The Plot Against Palestine Action

Jonathan Cook writes:

It was virtually inevitable that, once the British government decided to actively support Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, an unprecedented, authoritarian crackdown on dissent back home would follow. That climate of official repression culminated this week with the Court of Appeal — the UK’s second highest court — upholding the government’s proscription last year of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization.

The need to crush opposition to the British state’s complicity in Israeli atrocities in Gaza — which a consensus of international legal, scholarly, and human rights experts has determined amounts to a genocide — has led to many firsts in British legal history. But the proscription of Palestine Action is perhaps the most foundational, and the most dangerous.

It is the first time that a direct action group, whose form of civil disobedience is damaging property rather than using violence against people, has been declared a terrorist organization, on a par with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. Under this new interpretation of the law, the Suffragette movement — which fought to gain women the vote in Britain over a century ago, and whose members are uniformly extolled as role models by the very politicians who support Palestine Action’s proscription — would undoubtedly have been declared a terrorist organization.

It is sometimes forgotten, often willfully, that the Suffragettes operated underground cells that organized hundreds of bombings and arson attacks in pursuit of their goals, killing four people and wounding at least 24. Palestine Action, by contrast, has explicitly eschewed this kind of life-endangering violence while being far more transparent about its activities. It has restricted its actions to property damage, chiefly targeting the Israeli company Elbit Systems’ weapons factories in the UK that make drones used in Gaza.

The group admits that it causes damage to property but argues its attacks are warranted by a higher duty to international law, which places an obligation on third parties to prevent atrocities and genocide rather than collude in such crimes. And given how deeply enmeshed the British state is in Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, this duty is particularly acute.

The UK sells arms to Israel. It allows Israeli arms manufacturers such as Elbit to operate factories in the UK that build killer drones (one of which was used to kill seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza in April 2024, including three British citizens). British planes transport U.S. and German weapons to Israel. And the UK has been carrying out endless surveillance flights over Gaza to supply Israel with intelligence used in its obliteration of the enclave.

That is not all. Britain has provided Israel with diplomatic cover for its crimes, including at the UN Security Council. Israeli generals and politicians suspected of war crimes in Gaza are welcomed in the UK. And as foreign secretary in the previous government, David Cameron threatened to pull funding from the International Criminal Court (ICC) — in violation of Britain’s legal obligations under the Rome Statute — over the court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

British collusion in Israeli crimes is the reason Palestine Action was originally founded six years ago, and it stepped up its attacks, particularly on Elbit factories, when Israel began its current onslaught on Gaza in October 2023. Its actions were designed not only to interrupt the supply of weapons to Israel but to provoke a debate in Britain about why the government should stop actively aiding these crimes against the Palestinian people.

Instead, the British state has worked strenuously — through the establishment media, the police, and the courts — to redirect popular attention away from its own criminal actions under international law. The goal has been to keep the public fixated on the faux-illegality of opposing genocide rather than the British security state’s all-too-real criminal collusion in that genocide.

Among other things, this has extended to endless condemnations by politicians and the media of peaceful mass demonstrations against the genocide as “hate marches” and “antisemitic” — despite the protests including a large contingent of demonstrators who make their Jewishness explicit.

Architecture of repression

In proscribing Palestine Action, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has brought out of the shadows a legal architecture of repression — mostly squirreled away in recent amendments to counter-terrorism laws — that seems to have been prepared for just such a moment as this. The police and courts appear only too willing to conspire in vaguely worded legal formulations, creating a dragnet in which the government can ensnare as a terrorist anyone who challenges the legitimacy or legality of its foreign policy.

That has been most obvious in the now routine sight of police officers hauling away thousands of British citizens — many of them retired lawyers, doctors, vicars, and army veterans — for the crime of holding up a placard that reads: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Under Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act, anyone expressing an opinion, even inadvertently, that might “encourage support” for a proscribed organization can be arrested and potentially faces a jail term of up to 14 years.

Waves of highly visible defiance, often taking place in the square adjacent to Britain’s parliament, have been deeply discomfiting to Starmer’s government — as well as to him personally, given his credentials as a former leading human rights lawyer. Starmer once argued before the ICC that a sustained Serbian attack on the Croatian city of Vukovar was a genocide, yet he has repeatedly rejected the same label for Israel’s destruction of Gaza, which is many orders of magnitude worse.

Earlier this year, it briefly looked as if the placard protests might have won Palestine Action a reprieve. The High Court ruled in February that the government’s proscription last July was “unlawful,” on the basis of its disproportionate chilling effect on free speech and the right to protest. However, the police were allowed to carry on arresting people for holding the placards, thereby giving no practical remedy to the chilling effect that had supposedly concerned the High Court.

With the Court of Appeal now overturning that lackluster decision, the High Court’s ruling against proscription looks more like misdirection — a piece of cynical, legal theatre. The February ruling is better understood as the British judiciary creating the impression that it had carefully weighed the balance between protecting long-cherished, basic rights of free speech and assembly, on the one hand, and supposed “national security concerns” — that is, Israel’s right to commit atrocities — on the other.

In truth, however, there was no real likelihood that Britain’s highest judges, pillars of the establishment, would agree to place limits on the UK’s participation in the genocide. That would set the British state on a collision course with Washington, which has been fully on board with the genocide under both the Biden and Trump presidencies.

Faced with widespread condemnation from human rights groups, international legal organizations, and prominent sections of the British public, the Starmer government desperately needed to breathe life into its improbable claim at the High Court and Court of Appeal that Palestine Action should be treated as equivalent to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group — no simple task. But help came in the form of a high-profile court case against some of the two dozen Palestine Action activists awaiting trial.

