Politics
Quakers take silent protest from Scotland Yard to parliament
On Tuesday 17 March, Quakers will hold a silent Meeting for Worship outside New Scotland Yard. They’ll then join a mass lobby of parliament to defend the right to protest.
The meeting follows two police raids on Quaker premises. On 5 March the Metropolitan Police raided Westminster Meeting House, arresting 15 people attending a nonviolent direct action training session.
No one has yet been charged. No one from the first raid, less than a year ago, was ever charged either.
The Quaker meeting takes place at 11.45am at the southern end of Embankment Gardens, with supporters invited to meet from 11.15am. There will also be a livestream.
Quakers – 350 years of resisting oppression
Caroline Nursey, clerk of Westminster Quaker Meeting, said:
Quakers have been accustomed to oppression by the state for over 350 years. We will continue to hire space to explicitly nonviolent groups, just as we always have.
After the meeting for worship, participants will join a mass lobby of parliament from 2pm. Amnesty International UK, Greenpeace, Liberty, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Quakers in Britain, and major trade unions have organised the lobby.
At meetings in Westminster Hall, they will urge MPs to reject the “cumulative disruption” clause in the Crime and Policing Bill. This clause is dangerously broad and undermines human rights. In particular it threatens the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.
Though its primary target is Palestine marches, it could sweep up campaigns on peace, climate justice, and much more.
Police could ban an anti-racist march from Whitehall because of a previous farmers’ protest. Or they could restrict a pride march because a far-right demonstration recently happened in the same town.
The Crime and Policing Bill is part of a broader trend in the UK of cracking down on those who disagree with the government.
The UK is already the only western European country which Civicus has rated “obstructed” for civic freedoms. And a United Nations Special Rapporteur has criticised the UK’s approach.
Gina Romero, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association, will attend the mass lobby and hold separate meetings with MPs.
Find full details of the Quakers’ event here.
Featured image via the Canary
Health secretary Wes Streeting has delivered a statement to the House of Commons in which he confirmed that funding for mental health has fallen as a proportion of NHS spending in England.
While there has been a real terms increase of £140m, this amounts a 3.2% reduction in share of spending from last year. Streeting’s statement makes this seem smaller by expressing it as a drop from 8.68% to 8.40% of the total.
This spending reduction comes despite confirmation that one in five people aged 16-64 (22.6%) in England now have a common mental health condition, a 20% increase since 2014. This rises to one in four among young people.
Mental health problems are the leading health condition among young people out of work.
Mark Rowland, chief executive at the Mental Health Foundation, said:
Poor mental health is at record highs, including millions of children and young people on waiting lists for treatment or out of work with mental health problems without adequate support to return to the workforce.
This is a human and economic catastrophe, costing the UK at least £118bn a year. In the midst of a national mental health crisis, a cut to the share of spend for mental health raises real concerns about the government’s commitment to mental health.
We support essential NHS reforms to focus on early intervention and prevention (such as Mental Health in School Teams) as well as a focus on Neighbourhood health centres. However, a reduction in spend relative to other areas of health spend undermines this effort. We wouldn’t accept rising cancer rates and falling share of spend and we shouldn’t for mental health.
Without an effective, co-ordinated ‘invest to save approach’, the mental health crisis will only get worse. It will continue to cost the UK billions of pounds, and millions of people will continue to suffer the consequences of preventable mental health problems.
Featured image via the Canary
When someone speaks of a genocide against indigenous peoples, you could be forgiven for thinking they’re referring to historical events. Maybe Europeans’ devastating, disease-spreading conquests of the Americas during the 16th century. Or Japan’s campaigns of assimilation and dispossession directed at indigenous Ainu in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
But not anymore. Today, a ‘genocide of indigenous people’ is just as likely to be used to describe the supposed ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white Europeans as it is an event from centuries ago. Take a recent viral GB News clip, featuring someone called Thomas Corbett-Dillon. Introduced as a ‘former Boris Johnson adviser’ (a seemingly tenuous claim), Corbett-Dillon declared that ‘there is a genocide happening on this island because it is being taken over by different people who are not indigenous to this land’.
