starmer’s leadership combined. As trade union contributions have dipped slightly, from around £6.9m in 2020 and 2021 to £5.3m in 2022, donations from businesses and individuals have soared: they totalled £2.3m in 2020 and rose to £3m in 2021 and £7.6m in 2022 before nearly doubling last year.

Around £10m of this total comes from just four sources: Gary Lubner (£4.6m), David Sainsbury (£3.1m), Fran Perrin (£1m) and Ecotricity (£1m), the green energy firm owned by prominent eco-activist Dale Vince. This means that just two individuals gave the Labour Party more money last year than all the trade unions combined.

Lubner is the former CEO of Belron, a global firm specialising in vehicle glass repair. He has been donating to the party since meeting shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves at a dinner hosted by the big-four consultancy firm PwC in 2021. Sainsbury – of supermarket fame – has been an on-off Labour donor for decades, forging a close relationship with the party during the New Labour years when he got a seat in the Lords and served as a science minister. His daughter, Fran Perrin, was an adviser in Tony Blair’s Downing Street.

Including trade unions, there were 114 donors who gave £25,000 or more last year, while the overall average sum donated over the year was £111,499.

Tories in need of new funding sources ahead of GE

It is perhaps an indictment of the British political system that two of the largest individual donors to political parties last year were both men with the last name Sainsbury. David Sainsbury’s contribution to Labour was dwarfed by the £10m left by his cousin, Tory peer John Sainsbury, to the Conservatives in his will – the largest single donation ever received by the party.

Of the £44.5m in cash received by the Conservatives last year, more than £20m came from two sources: John Sainsbury and Frank Hester, an IT entrepreneur from Leeds who has given £5m personally and another £5m through his firm, The Phoenix Partnership. Hester’s firm has profited from public sector contracts and his ties with the party are under heightened scrutiny following the publication of an investigation by the Guardian that revealed he had said former Labour MP Diane Abbott made him “want to hate all black women” and should be shot.

A further £11.3m came from five individuals:

  • Mohamed Mansour, Egyptian-born billionaire who controls the behemoth conglomerate Mansour Group, which has interests in real estate, finance, retail and tech: £5m
  • Graham Edwards, co-founder of one of the largest private companies in the UK, Telereal Trillium, which owns thousands of properties and approximately 60 million square feet of land: £2m
  • Amit Lohia, son of billionaire petrochemical and fertiliser tycoon Sri Prakash Lohia, chair of Indorama: £2m
  • Christopher Barry Wood, founder of biotech firm Medannex: £1.3m
  • Alan Howard, hedge fund manager who co-founded Jersey-based Brevan Howard and has significant interests in crypto-currency: £1m

Even without the mega-donation from John Sainsbury, the party comfortably brought in more than Labour last year, and plans pushed through recently by the government raising the amount that political parties can spend at a general election have been widely seen as a sign the party still believes it can leverage its financial pull to good effect against Starmer’s Labour.

However, when the one-off £10m donation is discounted, the party’s fundraising efforts slowed down significantly in the latter half of last year. In the first six months of 2023 the party received £20.6m, compared with just £12m in the second half of the year. Without the £10m from Lord Sainsbury, the party would have taken in just £3m in the third quarter, a huge drop from Q2 (£9.2m) and Q1 (£11.4m).

This might suggest that, at least into the latter portion of last year, the Conservatives were not planning on holding an election in the early portion of 2024, as we would expect to see an uptick in fundraising in anticipation of that.

Overall, there were 286 donors who gave the Conservative Party £25,000 or more last year. The average Tory donor gave £90,811 over the course of the year.

If you’re concerned about the influence of money in politics and want to support our reporting in this area, sign up to our newly-launched newsletter, The Dark Arts, on Substack.

Original article by Ethan Shone republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingWhere Labour and the Tories got their money from in 2023

Labour’s public-private plans are just a return to the dreaded PFI era

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/labours-public-private-plans-are-just-return-dreaded-pfi-era

Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves in the shadow of Tony Bliar.

SOLOMON HUGHES warns Reeves’s proposed national wealth fund hands City financiers control over billions in public money for big business — and we get… to pay!

HOW will Keir Starmer’s Labour try to “grow the economy?” The short answer is it is going to try to use public money to persuade international investors to put cash into “growth” industries.

It’s the return of the public-private partnership. The big danger is that, like Labour’s last public-private partnership, the private corporations will get all the growth, while the public sector gets ripped off.

