Protesters March on NYC Transit Hubs Demanding Gaza Cease-Fire

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Demonstrators demanding a Gaza cease-fire protest outside Penn Station in New York City on December 18, 2023. (Photo: caren/X)

“We must stand up and not be silent to this injustice,” said one rabbi taking part in the demonstration.

A coordinated wave of demonstrations against what activists called Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza targeted New York City transit hubs Monday afternoon, with protesters demanding an immediate cease-fire as heavy Israeli bombardment of the besieged strip pushed the death toll from 73 days of attacks to nearly 20,000.

Protesters marched from Grand Central Station to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and then on to Penn Station, where at least hundreds of activists gave police the slip and occupied Moynihan Hall. Many participants prayed for peace before leaving the station.

“We must stand up and not be silent to this injustice,” Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss toldamNewYork Metro outside Grand Central Station. “We hurt and cry with the people who are dying and suffering under the stranglehold of the Zionist occupation. We want the world to know that we hurt because we are Jews, we will not be silent because we are Jews.”

Independent photojournalist Katie Smith followed the entire demonstration—which was coordinated by the group Within Our Lifetime—documenting incidents including police “violently engaging with protesters” and a confrontation between the actor Alec Baldwin and activists.

According to Smith, activists later marched to a building in Greenwich Village where a fundraiser for the Israel Defense Forces was reportedly being held.

Monday’s actions followed recent protests in New York, including a Manhattan march led by artists remembering the life and work of Refaat Alareer—a Gaza poet and professor killed last week in an Israeli airstrike—and calling on Israel to free political prisoners including the members of Freedom Theater recently arrested in Jenin in the illegally occupied West Bank.

In recent days, large protests for Gaza have also taken place in U.S. cities including HoustonLos Angeles, and Washington, D.C., as well as in cities in countries including the U.K., Canada, France, Belgium, Norway, and Germany.

In California, workers at Google and allies held a Thursday die-in at the tech giant’s San Francisco office “to demand the company stop powering Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza” through the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus cloud computing contract.

More protests are planned for this week, including a nationwide action by Mennonites on Tuesday and a rally by over 80 groups on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. that same day.

Sponsored by the Action Center on Race and Economy, Adalah Justice Project, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Tuesday’s D.C. event is being held to “demand a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and oppose the Biden administration’s proposed military aid package sending billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel, U.S. southern border militarization, and immigration enforcement.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Zionist president Joe Biden. 27 July 2021 image by Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz. Original public domain image from Flickr
Zionist president Joe Biden. 27 July 2021 image by Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz. Original public domain image from Flickr
Continue ReadingProtesters March on NYC Transit Hubs Demanding Gaza Cease-Fire

How big business took over the Labour Party

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

Corporate lobbyists have successfully pushed Keir Starmer’s party to ditch its progressive policies

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.

Over the summer, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party for the first time articulated a clear vision for government: everything will continue to be awful. Nothing will get better. Hope is for fools. And, most importantly, no one with wealth or power need worry themselves that any of either will be taken from them.

Because despite two-thirds of voters wanting the government to increase wealth taxes, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves last month emphasised that she won’t. And although 63% of Brits think taxes on the rich are too low, Starmer has made clear that he doesn’t want to raise income tax for top earners, saying his driving principle is, rather, to lower taxes. Only 5% think the rich pay too much tax.

Meanwhile, Labour’s £28bn-a-year pledge to invest in a Green New Deal – a plan to boost the transition to a zero-carbon economy – has been cancelled by Reeves, who stressed a need for ‘fiscal discipline’. The policy has wide support among voters, particularly in key marginals in England’s North and Midlands.

Also on the party’s scrapheap are popular plans for a publicly owned energy company and a tax hike on digital giants such as Facebook and Google, as well as pledges to replace Universal Credit and scrap the two-child benefit cap.

A certain portion of the press – both Conservative hacks and Blairite shills – see all this as genius: if Labour steals the Tories’ story, how can Rishi Sunak attack? And in a way, though not the way they mean, they may be right.

