IF THE GOVERNMENT REALLY HAD THE COURAGE TO “RECONNECT EMOTIONALLY” WITH THE BRITISH VOTER, IT WOULD BE BLASTED BY SHAME AND HORROR ~ Tabitha Troughton ~ What is this, slithering in your direction, smears of red and shards of bone in its wake, smirking ingratiatingly, waving gory tentacles, and muttering platitudes through its 27,000 teeth? Is it a giant slug? No! It’s the UK’s government, which has just been told, by Starmer’s toxic chief of staff, that it needs “to reconnect emotionally with voters”. Given the government’s documented track record of carnage, cowardice and corruption, voters may well flee, but the Guardian is made of sterner stuff. “In a presentation”, that paper explained seriously on its 6 January front page, “ministers were told the government needed to gain back voters’ trust with three Es”. The jokes are writing themselves. Who would not, at this point, risk an MDMA-induced stroke for a brief, delusional high, in which one forgets the government’s ongoing policies, and also the near indescribable awfulness of a recent Keir Starmer promo video, in which workers were invited to Downing Street for Christmas lunch. This showcased the prime minister prodding limply at cold roast potatoes,and pretending to chat to a prole, while completely ignoring their replies. It was the best they could do, or a post-realist joke. The “three E’s” with which the government were told to woo the country turn out to be “emotion, empathy and evidence”. Presumably the same emotion driving continued diplomatic and military support for our ally, the Israeli government, whose continuing genocide in Gaza has seen children freeze to death in inundated tents. Perhaps the empathy to match that of our ally, the Israeli government, who backs settlers ravaging in the West Bank and escalates the torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners with relish and impunity. Or maybe the kind of evidence yet to be heard against un-convicted prisoners of conscience starving to death in UK prisons for opposing weapons supply to our ally, the Israeli government—deliberately held on remand way beyond the legal limit, while the government contemptuously dismisses them. The UK’s prime minister, eyes glassy, refuses to support international law. It is not, he says, in the “national interest”, as though it is ever in the national interest to be a humiliated ally to demented, brutal, sociopathic regimes. The economy of Spain, whose government has stood openly against Trump, is out-performing those of Germany, France and Italy. Meanwhile the UK, staggering and flailing, pays vassal tribute: billions more to US pharmaceuticals, billions upon billions more on “defence”. There is a vast, shapeshifting horror in the shape of civil war, posing on the horizon behind the UK’s giant slug of shame. It is being invited into the country by obedient acolytes Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. And this government’s attempt to ditch jury trials, for example, is the latest in a series of gifts to this unholiest of gods. It is now absurdly easy to picture the UK state in five years time as a low-budget version of America, even without Reform. Looking to Gaza, we might be tempted to think we deserve this. But of course, no-one deserves this. If the government did have the courage to “reconnect emotionally” with the British voter, it would be blasted by shame and horror. Hannah Arendt observed, in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, that modern terror is not merely used by dictators against opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people, who are perfectly obedient. So, to the barricades, UK citoyens! Keep up your pens and paintbrushes, your guitars and cameras, your research tools; keep raising your flags and voices; sport your frivolous costumes against the coming shadow. Create plans for neighbourhood support. Save the slug from itself. Being “perfectly obedient” is not an escape, or an answer. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Number10 on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 The post Gifts to the unholiest of gods appeared first on Freedom News.