The main economy-grower Starmer is promoting is Rachel Reeves’s proposed national wealth fund. It will invest in key industries like “green energy” and other modern manufacturing sectors.

There is a strong Labour case to run a national bank investing in key industries: the 1945 Labour government set up two such banks, the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation and the Finance Corporation for Industry, which lent growth capital to small- and medium-sized industries or larger manufacturing firms respectively.

Labour argued that the City avoided investing in these crucial sectors, exacerbating the 1930s Depression. Both government-founded investment funds were very successful. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour proposed similar publicly owned national investment banks.

But Reeves’s plan makes public money subordinate to private investment. She told the last Labour conference: “For every pound of investment we put in, we will leverage in three times as much private investment.”

Labour plans to invest £7.3 billion in the fund, and so attract around £22bn private “co-investment.” Reeves says private money will be attracted because the government cash will be “encouraging and derisking investment” from international finance: investors will assume that if the government has a stake in, say, a car battery factory, that it is a “sure thing” and won’t be allowed to go bust or lose money for shareholders.

But what happens if the publicly backed investments hit trouble? Say the car batteries come out too expensive, reducing profits, or need extra investment to fix production problems — will the private investors insist that the public investor take the losses? And if the profits are bigger than expected, will both parties benefit equally?

There are some major signs Reeves’s deals will favour the big private investors. First, because it is putting in more of the money, they can call more of the shots. This is not really a national wealth fund because most of the money will not be national.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/labours-public-private-plans-are-just-return-dreaded-pfi-era

Continue ReadingLabour’s public-private plans are just a return to the dreaded PFI era

Morning Star: Politicians can’t be trusted on racism: we must build from the bottom up

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-politicians-cant-be-trusted-racism-we-must-build-bottom

People take part in the Resist Racism Scotland rally in George Square, Glasgow, organised by Stand Up To Racism and the STUC, March 18, 2023

You will not find Gove, or Sunak, or for that matter Keir Starmer, on this weekend’s anti-racist marches. For them racism is an accusation to be deployed cynically for factional advantage, not an evil to be confronted through standing in solidarity with its victims.

So Starmer can condemn the Tories for permitting racist abuse of Diane Abbott, while ignoring a leaked report into Labour officials’ racism including multiple instances directed at her, and blandly brief that “disciplinary processes take time” when challenged over her ongoing suspension as a Labour MP — though 10 months in, we know the party hasn’t even spoken to her. Some investigation.

So Sunak can retort with another attack on the left — repeating the lie that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership tolerated anti-semitism — a jibe eagerly accepted by Starmer.

These people cannot be trusted to oppose racism. Even their performative anti-racism is often racist (as in the insinuation that Muslims are a threat to Jews, or Labour’s disproportionate crackdown on Jewish anti-zionists).

They are the “forces at home trying to tear us apart.” They do so because nothing scares them more than people power: than a mass movement for peace that challenges British imperialism, today, as for centuries, one of the main drivers of racism.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-politicians-cant-be-trusted-racism-we-must-build-bottom

Continue ReadingMorning Star: Politicians can’t be trusted on racism: we must build from the bottom up

Hey Michael Gove, I’ve got 2 extremist groups for you

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You want groups that fit this definition: “Extremism is the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to: 1 negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; or 2 undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or 3 intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve the results in (1) or (2).” source: UK ministers and officials to be banned from contact with groups labelled extremist.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak claims “There is a growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule. And we’ve got to collectively, all of us, change that urgently." Sunak is recognised as a war criminal due to his complicity in genocide.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak claims “There is a growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule. And we’ve got to collectively, all of us, change that urgently.” Sunak is recognised as a war criminal due to his complicity in genocide.

The UK Conservative Party and the UK Labour party certainly meet this definition. Promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance.

Where shall I start? Both the Conservative and Labour party promote and advance Zionism, an ideology based on violence, hatred and intolerance that also meets the secondary condition 1. (aims to) negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. Many rights are denied: the right to life and the right to be free from degrading or inhuman treatment. The Conservative and Labour parties are complicit in genocide, I’m not sure that you can get more extremist than that.

Then there’s the persecution of Julian Assange. That’s the advancement of an ideology based on intolerance aiming to deny Assanges fundamental rights and freedoms. That’s both the Conservative party and UK’s Labour party again. There are strong indicators that the Labour party’s Keir Starmer was directly involved in Assange’s early persecution.