Wealth and political power are enormously concentrated in Britain. Since 1945, Labour has only ever got into government when it’s made very clear that it doesn’t intend to challenge the ruling elite.

As we saw with Jeremy Corbyn, our oligarch-controlled media, the City and even army generals won’t allow any suggestion that the party plans to govern in line with the egalitarian desires of the overwhelming majority of voters.

In the battle of a general election, the cultural grip of the UK’s establishment is strong enough to override voters’ policy preferences. Actually doing the things voters want – taxing the rich, renationalising key services and tackling the climate crisis – would mean taking on institutions powerful enough to take you down. Or, at least, that’s what many Labour strategists have effectively concluded, even if that’s not how they would express it.

Of course, you can argue against that. Maybe establishment institutions are losing their grip. Perhaps the Tories would still lose the next election if Starmer stuck to his promise to run on the left.

On the other hand, it’s possible that the Labour leader being such an obvious liar – getting himself elected by his party on one set of promises and then immediately breaking them – will allow the Tories to successfully take him down. But more likely, it will make his first term as prime minister very difficult, and leave a festering anger that the right will exploit.

Cock-ups and corruption

Over the past few weeks, I’ve revealed a series of scandals about Labour.

The party accepted an illegal donation of £600,000. Starmer has accepted more corporate freebies over the past two years than every other Labour leader since 1997 put together. The shadow business secretary, his wife-come-senior-assistant, and a senior Starmer staffer accepted luxury Glastonbury tickets from Google, then announced they were scrapping plans to hike the digital service tax the next day. Shadow cabinet members, including Starmer, have corporate lobbyists placed in their staff teams.

Most of these stories boil down to at least one of the various C-words that shape so much of our politics: cock-up, conspiracy, co-option, coercion, collusion, corruption, capture, cooperation and class interest. Each is, in its own way, revealing.

In the first story, I showed that the Barnes and Richmond Labour Club had given the central party an illegal donation of just under £600,000. This seems to have been an example of the first C – a cock-up.

The money came from a local Labour club selling a building that had once been used as a social club for members. The club’s treasurer had given the cash to his local party through the national party in order to comply with regulations. But the national party seems to have failed to deliver it: within five minutes of going through their donor list, I could see that they’d broken the rules.

One local Labour club messing up isn’t a big deal. The fact that the central party cared so little about obeying transparency laws that one of its biggest donors in recent years inadvertently broke them, is. For all of Starmer’s emphasis on competence, the party he leads seems not to have invested enough in training its staff in the laws governing political finance.

It’s much harder to see Google as the bad guy when you’ve sung along to Elton John with its team, while tipsy on its tab

When we broke the second story, about Starmer’s freebies, and the third, about Jonathan Reynolds’ trip to Glasto with Google, there was a pretty ferocious reaction online. The word people kept coming back to was ‘corruption’. But I’m sure that, in his mind, Starmer doesn’t think there is any transaction going on; he’s not accepting gifts from the gambling industry in exchange for future laxity with gambling laws. They are just inviting him, he presumably thinks, because they enjoy the glamour of having the likely next prime minister on their arm.

And, the labour leader’s internal monologue might argue, it’s perfectly appropriate for him to hear from and experience the wares of various British industries. In any case, if a politician was selling elements of public policy, they could do a lot better than a four-course meal with fizz in a special box at the races.

A better word for what is going on is ‘co-option’.

Co-option

The social theorist Ralph Miliband – dad of Ed and David – documented how the same thing was done to the very first Labour MPs, a century ago. While some of the establishment was horrified by the arrival of these cloth-capped working-class men in the hallowed halls of the Palace of Westminster, its cleverer figures knew just what to do. They took them out for dinner at their smart London clubs. They introduced them to their wives, and to fine wines. They inducted them into the ruling class.

