“Wes Streeting says that if the NHS doesn’t change, it will die. But it is inadequate funding that has left our NHS in a poor state of health, not lack of reform.
“Between 2010 and 2019 the UK had a lower level of capital investment in health care and 18% lower average health spending than 14 EU countries.
“So to say that the public is paying a heavy price for failure is an insult to hard-working NHS staff, who are doing their level best despite being overworked and underpaid. It is the failure to invest adequately and pay staff properly that is at the root of dissatisfaction with the NHS.
“The public agrees. They don’t want endless reforms; neither do they share the Conservative or Labour appetite for creeping privatisation. They want the current model to work and to see the NHS available to everyone free of charge and primarily funded through taxes. A tax on the super-rich billionaires and multi-millionaires can provide the funds needed to fix our cherished NHS.
“The Green Party has never had any truck with the profit motive in health care and will continue to push for a fully publicly funded NHS.”
From a small group of seasoned protesters, a lively and creative coalition of Jewish groups has come together to form a growing, visible bloc in solidarity with the Palestinians on all the protests against Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. RUTH LUKOM reports
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Our newly formed Jewish Bloc — including, among others, the Black-Jewish Alliance, Na’amod, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, the Jewish Socialists’ Group, Jewish Voice for Labour and Jewdas as well as individual Jews and activists who have come together — is now a recognised presence. No longer a curiosity.
We are getting an entirely different and sometimes quite moving response to what we have previously encountered. It is a combination of gratitude and relief as we have vindicated what everyone knew in their hearts: that what they were reading and hearing in mainstream media about British Jews being united on Israel and Palestine was a lie.
As more groups joined, our Jewish Bloc began organising more methodically. Someone knew a graphic designer and they came up with our watermelon/star logo, which has been picked up everywhere.
Before a mass demo, we talk online and arrange a meeting place which is put on to our Jewish Bloc logo and then circulated. Our numbers have grown — up to 1,000 on one demo. The people joining us are a combination of longstanding activists and other Jews who are horrified and angry at Israeli brutality but still wary of the mass protests because of the raw emotions, fear of hostility or uneasiness about the “river and sea” chants.
Since December the Jewish Bloc has met up each month with other comrades and friends for a Shabbat dinner, where we eat, drink, sing and dance with our group banners draped around the room.
But that’s just in London.
Around the country, in all the major cities, Jews are demonstrating as Jews. In Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, Jews have joined the Palestine demos and organised vigils. Says Carla Bloom, a member of Na’amod in Brighton: “We demonstrate to all and sundry that it’s possible to be an ‘out’ Jew and not support Israel. We encourage other Jews to have the confidence to speak out against Israel — because the pro-ceasefire argument is strengthened when ‘even’ Jews espouse it.”
And Misha in Scotland says: “I will often march with a wider community group of Jewish people at the protests, or will visibilise myself as being Jewish through holding different signs. To believe in and act for Palestinian liberation is what my Judaism requires of me.
“The mainstream narrative, perpetuated by both global and mainstream British Jewish institutions, holds the belief that all Jews are zionists. I identify as Jewish at the demos to resist this narrative: to show that there is Jewish solidarity for Palestine; that there is a global community of Jews who stand in solidarity with Palestine and we are no less Jewish for this.”
Nicolás Maduro received by thousands in the city of Maturín. Photo: Nicolás Maduro/ X
As Venezuela prepares to head to the polls in July, the US has already started drumming up suspicion and doubt around the electoral process.
Twenty-five years after Hugo Chávez took office and began the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, US officials have still not tired of dreaming up new plots to overthrow the country’s government. Five years ago, following the last presidential election, they attempted to install Juan Guaidó—a politician most Venezuelans had never even heard of—as the country’s head of state. And now, with the date for the next presidential election officially set for July 28, the Biden administration is gearing up for the biggest regime-change push since the Guaidó coup attempt.