THE GOVERNMENT AND MEDIA ARE PRETENDING TO SUPPORT THE JEWISH COMMUNITY—BY OBEYING THE FAR RIGHT ~ Tabitha Troughton ~ Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have just been rioting in Tel Aviv itself, with the match banned as a result. For the previous 72 hours, the British public were once again instructed, by the media and politicians, not to believe their lying eyes. Forget videos of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters running riot in Amsterdam in November, or of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters beating someone in Athens unconscious in March last year: banning Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from a game at Aston Villa is, according to the UK’s prime minister, antisemitic. It did not need confirmation from the Israeli Minister for Foreign Affairs that the British government is now entirely obeying the diktats of the State of Israel. “A line must be drawn” Gideon Sa’ar reports having told foreign secretary Yvette Cooper yesterday (19 October), listing the measures necessary further to spread fear among, and alienate, British Jewish people. This included the banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. Sa’ar: “expressed our clear and unequivocal expectation that this disgraceful decision be revoked and that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans be allowed to attend the game”. The resulting campaign is just the most recent in a redoubled wave of attacks on fact and community, clearly at the Israeli state’s behest. It is worth examining the run up to it. At the start of October, thirteen UK citizens were among those kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli military. Millions of people worldwide had been watching live-streamed footage from the Global Sumud Flotilla; around 50 small, civilian boats on a humanitarian mission to break Israel’s 17 year-long blockade of Gaza. By 2 am on Thursday 2nd, around 13 of the boats had been boarded and seized by Israel, with the rest still under pursuit. In total, 462 peaceful flotilla activists, from around 45 countries, were eventually taken hostage. Many would later report being tortured. By Thursday evening, emergency protests in support of the flotilla crew had erupted across the world, through the whole of Europe through to Dhaka, Rio and beyond. The UK public’s response, while comparatively muted, was no different. Earlier that day, the British Transport Police had issued a warning. Protests were expected “in response to Israel detaining activists on the Global Sumud Flotilla in the early hours of this morning”. Emergency gatherings indeed sprang up that evening around the country, from Edinburgh to London Piccadilly. Later that morning, in Manchester, two Jewish people had tragically been killed, and others injured, after a terrorist attacked a synagogue. The feelings of shock, dismay and horror across the population were heartfelt: condemnations of the act, and support for the victims and the wider Jewish community poured in from across all spectrums – religious, political and communal. And then one of the largest of disinformation campaigns slammed into action. It was spread by a variety of actors with a variety of motives, but the strategy was the same. To start with: tell people that the UK flotilla protests were not protests in support of the flotilla. Tell them they were protests in celebration of the Manchester terrorist attack. The flotilla protests were “a shameful response to the Manchester attack” according to The Spectator. “Vicious Jew-hatred was indulged, yet again” agreed the Scotsman. “They weren’t demonstrating. They were, actually celebrating. I can’t even imagine whoever’s seen such vile scenes on our streets” Farage told his followers. “I could not take it that after such a horrendous terrorist attack, I could see marches of celebrations in London and other cities that celebrated this murderous attack”, Israeli deputy foreign minister Sharren Haskel said, on Good Morning Britain. The next immediate target was larger; hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people: those who had marched peacefully through London, month after month,  against their government’s complicity in genocide. Suddenly, once again, the marches were “hate marches”, specifically a mass of “Jew hate”, and directly linked to the Manchester terror attack. “Everyone on pro-Palestine marches this weekend is complicit” threatened the Express. Social media was bombarded by posts from right wing accounts: “Anti Semitic mobs have been allowed to march through our streets, waving their terrorist flags and shouting Death to Jews” was one exemplar. “People like killing Jews” the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges clarified. Until now, coverage of the silent, seated, placard-holding Palestine Action protests had been sympathetic. It would, you would think, from the footage of priests, pensioners, Quakers and disabled people being arrested under the Terrorism Act, and carried off by reluctant police, be difficult