UK Politics

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28230288

The pro-Palestine Youth Demand movement says it has been targeted with over 150 arrests since it began

Katherine Hearst Published date: 5 April 2025 09:12 BST

"On 27 March, some 20 police officers burst in on a group of young women at a Quaker’s meeting house in central London and arrested them on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.

The women were activists who had gathered for an open meeting of Youth Demand, a pro-Palestine and climate justice movement demanding an end to UK government arms sales to Israel and new fossil fuel licensing. The group emerged in the aftermath of Israel’s war on Gaza, which began in October 2023."

I found this interesting. It looks back at Sir Keir's five years as the leader of Labour.

Here's an interesting quote:

He turned left to win the party leadership and turned right to win a general election.

And regarding his campaign for the Labour leadership in 2020:

To win the backing of left-wing Labour activists, he backed a wealth tax on the top 5% of earners, abolishing university tuition fees, nationalising water and energy and restoring freedom of movement between the UK and EU countries. Whatever happened to those promises?

April 5 (Reuters) - Israel has detained two British members of parliament and refused entry to the officials who were visiting as part of a parliamentary delegation, British Foreign Minister David Lammy said in a statement late on Saturday.

Sky News, citing a statement from the Israeli immigration ministry, says that the detained parliamentarians are Labour MPs Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed, who were rejected because they were suspected of plans to "document the activities of security forces and spread anti-Israel hatred."

"I have made clear to my counterparts in the Israeli government that this is no way to treat British Parliamentarians, and we have been in contact with both MPs tonight to offer our support," Lammy said.

The latest crime scene in Gaza is shockingly illustrative of how Israel murders civilians, targets medics and covers up its crimes - and of how western media collude in downplaying such atrocities, helping Israel to ensure that the extent of the death toll in Gaza will never be properly known.

As the story broke on Monday, the BBC’s News at Ten gave over its schedule to a bin strike by workers in Birmingham; fears about the influence of social media prompted by a Netflix drama, Adolescence; bad weather on a Greek island; the return to Earth of stranded Nasa astronauts; and Britain’s fourth political party claiming it would do well in next month’s local elections.

All of that pushed out any mention of Israel’s latest war crime in Gaza.

Presumably under pressure from its ordinary journalists - who are known to be in near-revolt over the state broadcaster’s persistent failure to cover Israeli atrocities in Gaza - the next day’s half-hour evening news belatedly dedicated 30 seconds to the item, near the end of the running order.

Keir Starmer is preparing to rethink key elements of the government’s economic policy in an emergency response to Donald Trump’s tariff blitz, amid growing concern in Downing Street that the US president’s trade war could do lasting damage to the UK.

The prime minister believes, say allies, that “old assumptions should be discarded” in the UK’s response, suggesting he and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, may be preparing to raise taxes again – despite having promised not to do so – or even possibly change their “iron clad” fiscal rules to allow more borrowing and fire up economic growth at home in the event of recession.
[…]
This week, Starmer, who has refused to criticise Trump or his tariffs directly, will focus on how to frame an economic response to a global economic shock that protects working people, and their incomes and jobs – as well as the UK’s public services.

He believes that the last few days have ushered in a “new era”, that the “world has changed” and that a global trade war risks “undermining a proud, hard-working nation”.

The kind of language now emanating from Starmer’s circles will be seen by economists – and politicians at Westminster – as preparing the ground for big potential shifts in economic policy on the basis that emergency times may require emergency measures.

Also, Treasury Minister says 'globalisation era has ended':

Speaking on the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show, [Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren] Jones was asked whether globalisation - which has resulted in a boom in imports of cheap fashion, electrical goods and other products - was over.

"Yeah it's ended, the prime minister said that himself this morning," he said.

The change meant the UK had to "build out" relationships with allies around the world but also invest in the UK's own economy, Jones said, denying ministers were "scrabbling" for solutions.

He insisted the government was "trying to get ahead of these challenges" , which he said were "why we have to invest in the domestic economy, both for UK businesses, but also our public services... which is why our plan for change is investing in the NHS and skills as well as industrial policy."