Response to Rishi Sunak's extremism speech at Downing Street 1 March 2024.
Response to Rishi Sunak’s extremism speech at Downing Street 1 March 2024.

Here’s the leader of the Conservative party, Rishi Sunak. He’s pictured giving an extremist speech trying to undermine democracy and democratic rights e.g. the democratic right to protest, on 1 March 2024. He also involved in mob rule – he rules for a small group of very wealthy, nasty people – some of them tax avoiders and newspaper owners. Anyway Michael, I expect that you’ll be hearing more from me about these extremist groups, there’s plenty more to their extremism.

Continue ReadingHey Michael Gove, I’ve got 2 extremist groups for you

Diane Abbott accuses Tories AND Labour of ‘shocking’ racism in donor row

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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/diane-abbott-labour-tory-donor-racism-b2512086.html

Diane Abbott has hit out at the Conservatives and Labour, accusing both parties of “shocking” racism in the Tory donor scandal.

The MP, who sits as an independent and was dragged into the centre of the race row, turned her fire on Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak after the pair clashed over the issue at PMQs on Wednesday.

Mr Sunak has refused to hand back a £10m donation from businessman Frank Hester after he allegedly said Ms Abbott made him “want to hate all Black women” and that she should be “shot”.

Writing in The Independent, Britain’s longest-serving Black MP described his words as “outrageously racist and sexist” and added: “I am afraid long-term experience teaches me that the Tory party has long been a source of whipping up racism in this country, including directed at me personally.”

Abbott has attacked Starmer and Labour over racism in the party (Getty)

She also attacked Sir Keir and said: “The position of the current leadership of the Labour Party is disappointing, which seemed equally reluctant at the outset to call out either racism or sexism.

“Instead, the entire focus was on the demand that the Tories give Hester back his money, which is surely not the primary point in this case.”

Ms Abbott, who was a Labour MP for more than three decades until she was suspended last year, said her former party had initially failed to label Mr Hester’s alleged comments against her as racist and sexist.

She went on to condemn the “shocking levels of racism and sexism from within the Labour Party, again much of it directed against me personally”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/diane-abbott-labour-tory-donor-racism-b2512086.html

Continue ReadingDiane Abbott accuses Tories AND Labour of ‘shocking’ racism in donor row

Morning Star: Rishi Sunak must answer for the abuse endured by Diane Abbott — but so must Keir Starmer

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/sunak-and-starmer-must-answer-abuse-abbott

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak walk through the Peer’s Lobby at the Palace of Westminster ahead of the State Opening of Parliament in the House of Lords, London, November 6, 2023

THE sickening racist abuse directed at Diane Abbott by top Tory donor Frank Hester represents a challenge to the leaders of both the major political parties.

Hester, who has given the Conservative Party £10 million over the last year, told a meeting in 2019 that looking at the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington made him “want to hate all black women” and added for good measure that Abbott “should be shot.”

Such remarks should be enough to immediately terminate anybody’s involvement in public life, and they may indeed constitute a criminal offence.

Hester was speaking, remember, just three years after a Labour MP, Jo Cox, was indeed shot to death by a far-right fanatic.

Everyone should first of all send their unqualified solidarity to Abbott, long the victim of more racist and misogynistic abuse than any other MP.

Racism is a bipartisan problem. And it is reinforced by Starmer’s own treatment of Abbott.

She has been suspended from the Labour whip in Parliament for nearly a year now. Her offence was to write a newspaper letter suggesting Jewish people, among others, had not suffered from racism.

Her letter was clearly wrong and she immediately and fulsomely apologised for it. Since then her case has been “under investigation.”

Yet it is unclear what there is to investigate. There can be no possible reason for leaving her in political suspense for such a protracted period over what is a fairly straightforward issue.

The reason for this procrastination is obvious: because Abbott has spent her life on the left of the Labour Party, and served in senior roles under Jeremy Corbyn, he wants rid of her.

If she remains whipless when the next general election is called then she will be unable to stand as a Labour candidate, allowing some gormless Starmerite or other to be imposed on Hackney North.

Abbott is Britain’s first black woman MP, and its longest-serving black MP too. For her to be treated like this ought to be a source of national shame.