That pundits are prepared to make such a claim on live TV is a sign of just how normalised elements of the so-called Great Replacement Theory have become among parts of the right. Popularised by French writer Renaud Camus, the theory holds that Western elites are conspiring to replace white populations with immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Camus was banned from entering the UK last year – a decision that only amplified his arguments and allowed him to pose as a truth-teller silenced by the elites.
The likes of Corbett-Dillon are far from the only ones to invoke the spectre of ‘genocide’ to advance their cause. Over the past decade, the concept of genocide has been stretched far beyond its historical meaning, which was rooted in the singular horror of the Holocaust. Trans activists have spoken of a ‘trans genocide’. Anti-abortion activists have described abortion as a ‘silent holocaust’ or an ‘American genocide’. And Israel has relentlessly been accused of committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza while waging war against Hamas, the terrorists responsible for the 7 October massacre, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. In fact, the accusations began in the immediate aftermath of that tragedy, before Israel had even responded militarily.
The likening of abortion rates or high levels of net migration to the most horrendous event in human history may be grim, but it serves a propagandistic purpose: to dress up, in this case, demographic change as a form of genocide that demands extreme action – hence, extremist right-wingers’ fantasies of ‘total remigration’ (the removal of all non-whites from Western countries).
What’s especially striking about the right’s growing willingness to frame anti-immigration arguments in terms of genocide is the extent to which they’ve adopted the morally charged language of the left. After all, the discourse of indigeneity and victimhood was long associated with ‘progressive’ politics. Many conservatives usually recoil from the language of indigenous rights in the context of Australia, Canada, New Zealand or the US. But they now appear all too comfortable invoking it in the context of Britain. In one YouTube video, commentator Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon of Akkad, even asked why the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples should not apply to the English.
Instead of advocating equality before the law and a shared national identity that transcends ethnicity, too many on the right are now pursuing their own identity politics, complete with their own claim to victimhood.
In the absence of a serious vision for the betterment of society, it seems parts of the right have embraced rhetorical hysteria instead. It is less a political analysis than it is an emotional release. Talking up a fictitious ‘genocide’ allows parts of the right to avoid confronting the significant challenges we face, including those brought about by migration and multiculturalism, from failures of integration to a lack of social cohesion.
None of this means that questions of culture, ethnicity and demographics don’t matter. Concerns about segregation, the entrenchment of ethnic and religious identity politics, and the social consequences of poorly managed immigration are urgent topics for public debate. Too often, anyone airing these concerns has been dismissed as racist or reactionary.
But describing demographic change as ‘genocide’, because migrants settle in Britain and have children, is not only inaccurate, it is morally grotesque, too. It is using the worst crimes in history to score political points. Plus, it poisons the debate and sets people against one another. By pushing the discussion to its most hysterical extremes, some on the right are making the serious conversation we need about immigration and demographic change harder rather than easier.
Those warning of a ‘genocide’ may think they’re speaking for ordinary Brits. But just like the woke left before them, they’ve mistaken their social-media echo chamber for the nation at large.
Inaya Folarin Iman is a spiked columnist and founder of the Equiano Project.
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Missing: Britain’s “war-fighting readiness” defence investment plan. Expected arrival date: last autumn…
The much-talked-about action-thriller was an awards season front-runner, despite some criticism from audiences over certain portrayals in the film, particularly over the fetishization of Black female characters like Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills.Speaking to HuffPost from the Oscars press room after the show, the filmmaker acknowledged that he knows “a little bit about that critique,” noting “it’s complicated.”
Deputy leader of Reform Richard Tice has claimed that reports his property empire avoided almost £600,000 in tax is “a desperate Establishment trying to smear” him. Of course, exploiting rent from people’s need for housing with net property assets of over £30 million is entirely anti-establishment and doesn’t epitomise the housing crisis the country is facing.
Tice chats shit
According to the Times, Tice channelled shareholder dividends into an offshore trust and dormant businesses. Doing so, he reportedly avoided hundreds of thousands in tax from the majority of 2018 to 2021. And that’s on multi-million pound profits.
Apparently, a thriving member of the rentier neoliberal capitalist class who treats the essential of housing as an asset is going to help struggling Britons with the cost of living.
Tice recently said:
The cost of living is the number one concern of everybody, and everything that this Government does is just adding to costs for businesses, and they have to pass it on to consumers.
