#Labour Government

[eretzyisrael]

by Melanie Phillips

Five days after Britain’s Labour party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority in the general election, we can see the outline of what this is likely to mean for British Jews and their country’s relationship with Israel. That outline is not reassuring.

The new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is said to have purged his party of antisemitism and has persuaded many British Jews that he has made Labour safe again for Jewish voters. On Sunday morning, he told the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — antisemite, Holocaust denier and fan of Hitler’s wartime ally in the Middle East — that an independent state was the “undeniable right” of the Palestinian people and that “financial support for the Palestinian Authority” was one of his “immediate priorities”. 

He did not tell Abbas that a condition of this financial support was that the PA must stop paying financial rewards to terrorists and their families for murdering Israelis. Nor did he say that a condition of receiving more British taxpayers’ money was that the PA must end its indoctrination of Palestinian Arab children in Nazi-themed demonisation of the Jews, teaching them that their greatest ambition should be to murder Jews and steal all their land. 

Instead, Starmer proceeded to lecture Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin  Netanyahu, that there was a “clear and urgent” need for a ceasefire in Gaza as well as an immediate increase in the volume of humanitarian aid reaching civilians. As for the war being waged by Hezbollah in Lebanon against northern Israel, Starmer warned Netanyahu:

It was crucial all parties acted with caution.

What kind of “caution” does Starmer suggest is appropriate in the face of a threat of genocide by Hezbollah and its patron, Iran? Or to put it another way, with Hezbollah primed to unleash its armoury of 150,000 rockets and other missiles that can reach all of Israel, and with Iran itself along with Iraqi, Syrian and Houthi militias not to mention the terrorist armies of the “West Bank” all primed to attack Israel if it launches all-out war against Hezbollah, does Starmer really believe that Israel actually needs to be told to act “with caution”? 

Can he really not grasp that, given the daily onslaught over the past nine months from dozens of rockets, drones and guided missiles that have destroyed Israeli border towns, left swathes of northern Israel burning, made more than 60,000 Israelis refugees in their own country and kept other residents in the north trapped in their safe rooms (two Israelis were killed today by a Hezbollah rocket strike that hit their car) that if the Israelis abandon that “caution” it’s because they have no other choice?   

Starmer shows absolutely zero understanding that this crisis isn’t about Hamas, Hezbollah or the Palestinian Arabs. They are proxies and pawns in an Iranian war of extermination against Israel, the essential precursor to the destruction and conquest of America, Britain and the west. 

So little does he understand this that the new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is now poring over the government’s legal advice on whether to stop UK arms sales to Israel.

Once upon a time, Lammy was sympathetic to Israel. Now he is a foe. He has repeated what he said before the election, that Labour supports the request by the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Karim Khan, for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant — and that if these Israelis came to the UK after such warrants were issued, Britain would arrest them.

This despite the fact that the claims upon which Khan relied were lies, distortions and blood libels drawn from Hamas-sympathising and Israel-bashing organisations, and were all demonstrably untrue.

[thatbiologist]

Fuck Off Wes Streeting

UK Health Secretary, Wes Streeting has announced an indefinite ban on the prescription of puberty blockers for children. In contrast the the actual science of puberty blockers, the Labour Government falsely claims that puberty blockers pose a so called "unacceptable safety risk".

This Labour Government is going to continue the BS that the Conservatives ran with the scientific illiterate Cass Report. A fraudulent academic report that literally caused the deaths of at least 16 trans children.

If you're as angry as I am. Here's the MP contact information for Wes Streeting, tell him he's a disgrace.

Email: wes@redbridgelabour.org.uk

Call: 020 3475 7901

Address: 12a Highview Parade, Woodford Avenue, Ilford, IG4 5EP

[nuttersincorporated]

The Tories are out and Labour is in!

To everyone who voted; thank you.

I’m so glad that the Conservatives are finally out of power. Now that Labour is in power, hopefully things will stop getting worse for everyone all the time, constantly. Then maybe we can even hope that things start getting better instead.

[spiced-wine-fic]

[the-city-in-mind]

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"Having access to safe walking and cycling routes is a basic tenet of social justice."

The new Labour government in Great Britain will invest "unprecedented levels of funding" in cycling and walking as a critical part of plans to improve health, wealth inequality and the environment, has said Louise Haigh, the new secretary for transport.

