Politics
Lambeth leads the way in launching the Vote Palestine pledge
The Palestine Youth Movement (PYM) joined community members in Lambeth on Thursday 5 February to kick Labour out of their hometown. As a result, local people realised their democratic power in being the first community in the UK to launch the ‘Vote Palestine’ pledge campaign for the upcoming local elections in May.
Lambeth leading the way
The Lambeth event was led by Mariam of the PYM and London Votes Palestine campaign. Mariam gave an inspiring masterclass in how ordinary people can come together. In turn, she showed how voters across the country can use their democratic power to get the change they want to see in their hometowns.
Activists from Jewish Voice for Liberation (JVL) and Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) joined other local activists and people who have had enough of Labour’s ongoing complicity and willingness to ignore Israel’s flagrant breaches to countless international laws. Former ANC member and arms trade corruption investigator Andrew Feinstein also attended the event.
In true unity and solidarity, organisers inspired and energised local people to get Palestine on the ballot.
‘No divestment: No votes’
Mariam of the Palestine Youth Movement passionately introduced the Lambeth campaign and what it hopes to achieve:
Lambeth Vote Palestine is not just launching here, but it’s part of a national campaign that is launching in 12 boroughs across London because people are fed up of Labour councils that are not listening to people that are pushing resolutions for divestment from genocide. It’s launching in Manchester, in Greater Manchester, in Newcastle, in Birmingham and in Sheffield. And the first national launch is taking place here today in Brixton in Lambeth.
So, the way that Vote Palestine came together has essentially come from all these local organisers that have tried to push divestment resolutions to get money out of Israel and money into our council and into the people of this council. But we know that Labour councillors have lied to us about just how much political power they have in order to take on divestment. We know that Labour councillors have watered down resolutions that have managed to pass and protests have been tried, resolutions have been tried, all sorts of attention against Labour majority councils have been tried.
And we know that they’re not interested in divestment from Israel because it’s a party of genocide. It’s a party that’s done nothing against austerity. It’s a party that with Rachel Reeves’ latest budget is raising taxes on ordinary working people. And we see this in Lambeth as well. It is a council that has ignored us time and time again.
So up and down the country, We know that the elections are coming in May 2026. And we’ve gotten started a little bit early, but actually right now, Labour is preparing itself for who’s going to be standing in the next election, and preparing its candidates and other parties are doing that as well. But so is Vote Palestine. We are preparing to say: no divestment, no vote. So, we are asking two things nationally, as well as here in Lambeth.
The first is what’s called a councillor’s pledge. We are asking that any sitting councillor or new candidate signs a councillor’s pledge that commits them to getting money out of Israel and money into our communities. No divestment, no votes.
But there’s a second portion to this, because this is also a grassroots campaign and a people-driven campaign, one that’s going to be powered forward by us giving it a little bit of time every month and getting a big impact out through just a little bit of labour together. And that is the People’s Pledge. So we are also asking voters to take a pledge that will say, ‘if this candidate has not endorsed the councillor’s pledge, we will not be voting for them’. And we’re going to take that to councillor’s and say, ‘hey, you know what? In Lambeth, hundreds of people have committed to the Palestine pledge, to the people’s pledge, and these people will not be voting for candidates that have not endorsed divestment, that have not endorsed Palestine.’
Mariam later referred to the response they receive on the ground from constituents in London, adding:
We’ve been talking to people all over London around what’s the issue that needs more funding? And no one says genocide. So this campaign is really about… We’re putting Palestine on the ballot. We know that the people are with Palestine. We also know from the last election, with the election of the Gaza Independents, that there is a Palestine-first voter. It’s time to show that in the local elections. And we’re going to make that known.
From Lambeth, from Brixton, all the way up to Newcastle and the country over, we’re going to put Palestine on the ballot and make it a non-negotiable issue. No divestment, no votes.