It is past time that the phoney “investigation” into her was terminated and the whip restored.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/sunak-and-starmer-must-answer-abuse-abbott

Continue ReadingMorning Star: Rishi Sunak must answer for the abuse endured by Diane Abbott — but so must Keir Starmer

How the UK government rebranded protest as extremism

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Original article by Anita Mureithi republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Rishi Sunak used his first speech outside 10 Downing Street to say “hateful” groups had “hijacked” the streets in recent months, in reference to pro-Palestine marches | Carl Court/Getty Images

Daughter of terror attack victim Makram Ali says politicians are ‘fuelling fire’ by equating Muslims with extremism

James Eastwood and his union colleagues got to their office one Tuesday afternoon to find that someone had broken in. The intruder hadn’t taken personal valuables or expensive equipment: all they had done was pull down the pro-Palestine posters in the window.

The break-in didn’t come as a huge shock to Eastwood, co-chair of the University and College Union (UCU) branch at Queen Mary University in east London. A day earlier, uni bosses had called him asking for access to the office so they could remove the posters, one of which had a Palestinian flag on it, and another of which read: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Eastwood had agreed, requesting only that he be allowed to make the case before any action was taken.

The university was unwilling to wait, and forced the lock the next day. But Eastwood lays the blame beyond the office of the president and principal, Colin Bailey, who last year took home nearly £359,000. Instead, he holds the government responsible, feeling ministers have decided that “it’s not OK to be in solidarity with Palestine”. The university admits it took the posters down, telling openDemocracy that “such permanent displays… can stifle freedom of speech and make members of our community feel unsafe”.

Communities secretary Michael Gove is this week expected to widen the government’s definition of extremism to include “promotion or advancement of ideology based on hatred, intolerance or violence or undermining or overturning the rights or freedoms of others, or of undermining democracy itself”.

This might sound reasonable in isolation. But Gove’s intervention is the culmination of a months-long campaign by Tory politicians to paint pro-Palestine protesters as extremists.

Ahead of a march on 11 November, then home secretary Suella Braverman called the demonstrations “hate marches” and suggested the sanctity of Armistice Day was under threat. This led hundreds of far-right thugs – more than 90 of whom were arrested – to gather in Whitehall to “protect” the cenotaph from a march for Palestine that was taking place in another part of the city.

The posters were displayed on the windows of UCU’s office at Queen Mary University of London | James Eastwood

Emboldened by this narrative, former deputy Tory Party chair Lee Anderson last month claimed “Islamists” had “got control” of Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor. He later doubled down and refused to apologise, after which he was suspended for conflating “all Muslims with Islamist extremism”. The prime minister described Anderson’s comments as “wrong” but avoided calling them Islamophobic.

This rhetoric, which also included false claims from MPs that there were “no-go” Muslim-majority areas in Birmingham and east London, climaxed in a hastily-arranged, Friday night speech from Sunak outside 10 Downing Street at the beginning of March. This was a significant intervention – it was the first time he had addressed the nation in this way since becoming PM 18 months ago.

He warned that “extremists” were “spewing hate” and “hijacking” protests. He also called on protesters “to stand together to combat the forces of division and beat this poison”.

Campaigners believe the new definition of “extremism” will in practice mean public authorities being forced to cut links with a widening circle of proscribed pro-Palestine groups. Even three former Tory home secretaries said yesterday the politicisation of extremism had gone too far.

Eastwood said the mood music from the government “filters down and creates a climate where organisations including universities feel pressure to show that they’re doing something”.

“You see a reproduction of some of the government lines on what’s acceptable speech, what’s offensive speech, what speech is to be allowed or not allowed,” he added.

Fuelling the fire

On 18 June 2017, Darren Osborne drove a van from Cardiff to London with plans to attack a pro-Palestinian march. A jury would go on to hear he had wanted to kill then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, as well as Sadiq Khan.

Osborne, 48, had viewed posts on social media by former English Defence League leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (also known as Tommy Robinson) and Britain First before driving his van directly into a crowd of people leaving the Muslim Welfare House in Finsbury Park – Corbyn’s constituency – following evening Ramadan prayers. He killed 51-year-old Makram Ali and injured 12 others.

As he tried to escape, he is reported to have said: “I want to kill more Muslims.”

Ali’s daughter, Ruzina Akhtar, says politicians’ attempts to equate Islam with extremism are “fuelling the fire” and “inciting more hatred” towards Muslims.

“Every day, that’s going into someone’s ears who doesn’t have positive feelings towards Muslims,” she told openDemocracy. “It only takes one comment, or one thing to push someone over the edge. It’s not just actions – words speak loudly as well. Politicians need to be really careful with what they say and how they say it, because every single word could potentially be a threat to someone’s life.”