"We're in a climate crisis. We're in a public health crisis. Getting people walking and cycling and moving more are essential to solving both of those," she said.

Haigh added: "Car ownership now is just so expensive, insurance as a young driver is completely out of reach for a lot of people. So having that access to safe cycle routes is a basic element, is a basic tenet of social justice."

More at bit.ly/46VOSNk

[strangelandofbritain]

Thanks, Labour.

Take away my Winter Fuel Allowance and then refuse to raise the income tax threshold, so I will pay even more tax out of my meagre UK pension.

I thought voting Labour would mean reducing the poverty gap, not INCREASING it.

[agentfascinateur]

Bravo UK 👏👏

And the EU package too.

[jangillman]

[feckcops]

Quick, tangible change will see off the hard right – these are the things Labour must do now

“Fourteen years of austerity, economic incompetence and corruption under the Conservatives created the disillusionment and alienation from politics that Farage has been able to feed off. With a change of government, his focus now will be on damaging Labour.

“People will be relatively patient, but will want to see some early initial progress on a number of fronts – and significant results by at least the midterm of this government ... To guard against a rise of the hard right here, the left has to secure a wave of progressive policy delivery, and to start soon ...

“With 14 million people, including 4.3 million children, now living in poverty, an early win in the implementation of the anti-poverty strategy Labour committed to in its manifesto would be secured by the scrapping of the brutal two-child benefit cap, lifting 300,000 children out of poverty ...

“The wages of many workers have been effectively frozen since 2008 and there has been a widespread extension of insecure and often precarious work across the economy. Labour’s commitment to introduce its new deal for workers in its first 100 days could transform the lives of people at work, and address the scourge of low pay and insecure employment, but to be effective it has to be comprehensive with no further watering down ...

“People know how much pressure our public services have been put under by Conservative austerity, but will want to see change. They will support reform that puts control into the hands of the frontline professionals, but will react to reform that privatises and enables companies to profiteer, fuelling Farage’s claim of the corporate capture of the Labour party.

“Realistically, large-scale investment is needed ... We are at a defining moment not just for the new Labour government but for the politics of our country. Beware the danger but recognise the potential.”

[hjohn3]

The Sound And The Fury

Judge the Labour Government by its Enemies

Source: Money website

By Honest John

THE LABOUR government, elected less than five short months ago, often gives the impression it is under siege. Ministers and their spokespeople seem to be continually on the defensive, simultaneously accused of having a lack of ambition and being overly technocratic while at the same time being criticised for making policy and fiscal decisions that have actual consequences on society, sometimes by the same people. It is a strange world indeed when broadly sympathetic outlets such as the New Statesman, the Guardian and Novara Media unite in defence of the farming lobby against a social democratic government. It sometimes feels that for all the well-analysed desire for change on the part of the British electorate - which saw that electorate systematically dismantle the Conservatives at virtually every level of government over the last two years- when Labour actually attempt to introduce that change, liberal hands clutch pearls and the gates of the hellscape that is the right wing print and online media world are opened, and righteous fire is belched out at Keir Starmer and his beleaguered crew.

Take last month’s budget. Rachel Reeves, long accused of being a neoliberal drone (not least by me), showed remarkable dexterity in ditching aspects of her treasured fiscal rules, by borrowing over £28bn and raising tax revenues by over £40bn, all without increasing direct taxation on ordinary citizens, as Labour had promised in opposition. Was Reeves praised for this fiscal achievement? Not a bit of it. Labour were accused of everything from breaking manifesto promises to launching a new class war on the rich. The general view of the commentariat was that this was a terrible budget that would spook the bond markets, depress investment and force wealth-creators to leave the country. No matter that Reeves has almost fully met the destructive funding deficit which the NHS has endured, bequeathed the government by the Tories; it would appear to matter little that education, affordable housing (including council housing), bus transport, pensions, the minimum wage and public sector pay are all to receive increases in funding, and clearly matters not at all that, post-Budget, most voters surveyed approved of the direction of social policy and the finances found to support it. After all, what do they know?