The problem for the government was that they had all been arrested for involvement in damaging property related to the genocide — from Elbit factories to two Royal Air Force war planes — before the group was declared a terrorist organization. Though they were not charged retroactively with terrorism offences (the prosecution understood there was little chance of persuading a jury to convict them of such charges), they were held in pre-trial detention three times longer than the normal maximum and in particularly harsh, restrictive conditions. In effect, they were already treated as if they were terrorists.

This led to a prolonged hunger strike by several of the detainees. Notably, the strike received almost no coverage from the UK media, presumably out of fear it might draw attention to their mistreatment and the reasons why they were ready to risk their health and potentially their lives.

No normal trial

The trial of the six Palestine Action activists started in November 2025, running in parallel to the deliberations of the High Court and Court of Appeal on whether the government was justified in declaring the group a terrorist organization. The government used the trial to bolster its case for proscription, and in the process prejudiced the proceedings against the six accused before they had even begun.

Yvette Cooper, who, in her previous role as home secretary, proscribed Palestine Action almost a year ago, argued at the time that the trial would prove the group was engaged in terrorist activities, even though the prosecution never pressed any terrorist charges against the defendants. Meanwhile, rumors began circulating in the British media — reportedly planted by a PR firm working for Elbit Systems — suggesting that Palestine Action was secretly funded by Iran. No evidence for this claim was ever forthcoming.

The six defendants in the so-called Filton trial, named after the suburb of Bristol where Elbit’s drone factory — which they broke into on Aug. 6, 2024 — is located, were accused of three charges: aggravated burglary, violent disorder, and criminal damage.

Crucially, one of them, Samuel Corner, was also accused of grievous bodily harm with intent: After police arrived at the scene to arrest the activists, Corner struck one of them in the back with a sledgehammer the activists had been using to smash up Elbit’s drone production line, causing a small fracture in the policewoman’s vertebra.

When the media did cover the case, which was rare, it was to focus almost exclusively on the injury to the policewoman, framed in such a way as to suggest that her back had been “shattered.” (In fact, the fracture was so small it was not evident in an X-ray and missed on a first MRI scan; the recommended treatment was six weeks of mild rest and over-the-counter painkillers.)

The police were also allowed to release a highly selective video of edited scenes of confrontation between the activists, Elbit security guards, and police — another abuse of legal process in the case designed to whip up the public mood against the “Filton 6.”

It was clear that this was no normal trial. The government was determined to secure convictions that would prove the six activists had engaged in intentional and planned violence against people, and thereby stand up its proscription of Palestine Action. The job of the presiding judge, Jeremy Johnson, was to make sure the jury arrived at the right verdict. He was certainly the man for the task.

Johnson made it to the bench after years serving as the most favored barrister of the “secret state,” representing the intelligence services, the Defense Ministry, and the police. His working environment of choice as a lawyer had been behind-closed-doors prosecutions held out of view of the public or proper legal scrutiny.

During the trial, Johnson oversaw an extraordinary number of legal manipulations that helped the government. The defendants were denied the right to refer to their motives in attacking the Elbit factory (the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” were barred from the proceedings). The type and use of the weapons damaged in the attack was concealed from the jury. The defense was given no opportunity to cross-examine Elbit staff. Video evidence was introduced by the police that had been in the sole custody of Elbit for a year after the attack.

But most egregiously of all, Johnson ruled that the jury must not be informed of its right to acquit on the basis of conscience. Under a principle known as jury equity, established in British law hundreds of years ago, juries are allowed to defy a direction from a judge that a defendant has no legal defense. In fact, Johnson actively encouraged the jury to think they had no such right.

The lead defense barrister, Rajiv Menon KC, used his closing speech to defy the judge and alert the jury to this right. Johnson responded — in another legal first — by instituting contempt of court proceedings against Menon, which would ultimately be overruled by the Court of Appeal on procedural grounds amid mounting disquiet from the legal profession.

Weaponizing justice

Despite these many legal manipulations, Johnson was unable to secure the convictions sought by the government. In February, the jury acquitted the defendants of the most serious charges of aggravated burglary and violent disorder, and could not reach a verdict on the less serious one of criminal damage, or on Corner’s charge of grievous bodily harm.

The jury’s inability to reach a decision on criminal damage left the way open for the prosecution to initiate a second trial of four of the activists (the “Filton 4”): Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio, and Fatema Rajwani. Those proceedings ended last month, with the jury finding the four guilty of criminal damage and Corner of grievous bodily harm over the injury sustained by the policewoman. Disappointingly for the government, however, the jury refused to convict Corner of inflicting such harm intentionally, as the prosecution had wanted.

The jury were presumably influenced by the evidence: Testimony and video footage showed that Corner had been blinded by pepper spray moments before the tussle, and that he had been trying to protect a fellow female activist who, the footage showed, was being viciously assaulted when Corner was sprayed.

Notably, this had been the messiest of all the Palestine Action attacks — in large part, as the two trials showed, because Elbit security guards had decided not to withdraw and wait for the police to arrive but to launch a sustained attack on the activists, beating them and grabbing their sledgehammers to use against them. One of the defendants, Jordan Devlin, acquitted in the first trial, was shown to have been so badly beaten by the guards that it was difficult to understand why the Elbit staff themselves had not been charged.

In short, as Yvette Cooper, the former home secretary, had suggested, this was the government’s best shot at propping up its narrative that Palestine Action used violence and should be treated as a terrorist organization. But neither the criminal damage nor the GBH without intent convictions helped in this regard. Another solution was needed.

Before the verdict, Judge Johnson had stated that, should the Filton 4 be convicted of criminal damage, he would — in yet another legal first — use his powers of sentencing to add in a “terrorism connection.” He was able to do so under a highly controversial 2021 Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act that allows judges to “upgrade” criminal offences to terrorism offences during sentencing. Yet Johnson withheld that information from the jury and issued a gag order, meaning no one could make it public.

It was not hard to work out why the judge did not want the jury to know his intentions. Its members would have been highly unlikely to convict the Filton 4 of criminal damage had they known the judge would treat that verdict as effectively a license to convict the activists of terrorism.