The consequence was that the first Labour administrations in the 1920s governed very much within the rules set by the establishment they had been socialised into, including pushing through massive public spending cuts after the Wall Street Crash, rather than devaluing the pound. What we’re seeing now is the same process of co-option in post-Corbyn Labour. Only now, it’s not so much co-option into the old ruling class – though we get a whiff of that in Starmer’s days out at the races – but into the glitz of big business: tickets to the Brit Awards, the best seats in the nation’s swankiest football stadiums, the luxury end of Glastonbury.

Part of the message these businesses are trying to convey to Labour folk will be expressed verbally, over sips of champagne or between the amuse bouche and the appetiser. But part of it comes in the setting itself: it’s much harder to see Google as the bad guy when you’ve sung along to Elton John with its team, while tipsy on its tab. It’s much easier to go soft on elites once you feel part of them, to see things from the perspective of a multi-millionaire if you’re watching the football from the premium suite than if you’re cheering from the stands with the fans.

You see a similar phenomenon with sponsored events at Labour Party conference, as revealed by my colleague Ruby recently. Often, these are luxurious affairs – I can still remember the delicious beef and truffle canapés I got from a firm pushing freeports a few years back.

Businesses with policy agendas invest time and money in buying nice things for politicians and their staff because it works – not in the simple transactional way that a word like ‘corruption’ implies. But in subtler, softer ways. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t do it.

Co-operation

Cooperation is important, too. While members of the cabinet have special advisers funded through the civil service, their shadows don’t get equivalent staffing support – and the resources aren’t distributed equally. Some members of the shadow cabinet have just one adviser, funded by the Labour Party, others have whole teams, paid for by major donors.

It’s generally those associated with the right of the Labour Party who seem able to attract the funding of the handful of hedge funders and millionaires who chip in to such things. As a result, they get the researchers and spinners who make them look more competent, allowing them to deliver more, to grow their profiles, to succeed.

In 2018, the party took £700,000 in donations. So far this year, it’s already taken £12m

Peter Kyle, for example, who has recently been appointed shadow secretary of state for science, and who is associated with the right of the party, has been given £50,000 by wealthy financiers over the past year. Jonathan Ashworth, who was shadow secretary of state for work and pensions and who is seen as being on the soft left of the party, got no such donations, and was demoted to paymaster general in the recent reshuffle.

Other recipients of large amounts of private cash include shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper – all of whom are associated with the right of the party. Shadow cabinet members who come from the ‘soft left’ don’t get anything like the same support.

There is no suggestion of impropriety here. Kyle and pals genuinely believe in policies that are good for their banker backers, while Ashworth et al are less keen. But the result is that the one on the side of the super-rich gets to have a super-sized staff team, and the political muscle which comes with it.

This phenomenon is not limited to shadow cabinet members. The Labour Party has changed its policy over the past few months, and has subsequently been richly rewarded with a surge in large donations.

Since becoming leader in 2020, Starmer’s Labour has struggled for money. Membership – and the revenue it provides – has dropped by 170,000 in the past three years, while trade union contributions have fallen by more than a million since 2018.

But the party’s latest accounts, which came out this week, show that the shortfall has now been more than bridged by large donations from rich people and companies. In 2018, the party took £700,000 in donations above the £7,500 reporting threshold (or £1,500 for local parties and the like). So far this year, it’s already taken £12m.

The policies that Labour has ditched in recent months may have been overwhelmingly popular among voters. But they weren’t, it seems, with its wealthy potential donors.

Collusion

It’s not surprising that lots of businesses want to shape Labour policy. Polls show that the party will likely form the next government, and corporations want to make sure it won’t get in the way of their plans to extract as much profit as they can.

In one of its newsletters this week, Politico quotes Alice Perry, associate director at H/Advisors Cicero and a former chair of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, as saying that demand for insider advice on how to lobby Starmer’s team has rocketed since last year. According to the website: “You can’t move in SW1 without meeting one of the new bespoke ‘Labour units’ being set up by lobbying shops or their latest ex-Labour hire.”

The revolving door goes the other way, too. As I revealed earlier this week, at least ten current staffers for shadow cabinet ministers previously worked as corporate lobbyists.

