ONE DAY THERE WILL BE A RECKONING — BUT IT WON’T BE A WHITE BOY WITH A WAND AND A SCAR ~ Kell w Farshéa ~ This is a government of death. A cabinet of death-eaters who put the needs of capital and state above our humanity, and reactionary ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and disability above our shared solidarity. Death eaters who even now would rather prop up the genocidal state of Israel than attend to 8 activists on hunger strike who are being denied medical treatment or a judgement of their peers. People who have not even had a trial for crimes invented to suit the needs of Western geopolitical imperialism. People who saw the complicity of this British state and capital and fought back at source to intervene on behalf of humanity. The death-eaters manufacture consent through media as diverse as the BBC and GB News, the Guardian or the Express. Rationing social media and parliamentary questions for silence. So whilst basic access to medicine or a fair trial is denied — there is a mighty absence of the inquiring investigative journalism that the British press pretends to care about. There they are — the death eaters: Starmer, Lammy, Reeves, Mahmood, Streeting, Cooper — presiding over a cabinet of death. They take life-saving medical care from trans children and young people whilst praying to their gods in the name of love. They deport asylum seekers whilst claiming the mantle of liberalism. They pander to fascism and flag shagging, dangling the possibilities of mass deportations in the name of British fairness and British decency. A very British form of fairness built on the backs of colonial and imperial asset-stripping of half the world, of the third passage, the enslavement of millions, the cotton and sugar plantations, the indentured labourers, the gerrymandering of tribes, polities, countries and whole regions — all for the benefit of British capital and British power. The death eaters in Parliament — Farage, Badenoch, Starmer etc, — sidle up to the kleptomaniac fascist in the White House. They flatter him with baubles, monarchal fantasies of the divine right of kings, back when dictators dressed up their crimes with God (but don’t mention Charles I). Meanwhile they cut benefits for the dis/abled, play cheap tricks to push more gig economy working class people into tax brackets they cant afford. They promise whole new towns but do nothing about 700,000 empty buildings in the UK. They promise to bulldoze nuclear power stations through planning committees but still keep the oil and gas flowing from the North Sea. They demonise people who survive the prison system whilst doing nothing to address why so many veterans, ex-criminals, and people with mental health conditions will be the ones freezing on our streets this Christmas And still they cannot speak of Gaza. Gaza flooded. Gaza freezing. Gaza starving. The fake ceasefire and the Gaza land grab. Children shot for walking over invisible lines. Instead, the death eaters make political capital out of antisemitic hate crimes and mass shootings to avoid talking about Gaza. They’re all so pleased with themselves. And then there’s us. Spending our wages and benefits to keep people alive in Gaza in a global act of international solidarity. Brave comrades: arrested, harassed, punched in the face, laying down in the streets, slandered, occupying buildings, smashing the windows of the ECHR and Elbit. Same tactics, same struggles. One day there will be a reckoning. It won’t be a white boy with a wand and a scar though. It will be the whole damn world, and we will want justice. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: House of Commons on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 The post Governed by Death-eaters appeared first on Freedom News.

IT COMES TO SOMETHING WHEN EVEN VOICING SUPPORT FOR A NON-VIOLENT DIRECT ACTION GROUP RISKS BEING DESIGNATED AS CROSSING THE LINE, BUT LABOUR IS NO DEFENDER OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND PROTEST. Tabitha and Andy join us to discuss the decision of former defender of principled dissent Keir Starmer to ban an organisation that he might once have protected, that same MP’s determination to rob billions off the poorest to spend on pointless nuclear bomber aircraft, and self-titled “real opposition” leader Nigel Farage’s bung to rich foreigners. The post Anarchist News Review: Palestine Action Ban, Welfare Rebellion and Israel-Iran-US appeared first on Freedom News.