This may explain, in part, why a trial for criminal damage by activists to another weapons factory, this one in Wolverhampton, saw four defendants walk free this week after the jury could not reach a verdict. Unlike the Filton case, the judge allowed the jury to hear the defendants’ reasons for attacking the site, operated by U.S. aerospace firm Moog. The four are likely to face a retrial.

The anticipated underhand maneuver in the Filton trial provoked an application from a civil liberties group, Defend Our Juries, backed by thousands of legal professionals, for Judge Johnson to recuse himself from the sentencing hearing. He refused to do so.

The same group of legal professionals submitted a petition demanding that the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office investigate the judge’s “manifest bias and discrimination” during the trial. Discussing the petition, David Whyte, professor of law at Queen Mary University of London, observed that Johnson had acted with exceptional “cruelty and vindictiveness,” noting the highly irregular length of the activists pre-trial detention when even the prosecution had not requested remand.

During the Filton 4’s sentencing, Johnson made good on his promise to add a “terrorism connection,” increasing the activists’ jail sentences to between five and eight years. Additionally, they will be ineligible for normal parole, held in harsher conditions in prison, and face years of punitive restrictions after their release.

Judge Johnson’s official reasoning for adding the “terrorism connection” was that the four activists had tried to “influence the government” with their act of criminal damage to a factory making killer drones. That was clearly music to the ears of an embattled government struggling to sell its complicity in a genocide to the British public. It finally provided a rationale to treat as terrorism any practical attempt by groups such as Palestine Action to stop the supply of arms to Israel’s genocidal military.

As Huda Ammori, the co-founder of Palestine Action, observed this week: “The legal system is being weaponized to attack our movement.” 

A dark precedent

But Judge Johnson’s terrorism upgrade sets a much larger and darker precedent too. It effectively gives the British government the power to declare any disruptive civil disobedience group a terrorist organization, even if the government is unable to secure a terrorism conviction through a jury trial.

And all of this is happening as the UK government, in another unprecedented step, presses ahead with plans to scrap juries in many trials — leaving judges like Johnson exclusively in charge of deciding the fate of defendants. It is a recipe for more political show trials like that of the Filton 4.

As Amnesty International warned after this week’s Court of Appeal decision upholding proscription: “The banning of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization is a grave misuse of counter-terrorism powers with serious consequences for human rights. It is a huge overreach to treat direct action protest as terrorism.” It added that the decision “leaves the door wide open for governments to suppress other protest movements in the future.”

Undoubtedly, the Starmer government will be selective about how it uses this new suppressive power. For example, while followers of the far-right provocateur Tommy Robinson have been regularly found to break the law — not least in the recent race riots in the cities of Southampton and Belfast that included arson attacks on homes and injuries to police officers — it appears unlikely that those committing these kinds of crimes will be sentenced as terrorists, even though they are clearly seeking to “influence the government” to crack down harder on immigration.

Similarly, the government seems determined to make sure more than 2,000 British citizens who have recently served in Israel’s genocidal army face no consequences — including the son of Ephraim Mirvis, Britain’s Orthodox chief rabbi. These soldiers are not even being investigated, let alone arrested or charged with terrorism offences. Indeed, the British security state appears to have no problem with the gravest violations of international law — refusing to prosecute them entirely — precisely because it is already violating such laws itself through its deep complicity in Israel’s genocide.

The authoritarianism of Starmer’s government should be terrifying in itself. But it is likely to soon lead to an even more dangerous place: His deeply unpopular Labour Party risks being ousted at the next general election by the far-right Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage.

Starmer’s abuses of Britain’s terrorism laws have paved the way for Farage and Reform to unleash a whirlwind of repression. And be sure: Like Starmer, they will frame the crackdown on the most fundamental of civil liberties as vital to protecting “national security” from the threat of “terrorism.”

Start Spreading The News

The most powerful politician in New York City is the Mayor of New York City. Who knew? Barack Obama advanced himself by backing machine Democrats against insurgent opponents. Although he cannot be President, Zohran Mamdani is doing the opposite. He has obviously cut deals with Hakeem Jeffries and Ritchie Torres, or they would have been defeated as easily as Dan Goldman, Antonio Reynoso and Adriano Espaillat. And they know it. Everybody knows it. Roll on 2028.

We are expected to believe that Goldman was a Jew anti-Semitically defeated by another Jew in the second most Jewish congressional district in the country; the most Jewish district is next door. We are expected to believe that Mamdani's largely Jewish staff was organisationally crucial to the anti-Semitic defeats of Goldman, Reynoso and Espaillat, only one of whom is Jewish. And in screeching about the nominations of Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, the people screaming blue murder are accusing them of being only what they had always said that all Democrats were.

Extreme Heat?

Yes, really. The LSE event Extreme Heat: Improving governance and strengthening action around the world, “has been cancelled due to the red extreme heat warning issued by the UK Met Office.”

Apparently, our homes and workplaces are all going to have to be retrofitted with air conditioning. I would be all for that, but I am not a Net Zero fanatic. Do they really not know?

Then again, they have no idea what is necessary for the manufacture of the steel without which there could be no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations.

And whether or not Jeff Bezos quite said it, they think that human water consumption is limiting the progress of Artificial Intelligence. This is of a piece with that.

Fulfilled The Conventional Role?

Imagine assisted suicide in something like Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. And while I used to be an elected public governor of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, I had ceased to be one before the events described by Paul Knaggs:

County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust has paid £187,000 in damages, issued a formal apology, withdrawn its “Transitioning in the Workplace” policy, and agreed to provide changing, washing and toilet facilities separated between biological men and biological women. It has also agreed to retrain its managers so the discrimination and harassment the tribunal found can never happen again.