Labour has added ‘costs’ to businesses. But the issue with the government’s rise in employer National Insurance Contributions (NICs) is that they were flat rather than progressive. Labour’s business tax rise impacted less profitable small and medium size outfits. Whereas, highly profitable businesses can afford to pay more in tax to address inflation (through reducing available pounds – the main function of tax).
For example, private equity and venture capital UK firms make as much profit as £5,206,406 per employee. Meanwhile, real estate – like the company Tice owns – is the most profitable overall industry in the UK.
Instead, housing design, location and features should be provided at cost price by the state with that amount paid off in monthly installments. It should be a not for profit industry.
Featured image via the Canary
Adding it was “terrible” of the UK not to back the US in Iran…
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South East Water has said it cannot provide water for new homes planned in the area it’s supposed to provide for. Yet in 2024 it wasted more than 100 million litres of water every day through its creaking pipes.
South East Water put profit over infrastructure
The water company has spent significantly more servicing its debt and paying shareholder dividends than it has on upgrading infrastructure. In the two years to March 2022, South East Water paid £156 million in dividends and £72.8 million in interest. Yet it spent just £179.8 million on infrastructure improvements.
This highlights that water privatisation is the key issue preventing new homes from having water in the area.
If the water company were nationalised, it could be funded by government issued, debt-free flat currency with increased taxes on extreme wealth to control any inflation from the central money creation. Even if the infrastructure were funded by the current system of government borrowing, that has a lower interest rate than the private sector takes on. So debt would be zero or lower under public ownership – offering tens of millions in funding for infrastructure improvements in those two years. And the £156 million in dividends could also have gone on infrastructure improvements.
“Cannot accommodate” housing
A spokesperson for South East Water said:
From our review of the latest housing forecast figures, we have identified that we cannot accommodate additional growth beyond what was assumed in our Water Resources Management Plan 2024 in areas where we do not have a supply-demand surplus… Specifically, in the Tonbridge and Malling area, where we currently lack available headroom in our supplies, we would be unable to accommodate any growth exceeding our 2024 forecast assumptions throughout the entire planning period.
Perhaps there would be enough water supply if the company had invested in infrastructure such as pipe maintenance and reservoirs.
Shambles
On top of being unable to provide new homes with water, the company left 30,000 homes without water in Kent and Sussex in January. And that’s not the first time. In 2023, South East Water left thousands of homes without running water.
It’s clear the profit motive is incompatible with the essential of water.
Featured image via the Canary
Donald Trump’s press secretary has claimed other countries should help the US in the Iran crisis because they are “benefitting greatly” from the war.
The US president urged international partners including the UK to help keep the Strait of Hormuz open by sending warships to the region at the weekend amid Iranian attempts to effectively close the major oil shipping lane.
But, when allies resisted Trump’s pleas, the president sent a chilling warning about the future of Nato – and vowed to “remember” which countries did not assist him.
A reporter asked Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt why nations who were not informed of the US-Israel strikes on Iran in advance should risk their own militaries to help the war.
She replied: “These other countries are benefitting greatly from the United States military taking out the threat of Iran.”
The Iran war has actually sent crude Brent oil prices sky high, exceeding $100 a barrel as Tehran disrupts oil exports from the Gulf region.
This has sparked wider fears about the cost of living as the global markets express great unease about the current conflict.
But Leavitt said: “The rogue Iranian regime has long not just posed a threat to the United States of America but of course to our Gulf and Arab partners in the region.
“As you see, Iran has struck more than 300 civilian targets in the Gulf region.”
Tehran has escalated its aggression against the US military bases in the Middle East with widespread drone and missile attacks.
Leavitt added: “Their ballistic missile capability that the United States military is currently wiping out was a direct and imminent threat to our European allies as well as our bases in the region, which is why President Trump took this action in the first place.”
The White House’s reasoning behind its strikes against Iran have varied significantly, from claims about limiting Tehran’s abilities to make nuclear weapons to pushing for regime change.
Senior figures in the British government have also been unable to explain exactly why the US decided to bomb Iran.
Leavitt also said: “This is something that not the United States but the entire western world has agreed with for many many years, so I think the president is absolutely right to call on these countries to do more, to work with the United States to strengthen the Strait of Hormuz so we can stop this terrorist regime from restricting the free flow of energy.
“The fact they are doing so just underscores why President Trump needed to take this action in the first place.”
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