To listen to Labour’s critics in the right wing press, GB News, and the Conservative Party, Labour have somehow broken some immutable rule that taxes must never increase for the wealthy, that public services must simply put up with continued underfunding until society can “afford” to right a decade or more of ruinous austerity, and that every privilege, loophole and perverse incentive that has allowed the rich to plunder the poor in this country in a malign process that has gone on for over forty years, must be left untouched - forever. It seems these critics do not appear to have noticed, or accepted, that there has been a change of government and that Starmer’s Labour Party represents a completely different set of values to the clapped out Thatcherism of Rishi Sunak and the whacky and destructive right wing political and economic experiments imposed on the country his hapless predecessors. Perhaps they bought into the assessment of the left that Starmer’s Labour simply represents reheated Blairism and the rich and privileged could therefore go on ripping off the British people indefinitely, with no price to pay. Instead what these critics - on left and right - have to accept, no matter how much in pains them, that Britain now has the most left wing government since 1974 and, unlike its ill-starred predecessor, it has the political space to change this country permanently for the better.

Make no mistake, there are real problems with this government. It has been characterised by chronic pre-election caution, nasty factionalism, bouts of dishonesty, bizarre episodes of ministerial entitlement, a paucity in original or curious thinking, particularly in health, clumsy and slow-on-the-uptake messaging and at times wilful stubbornness. But wherever you look, underneath the sound and the fury, there is genuine, potentially transformative, change underway - whether you are an elective patient waiting for a procedure; a gig economy worker; a public sector employee; a renter; a trade union member; someone on minimum wage; someone wanting to get on the housing ladder; a rail traveller, a teacher or a pupil - there is at last hope that things may improve and that governmental priorities are not ranged against you, or that your hopes and aspirations will be met by those in charge with simply a resigned shrug. There is so much more still to do: the Green Prosperity Plan has to be revived; wealth needs to be taxed to help fund the restitution of public services not yet in receipt of government largesse; the utilities need to be brought back into public ownership and meaningful regulation; the low wage migration-dependent economy has to be transformed and Britain’s towns and former industrial communities need to to be regenerated with the pace and imagination New Labour applied to the cities. But in five months Labour has done much to reset the UK’s direction and priorities to the benefit of the less well-off.

In addition, the government’s constitutional changes range from the symbolic removal of hereditary aristocratic privilege from the governance of the country, to the potential regeneration of local democracy through the devolution of power and resources to the English regions and their Mayoralties in a way that could shut out Toryism from effective local government for a generation. Furthermore its proposals for enhanced devolution to Scotland and Wales could finally deposit sectional nationalism into the political dustbin where it has always belonged. A combination of a better resourced activist state overseeing investment where it is needed, planning the economy and rebuilding trust in public services after the cynicism and waste of the Tory years could also, over the next four years, stymie the advance of Reform and prevent the blight of the far right spreading its influence as it has in much of Europe and in the USA.

And who is ranged against this effort to secure national renewal? The list is long and ignoble: the discredited Tory Party; the conman Nigel Farage and his latest vehicle; the disgrace that is the right wing press; the unfunny joke that is GB News; disingenuous pensioners; the CBI; the preposterous Jeremy Clarkson; the hyper-rich; the private schools; the racist far right; the absurdity that is Elon Musk (part incompetent tech bro and part incipient fascist) and last, but not least, the landowners pleading poverty that represent the pampered and uneconomic farming industry.

It is said that by their enemies shall you know them. Well, on the basis of the above collection of the malign, the corrupt and the misinformed, Labour must be doing something right.

26th November 2024

[eretzyisrael]

By NATASHA HAUSDORFF

It has quickly become apparent that under the present UK government, the facts and the legal analysis are far less important in their formulation of policy towards Israel. In seeking to win back extreme voters whom Labour lost to rival parties, the easy fix is to take an aggressive stance towards Israel and pursue policies which many attribute to the party’s troubled history of antisemitism. The law be damned, much to the glee of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

We have seen this pattern in every aspect of the Labour government’s approach towards Israel since Sir Kier Starmer took up residence in Downing Street, from the re-funding of UNRWA, despite its complicity in terrorism, to the withdrawal of the UK’s representations to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on jurisdiction, despite foreign office lawyers seeking to advance those submissions in the British national interest. Politics have prevailed over the promises Starmer made before his victory, which included combatting antisemitism, discrimination, and inequality and supporting a secure Israel.