LABOUR’S DESIRE FOR AUTHORITY COMES FROM AN INSTINCT TO PROVE THEY CAN MANAGE THE WORKERS BEST ~ Jon Bigger ~ Two themes have been ever-present in Labour Party history. The first is an elitist view of the working class, in which the best voices, the most intelligent and responsible voices, will be found at the top of the party. The Labour Party’s founders did not have a positive view of the masses. The party existed to elevate the working class by giving voice to its perceived interests. This patronising looking-down upon the working class has never been fully shaken off. The second theme is a desire to appear tough on crime. The Tories have always been presented as the party of law and order whereas Labour are depicted as weak. The Tory instinct towards hierarchy and authority comes from a desire to keep the old order in power (initially the crown and aristocracy and later simply the rich). Labour’s desire for authority comes from an instinct to prove they can manage the workers best. These two instincts within the Labour Party cause it to forever patronise and criminalise its potential core supporters. When it comes to our current age of rising authoritarianism, these instincts could take the UK is some startling directions. Building on the previous Tory government’s curtailing of protest rights, we now see the Labour government preparing the ground to ban Palestine Action. If that comes to pass it will be illegal to promote the group as they will be considered in the same bracket as Islamist terrorist groups and some fascist groups. So while I can legally do so I just want to applaud their actions. They have been peaceful and disruptive. Their actions have shone a light on the continuing genocide perpetrated by Israel. They have been brave and imaginative and I hope they can continue. Working class Labour Party members who take an internationalist approach to their politics must be wondering why they still support the party. Palestine Action has consistently acted to support working class people in Palestine; Labour Party policy actively results in those people facing famine and brutal death at the hands of the Israeli military. Now, that same Labour Party will absurdly label the people they disagree with as terrorists, while aiding the Israeli state to carry on its sickening campaign of collective punishment—with arms sales, vocal support and possibly military help in its new war with Iran. The current Labour Party has also framed itself in terms of what it is not. It wishes to point out not only that it can manage things better than the Tories, but also that it is categorically not the party of Jeremy Corbyn. The desire to prove this time and again has compelled Keir Starmer to take the worst possible line on Israel. The issue of antisemitism within the party during Corbyn’s leadership blurs with its response to the Hamas aggression on 7th October 2023, when it was still in Opposition. There’s no obvious connection between these things except a desire to appear nothing like Corbyn. Wholehearted support for Israel’s so-called right to defend itself has meant turning a blind eye to the obvious genocide playing out in front of us. We could take the view that the ‘working class party’ has been corrupted by power, and this is the inevitable compromise such Social Democratic parties have to make in order to attain and stay in power. There is a truth in this analysis. The Labour Party does want to appear suitable for high office and nimble enough to deflect some of the inevitable criticism from Tory supporting newspapers. But we shouldn‘t forget that the urge to manage the working class was baked into the party from the very beginning. That emphasis on the hierarchy of the party never went away. They may never have been a revolutionary Marxist party but they share a great deal in sentiment when it comes to their visions of the working class: it is to be moulded by them, represented by them, with the rough edges ironed out. The leaderships know best. They’ve read the sacred texts and understand them. Both the Leninists and Labour see the working class as their party’s greatest asset and their greatest weakness. It is in this context that the Blair government moved further from social democracy and ignored the masses who marched against war with Iraq, introduced anti-social behaviour orders, and tried to database the population with an ID Card scheme. Keir Starmer is playing his Labour’s Greatest Hits album in the hope it works twice. Last year’s election manifesto included a large section on anti-social behaviour and floated the idea of Respect Orders, which could be used to ban people from town centres. The framing of the entire manifesto is that Labour will be better managers than the Tories. What they are managing is us. The attempt to ban Palestine Action is a blow to imaginative peaceful resistance. Embarrassed that a RAF base can be broken into at ease by people with wire cutters and paint, the State resorts to authoritarian means to shut the protests down. Unless it faces powerful grassroots resistance, Labour will likely go further in its efforts to manage and stifle working class voices that embarrass them. The post Labour’s authoritarian urge appeared first on Freedom News.