But the revolving door between lobbying agencies and the top of politics is old news. And at least a revolving door means you are either in or out at any given moment. Starmer and his colleagues, however, seem to have found a new way to blur the lines: taking on staff who are still employed as corporate lobbyists – seconded from their usual work to the Labour Party. Much of the shadow cabinet is, in other words, directly collaborating with the lobbying firms trying to sell access to them.

Commercial lobbying exists to help those with money get extra influence over governments. The inevitable corollary is that ordinary citizens will get, relatively, less say. As such, its point is to distort democratic processes, to bend them to the will of capital.

In the dying days of the last Labour government, a string of former cabinet ministers were caught offering themselves for hire as lobbyists. The ensuing scandal contributed to a sense that the party’s time in office was coming to a somewhat sordid end, and coincided with a dip in the polls. But that was after 13 years in power.

If the party is willing to so openly collude with corporate lobbyists when it ought to be fresh faced and ready for office, then voters will hear its message loud and clear: don’t expect anything to get better.

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

Continue ReadingHow big business took over the Labour Party

Labour figures took £10,000 gifts from Google and YouTube ahead of tax U-turn

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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.

Original article by Adam Ramsay republished from Open Democracy under  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Senior Labour figures accepted valuable gifts from Google in the days before abandoning a plan to tax digital giants more, openDemocracy can reveal.

Labour’s shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, his senior parliamentary assistant (who is his wife), and Keir Starmer’s political director all attended Glastonbury festival in June as guests of YouTube, which is owned by Google. Including accommodation and ‘hospitality’, Reynolds estimates his Glastonbury package for two was worth £3,377 – significantly more than the cost of two regular tickets, which were £335 each.

The next day, reports emerged that Labour had ditched its proposal to hike tax on digital businesses like Google.

The Digital Services Tax, introduced in 2020, is a 2% levy on the UK income of online companies like search engines and social media platforms. In August last year, Reynolds and his shadow chancellor colleague Rachel Reeves had called for an increase in the tax to 10%, saying the income would be used to fund a slash in tax for small businesses.

As recently as 5 June, Reynolds was still talking about the policy. Yet on 26 June this year, the day after Glastonbury ended, The Times reported that the policy had been ditched, with Labour saying it had “no plans” to raise the digital service tax when in government. Reynolds declined to comment.

It was not the only time senior figures in Starmer’s team accepted luxury gifts from Google in the months before the party’s U-turn. Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell’s political adviser, Labour’s executive director of policy, and the party’s head of domestic policy all accepted tickets and transport to, and ‘hospitality’ at, the Brit Awards in February from the digital giant. Powell’s register of interests estimates that the adviser’s ticket was worth £1,170.

Starmer’s political director also accepted transport to and ‘hospitality’ ahead of the event from Google, though his ticket, along with that of Starmer’s private secretary, was covered by Universal Music.

YouTube will sponsor an event at Labour’s annual conference next month with the chair of the business and trade select committee, Darren Jones. The talk, hosted by the New Statesman Media Group, will be on “harnessing tech for growth”.

Last week, openDemocracy revealed that Starmer had accepted a £380 dinner from Google for him and one staff member during the World Economic Forum in January.

In total, openDemocracy estimates that Labour shadow cabinet members and their staff accepted luxury gifts from Google worth nearly £10,000 over the months before they announced their policy U-turn. By contrast, the value to the British public of the policy Labour appears to have ditched is estimated at around £3bn.

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said: “This is a really very worrying set of events which suggests that big business has far too much access to senior opposition politicians.

“But this isn’t simply about foolish behaviour on the part of the individuals concerned. In office, Labour needs to radically restructure our economy if it’s to have any hope of creating a more sustainable and equal society, and undoing the damage of recent governments. To do that, they must take on vested interests, like the Big Tech monopolies, which have far too much wealth and power.”