Venezuela has long been a target for US intervention because of its efforts to build an alternative model to the neoliberal capitalism pushed by institutions like the IMF and World Bank. First theorized and implemented under the leadership of Chávez, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela puts forward a new model that emphasizes using the country’s resources, such as its oil revenue, to fund crucial missions. These then guarantee rights such as education, food, housing, transportation, culture, and sports to historically excluded majorities, to decrease longstanding socioeconomic inequality. A central part of the Bolivarian Revolution is the political and cultural transformation of the people through the promotion of Venezuelan national culture, internationalism, anti-imperialism, and the empowerment of all people as political subjects with rights and responsibilities. It is a project in direct contradiction to US interests in the oil-rich country and the region Washington considers its backyard.
The 2024 elections
President Nicolás Maduro is running for re-election as the candidate of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and the broader Great Patriotic Pole coalition. He has built his campaign around a program referred to as the “Seven Transformations,” proposing major new initiatives in the fields of economic modernization, asserting national sovereignty, safety and security, ensuring social rights, political participation, the environment, and geopolitics. These aim to maintain the pro-poor, socialist orientation of the country’s development model while enacting reforms to stimulate greater economic activity and counteract the impact of crippling US sanctions.
The opposition is divided into several different camps. The largest coalition of opposition parties is called the Unitary Platform and consists of parties or factions of parties controlled by the Venezuelan elite who were displaced from positions of power as a result of the Bolivarian Revolution. The Unitary Platform has taken part in several rounds of negotiations with the government over the past year leading up to the elections and signed an agreement last October known as the “Barbados Agreement.”
In this agreement, the opposition was granted concessions on issues related to the organization of the electoral process, and in exchange, the United States agreed to loosen some sanctions relating to Venezuela’s oil and mining industries. The Barbados Agreement stipulated that only opposition figures who are eligible according to existing laws would be permitted to run. At this stage, the Unitary Platform has not chosen a candidate.
The specifics of how the electoral process will be carried out, regulations on campaigning on media platforms, participation of electoral observers, and the updating of electoral rolls were outlined in an agreement signed on February 28. The agreement was the product of dialogue among over 150 political and social organizations and was based on over 500 proposals. Ninety-seven percent of the political parties registered with the National Electoral Council participated.
Nonetheless, US officials have presented this electoral process, subject to such extensive deliberation and approved with such wide support, as an attack on democracy.
María Corina Machado and the fraud narrative
The approach of the US government follows a familiar script—wage a campaign in the media and through international organizations to cast doubt on the integrity of the electoral process so relentlessly that the result can be presented as fraudulent no matter what the actual evidence is on election day.
The key piece of the “electoral fraud” narrative is already in place and revolves around the disqualification of the opposition figure María Corina Machado.
Machado is the oldest daughter of Henrique Machado Zuloaga, who was an executive of Sivensa. One of Venezuela’s largest steel companies, Sivensa was nationalized in 2008 under Hugo Chávez. Since the start of the Bolivarian Revolution, Machado has been active in the right-wing opposition and has gone so far as to support destabilization campaigns and attempts to overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected governments. She served as a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly from 2011-2014.
In July 2015, the Venezuelan comptroller general’s office announced that Machado was barred from holding public office for a period of one year after neglecting to disclose the extent of her earnings while she held public office.
The investigations into Machado continued. In July 2023, opposition deputy José Brito requested an update on Machado’s eligibility for holding public office given the upcoming presidential election and her stated intention to run. The comptroller general’s office responded, confirming that the disqualification of Machado was maintained and constituted a 15-year ban due to her support of regime change plots.
Though she initially refused to participate in the process, Machado appealed her ban through the Barbados Agreement procedure, which also stated that all candidates must defend Venezuela’s independence and reject violent actions against the government. In January 2024, the Supreme Court of Venezuela issued a sentence rejecting Machado’s appeal of the ban.