‘At the expense of our NHS, our benefit system, and all local services’
In Lambeth, Feinstein discussed the clear corruption at the heart of our current UK government, namely Keir Starmer’s lucrative relationship with billionaire-owned Quadrature:
And the reality is, I’ve just come from a Zoom meeting with four Palestinian journalists who are fortunate to be alive. What sort of a sick world do we live in? When journalists start a conversation when they introduce themselves by saying, I’m thankful to be alive. Because hundreds of their colleagues are not.
But what relevance does that have for Brixton and for Lambeth? It has every relevance. The reality is that the biggest political donation in British electoral history was paid by a company called Quadrature Capital to the campaign of Keir Starmer for the 2024 local election. That resulted in a situation where Starmer, who didn’t once show his face in his own constituency because he knows he would have been drummed out of town, spent tens of thousands of pounds on direct social media advertising. Our independent campaign was allowed to spend £17k in total on everything. Because the political system here is fixed.
Within three weeks of coming to power, Keir Starmer announced two policy proposals. One is he went back on his commitment to a new green economic plan that he’d committed at least £20bn to. And then he increased defence spending by £3.5bn a year until 2027. At which point, defense spending will increase by £15.4bn. Quadrature capital’s asset value at the end of those three weeks of Starmer being in power increased exponentially for the expenditure of £5m in their political donations.
And that is why Britain today lives in the best democracy money can buy. Our politicians are bought and paid for. Keir Starmer is a puppet. He is a puppet, not just of Morgan McSweeney, the little worm who is his chief of staff, but he is the puppet of billionaires and corporate interests like Quadrature. Quadrature has invested primarily in fossil fuels and arms company. Of that £15.4bn increase in our defense budget in 2027, a huge proportion of it will land up being used against the people of Palestine.
And that £15.4 bn is at the expense of our NHS, our benefit system, and all of our local services. Because frankly, and I’ll ask you to excuse my language here, but as you might gather, I’m a little bit angry about this. People like Keir Starmer and all of our establishment politicians don’t give a fuck about us. And if ever that was brought to our attention, it’s in the reality that people like them were more concerned about the fact that Jeremy Corbyn could not pronounce Jeffrey Epstein’s name properly, which they regarded as anti-Semitic. Then they are about the fact that Lord Peter Mandelson was who is an architect of the Starmer Project, is closest friends with a paedophile, with a man who has abused and sex-trafficked hundreds and hundreds of children for abuse by the old white men who run this world and profit from it.
‘Legal responsibility to take action’ in Lambeth
Local activist Jan O’Malley gave an eye-opening and inspiring speech about the sheer scale of Lambeth council investment in Israel and its ongoing genocide. Referring to the power of the BDS movement, O’Malley said:
BDS, you all know about BDS, boycott, divestment and sanctions. We are the D in BDS. So how big is this problem? PSC has done a massive amount of work on research on this, which has been a great resource for us all. And they have found that 81 local government pension schemes have collectively invested over £12bn in companies complicit with Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. It’s genocide, it’s apartheid and it’s illegal occupation. And the British government as a party to the genocide convention has a legal responsibility to take action to prevent further genocide.
PSC has sent a letter to every pension committee member across the country, telling them about this legal duty. It’s not worth waiting until the ICJ finally concludes there is a genocide, they’re meant to prevent genocides. And this means that we take immediate action to start divesting. So, in Lambeth, how big is the problem? Well, the figures that we got from FOIs that PSC did was that the Lambeth Pension Fund had £52.4m invested in companies complicit with Israel. And this included £25m in Amazon, £20m in Alphabet.
They may say, ‘oh, we all use them’, and at the council meeting, they were joking about that. ‘Do you mean we ought to stop us using Amazon and Uber and things in our everyday lives? This is what these unrealistic people who are petitioning us are saying.’ But both of those companies are involved in providing Project Nimbus, which is a computing technology system of surveillance, which has been used to target the journalists, the doctors, the people in Gaza that they wanted to target…. it’s used and bought and helps and supports the Israeli government and military. Other investments are arms companies like Boeing, Rolls Royce, but also Israeli government bonds, which are actually lending money to the Israeli government, and Barclays, which funds so many arms companies.