THE CRIMINALISATION OF HOMELESSNESS AND POVERTY IS NOT TRULY ENDING—ONLY BEING RESHAPED ~ Tony ~ On 10 June 2025 the Government confirmed it will repeal the Vagrancy Act 1824 by Spring 2026 (you just can’t rush these things), and whilst the news was widely and justifiably welcomed by homelessness charities, we should sound a note of caution: we have been here before. The previous Government also said it would repeal the Act, only to announce even more reactionary laws to be put in its place. This time the Government says it will be replaced by amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill to include a new offence of facilitating begging for gain and an offence of trespassing with the intention of committing a crime, both of which are included under the 1824 Act.  Of course, the Crime and Policing Bill is already a thoroughly repressive piece of legislation, including so-called respect orders (which can be used to prohibit a wide variety of anti-social behaviour), youth injunctions (to be used against children aged 10 or over but under 18) and further restrictions on protests (prohibiting the wearing or otherwise using of an item that conceals a person’s identity, an offence of possession of pyrotechnics at protests, and an offence of climbing on a war memorial). Whilst most of the Vagrancy Act was repealed over time, the part of the legislation that makes it a criminal offence to sleep rough or beg in England and Wales remains in force (it was repealed in Scotland in 1982), thus continuing to give the police both the power and the discretion to arrest people and Magistrates the power to impose a fine of up to £1,000. According the Single Homeless Project, between April 2022 (when the last Government said it would repeal the Vagrancy Act) and June 2024 (when Parliament was dissolved), 177 people, including 148 men and 27 women, were arrested under the law. To be clear this means that when you are starving and you beg for food or money to buy food you can be arrested. When you lose your home and are forced to sleep on the streets you can be fined. When you cannot pay the fine you can be imprisoned. As always the victims of capitalism are the scapegoats. HOW WE GOT HERE An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in England, to give its full title, was part of the response of the ruling class to the rioting that followed the Napoleonic Wars. The price of bread increased but wages did not (I hope this does not sound too contemporary). As a result many agricultural labourers were plunged into poverty. Trade unions were effectively illegal (just 10 years later the Tolpuddle Martyrs were tried, convicted and sentenced to penal transportation to Australia for swearing a secret oath as members of a friendly society). Unemployment increased. The Corn Laws were enacted to impose tariffs on all imported cereal grains, including wheat, oats and barley, thus increasing the profits and power of land owners. Unrest was widespread. The 1824 Act set a new model, which proved extremely influential around the world over the following centuries. Between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, vagrancy laws were adopted or reformulated almost everywhere the British rulers colonised. Laws were adopted to cover a broad range of ‘offences’ and ‘offensive’ ways of being, including impoverishment, idleness, begging, hawking, public gambling, sex work, public indecency, fortune-telling, traditional religious practices, drunkenness, homosexuality, cross-dressing, socialising across racial groups, being suspicious, and many other activities as well. They were adopted for a range of purposes: to control labour and limit workers’ bargaining positions, including after the abolition of slavery; to define the boundaries of civilized, industrious, and moral society; and to “clean up the streets” and reinforce urban boundaries. Most overarchingly, vagrancy laws served as a practical and rhetorical means through which the discretionary power of the state, as enforced through the police and magistracy, was expanded. The Vagrancy Act 1824 comes from a largely forgotten era. Before the supposed Victorian values that so many reactionary politicians still like to espouse. A decade before the ‘new’ poor law which introduced the workhouses. Twenty years before Engels’ study of the Condition of the Working Class in England. Over a century before the welfare state. As for the offences of leaving properties empty, making rents unaffordable and reducing people to poverty, unsurprisingly no legalisation is proposed—but law and morality rarely coincide. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: Matt Collamer on Unsplash The post Scrapping the Vagrancy Act appeared first on Freedom News.