That settlement followed the landmark ruling in January 2026, when Employment Judge Seamus Sweeney found that the Trust had unlawfully harassed and discriminated against its own nurses by forcing them to share a female changing room with a biological male colleague who identifies as a woman. The judge’s words were unsparing: the Trust’s conduct had “the effect of violating the dignity” of the women and creating “a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment.”

Seven nurses won this: Bethany Hutchison, Lisa Lockey, Karen Danson, Tracy Hooper, Annice Grundy, Carly Hoy and Jane Peveller. They stood their ground when they should never have had to. They have been called the Angels of the North, and compared to the Ford Dagenham machinists who struck for equal pay in 1968. The comparison is apt for one reason above all others: like the women of Dagenham, they won despite the labour movement, not because of it. 

They asked for dignity, privacy and safety at work. They were ignored.

Where were the unions? 

Here is the part that should keep every union official in the country awake at night in shame.

When the dispute began, Bethany Hutchison did what any worker is told to do. She emailed her union representative. She got no reply. A month later, with a legal case already underway, she discovered why. Her union was representing the man she and her colleagues had complained about. She had paid her subs in good faith, and her union had quietly lined up on the other side.

Throughout the entire ordeal, the nurses received no meaningful support from any of the big unions, including Unison and the Royal College of Nursing. Women who had paid into the system for years, some for decades, were left to fund and fight a major legal case on their own, while carrying on with frontline shifts and absorbing the emotional toll of being smeared as bigots for asking not to undress in front of a man.

So they did something the labour movement used to understand. They organised. With nothing left to lose, they built their own union, the Darlington Nursing Union, the first of its kind dedicated to defending women’s dignity in the workplace. Think about what that means. In 2024, working women had to invent a new trade union because the existing ones would not do the one job a union exists to do: stand with its members against the boss.

Unison didn’t just fail them. It attacked them.

Unison is the biggest union in the country, with around 1.3 million members and a membership that is roughly 70 per cent female. You would expect it, of all organisations, to defend women.

Instead, when the then Health Secretary Wes Streeting agreed to meet the nurses, Unison’s then president Steve North publicly accused him of “pandering to anti-trans bigotry”. Not the Trust that broke the law. Not the managers who told frightened women to “broaden their mindset,” “be educated” and “be more inclusive.” The bigots, in the union president’s telling, were the nurses.

When the nurses won, did Unison reflect? It did not. The union’s official response to a 100-page judgment finding unlawful discrimination was to announce that its policy “remains the same” and that it “stands by its beliefs in the rights of our trans, non-binary and gender-diverse members.” Beliefs, note. Not members. Not the female members it abandoned.

This is not a one-off. Unison’s incoming general secretary, the far-left campaigner Andrea Egan, was asked directly whether she would be comfortable with her union representing a woman in Sandie Peggie’s position. Her answer: “I wouldn’t.” As the equality lawyer Audrey Ludwig pointed out, refusing to represent a member discriminated against for a gender-critical belief may itself be unlawful under section 57 of the Equality Act. A union leader who does not know that, or does not care, has stopped being a trade unionist and started being an activist with a members’ database.

It gets worse. Egan is not merely declining to defend women. She is leading the charge against the law that protects them. Under her, UNISON has launched a campaign to oppose the EHRC’s new statutory Code of Practice on single-sex spaces, writing to the watchdog, lobbying MPs to vote the Code down in the Commons, and calling on members and trans allies to stand together against it. The union says it is proud of this work.

And here is what UNISON would have its members believe is optional. The EHRC Code is not a suggestion. It is a statutory Code of Practice, laid before Parliament, that sets out the law as the Supreme Court has already settled it. It exists precisely to help employers get this right: to understand when a single-sex service is lawful, and to protect women’s rights to safe spaces, to their own sport, and to dignity at work. The country’s biggest union, with a membership that is mostly women, is campaigning to muddy the very clarity the Darlington nurses spent years fighting to establish. A union that lobbies against the law protecting its female members has not lost its way. It has chosen a side, and it is not theirs.

The RCN: absent when it mattered, then late to the scene 

The Royal College of Nursing’s record is its own indictment. It too gave the Darlington nurses nothing when they needed it most, and only warned the Trust after the women had already done the hard yards alone.

And in Scotland, nurse Sandie Peggie is now taking the RCN to court for failing her. Her solicitor, Margaret Gribbon, puts it bluntly: had the RCN “fulfilled the conventional role of a trade union,” Peggie likely would not have endured an 18-month disciplinary ordeal and been forced to sue. While women undressed next to men at work, the RCN was busy producing equity-and-inclusion “toolkits” about microaggressions and allyship. It had time for the language games. It had no time for its women.

This is what capture looks like

There is a class story here, and it is the one the modern labour movement least wants to hear.

The unions were built by working people to protect working people from the power of the employer. Somewhere along the way, a layer of officials, equality officers and full-time activists decided that a fashionable ideology mattered more than the people paying their wages. They sided with management dressing up discrimination as “inclusion.” They treated frontline women, cleaners, nurses, the actual working class, as an obstacle to be re-educated rather than members to be defended.

And the bill is coming in. Union membership has fallen to a record low, barely a fifth of UK employees. When unions stop defending workers, workers stop seeing the point of unions. The Darlington nurses didn’t leave the movement. The movement left them, and they had no choice but to build a new one.

The cost, and the unfinished business 

Remember who paid for all this. The Trust spent an estimated £603,000 of public money, money meant for patient care, defending its right to put men in women’s changing rooms, on top of the £187,000 it has now handed the nurses. The same Trust has just been found by the Care Quality Commission to be “unsafe,” “badly led” and gripped by a “blame culture.” None of this was inevitable. All of it flowed from leaders who valued ideology over the people they employed and the patients they serve.

And it is not over. Despite winning, four of the nurses still face investigation by the Nursing and Midwifery Council, referred for “transphobia” for the act of speaking publicly, even though the tribunal ruled that speaking out was a protected act. The victimisation simply changed address.