Amid reports both elements of the spending review and the industrial strategy could now be brought forward from their expected June publication date, he said Labour had been working on the industrial strategy since it was in opposition.

Pressed on whether they would be brought forward, Jones deferred to Sir Keir's announcement expected in the coming days and laughed when Laura Kuenssberg said "that sounds almost like a yes but you're not allowed to say it to us this morning".

The UK government is continuing its policy of not responding with counter-tariffs, as other countries have done, preferring a "calm" approach focused on a UK-US trade deal.

"We're hoping to do a deal," Jones said, adding on tariffs that "we have a better outcome than other comparable countries as a consequence of our diplomacy".

The UK’s foreign secretary has criticised Israeli authorities for denying two Labour MPs entry into the country and deporting them.

Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed were rejected because they were suspected of plans to “document the activities of security forces and spread anti-Israel hatred”, according to a statement from the Israeli immigration ministry cited by Sky News and Politics UK.

Yang, who represents Earley and Woodley in Berkshire, and Mohamed, the MP for Sheffield Central, both flew into Ben Gurion airport from Luton with their aides, according to reports.

The foreign secretary, David Lammy, said in a statement on Saturday: “It is unacceptable, counterproductive, and deeply concerning that two British MPs on a parliamentary delegation to Israel have been detained and refused entry by the Israeli authorities.

“I have made clear to my counterparts in the Israeli government that this is no way to treat British parliamentarians, and we have been in contact with both MPs tonight to offer our support.

“The UK government’s focus remains securing a return to the ceasefire and negotiations to stop the bloodshed, free the hostages and end the conflict in Gaza.”

Since renewed military operations last month ended a short-lived truce in its war with Hamas, Israel has pushed to seize territory in the Gaza Strip in what it said was a strategy to force militants to free hostages still in captivity.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said 1,249 people have been killed since Israel resumed intense bombing last month, bringing the overall death toll since the war began to 50,609.

The 7 October 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the war resulted in 1,218 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

An Afghan woman who risked her life to defend human rights in her home country before fleeing to the UK has been told by the Home Office it is safe for her to return after officials rejected her asylum claim.

Mina (not her real name) worked for western government-backed projects and was involved in training and mentoring women across Afghanistan, which left her in grave danger even before the Taliban took over in 2021.

“I assumed my asylum claim would be granted – I am from Afghanistan, I’m a woman, I worked with western governments,” said Mina. “The refusal was an absolute shock. Now every day I fear being sent back to my home country. Having a normal life here looks like a dream for me. I’m really suffering mentally.

“When I was working with western government projects I received security training about how to respond if I was caught up in a bombing or a kidnapping. Every day I was a few minutes or a few seconds away from bomb blasts.

“My heart beat so fast when I had to pass the checkpoints. Every morning when I said goodbye to my family to go to work I thought it might be the last time I saw them,” she said. “Some of my colleagues just disappeared. The Taliban changed the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to the Ministry of Vice and Virtue – proper, systematic elimination of women.”

The Home Office has previously generally accepted protection claims from women like Mina who could be targeted by the Taliban because of their high-profile work empowering women and who have provided evidence of their work with western government projects.

But in the most recent data for the last three months of 2024 immigration statistics show 26 Afghan women had their claims rejected. Overall 2,000 Afghan asylum seekers had their claims refused, an increase from 48 in the same quarter of 2023. The grant rate for Afghan cases has gone down from 98.5% in the last quarter of 2023 to 36% in the last quarter of 2024.

The 2025 Human Rights Watch report into Afghanistan documents a serious deterioration in the rights of girls and women and an increase in risks to their safety.

Although Mina explained in her Home Office asylum interview of the dangers she faced in Afghanistan because of the work she did a Home Office decision maker who rejected her claim, concluded that: “It is considered that you do not face a real risk of persecution or harm on your return to Afghanistan on the basis of your claimed adverse attention by the Taliban.”

The refusal letter adds: “You likely have a great support network due to your occupation.”

However many of those Mina worked with prior to the Taliban takeover are either in hiding or have fled the country and these support networks have largely been destroyed.

“There are no compassionate factors in your case that warrant a grant of leave to remain outside the immigration rules,” the letter states.