Staff for other Labour shadow cabinet members have also accepted valuable gifts from controversial companies. A political adviser to the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, accepted two ‘box’ tickets to a Harry Styles concert worth £250 each from BT. In the 2019 Labour manifesto, the party committed to nationalising BT, a measure the company opposed. It’s not clear whether the party maintains this policy, but Reeves has distanced herself from other nationalisation plans.

In April this year, BT announced a 14.4% average increase in its prices, and £1.7bn in profit. An Openreach spokesperson said: “As you’d expect from any major employer investing billions into the UK, we engage regularly with a range of stakeholders to support the interests of our people, our customers and our business. Any hospitality is consistent with the rules, fully declared and transparent.”

Updated 31 August 2023: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the value of the Harry Styles box tickets was £700 each. They were in fact £250 each.

Original article by Adam Ramsay republished from Open Democracy under  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingLabour figures took £10,000 gifts from Google and YouTube ahead of tax U-turn

Starmer has taken more freebies than all Labour leaders since 1997 combined

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Original article by Adam Ramsey republished from Open Democracy.

Labour leader’s 28 junkets include Spurs hospitality, two Coldplay concerts and a £380 dinner from Google at Davos

Image of Keir Starmer and a poor child.
Image of Keir ‘Kid Starver’ Starmer. Image thanks to The Skwawkbox

Keir Starmer has accepted more free tickets to events such as sports matches, concerts and parties than the combined total of every other Labour leader since records began in 1997, openDemocracy analysis has found.

While the Labour leader spent his first year and a half in the role under lockdown, he has quickly made up for it, accepting gifts from donors including multi-millionaires, gambling giants, the online shopping app GETIR and the construction giant Mulalley & Co on 28 separate occasions. The gifts include days at the races, hospitality at Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur matches, an Adele gig, and two separate Coldplay concerts. In total, they are worth nearly £30,000.

In his five years as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn only accepted one such freebie: tickets to Glastonbury, where he spoke on the pyramid stage in 2017. Former Corbyn adviser Andrew Fisher told openDemocracy the Islington North MP had made a point of turning down corporate hospitality.

“Politicians at any level shouldn’t be beholden to corporate interests,” he said. “They’re elected to represent the people, and are well paid for it.”

His predecessor, Ed Miliband, only accepted tickets to the London Olympics and Paralympics opening and closing ceremonies, and a number of the contests during the games. Gordon Brown accepted no such gifts during his time as Labour leader and prime minister.

While Tony Blair led a jet-setting lifestyle – including accepting summer holidays with the regional president of Tuscany and in Cliff Richard’s holiday home in the Caribbean – he accepted fewer gifts than Starmer in his whole time as prime minister, and usually donated the value of any such freebie to a relevant charity.

‘An indulgent retreat’

Companies giving Starmer and his office gifts include the groceries delivery app GETIR, the fast food delivery company Just Eat, and Matthew Moulding, chief exec of the online retail warehouse firm The Hut Group, which has recently expanded into the hotels business.

openDemocracy understands Moulding put Starmer and three others up in his luxury Manchester hotel The King Street Townhouse on the night of 1 June. The boutique hotel has an infinity pool with views over Manchester’s iconic town hall. Its restaurant advertises “a dining experience you’ll remember forever” while The Telegraph has described it as “an indulgent retreat in the city centre”.

A spokesperson for The Hut Group would not comment on why they provided Starmer and others with free accommodation in their hotel.

Meanwhile, GETIR gave Starmer “four tickets with hospitality for Tottenham Hotspur vs Arsenal,” worth £1,600. The match attended by Starmer, who is an Arsenal fan, took place at the Spurs stadium, where the executive suite advertises “private gourmet dining” and “beautifully crafted menus… crafted by world famous chefs”.

Speaking to openDemocracy, a staff collective of GETIR employees in Germany, where the firm is more established than the UK, said it was “like working in a cartel”, and that employees are often too afraid to speak out against the violation of their rights. GETIR didn’t respond to openDemocracy’s request for comment.