Nor has the government covered itself in glory. Wes Streeting at least met the women and admitted “something has gone wrong in our society.” His successor as Health Secretary, James Murray, has been accused of snubbing them, quietly dropping Streeting’s promise to meet, even as he tells the BBC he would “no longer say trans women are women” and that single-sex spaces in the NHS must be protected on the basis of biological sex. Fine words. The nurses are still waiting to see them turned into a single-sex changing room that is actually enforced across every trust in the country, rather than left for frightened women to litigate one hospital at a time.

The warning 

The Darlington nurses did what too many institutions refused to do. They told the truth, took the pressure, and won. The Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland judgment and the EHRC’s new guidance are now behind them. The law is no longer in doubt.

So this is a warning shot to every employer, every NHS trust, and above all to every trade union that left its women standing alone while management called discrimination “inclusion.”

A union that will not defend its members against the boss is not a union. It is a subscription service for an ideology its members never signed up to. Unison and the RCN should be ashamed, and the women who run them should remember what the word solidarity used to mean.

To every female worker in Britain: your rights exist, your boundaries matter, and you do not have to surrender them to keep anyone else comfortable. If your union won’t stand with you, the women of Darlington have just shown you what to do instead.

The First Duty?

As a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury who was preparing to become its First Lord, Andy Burnham is taking the advice of Andy Haldane, a former Chief Economist of the Bank of England; of Richard Hughes, a former Chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility; and of Jim O’Neill, a former Chair of Goldman Sachs. Their advice is to scrap the triple lock, which delivers an internationally pitiful pension from an age that would provoke civil unrest in any serious country.

Heaven forfend that money should go to the people who spent it, and thus into the consumer economy that employed the young even amidst the endless increases in the pension age. Those increases have also caused much of the explosion in claims for working age sickness and disability benefits, both among the old who were being damaged physically and therefore often mentally by being kept in the workforce, and among the young who were being damaged mentally and therefore often physically by being unable to join it or to progress in it. If you want more wars, then you want an awful lot more both of physical disability and of lifelong mental illness. But the benefits for those go straight back into the real economy. Not so the money to the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower called it.

For only the twenty-second highest population in the world, the sixth highest military spending is still not enough for those generous future employers, the arms companies. And for all the convulsions in the Parliamentary Labour Party between 2015 and 2024, the one thing on which they all agreed was WASPI. Did even the seceders to Change UK dissent from that? Even if each of the 3.6 million WASPIs had been paid the full £2,950, then that would have added up to £10.62 billion, most of which would have rapidly made its way to the tills. Now keep an eye out for everything that cost more than that.

Still a Reserve Officer, nudge nudge wink wink, Al Carns was a Conservative-voting Colonel in the Special Forces, nudge nudge wink wink, until June 2024, when he resigned his commission and joined the Labour Party after the General Election had been called. He was then parachuted in a new sense, into the Birmingham Selly Oak seat that had been vacated at the last possible moment by Steve McCabe, Parliamentary Chair of Labour Friends of Israel. The General Election was on 4 July. On 9 July, Carns was made a Defence Minister. Less than two years later, and with no chance of winning, he is the only potential rival who might delay Burnham’s coronation by forcing a contest. So everything has to be tailored to persuading him not to bother. And as well as practically limitless military spending, he also wants an amnesty for veterans of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a principle that, once conceded, could not be denied in relation to any other deployment prior to the conferral of total immunity by the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act. Think on.

Speech and Drama?

There are plenty of political grounds on which to criticise Lara Bird, but British people's accents routinely yet unconsciously shift depending on the company or the audience. My own changes markedly between the University of Durham, the largely middle-class village eight miles away where I have lived since 1990, and the old pit village less than two miles away again where I spent much of my childhood, or the old steel town five miles in the other direction. It never becomes RP or Pitmatic, but I cannot do it to order, and I would consciously have to stop myself.

Saint Helenians are an entirely English-speaking community of British citizens whose speech in Britain, and historically in Saint Helena if less so now, varies markedly depending on who is in the room. Indeed, it can do so depending on the room itself. Without the slightest social insecurity, which is not my background there any more than here, many of the same individuals will have sounded quite different during my grandmother's funeral this morning and at the wake this afternoon.

So light and middle-class that I had grown up thinking that I did not have it, my County Durham accent was mocked at Durham, so heaven knows what Bridget Phillipson had to laugh off at Oxford. But while her claims of childhood deprivation are nowhere near as far-fetched as Wes Streeting's, they do cry out for interrogation. Labour came to power when she was 13. Working for a charity founded by her mother was Phillipson's only job until she entered Parliament at the age of 26. If her council house had no heating upstairs, then why was that matter not addressed by her Labour council? Her mother was on it.

A Decisive Turning Point

Alex Gordon writes:

Keir Starmer’s tearful resignation on the steps of Downing Street on the tenth anniversary of the referendum which took Britain out of the European Union underlines the popular vote for Brexit as the most consequential, not to say revolutionary moment in British politics since the 1984-5 miners’ strike.

The miners, and indeed the entire working-class movement, were defeated by the state onslaught planned and executed by the Thatcher government. The EU referendum on June 23 2016 was a catastrophic defeat for the principal strategy of British state monopoly capitalism, from which a decade later it has not recovered and shows little sign of being able to do so.

Class power in Britain’s unwritten constitution is wielded by an incredibly small network of leading bankers, corporate executives, senior mandarins, intelligence and military-industrial chiefs.

Britain’s two governing political parties have taken turns to act as temporary tribunes for the interests of British capital and US imperialism for 70 years. This pact proved both stable and durable during the cold war between the rival superpower blocs — the US and Nato, and socialist countries led by the Soviet Union.