“When I arrived here I felt safe,” Mina said. “I thought I would have a chance to live. In Afghanistan I had not been considered a human. I learnt to ride a bicycle here, something I was not allowed to do in my country. I was really full of hope that my life would change. But someone pressed pause on my life. I hope someone will press play again.”

Her solicitor Jamie Bell of Duncan Lewis said: “It is shocking that 26 Afghan women were refused asylum in the last quarter. However this is a particularly upsetting case where the Home Office states that a woman who risked her life defending women’s rights in Afghanistan would not be at risk on return. The UK should be proud to offer protection to an individual like her. This refusal letter is offensive to all those who defended western values in Afghanistan and who ought to be offered protection when they cannot safely return.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “It is our longstanding policy not to comment on individual cases.”

Britain must allow US chlorine-washed chicken into UK markets if it wants relief from sweeping tariffs, Donald Trump has indicated.

It comes after the UK failed to avoid tariffs imposed on the global economy, with the US president slapping a 10 per cent levies on all British exports to the United States.

...

In a statement published alongside the tariff announcement, the White House said: “The UK maintains non-science-based standards that severely restrict US exports of safe, high-quality beef and poultry products.”

It suggested that Britain’s ban on chlorinated chicken was among a range of “non-tariff barriers” that limit the US’s ability to trade.

The UK has long ruled out allowing imports of chlorine-washed chicken from the US due to health concerns, with Downing Street on Thursday reiterating its manifesto commitment to high food standards.

Asked whether the UK could allow imports of chlorine washed chicken in order to appease the US, the prime minister’s officials spokesperson said: “Our position on that is unchanged. You’ve got the manifesto commitment on food standards, which obviously remains.”

...

The last major polling done on the issue, conducted in 2020, revealed that 80 per cent of Britons are opposed to allowing imports to the UK, and the same proportion is also against allowing chicken products that have been farmed using hormones.

There is also growing pressure from the farming industry to rule out concessions on the issue, amid fears it could undercut British farmers and drive down food standards.

Nigel Farage admitted he would allow American chlorine-washed chicken to be sold in the UK as part of a free trade deal with the US.

Ministers hope this announcement is a reasonable basis for carrying on with negotiations over a trade deal that could lead to them falling or being dropped entirely.

The fate of boys “is a defining issue of our time”, according to the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, as she calls for more men to become teachers to combat “toxic” behaviours.

since 2010 the number of teachers in our schools has increased by 28,000 – but just 533 of those are men

Do you think this is an issue? Decades ago, boys would have been taught by male teachers, so today's female teachers are a change from the past.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/26833310

US state department officials have challenged Britain’s communications regulator over the impact on freedom of expression created by new online safety laws, the Guardian understands.

A group of officials from the state department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) recently met Ofcom in London. It is understood that they raised the issue of the new online safety act and how it risked infringing free speech.

The state department body later said the meeting was part of its initiative “to affirm the US commitment to defending freedom of expression, both in Europe and around the world”. During the meeting, Ofcom officials said the new rules were only in place to deal with explicitly illegal content, as well as material that could be harmful to children.

Asked about the meeting, which is understood to have taken place in March, a state department spokesperson said: “As Vice-President Vance has said, we are concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom. It is important that the UK respect and protect freedom of expression.”

...

It follows months of pressure from figures close to President Trump over free speech. Some have accused the UK government of failing to protect free expression, especially after the riots that took place last summer.

In February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, complained of “infringements on free speech” in the UK. Elon Musk, one of Trump’s closest allies, repeatedly claimed that some prison sentences handed down to people who incited the riots on X were a breach of free speech. X hosts accounts by figures including Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate, who were accused of inciting people to join Islamophobic protests.

Since the riots last summer, the online safety act has been implemented as a way of regulating illegal online content. During a visit to the UK, the US state department team held meetings with Ofcom, the Foreign Office and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a US group that funds and campaigns on conservative issues.

Among the group was Samuel D Samson, who previously worked for US conservative organisations. He was appointed as a senior advisr at the DRL in January after Trump’s victory. On the day of last year’s US election, he tweeted: “Today we choose God over Pagan idols.”