Just Eat handed Starmer two sets of tickets in 2021 – to the British Kebab Awards, and the ‘Taste of London’ event, both of which he gave to staff in his office. The firm is currently facing legal action from lawyers representing thousands of its workers over allegations that it denies them basic rights like holiday pay and minimum wage by categorising them as self-employed.

Recent reports have indicated that Starmer is now considering rolling back on previous commitments to enhance rights for workers in sectors like the online delivery market, where jobs are notoriously precarious.

In total, Starmer has accepted tickets to 11 football matches, in most cases in exclusive executive suites, and also two rugby matches.

Starmer has also attended two glamorous days at the races, including six tickets with hospitality for Doncaster Races in autumn 2022 worth more than £3,000, thanks to the Arena Racing Company. The race course’s fine dining restaurant offers a package which includes a glass of prosecco on arrival, a “three course plated lunch” and exclusive views of the track for the day.

In June this year, Starmer accepted a “private box for four people at Epsom Downs Racecourse, including catering and admission tickets, total value £3,716”, courtesy of the Jockey Club. Epsom Downs’ VIP experience includes a champagne reception, free bar and a four-course meal, as well as exclusive views of the race track.

Speaking to openDemocracy, Matt Zarb-Cousin, director of Clean Up Gambling, said: “The same Labour leader that refuses to meet with climate justice campaigners is selling off his time to the highest bidder. Concerning for gambling reform campaigners is his willingness to accept hospitality from the gambling industry, including racing which has actively lobbied against affordability checks in defence of the operators. Policy drafted by the vested interests that have Starmer’s ear will only benefit corporations at the expense of protecting consumers.”

In January this year, Starmer accepted a meal for himself and an aide worth £380, as a gift from Google while he was in Davos at the World Economic Forum. In June, the Labour Party abandoned plans to introduce a digital tax on big tech firms like Google, which had been estimated to be worth £3bn.

North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll, who quit the Labour Party last month and has spoken out against Starmer’s leadership, said: “I’ve been offered tickets for the executive boxes at [Newcastle United stadium] St James’ Park, expensive dinners by lobbyists, hospitality for sporting events – and I turn them all down. It’s wrong to take perks when you’re elected to do a job.

“Why does an MP need free tickets to the football or Coldplay concerts to do their job? At best it’s a culture of entitlement.”

Starmer is paid £149,682 a year for his work as an MP and as leader of the opposition, and also received an £18,450 advance for a book in 2022 from the Rupert Murdoch-owned publishing house Harper Collins. The Labour Party did not respond to openDemocracy’s request for comment.

Original article by Adam Ramsey republished from Open Democracy.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/keir-starmer-freebies-junkets-tottenham-hotspur-chelsea-coldplay-adele-google/

Continue ReadingStarmer has taken more freebies than all Labour leaders since 1997 combined

Politics news allsorts

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Image of GCHQ donught buildingHuge tech firms have formed the Reform Government Surveillance group to demand changes to excessive surveillance by world governments. The group has published an open letter to President Obama and Congress:

Dear Mr. President and Members of Congress,

We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide. The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for a change.

For our part, we are focused on keeping users’ data secure — deploying the latest encryption technology to prevent unauthorized surveillance on our networks and by pushing back on government requests to ensure that they are legal and reasonable in scope.

We urge the US to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight. To see the full set of principles we support, visit ReformGovernmentSurveillance.com

Sincerely,

AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo

Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee is dismissive of the call:

“So I start off by recognising that, in the modern world, the terrorists use all the technology available to them.

“It would be foolish for the intelligence agencies in free societies not to start by using that technology.

Isn’t there a contradiction there?

Amnesty International is to start legal action against the UK government through the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. While it’s quite clear that Amnesty is not involved in terrorism, that will be used as the justification since it is the normal BS justification.

 

MPs to honour Mandela today.

Iain Duncan Smith again

I watched the 4th episode of The Revolution Will be Televised last night. First broadcast on 1st December, it’s very good.

Continue ReadingPolitics news allsorts