Britain’s ruling class did not adopt its subservient position to US imperialism willingly. In 1956, Britain, France and Israel lost their joint military attack aimed at punishing Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, for his temerity in nationalising the Suez Canal.

Ever since that chastening experience, Britain’s political Establishment has been dedicated to shoring up its so-called “special relationship” with the United States, a relationship frequently likened to that between a dog and a lamppost.

In 1956, US president Dwight D Eisenhower intervened to halt the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt using political pressure and financial coercion to force a humiliating retreat by Europe’s declining imperial powers. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden suffered a complete physical and nervous breakdown.

As a new cold war global hegemon, the US wanted to block Britain and France from flexing their declining imperial might to control the world’s most strategic waterway.

The Suez debacle was the moment when Britain’s ruling class was forced abruptly to come to terms with its subaltern role in the new cold war world order.

France continued to fight and lose bloody and disastrous colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. Britain’s rulers opted to become the US poodle.

A core element of the US geopolitical strategy was to use Britain’s ruling class as an agent inside the European Economic Community (later the European Union), founded with the 1957 Treaty of Rome, one year after the Suez crisis.

Britain’s integration into the EEC had been a strategic aim of US cold war policy since the CIA formed the American Committee on United Europe in February 1949.

ACUE was a front organisation to channel funds to the European Movement and European federalist campaigns promoting a Europe modelled on the US. Britain’s adherence confirmed US leadership and Britain’s subordinate role to US imperialism.

In February 1957, Rajani Palme Dutt identified the moment a wing of the Tory Party pivoted towards the European Common Market, writing: “‘Europe Limited’ – “The new vision of the Macmillan-Thorneycroft-Eccles team is to turn to the project of the so-called ‘European Common Market’.”

In December 1962, US secretary of state Dean Acheson told the US Military Academy at West Point: “Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role — that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘Commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength … this role is about played out.”

For US imperialism, Britain’s application to join the European Common Market was in Acheson’s words, a “decisive turning point.” If Britain joined, “another step forward of vast importance will have been taken.” 

US pressure first led the British government to apply to join the EEC in 1961. Successive applications were vetoed by French president Charles de Gaulle.

Britain eventually joined the EEC on January 1 1973 with a mission to promote US banking, commercial and strategic interests. The outcome was the Single European Act signed in February 1986.

In October 1986, Thatcher’s “Big Bang” liberalised London’s financial markets as a prelude to her European policy for a full European single market without borders or regulatory obstacles for free movement of goods, services, capital and labour.

A young Thatcherite, John Bercow, recalled: “Margaret Thatcher was herself a driving force behind the Act and some of her ministers positively fizzed with enthusiasm about the single market which it spawned. She and they believed that the Act achieved the Thatcherisation of Europe through the furtherance of free trade.”

The influx of US finance capital into the City of London drove EU political developments through EU treaties of Maastricht (1992), Amsterdam (1997), Nice (2001) and Lisbon (2007), which mandated aggressive neoliberal policies opening energy, water, post, rail, docks, shipping and air transport to private capital.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the contradictions in EU enlargement to include central, eastern and south-eastern Europe and the Baltic meant the agreement between Anglo-US capital and Franco-German capital began to break down.

The latter required a more centralised, federal political structure to consolidate industrial capital, while the former demanded a less regulated, finance-led structure subordinate to Nato’s expansion into former Soviet space.

These contradictions have only deepened since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016. Those EU-nostalgics today who dream of Britain rejoining the EU have consistently failed to explain how British firms, which are now massively subject to US ownership through mergers and acquisitions, would reconcile those interests with EU regulations.

More pertinently, the mantra of “dynamic alignment” with EU rules prevents any British government nationalising rail, mail, utilities and essential public services, let alone practising “Manchesterism,” as espoused by Andy Burnham.

The democratic vote to leave the EU in 2016 has disoriented Britain’s ruling class who can no longer rule in the old way. The question is whether the working class and those who are crushed by the interests of the financial oligarchs of the City of London will choose to live in a new way.

And Kevin Crane writes:

The Brexit referendum of 2016 was undeniably a weird event, that happened for weird reasons. The Tories, under the leadership of David Cameron, called the referendum after doing substantially better than expected in the general election the year before. This should have, in theory, been massive cause for celebration for them, but what it actually did was expose contradictions that the party had been struggling to contain.

Cameron’s government had spent the previous five years governing in coalition with the Lib Dems and had assumed that the situation was likely to continue. When the Lib Dems absolutely collapsed in support in 2015, accompanied by an unexpectedly poor result for Labour, the Conservative Party found itself in possession of a parliamentary majority and a mandate for the full implementation of their electoral manifesto. Uncomfortably for the very pro-EU leadership of the party, this had included a referendum on EU membership, which they had conceded to their very anti-Europe party membership on the understanding that they would not actually need to do anything about it.

Winning big in Westminster suddenly meant that Cameron was faced with having to campaign in a contentious referendum for which no real preparation had been made. The rest of the story, from the point of right-wing politics, is basically a set of miscalculations by him and subsequent Tory leaders that saw them get outmanoeuvred by events and public opinion over and over again. Cameron called the referendum as soon as he practically could in the mistaken belief that a short campaign would benefit Remainers, only to discover that pro-EU groups and institutions had all mutually failed to prepare themselves to put persuasive arguments to the public. The Leave side was, as was predicted, fractious and disorganised, but it was able to make simple arguments and appeal to large groups of people who were discontented by Britain’s increasingly unequal and dysfunctional economy and society, not least because they had been honing arguments and propaganda for their side for the previous twenty years.

So, when the day itself came, the result was a shock, but it was not incomprehensible. The largest faction of the British ruling class was horrified, but what it was witnessing was the breakdown of its favoured political party’s strategy for corralling its social base. The Tories had used a critique of the EU, which was not sincerely believed, to maintain the enthusiasm and loyalty of voters who were experiencing net-negative effects from the actual policies of the Tory Party. Then a sharp change in the political landscape suddenly meant that they had to act on that critique, leading to years of absolutely genuine confusion about how to deal with issues like trade, immigration and Ireland.