The Biden administration immediately sought to use economic coercion to undermine this decision by an institution of Venezuela, a sovereign state. As part of the Barbados Agreement, the US government issued licenses to certain oil companies permitting them to resume operations in Venezuela despite the sanctions. At the end of January, the State Department announced that the sanctions waivers issued to these companies would not be renewed once they expire on April 18.
At the same time, there is endless media reinforcement of the position that an election without Machado cannot be considered legitimate. On January 30, a few days after the Supreme Court rejected her appeal, Machado went on the television network CNN and was presented to viewers as “Venezuela’s main opposition leader.” An earlier Washington Post article is also typical of this narrative, headlined, “She’s the front-runner in the race to oust Maduro. He’s out to block her.” This combination of economic and political pressure is what has led to explosions in right-wing street violence in the past, following the 2013 presidential election when Maduro was first elected.
Machado: Regime change operative?
In 2002, following the short-lived coup d’état against Chávez, Machado signed the decree which established an unelected government under chamber of commerce head Pedro Carmona. In 2005 she met with former US president George W. Bush at the White House to discuss “democracy” (i.e., the overthrow of the Venezuelan government) More recently, she has been a key supporter and leader of the numerous right-wing plots to overthrow the democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro. These include the 2014 and 2017guarimba protests which saw extreme violence against security forces and chavista supporters, as well as the destruction of infrastructure.
In 2014, Machado was removed from her post in the National Assembly after she attended a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in the place of the Panamanian representative in order to testify about 2014 protests, to speak out against the government, and to call for foreign support for her cause. The move was widely condemned as a violation of both the Venezuelan constitution and Panamanian law, and in response, Panamanian civil society and movement organizations filed a lawsuit against her for usurping a public post.
Machado has also celebrated the effectiveness of the illegal sanctions regime imposed on Venezuela in applying political pressure for regime change, and on several occasions, has called for even more sanctions. The sanctions have had devastating consequences for the Venezuelan people, well documented by different UN bodies and rapporteurs, human rights organizations, and think tanks. United Nations special rapporteur Alena Douhan noted that “[t]he announced purpose of the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign—to change the Government of Venezuela—violates the principle of sovereign equality of states and constitutes an intervention in the domestic affairs of Venezuela that also affects its regional relations.”
In 2019, Machado supported the push by Juan Guaidó’s parallel, fictitious government to request that the OAS apply the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR) against Venezuela to end the “usurpation of power” by Maduro. The activation of TIAR would have provided a legal justification for foreign military intervention, (more) economic sanctions, and a commercial blockade.
An examination of the actual facts of Machado’s political career shows how the truth is much more complicated than the mainstream narrative about a government baselessly repressing an opponent.
After years of political instability caused by right-wing plots to overthrow the democratically elected government and even assassinate the leader, the Venezuelan government has pursued a straight-forward principle: political forces of any ideological variety can participate in elections as long as they do not conspire with foreign powers to undermine the independence of Venezuela or its sovereign institutions. This is in line with practices around the world. In the United States, for instance, there has been a great deal of public attention to the clause of the 14th Amendment that bars those guilty of insurrection from public office.
As the July 28 elections approach, tensions between the disparate elements of the Venezuelan political scene are bound to intensify. But the Biden administration is bound to be guided by the same overarching goal that has animated the policy decisions of Democratic and Republican administrations alike—remove from power one of the most long-standing opponents of Washington’s dominant role in the western hemisphere.
Zoe Alexandra is the co-editor of Peoples Dispatch.
Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party
“Today’s budget exposes a government that is blind to the scale of the crises we face. While private companies are taking home more profit than ever before, more than 4 million children live in poverty.”
Jeremy Corbyn MP
“Austerity is a political choice, not an economic necessity” – Jeremy Corbyn exclusive on #Budget24
Jeremy Corbyn MP writes for Labour Outlookon #Budget24.