ANDY MEINKE JOINS US FOR THE WEEKLY WAFFLE, LOOKING THIS WEEK AT LABOUR’S THRASHING ABOUT AS IT TRIES TO SIMULTANEOUSLY BACKTRACK ON WILDLY UNPOPULAR CUTS, PUFF UP ITS CAPITAL AND DEFENCE SPENDING CREDENTIALS, AND MAINTAIN AN AIR OF PARSIMONIOUS PENNY PINCHING. As billions are set to be put aside for yet more BAE subsidies, the question arises as to whether the anti-war campaigning on Palestine will energise broader peace activism, while at a lower level the newly-installed Reform councils are bracing for inspections of their coffers. Is that going anywhere? Probably not. The post Anarchist News Review: Budgets, Palestine organising and Reform Doge’ing repsonsibility 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.

PERHAPS AN ANTI-LABOUR SENTIMENT IS NO SURPRISE COMING FROM AN ANARCHIST OPINION COLUMN, BUT MY ATHEISM, THIS SHOWER OF SPINELESS REJECTS FROM CENTRIST CENTRAL CASTING HAVE HAD NO COMPUNCTION AT ALL IN SUCKING UP TO THE NEWLY-INSTALLED IMPERIAL ORANGE. ~ Rob Ray ~ After a furtive half-minute in a back room tickling Trump’s earhole last week Sir Prime Minister  Keir is smoothing his hair out for an in-person conversation on Thursday, at which he seems to hope that the so-called special relationship can be rekindled. For a party that prides itself on not being the Tories (little else can be said of their principles) there certainly seems to have been a rush to be as much like the Maga Republicans as possible recently. Just this month there’s been Rachel Reeves doing her best impression of a poundshop Musk by announcing (yet another) audit of regulators aimed at “removing red tape” – including on arms sales. Even the previously vaunted AI safety ideal is on the chopping block. Over at the Home Office meanwhile it’s time for another round of the “how harsh can we be to migrants” show as an effort is made to deny citizenship to refugees arriving by “dangerous routes.” You might ask how refugees, who cannot claim asylum without being here but aren’t allowed visas, might arrive without taking a dangerous route. Yes, quite. Labour’s disinterest in repealing the Tories’ anti-protest laws has been covered in this column before, but its insistence on fighting the legal case for keeping climate and Gaza protesters in jail for as long as possible during a prison crisis has been particularly cruel. And most damning of all is the use of upcoming welfare cuts to fund increased defence spending – a measure tailored specifically to appeal to the whims of the US president, and useless for any other consideration. Billions of pounds that could have gone to saving lives in Britain, destined to adorn a balance sheet when bragging at a G8 dinner. Hardly surprising, in this atmosphere, is the disinterment of Blue Labour, a monumentally thick-headed idea in its first 2010s incarnation and a worse one now, trying the same “chase the rabbit down the hole” tactics that gave Reform its big break in the first place. And yet all of this, the “hey look we’re like you” of audits and migrant bashing, the mealy-mouthing around topics like Gaza and Ukraine (where just days prior there had been sabre-rattling bellicosity towards Putin and promises of a 100-year partnership), the selling of whatever minimal principle still remained in hopes of being “the adult in the room” with Donnie are as nought. The US does not care whether Labour is pre-emptively grovelling, and Trump will humiliate his poodle regardless.  It’s perhaps the most numbingly pathetic part of this “strategy” for Reform shoe-stealing and Trump placating that it doesn’t even work on its own terms. People who have turned to Reform may be self-defeating, many or most may be bigots, or even willing dupes. But this isn’t the same thing as being stupid. Farage is a grifter, but he’s been banging his drum for decades. His politics are consistent. Labour on the other hand … everyone knows this lot. Their policies are weathervane. Making a big song and dance of performative cruelty only pushes the boundaries of what’s acceptable, or even desirable, in the body politic.  And Trump will simply tell Starmer what to do with menaces, sounding vaguely magnanimous about it if Labour sucks up hard enough. This is looking likely to be party politics for the next four years. Labour chasing Reform domestically, and Trump on the world stage. Which is a departure from what was being suggested by liberals and even much of the left as we entered the new government last year, that we’d at least be spared more Tory mess.  Turns out the anarchists were right, and we’re getting largely the same Tory mess. Dogend neoliberalism washed down with a slug of watery Faragism.  While centrists do what they were always going to, there has been at least some acceptance on the left, at long last, that hopes of an electoral route for progressive reform through Labour are now dead. And inevitably there has been recent talk, on the left, of starting a new party, or of trying to capture the Greens.  Either would be a waste of time.  