to sell this as an antisemitic hate event. But not this time. “We’ve had Swastikas, pro-Hamas posters, pro-terror posters and calls for Intifada”, Dan Hodges asserted, of the most recent Palestine Action protest in Trafalgar Square on 4 October, which he does not appear to have attended. The supposed evidence for this came from three photos of people on the fringes of the protest: a grey-haired man with a t-shirt which compared the Israeli government to Nazis, and one person with a placard saying they supported Hamas’ right to resistance. A banner from Cage, the campaigning civil rights organisation demanding that the government “Abolish terror laws” was presumably “pro terror”. The Times’ Matthew Syed, wandering around the sombre square on Saturday, was asking people, there to protest their government’s support of an ongoing genocide, whether “Hamas were partly responsible”. Told to piss off with his stupid questions by women there to witness the protest, Syed extrapolates this into a “hatred of Jews”. Many participants in the protest were Jewish and the protest itself was supported by Jewish organisations, including Jewish Voice for Labour and Na’amod. There were placards affirming the general grief for Manchester, but Syed comes away with “the pervasive view that the Manchester atrocity was not a heinous attack but righteous comeuppance for an evil people”. The protestors, from priest to Quaker, were “almost gloating over the Yom Kippur attack” the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews later told his Jewish audience. Coasting on the back of this, like a surfer upon sewage, was the British government. Naturally they wanted to end the protests; the public accusations of their engagement in the mass slaughter of defenceless people. And yet, interviewed by Owen Jones and Rivkah Brown at the Labour Party conference last month, it was clear that they were not about to do this by stopping their diplomatic and military support for the current Israeli government. Indeed, the government can do nothing to go against the Trump/Netanyahu axis, or so it has persuaded itself. Consider the haunted grey face of Yvette Cooper, questioned by Jones over Gaza. Or Jess Phillips, pursued by an incredulous Rivkah Brown with questions about the proscription of Palestine Action. “We’re just doing what we’re told” shrugged Phillips’ body language. “Are you daft, or something?” “I just do as I’m told, you know”, Labour’s Peter Prinsley confirmed to Declassified UK outside the conference. So this ideologically authoritarian, blindly in thrall government doubles down. The Prime Minister told the country that there are “people on our streets calling for the murder of Jewish people”. He did not mean the threat, to all people, of insane extremist violence; he meant what Gideon Sa’ar has instructed him to mean: the schoolgirls, students, pensioners, white and brown, singing “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. According to Sa’ar, and the right wing press, and their supporters, this calls for “the elimination of the State of Israel” – and is therefore antisemitic. Legislation, said Sa’ar, was needed. And thus the UK’s right wing, and its convenient dupes, flog the fallacy that the majority of the country who demanded arms sales to Israel be suspended, or who think banning Maccabi Tel Aviv fans is a good idea, simply hate Jewish people. Meanwhile, the Israeli state not only invites in, but parades, a man known as one of the UK’s most unwanted Nazi-adjacent mortgage fiddlers. The shock among the British Jewish community when Tommy Robinson’s trip was announced was palpable, including from the British Board of Deputies of British Jews, which described him as a “thug” who represented “the very worst of Britain”. Robinson was urging supporters to rally at the Maccabi Tel Aviv/Villa game, where the Prime Minister and his accomplices are simultaneously attempting to expedite, as directed by Sa’ar, an influx of notoriously violent foreign race-haters, screaming “antisemitism” if challenged. If there were a better way to spread fear, division and hatred among our Muslim and Jewish communities, it is difficult to think of one. “If Tommy Robinson wants to show he’s a friend of Jews I urge him not to go after Jewish journalists just because they happen to disagree with him” pleaded one Jewish journalist. It is a terrible and damning game that this government and its allies are attempting: pretending to support the Jewish community by obeying the far right. Meanwhile, excluding figures from London, religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims rose by 19% in the year before March, including direct attacks on mosques and Muslims themselves. Communities are standing up to this, as they have, and they can, and they will.  The government, clearly, will not. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photos: Israel Police / Sports5. Maccabi Tel Aviv banners read “We’re back from reserve duty” and “Harbu Derby“ The post Red card for reality appeared first on Freedom News.