To the extent that the UK will seek to ground its further abandonment of Israel upon recent dictates of international legal institutions, it is important that these lawfare initiatives be robustly called out. These include a recent non-binding Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice based upon abject falsehoods, manipulation of international law, and a misapplication of history and geography that sought to wipe Israel off the map. Equally troubling are the false allegations in every sentence of the ICC Prosecutor’s public summary of his application for arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, including the canard of starvation in Gaza, which has been resoundingly debunked in a new report by UK Lawyers for Israel.

Israel stands at the forefront of combatting the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance,’ which is driven by hatred of the West, including the United Kingdom and its democratic ideals. We must not forget that citizens of the UK were among those murdered and kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the October 7 massacre.

[tmarshconnors]

The Great British Conundrum

Ah, Britain my homeland a nation famed for its stiff upper lip, common sense, and a long-standing tradition of political pragmatism. But recently, I’ve found myself feeling a deep-seated shame in my country’s political trajectory, a feeling that's hard to shake. It’s like we've lost our compass and don’t know which direction to follow. To put it politely. We’ve had Conservatives elected to lead, yet, rather than implementing conservative policies, we saw them governing like liberals. And now, the Labour Party sweeping in on a wave of frustration seems dead set on imposing an outright socialist agenda. I can’t say I’m thrilled.

In a time when true conservative values should be the answer to the social and economic chaos around us, the Conservatives barely held onto their ideological roots. They became lost in a desperate attempt to appeal to everyone, trying to be all things to all people governing like moderates when they should have drawn firm lines. People expected robust action on immigration, crime, economic growth, and more, but instead, we got half-measures, compromises, and a heavy dose of liberal appeasement.

So, it’s no wonder that Labour found an easy path to power. People were tired of the Conservatives’ wavering, their failure to take a stand or implement anything truly conservative. Labour painted themselves as the refreshing alternative, promising solutions for those left disillusioned by years of fence sitting. But let’s be honest: Labour’s brand of 'solutions' isn’t designed to make Britain prosperous or independent; it’s aimed at pulling the country leftward at a startling speed. And it’s not a course correction; it’s an overhaul.

We are a country now faced with a government that believes in bigger state control, wealth redistribution, and policies that echo socialism. I am no fan of this trajectory. AT ALL! The Labour Party may be all about fairer society rhetoric, but the methods often involve policies that weaken individual freedoms, inhibit entrepreneurial spirit, and crush personal responsibility. It’s as if we’ve forgotten that a prosperous nation doesn’t come from more bureaucracy but from empowering individuals to rise, contribute, and thrive.

The political landscape of Britain has come to look like a parody of itself. Conservative leaders acting like liberals, liberal ideas embedded in every institution, and a left-wing government now preaching values antithetical to the very foundations of British life. This isn't the Britain I know, and it’s frustrating to watch.

But we must remember, as bleak as it feels now, the pendulum always swings back. There’s an audience in this country for true conservative values policies that uphold national sovereignty, encourage economic freedom, and foster individual responsibility. We can only hope that our next wave of leaders embodies those principles with conviction, not by pandering but by presenting a genuine vision for a prosperous, strong, and free Britain.

For now, I feel disillusioned and fed up. But I also know that there's a spark of resilience in this country, one that has carried it through challenges before. The British people deserve better, and I believe, eventually, we’ll find our way back.

[armouredgoblin]

The budget

The more I hear

The more angry I get

[spiced-wine-fic]

[tofueatingwokerati]

When given a complete set of data and trying to replicate the initial results they failed. There was no fiscal benefit to austerity the data proved that.

Austerity is an ideological choice to knowingly and wilfully force people into unnecessary poverty, to the inflate the incomes of people already rich enough to not need any more money.

Remember this when Labour try to push the virtues of balancing the books under cover of this blatant lie.

[workersbushtelegraph]

The Voice

I wish to make it perfectly clear, on behalf of our people, that we accept no condition of inferiority as compared with European people. Two distinct civilisations are represented by the respective races. On one hand we have the civilisation of necessity and on the other hand civilisation coincident with a bounty of supply of all the requirements of the human race. That the European people by the…