Referring to a petition sent to Lambeth Council and its pensions committee, O’Malley finished by saying:
We took our petition. We presented it middle of November last year, thinking the council needed time to check the addresses and everything. And then we had to give them enough time. And they were meant to let us know in 10 days, if there was anything wrong with our petition. They didn’t until the day before the full council meeting, when they rejected the petition on the grounds that it was about something that they do not control, and they pointed a little item J in their constitution about petitions which will be rejected. They’re saying they’ve changed their constitution to take out the word control and amend all the weaselly words. They only administer.
So, what has the Pensions Committee been doing every three months when they meet and take decisions? It’s a total farce. It’s ludicrous. It’s dishonest. So shame on Lambeth Council. I was really shocked at this. It took me, I’m quite cynical and I’ve been demonstrating an activism since I was 14, but I’ve not known a council behave like this in my lifetime. So it shocked me. I wasn’t ready for it. So what are we going to do? We’re going to challenge. this attack on solidarity with Palestine, which is what it is, and democracy, which is what it is, by all available means, including in the local elections in May, which leads us to why we’re here tonight. And we will support alternative candidates who take the pledge for Palestine. And we will challenge Labour councillors who refuse to take the pledge and collude with this despicable denial of democracy. So let’s challenge them on the doorsteps. Let’s get busy with Lambeth Votes Palestine.
‘Get these shits out of their offices’
As ever, another powerful speech in Lambeth was delivered by Glyn Secker of what was formerly Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL). First Secker told us that the ‘L’ no longer stands for Labour, as a result of their pro-genocide actions, but now stands for ‘liberation’ in solidarity with Palestinians. Secker has long refused to be connected to the hostile state of Zionist Israel particularly as a Jewish man, stating:
We represent a very different perspective on what it means to be a Jew in this country, a very different point of view from the Jewish establishment, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council. I’m going to give you a perspective, a historical one, tied up with where we are now.
Jews in this country represent 0.5% of the population. Muslims represent about 5%. So you might ask, why is the Israeli lobby so damn powerful? Why is their establishment here has minimal concerns with Islamophobia, but maximal focus on anti-Semitism and its weaponization?
But we can do no more than understand racism without understanding imperialism and slavery, than we can understand Islamophobia without understanding oil imperialism, which replaced slavery as a financial driver of the second stage of the development of international capitalism.
The economic foundations of Israel were laid by mercantile Jews, traders, financiers, and then developing into international bankers. the privileged upper-class Jews with a role in developing the first stage of capitalism. To jump very quickly from that to Israel and Zionism, Zionism translated that role into a nationalist form, a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of hostile Arabism, as a British colonial agent in the Middle East described it at the time. And what happened was the development of Israel took over that role of Jewish capital when the bankers began, the Jewish bankers, Rothschilds and so on, began to give way to the large financial institutions developing in the States.
And so Israel took on that role of American imperial interest in the Middle East. Like the financials before them, they slotted neatly into servicing the dominant economic and political order. And so you have the United States’ multi-billion pound transfers to Israel, not just now during the genocide, but it’s accelerated. It’s been going on for decades, from the beginning of Israel’s inception, pretty much. So it’s imperative to draw a distinction between Israel and its ideology, political Zionism and Jew. Because I have nothing to do with what’s going on there, as far as I’m concerned, and I will not be identified with that. And there are many hundreds of thousands, probably a couple of million of us around the country.
Secker finished with a bit of advice for those out on doorsteps facing the inevitable allegations of antisemitism for refusing to support mass-murder, advising:
So what do you do on the doorstep when you’re told that it’s anti-Semitic? Well, you just say, there’s a whole lot of Jews in this country, who are deeply committed to it, because they’re deeply committed against genocide, who are deeply committed against any Holocaust, whoever perpetrates it.
And if it’s Jews, well for me, I’m deeply against that from the bottom of my being, because that is not something that I identify with in terms of my integrity and my humanity. So, I can’t tolerate, as a Jewish pensioner, drawing a lamb of pension that my deferred wages are invested in weapons companies that are slaughtering Palestinians.
So, I am deeply behind this campaign to get these shits out of their offices so we can disinvest.
Featured image via the Canary