While politicians pontificate over definitions, Akhtar warned: “They’re in their own political bubble. They’re not thinking about the wider effect their words could have.

“Instead of inciting hatred, they need to be working together with communities. On the one hand, they’ll talk about how Britain is multicultural and so inclusive, but then they’re putting targets on people’s backs.”

Ruzina Akhtar and her dad, Makram Ali | Ruzina Akhtar

Akhtar will be easing into yet another Ramadan without her dad today. The one thing she wants people to remember is how dangerous these dehumanising, Islamophobic tropes can be. “Muslims can be targets as well,” she said. “It doesn’t matter who you are. At the end of the day, we’re all human beings.”

Of course, the UK government’s rebranding of pro-Palestine voices and peaceful protesters as extremists is not a new phenomenon.

For years, people who support Palestine vocally and publicly have been targeted under Prevent – the UK government-led counter-terrorism programme, which human rights organisations say is discriminatory and ineffective. In his speech, Sunak doubled down on his support for the programme.

In 2016, Rahmaan Mohammadi – a schoolboy from Luton – was referred to Prevent and questioned by anti-terrorism police for wearing ‘free Palestine’ badges and wristbands to school. He also claimed that he was told to stop talking about Palestine in school.

And openDemocracy revealed in January that more than 100 schoolchildren and university students had experienced “harsh repression and censorship” following the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October.

Now, ahead of a general election, Fatima Rajina, an academic specialising in issues on identity, race, British Muslims and postcolonialism, says long-standing Islamophobic and anti-Muslim tropes have been invoked in order to win votes and deflect from government failures.

“It’s stoking fear, because that is what has been done for the last 20-plus years,” she said. “The ‘war on terror’ rhetoric has meant that politicians rely on very well established tropes about Muslims. And they proceed with that because that is what gets into people’s minds.”

War on terror

If you’ve ever been to a march for Palestine you might have watched the prime minister’s Downing Street address and wondered if you were being gaslit. For many, the marches have been largely peaceful, with people of different faiths, backgrounds and ethnicities coming together to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

openDemocracy recently revealed that, despite attempts by some MPs to form a narrative that the marches amounted to “mass extremism” and were “openly criminal”, only 36 people out of the millions who attended last year had been charged with a crime.

The post 9/11 so-called ‘war on terror’ touched all aspects of day-to-day life for Muslims in the UK, from Prevent referrals to surveillance in mosques and schools, as well as so-called ‘schedule 7’ stops at UK ports and airports and increased use of stop and search.

Rajina says the government relies on convincing people that such measures are for the sake of “safety” and the public good, and calls this framing “very sinister”.

“All of these concerns are packaged into ‘the Muslim is the problem’,” she said. As children starve to death in Gaza, more airtime is given to the concerns of politicians who say they feel threatened by constituents who want the attacks in Palestine to stop.

But the mood music isn’t just coming from the government. Labour politicians including deputy leader Angela Rayner and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves last month reported feeling “unsafe” and “intimidated” by members of the public protesting the siege on Gaza, while Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle suggested MPs could be in danger from pro-Palestinian constituents for voting against a ceasefire.

“It’s Muslims who are being targeted as the ones who are causing all this trouble outside MPs’ offices, scaring them,” said Rajina. “And that is because there’s already an established fear. Tapping into that then makes people think: ‘Oh my God, these Muslims don’t know how democracy works’.

“I think this idea of it being a Muslim issue, and framing it in that way, is really and truly about the upcoming election. It is about stoking fear and playing with established fear. It’s also to deflect from the fact that we’re going through a cost of living crisis.”

What’s also clear is that the UK government’s branding of activists and protesters as ‘extremists’ hasn’t been limited to Muslims and pro-Palestine voices.

When Black Lives Matter protests swept through the UK in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, then prime minister Boris Johnson similarly claimed that anti-racism protests in the UK had been “hijacked by extremists intent on violence”.

And when Extinction Rebellion (XR) gained prominence after its first action in 2018, its activists were labelled as “eco-terrorists”.

The backlash bears the fingerprints of right-wing think tanks. In a 2019 report, influential right-wing think tank Policy Exchange called XR an “extremist group” that wanted to overturn democracy and ran the risk of “[breaking] with organisational discipline and [becoming] violent”. Months later, XR was designated an extremist group by counter-terror police, while openDemocracy revealed in 2022 that a controversial anti-protest law appeared to have come directly from the Policy Exchange report.