He has previously taken a close interest in freedom of speech issues, writing about the topic in the American Conservative magazine. The DRL’s interest in Britain marks a pivot by an agency originally set up in the 1970s to advance democracy around the world against the backdrop of the cold war. Rather than Britain’s domestic affairs, the DRL’s advocacy has focused on the Middle East, Russia and China.

As Labour imposes poverty on up to 400,000 people through cuts to disability benefits, according to estimates by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, this argument is submerged under a tidal wave of misery. The government has already robbed many pensioners of their winter fuel payments, and not only voted to keep a Tory two-child benefit cap that imposes squalor on hundreds of thousands of children, but suspended those Labour MPs who opposed it. A Labour party that knowingly imposes hardship on disabled people, pensioners and children has filed for moral and political bankruptcy.

Some continue supporting Labour in lieu of an alternative: according to YouGov, more Labour voters than not now disapprove of the government, an astonishing statistic given the party’s support has plummeted to less than a quarter of the electorate. Some stop voting. Some may opt for the Greens, but its four MPs have failed to offer any cut-through leadership, despite uniquely fertile circumstances. Others defect to independent candidates, but their success is based on ad hoc local initiatives. And, bleakly, others may opt for Reform UK, which fills the vacuum as the ultimate protest vote, even though the party backs cutting benefits for disabled people, increasing privatisation of the NHS and slashing taxes for the rich.

The obvious question, then, is: why is the left failing to profit from this mass appeal? A media ecosystem rigged in favour of the right hardly helps, but witness how Citibanker-turned-equality guru Gary Stevenson is reaching millions through YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Despite the likes of Elon Musk gaming algorithms in favour of the Trumpian right, it is easier for the left to reach the wider electorate than ever. The left has just failed badly to harness social media platforms for its own advantage.

The main hurdle is obvious: an absence of leadership. The left has a theory of change that centres collective struggle. It needs a leader that can bridge a divide. Crudely, that means appealing to older, overwhelmingly white voters who live in towns and hold more socially conservative views, and younger, more diverse citizens in urban communities who tend to be more socially progressive. This can be done: at his best, Bernie Sanders appeals to Trump sympathisers in the rust belt and Brooklyn graduates in precarious jobs who march for Palestine. Jeremy Corbyn, too, won 40% of the vote in 2017 by appealing to these different constituencies.

An obvious candidate is Mick Lynch, the retired general secretary of the RMT union, whose effortless slapdowns of obtuse TV presenters showed his promise as the anti-Farage. His appeal is a combination of working-class experience, authenticity, composure and an ability to make political arguments accessible to the average punter. But he shows no signs of desiring a mantle that, admittedly, involves being hounded by a thuggish media. Yet someone with his qualities could be a focal point for otherwise disparate disillusionment. It would mean striking an arrangement with the Greens, who rode the wave of pre-election distaste with Starmerism to come second in dozens of constituencies, despite their abysmal failure to capitalise since.

Any leader would have to shift the debate from the “culture wars” to economic justice. The former is intended to drive the left into defensive territory and, as Ronald Reagan astutely observed, in politics, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. But if the left drew attention to inequality and disintegrating public services, and made the case for taxing the rich, the right would be forced to explain itself instead. This does not mean throwing minorities under a publicly owned bus. It simply means that issues that emphasise the shared, common interests of the majority should be at the forefront.

The family of a British aid worker killed by an Israeli drone strike in Gaza have slammed the British government for refusing to release information about the attack gathered by a Royal Air Force (RAF) spy plane.

James Kirby, a 47-year-old former British Army rifleman, was working in Gaza for the World Central Kitchen when he was killed last April in an Israeli targeted attack on a three-car aid convoy. He died alongside several others, including two other British veterans.

The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) told The Times it had footage from a RAF spy plane that was flying over Gaza trying to locate Israeli captives on the day of the strike. The MoD refused to disclose the footage, citing national security and defence exemptions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially claimed the killing of the British aid workers last April was "unintentional". The Israeli military later dismissed two officers and reprimanded two senior commanders, saying a drone operator had mistakenly targeted the convoy.

But in an interview with The Times, the Kirby family slammed the military's investigation as a "whitewash" and called for an independent inquiry.