FROM DESTROYING THE ENVIRONMENT TO BETRAYING THE DISABLED, THE GOVERNMENT IS RUNNING THE SAME PLAY—WILL PEOPLE FALL FOR IT? ~ punkacademic ~ There’s the old adage that goes: the first time people show you who they are, believe them. Over a decade ago, Rachel Reeves, today the Chancellor of the Exchequer, then Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, proudly boasted that she’d be ‘tougher on benefits than the Tories’. Fast forward twelve years and the story remains the same, one which Labour’s Wes Streeting proudly celebrated as he goaded the Tory opposition in Parliament—we are doing things you wanted to, but never could, on welfare, he claimed. There’s no doubt that the garbage served up in the government’s Pathways to Work Green Paper is a Tory fantasy.  A sentiment of ‘punish those cripples’, all shrouded in some nineteenth century moralising bullshit about helping people help themselves. We anarchists do believe in a particular form of self-help, but ‘direct action gets the goods’ doesn’t seem to be what Whitehall PPE drones or their Labour confederates have in mind. The key planks of it are by now well-known, and have drawn an outcry, all the more impressive to centrist pundits because the outcry isn’t just coming from ‘the Left’ (which BBC house style now sees fit to capitalise as some sort of mortal enemy). Cuts to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) by ‘tightening’ eligibility criteria (namely raising the scoring threshold for award on the daily living component) and denying Universal Credit’s health element altogether to younger people (and reducing the value of it for new claimants) are central to the government’s real ambition—to save money. Having imposed ‘fiscal rules’ to buy off the media, Reeves and Liz Kendall now want to sacrifice the disabled for the sake of their own political aspirations. But that was also true in 2013, when Reeves made her statement that she’s now bringing into practice. The truth is, despite the brief Corbyn interregnum when Labour had a leader (but not a party apparatus) that genuinely did want something demonstrably different, this is who Labour are. It’s who they have been since at least the mid-1990s. And yet, in 2024, at least some voters chose to live in a land of make-believe and think otherwise. Why? It’s hard not to think at times that sections of the electorate actively want to be lied to. It saves having to do anything difficult, like stand up for people in your workplace against the employer trying to ‘manage out’ a disabled member of staff, for instance, or object to a new policy dehumanising trans people imposed by management to ‘avoid legal risk’. It’s to that constituency that Labour still appeals with a sop; we’ll put more money into Access to Work, they say, a scheme that doesn’t work as it stands and which some employers choose to ignore. Besides, it’s also being reported that they are actually cutting it. But the people Labour are appealing to here don’t use it, don’t know what it is (as with PIP) and can salve their consciences with it. Ditto for the environment. Labour’s going to tear up planning restrictions and the local planning approval system in its ‘dash for growth’, because apparently bats and newts are the new ‘enemies within’. At first glance, planning regulations might seem an odd hill for an anarchist to die on but they’re not. You don’t have to follow Murray Bookchin’s ideas about libertarian municipalism to their conclusion to get that the highly-imperfect planning system at least affords a veneer of engagement with both the needs of actual people and the environment, over the whispers (or shouts) of the CEOs from whom Starmer takes his lead. And besides, Murray Bookchin’s point was always about the evils of domination, and that social ecology properly implemented meant a rejection of dominance and hierarchy in all spaces. Needs need to be considered. Even those of newts, Keir. But there’s a sop for that too. Whilst eradicating environmental concerns in the particular, specific, cases of actual schemes being built and landscapes destroyed, they tell us there’ll be money for environmental remediation in general through a ‘nature levy’. Again, this should help those who are still Labour apologists sleep at night. The list goes on. Freeports and enterprise zones, but expanded workers’ rights too (that are being watered down as we speak). Keep that conscience water trickling on to eager lips. Tell me lies. For anarchists, it’s easy to see that electoral politics is bankrupt, that promises are cheap and lies are easy (though few of us were born anarchists and took more or less time to realise). One point to note, however, regarding the constituency for whom these lies are designed is that it’s shrinking all the time. People are increasingly aware that solutions to the problems we face aren’t available through parliamentary politics. The government is also aware of this growing awareness, hence the ongoing criminalisation of protest. And yet resistance is not futile, but as ever it has to be collective. As the editorial in the latest print edition of Freedom asks, how are we powerful today? As a queer cripple who regularly feels powerless, I feel power-in-action every time we are ungovernable. When I become we. When we refuse, and we create. When we tell our truths, and reject their lies. In an era where the bankruptcy of electoral politics is playing a role in the rise of the far right, it’s critical that we talk – one-to-one if necessary – with those who will listen. That we work together in our shared struggles. That we fight to share joy even in these bitter times. That might seem trite, but it isn’t. The privatisation of the self that digital social media encourages can be soul-destroying. Often, talking to people isn’t. Joy on our terms. Life on our terms. Now and always. That is part of how we come together, heal, and build a power free of hierarchy, domination, and lies. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Bart Hawkins Kreps (public domain) The post Labour’s sweet little lies appeared first on Freedom News.