The problem is not that we lack a party, it’s that any left party would lack a constituency. Labour gets away with this stuff because there’s no counter power to scare them out of it. They had election results in 2017 and 2019 showcasing this very fact, in which the public, offered a social democratic model by Corbyn and McDonnell, looked at it and said “nah, not plausible.”  And of course it wasn’t. The left Labour machine was almost solely electoral, it had no economic muscle in the absence of a serious trade union or social movement and was getting its arse kicked by the media even before putting a foot in Downing Street. The public was correct to be sceptical and will continue to be so until we, collectively, have something of substance to offer. And that doesn’t start in Parliament.  For those of us who give a damn, the next four years should not involve worrying about what’s in the polls. Our concern should be for building the networks and community resilience that we failed to build ten years ago. Overtly and constructively fostering cultures of solidarity to reverse the alienation which has produced so many of the stupid ideas which currently infest our body politic. That’s what underpins Reform’s rise, along with MAGA in the US. And given both climate change and the resumption of belligerent geopolitics, we need to have a sense of urgency about doing so. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The post Labour’s rose is as ash and smoke appeared first on Freedom News.

LABOUR’S REBRANDING ALIGNS WITH A GLOBAL SURGE IN FAR-RIGHT, ANTI-MIGRANT RHETORIC ~ Blade Runner ~ Labour’s government is celebrating record deportation figures while pushing through draconian new legislation that criminalises migration to an unprecedented degree. The Border Security, Asylum, and Immigration Bill imposes severe penalties: 14-year prison sentences for selling small boat parts or offering shelter to asylum seekers. Even accessing weather or travel information to assist “illegal” journeys is now punishable by a five-year sentence, regardless of where the act is committed. Forced phone seizures, denial of identification, and stripping migrants of modern slavery victim protections have also been legalised. Since taking office, Labour has deported nearly 19,000 “foreign criminals”, the highest figure since 2017. Deportees have been paraded in handcuffs and subjected to public humiliation—tactics reminiscent of Trump-era U.S. policies. The government’s rhetoric frames migrants as dangerous criminals, using counter-terror language to justify heightened surveillance and police-state measures. The Bill also creates a permanent underclass of stateless individuals by denying citizenship to those who arrive via unauthorised routes, such as crossing the Channel in small boats. This could bar 71,000 asylum seekers from claiming British citizenship. Colin Yeo, a leading immigration barrister, warns this policy will trap people in a liminal space without voting rights, excluded from civic life, and at risk of deportation for minor infractions. The government is also offering a contract worth nearly £400 million to manage deportation flights over the next seven years. In January, a Home Office-led crackdown on illegal working saw 509 arrests during 828 business raids targeting nail bars, car washes, convenience stores, and restaurants. Over 1,000 civil penalties—up to £60,000 each—have been issued to companies employing undocumented migrants. Reports suggest Home Secretary Yvette Cooper will join a dawn raid to underscore the crackdown. This hard-line shift is more than a calculated rebranding aimed at stemming voter defections to the far right. It aligns with a global surge in far-right, anti-migrant rhetoric. European and U.S. far-right leaders are strengthening alliances, exemplified by last week’s populist rally under the banner “Make Europe Great Again”. Elon Musk has voiced support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which ahead of Germany’s upcoming elections is now polling just 8 points behind the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) coalition. The British legislation goes beyond the agendas of the Conservative and Reform parties, exposing Keir Starmer’s vision to “Make UK Great Again”. As fascism enters the 21st century, our comrades in the US remind us that rather than seeking safety in passivity, it’s actually safer at the front lines of grassroots resistance, from where we can see clearer what is going on ahead of us. For UK radicals, the smart play in response to Labour’s surge to the right is to avoid the traps of peaceful protest and the failed solutions of mainstream electoral politics, both of which have repeatedly shown themselves to be part of the problem. Instead, the resurgence of far-right movements highlights the failures of electoral democracy and points to the necessity of building a movement grounded in direct action and community-based organising. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: Keir Starmer MP on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 The post Do it like Trump—Labour targets migrants appeared first on Freedom News.