Policy Exchange has now turned its attention to pro-Palestinian voices, briefing politicians that academics on the board of equality and diversity at Research England – a government science and research body – had showed “support for radical anti-Israeli views”.

The document appears to have made its way into the hands of cabinet minister Michelle Donelan, who was last week forced to pay damages to one of the academics in question after wrongly accusing her of supporting Hamas. Her £15,000 libel bill is being footed by the taxpayer.

As well as arrests under the Policing Act – and its sequel, the Public Order Act, which also gives police more powers to restrict protests – an increased number of activists with groups such as XR and Just Stop Oil have been referred to the Prevent anti-terror scheme.

Ban

This narrative that activist movements are undemocratic or opposed to British values is underlined by John Woodcock, a peer and former Labour MP who now serves as the government’s adviser on political violence. Woodcock believes a ban on MPs and councillors having contact with groups like Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Extinction Rebellion, and Just Stop Oil, would restore faith in liberal democracy.

But the attempt to turn supposedly ‘ordinary’ Brits against ‘extremist’ protesters has very real human consequences, particularly when layered with Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate.

As recently as last month, amid a wave of Islamophobic and antisemitic hate crime since October 7, an east London mosque reported its second bomb threat in two months.

And citing experiences of Islamophobia reported by MPs Apsana Begum and Zarah Sultana, Rajina said: “These are prominent and well known public figures here in Britain. So then imagine what it looks like when it trickles down to the ordinary person who is just going about their everyday activities, doing their shopping and catching the train and whatever other mundane activity, and then suddenly they are at the receiving end of Islamophobic abuse.”

The demonisation of protesters has also laid the foundation for violence against peaceful climate activists.

“We’re trying to teach young people to go out there, make sure you’re holding your MP to account… put pressure on councils. And now suddenly, we’re saying: ‘Hold on a second, that’s not the way to do it’. But what are we saying? What sort of citizenship are we looking for? What do you want people to do?”

Original article by Anita Mureithi republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

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Keir Starmer will continue austerity. That means keeping vulnerable people in ‘brutalising poverty’

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https://www.bigissue.com/opinion/keir-starmer-austerity-u-turn-labour-poverty-suffering/

Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at World Economic Forum, Davos.
Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at World Economic Forum, Davos.

Beyond each Labour U-turn is a well of suffering and poverty that has no justifiable reason to exist, says trade union case worker Kasmira Kincaid

Our politicians invariably speak of “fiscal responsibility”; of “balancing the budget” and “living within our means”. The Keir Starmer of today – as opposed to the Keir Starmer who was elected to lead the Labour Party in 2020 – is no different. But these words just serve to obscure the obscenity of what is actually being said: that we can’t afford to feed the poor, to house the homeless, and to allow people to live in dignity and comfort.

But the thing is we can. We know we can. We know it when we see government funds used to drop bombs on foreign countries. We know it when we see sweeping tax cuts to the wealthy, and tax evaders let off the hook. And we know it when we walk past empty tower blocks, full of investment properties, while homeless people die on the streets.

It’s a supreme form of gaslighting to suggest otherwise, asking us to deny the evidence of our senses and experiences. Making sure everyone gets what they need is a logistical challenge, for sure. But there is enough to make sure everyone gets what they need.

As a new Labour government comes to feel inevitable, many of us are taking stock of what such a government would mean. Over the last four years, Keir Starmer has U-turned on practically every anti-austerity policy in his 2020 leadership bid: from abolishing universal credit and what he once called “the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime”; to scrapping work capability assessments and the two-child limit on benefits; to re-nationalising key public services.

Today I live a life where few of these policies would directly affect me. Yet I haven’t forgotten what it felt like to be in the firing line for government decisions. The material conditions of people’s lives should be the beginning and end of politics. As we voice our opposition to continued austerity we’d do well to remember that. To remember that beyond each of these U-turns is a well of human suffering that has no justifiable reason to exist.

Kasmira Kincaid is a trade union case worker and former benefits claimant.

https://www.bigissue.com/opinion/keir-starmer-austerity-u-turn-labour-poverty-suffering/

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Image of cash and pre-payment meter key
Continue ReadingKeir Starmer will continue austerity. That means keeping vulnerable people in ‘brutalising poverty’