None of this was entirely surprising, since the Tories talking out of both sides of their mouths on Europe had been causing organisational problems for the party since the 1990s. What was more disturbing, and more important, was how an internal conflict emanating from within the political right managed to become toxic to the political left, and how it looks like it might continue to be.

With friends like David Cameron, who needed enemies? 

The declaration of the Brexit referendum suddenly forced everyone even vaguely left-of-centre to talk about the EU to a much greater extent than they ever had previously. It was, in hindsight, somewhat ridiculous that so little thought was given by the left to such a dominant institution in setting so much policy, standards and law.

Part of the reason the British left hadn’t discussed Europe much was that successive governments had both pushed EU integration through without that much in the way of debate. Brits did not get to vote on EU-driven constitutional changes, as had happened in France and Ireland, which had given the left openings to express specifically anti-capitalist critiques of the aggressively free-trade bloc, and thus also forced the left to engage with debates about what positions to take on the union.

British governments had also, however, steered Britain out of some more radical aspects of federalism, such as not joining the Euro currency, which also had the effect of supressing serious discussion and analysis. It all meant that when 2016 came around, you had few solid arguments and an absolute mountain of received wisdom about the EU on the left in the country. With very exceptions, the view was that if the Tory right doesn’t like the EU, then the left quite simply should.

All left-of-centre mainstream parties, most media and civil-society groups, and most trade unions instantly and enthusiastically joined the official pro-Remain front, Stronger Together, despite this basically being a popular front with Cameron’s Tory cabinet. The minority of the radical left that attempted to give a more critical analysis had, frankly, left it far too late to make the arguments and were overwhelmingly sidelined and ridiculed. Much-loved members of past generations of socialist leaders who remembered that Europe had originally been a Tory policy that the left opposed, such as the politician Tony Benn or the union leader Bob Crow, had passed away and weren’t there to offer an alternative lead.

Cameron eagerly made use of the left and the Labour movement to try and bolster his ineffectual campaign, but the truth is these forces were no more sophisticated or effective at advocating for EU membership than his own were. Worse still was the appallingly misleading nature of ‘leftwing’ pro-EU propaganda, such as an astonishing Trades Union Congress leaflet that circulated claiming that workers’ rights had been handed down from on-high by the benevolence of Brussels, rather than having been fought for by workers themselves. This was despite the EU having done absolutely nothing to stop the Thatcherite anti-union laws being passed and enforced in Britain. Desperate to try and motivate votes for Remain, many ‘progressives’ were basically reduced to projecting onto the EU the features they wanted it to have. 

Trading socialist politics for EU membership, and getting neither 

The generally accepted silence the liberal left had regarding the EU before 2016 was more than made up for by the almighty racket they would make about it after losing the referendum. Even people who had themselves voted Remain would start to become tired with ‘remoaners’ who would steer pretty much any discussion about anything back to why all the world’s problems revolved around whether or not Britain was signed up to a capitalist trading bloc. 

The continuity Remain movement that emerged in the last years of the 2010s would go on to have a huge impact on British politics, just not one that had anything to do with their stated goals. Labour was at the time lead by the socialist Jeremy Corbyn, and powerful people were looking for a force with which to undermine him. Various things were tried, such as smearing Corbyn as sexist, which was dropped early on as it was just a bit silly. More serious bids to defeat him over his opposition to war and imperialism failed because his messaging on this was actually popular with millions of people. Antisemitism smears proved stickier, but it was the deployment of pro-Europeanism that would really derail the Corbyn project.

An oft-repeated false history of the Corbyn period is that the man himself, a left Eurosceptic like his mentor Tony Benn, damaged his popularity through lack of support for Remain. This myth is easy to disprove: Corbyn’s Labour peaked in popularity in the 2017 general election, when it made totally unexpected gains by focusing on its opposition to war and austerity. At this time, it was broadly accepting of the Brexit referendum result the previous year, and Corbyn had instructed MPs to vote for the Brexit process in parliament mere months beforehand. 

It was after that general election that a serious operation was begun to shift leftwing Labour members and supporters in an actively Remain direction, and this coincided with the decline in support that Labour experienced in the run up to the disaster of the 2019 general election. Claims that Remainer figures inside Labour and the trade unions made that becoming anti-Brexit would increase the party’s popularity were repeatedly proved wrong, even as the party became more and more focused on reversing Brexit as a policy. 

The central figure to this was, of course, one Sir Keir Starmer, very mistakenly given the Shadow Brexit Secretary job by Corbyn himself. We now know, thanks to the work of journalists like Oliver Eagleton and Paul Golden that, that Starmer used this position to box Corbyn into a position of supporting Remain. He would arbitrarily announce his own policies, and engage in dishonest auto-sabotaged negotiations with the government, in order to ensure that his own leader had no scope to present any kind of ‘soft Brexit’ – similar to the arrangements that non-EU countries in Europe like Norway and Switzerland have – so that the only imaginable way forward was either to stay in the EU or have the ‘hard Brexit’ favoured by the Tory right. 

Remain supporters believed that this was a good thing, because they thought that the prospect of hard Brexit would present a squeeze effect on voters that would encourage them to vote for a pro-EU Labour Party (even if they weren’t keen on Corbyn’s leftwing policies). They believed this because they quite simply had no grasp of how most of the public viewed the Brexit question three years on from the referendum. As we know, Labour got absolutely trounced, and the returned Tory government proceeded to implement the hardest version of Brexit it knew how to deliver. 