THE FORMER DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER WEAPONISED HIS NORTHERN ROOTS AND TRADE UNION AFFILIATIONS TO ENABLE NEOLIBERAL LABOUR AND ITS WARS ~ Uri Gordon ~ John Prescott, the plainspoken northern bruiser who riled upper-class Tories while loyally advancing the New Labour project, has died. For many anarchists, the former Deputy Prime Minister embodied the grim transformation of Labour from its flawed but working-class-oriented roots into the hollowed-out machine of neoliberal opportunism that Tony Blair engineered. Prescott, for his part, played his role with gusto, casting himself as a champion of the common people while enabling policies that dismantled working-class solidarity. Prescott’s public persona was crafted around his origins. Born in Prestatyn, Wales, and raised in working-class Yorkshire, he became a ship steward and union activist before moving into politics—a trajectory that, on paper, seemed to mark him as a man of the people. Yet, once he ascended the ranks of the Labour Party, Prescott proved himself less a representative of working-class interests and more a willing enabler of Blairite capitalism. Prescott leaned into his northern roots and trade union affiliations with unflagging zeal. It is easy to see how, for the mainstream media, his unvarnished accent and sometimes mangled syntax made him a convenient foil to the Conservative Party, playing into the narrative of Labour as the party of “ordinary people”. Yet Prescott weaponised this image to give the Blair government a free pass for mass privatisation, devastating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a surveillance society at home. The infamous “Clause Four” moment, which symbolised Labour’s abandonment of its commitment to common ownership, defined the Blair years—and Prescott’s complicity in that shift was undeniable. He presided over massive council housing demolitions under the guise of urban renewal, gutting working-class communities and enabling private developers to seize prime land. It is little wonder that anarcho-punk veterans Chumbawamba famously doused Prescott in water at the 1998 BRIT Awards. Their act, they declared, was “a metaphor for the underdog pissing on the steps of Downing Street”. To his credit—or perhaps by sheer chance—Prescott occasionally found himself out of step with his New Labour colleagues. He reportedly harboured doubts about the Iraq invasion, calling it “Bush’s war”, but dutifully fell in line when the time came for Blair’s government to sell its lies to the public. He also expressed regret for Labour’s support of private finance initiatives (PFIs), which saddled the public with debt while lining corporate pockets. Yet these moments of self-awareness came long after the damage was done, and Prescott’s loyalty to the party always trumped any pangs of conscience. As anarchists, we might sympathise with Prescott’s moments of raw defiance—against aristocratic sneers or flying eggs—but they remain empty gestures when set against his political record. His career reflects the broader failure of social democratic parties to resist the pull of power and privilege. When confronted with the choice between serving the working class and serving capital, Prescott—like Labour itself—chose the latter. So farewell, Johnny Two Jags. Your bluster will be remembered, but so will your embodiment of Labour’s final divestment of its socialist pretences. History may afford you a small place in its annals as the man who punched an egg-thrower, but it will not be kind to your political legacy. For the working class you claimed to represent, you were not a champion but a cautionary tale. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: Wikimedia Commons The post John Prescott: The Blairite bulldog who forgot the working class appeared first on Freedom News.