This is what we said back in 2015, five years into a devastating programme of cuts and privatisation. We knew that austerity would decimate our public services, plunge millions into poverty and send our country into economic decline. It was true then – and it is true now.
Today’s budget exposes a government that is blind to the scale of the crises we face. While private companies are taking home more profit than ever before, more than 4 million children live in poverty. A quarter of a million people are homeless, while millions more languish on social housing waiting lists. Our NHS is on its knees after decades of austerity and privatisation.
Perhaps most alarmingly, we are sleepwalking toward a climate emergency. Make no mistake, the climate crisis is here, and we are running out of time to avoid total catastrophe. People in the Global South are already suffering the worst consequences – more and more people in this country will experience the devastating effects of air pollution, heatwaves and flooding.
The Tories’ economic experiment has failed – and they should not get off lightly. Parroting the language of austerity is a grave mistake, and represents a missed opportunity to bring about the transformative change this country needs. When there are more billionaires in this country than ever before, the idea that we cannot afford to build a fairer and greener society is absurd. We have the means to end poverty, pay our workers properly and save the planet. We just need the political will.
Millions of us still believe in a real alternative.
One that funds a fully-public NHS; austerity and privatisation are the causes of – not the solutions to – the healthcare crisis.
One that introduced rent controls and builds social housing; we will never tackle the housing emergency until we treat housing as a human right, and embark upon a huge council house-building programme.
One that invests in a Green New Deal to transform the economy and create thousands of green, unionised jobs.
One that scraps the 2-child benefits cap; this cruel and callous policy is a moral disgrace, and we could pay for the abolition of this policy seventeen times over with a 1-2% wealth tax on people with assets over £10 million.
One that brings energy, water, rail and mail into public ownership; privatisation has been a total disaster, and it’s time we stood up to the companies holding our country to ransom.
Our economy is not just broken. It is rigged in the interests of the few – and unless we fundamentally rewrite the rules of our economy, nothing will change. There’s nothing fiscally responsible about plunging millions of people into poverty or destroying our natural world. Why can’t we have the courage to campaign for a more joyful, equal and sustainable future?
As the MP for Islington North, I will continue to campaign alongside my community for a redistribution of wealth and power. For an economy that puts human need before corporate greed. For a society that cares for each other and cares for all.
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BROTHERS IN ARMS: Fidel Castro welcomes Yasser Arafat on his visit to Cuba in November 1974Photo: Liborio Noval/Granma.cu
Cuba has stood unswervingly by Palestine since 1947 guided by its own rejection of imperialist lawlessness, writes BERNARD REGAN
On January 12 2024 Cuba announced its intention to support the request of the Republic of South Africa to initiate proceedings against Israel in the International Court of Justice.
South Africa’s charge is that Israel is guilty of committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Cuba has a long record of supporting the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. This record even pre-dates the 1959 Revolution.
In November 1947 Dr Ernesto Dihigo speaking on behalf of Cuba at the United Nations said that Cuba denounced the violation of international law by the United Kingdom. “The Balfour Declaration, in our opinion,” he said, “ is completely without legal value, since the British government offered in it something that it had no right to dispose of, because it was not its own.”
The Cuban revolutionaries saw Palestine as part of the fight against colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism.
On June 18 1959, just a six months after the birth of the Revolution, Che Guevara and Raul Castro visited Al Burajj Refugee camp in Gaza, then under the control of the Egyptian government of Gamal Nasser.
Che and Raul were touring countries at the forefront of the struggle against imperialism, talking to leaders and discussing how unity could be built across the continents.
Che reaffirmed Cuba’s support for Palestine at the UN general assembly on December 11 1964, making an excoriating critique of the role of US imperialism and extending solidarity, among others, to the “Arabs of Palestine.” He attacked the role of US imperialism in blocking the rights of peoples to self-determination and for interfering in the internal and sovereign affairs of countries across the continents.