From the point of view of wealthy backers who’d lavishly funded the various Remain campaigns – from the deeply dishonest ‘People’s Vote’ to the downright cringey “Our Future Our Choice” – this was a splendid result as they had kept a leftwing and anti-war government from coming to office. From the point of view of the people who had been the foot soldiers of this thing, however, it was an utter disaster from which they had come away with nothing. 

There has been, so far as I can tell, essentially no serious reflection from left Remain as to how they lost the entire shooting match, indeed what we’ve mostly seen is pretty much rhetorical consistency from them for the past decade. As the ten-year anniversary of the referendum goes by, various liberal left pundits are trumpeting surveys that show that a majority of voters would vote to rejoin the EU in a hypothetical referendum to do so. They don’t seem to be put off by the fact that they had surveys saying that a majority of voters were going to vote that way before the referendum, and then again in 2018 and 2019 before Brexit was the issue that decisively won the election for the Tories, and really most years since. They constantly get excited by deeply flawed evidence that says what they want it to say because of ideology, specifically the ideology of radical liberalism. Appealing to this is, arguably, one of the key functions of the EU, along with its role in shaping and directing capitalist trade and markets.

The alternative to anti-capitalism

Radical liberalism has, to a large extent, displaced social democracy as the main type of reformism left thinking, not just in Britain but in most of Europe and much of the rest of the world. It is oppositional to neoliberalism and to the reactionary right, but it comes with some very heavy restrictions on what alternatives it is willing to put to those. 

It is heavily individualist and influenced by a lot of ideas that come out of postmodern thinking that doesn’t place faith in systemic analysis. Radical liberals can be critical of capitalism, because of the negative things that it does, but they don’t really have a theoretical picture of why it does these things or what alternative order would lead to better outcomes. Bad people are quite simply in charge, and their ‘socialism’ (if they even use the term) is limited to finding ways to have nicer people act as administrators. It is made even weaker by their superficial grasp of class, which is primarily focused on poverty or restricted access to opportunity: relation to consumption, in other words, rather than relation to production.

Failing to understand that the exploitation of the working class as the source of ruling class wealth is really the start point for radical liberalism’s self-defeating attitudes towards political, economic and state power. If you accept the globalisation-era claim that the EU is, in fact, the source of wealth via its superior organisation of trade, you fundamentally break with the idea that the strategic orientation of the left is through the organisation of the working class. The strategic focus shifts instead to appealing to the ‘progressive’ potential of the state and transnational institutions. It also leads one to defend those institutions from criticisms, and this produces an utterly false of logic of the enemy-of-my-enemy when those criticisms come from people to whom liberals have other criticisms.

A lot of what radical liberals think they support about the EU is based on a false logic which say’s ‘The right-wing nationalists dislike the EU, and disagree with me about X, so the EU is good for X.”’ This is what leads ignorant TUC bureaucrats to issuing dim-witted leaflets claiming the EU invented workers’ rights. It is what leads some British leftists to incorrectly claim that we cannot resist neoliberalism outside the EU, despite the structures of the EU having been specifically to crush the Syriza government for resisting neoliberalism. Many other people to claim that the EU is the solution to climate change, or political repression, or high cost of living, but – most commonly of all – the solution to racism.

The idea that the EU can magically weave some sort of anti-racist magic that will make people more friendly to workers and refugees from other countries was already fairly silly a decade ago, but it is frankly a sick joke today, as the bloc continues to militarise its external borders, moves away from allowing free movement across its internal ones and begins to set up refugee gulags that are exactly the same as the failed Rwanda plan our previous Tory government tried to implement. While Brits might reasonably, if wrongly. have felt like continental Europe was more cosmopolitan that their home country (which was often labelled ‘rainy fascism island’ in online discussion by radlibs), it is just plain ignorant not to notice that most European countries have moved to significantly to the right on race and immigration at least as much as Britain has since Brexit, if not more in some instances.

Things that are going wrong in our country are overwhelmingly doing so in similar ways for those states still in the EU: the drive to war and militarism at the expense of welfare and environmental action, the surrender to Trump’s extractive trade wars, the curtailing of civil liberties and free speech. Left Remainers claimed that Britain leaving the EU would lead it down a uniquely and specifically reactionary path, the truth is that Britain has largely converged with the same reactionary path as the EU. As with their failures at home, the radical liberals have no real analysis of why their proposed solution so obviously does not work abroad. 

These bad radical liberal takes are themselves in no way a uniquely British problem. The whole reason why the aforementioned Syriza government in Greece was able to have an extremely strong anti-austerity mandate – which they won at an election and a referendum – destroyed was because that government was addled by a lot of the same bad ideological thinking. In many other European countries, Italy being an extreme case and France a more moderate one, Europeanism has caused previously strong radical left movements to be near destroyed. Yanis Varoufakis, a prolific left academic and the original minister for finance in the Greek Syriza government, has written powerfully about how an insidious Europeanist dream has been used to displace more consistently anti-capitalist class-based left politics throughout the continent. 

There’s a definitely a deep irony in the way that the ten year anniversary of the Brexit referendum has coincided with a sharp drop in the fortunes of two of the politicians who had previously used the issue to their advantage so successfully. One of them is Nigel Farage, the nationalist reactionary who acted as the outrider for Brexit, who is now in a massive mess over his inability to parlay his past campaigning successes into building a viable party of government. The other, though, is Keir Starmer, whose pathetic self-pitying resignation speech was hilariously interrupted by a ranting remoaner, who he was claiming to speak on behalf of just seven years ago. Starmer’s overdue passing has, amongst many other reactions, lead to a resurgence in activity by the pro-EU movement, as witnessed by a (fairly small) demonstration in Whitehall on Saturday and a large volume of speculative articles in the liberal press. The left in Britain cannot afford to allow itself to cede initiative to this nonsense again: we need to take the initiative and argue for a genuine socialist response to society’s crises, not give the ground to radical liberal arguments that identify real problems but present utterly useless solutions.