The Heartlands Tribune

Working Class Independent left-wing news, views, and opinions. Formally, Labour Heartlands
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[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

"You can buy your council house, so you’ll be a property owner, you may not be able to get a wage increase, but you can borrow’. And the borrowing was deliberately encouraged because people in debt are slaves to their employers.” -Tony Benn #morgages #CostOfLivingCrisis #Scam

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

@Thelma_DWalker They still will

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Switzerland has a wealth tax. But rich people aren't flocking to leave the country. In fact, they're queuing up to get in.

[The Crispin Flintoff Show @CrispinShow]

Always reading a script. An empty suit right up to the end.

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

Starmer is gone. Good riddance, and close the door behind you. But what followed should trouble anyone who still cares about democracy.

After Labour’s disastrous local elections, we were told there would be a leadership contest. Contenders began jockeying for position. Then Labour manufactured a by-election to parachute Andy Burnham into Westminster.

Even then, we were told it was merely the route into a proper contest. Funny how the other contenders stood down the moment Burnham was elected.

Now he walks into No 10 uncontested. No hustings. No public debate. No detailed plan for change. More than 400 Labour MPs sit in Parliament, yet the party had to bring in the Mayor of Manchester because none of them had the confidence or support to lead the country. That is an indictment in itself.

Burnham keeps promising change, but change from what, and towards what? A politician cannot be held to promises he has never clearly made.

This is a coronation without scrutiny. Why are we simply standing back and watching it happen?

More than 400 Labour MPs, yet the party had to manufacture a by-election and bring in Andy Burnham. What does that say about the parliamentary Labour Party?

#AndyBurnham

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

Good luck England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

On this day in history, 15 July 1381, the English state hanged, drew and quartered a priest for asking one question.

John Ball's crime wasn't theft. It wasn't violence. It was a sermon.

"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"

If our first parents worked the land with their own hands, where did any man's right to lord it over another come from? Bondage, Ball preached, was "the unjust oppression of naughty men," not the will of God.

That question terrified a kingdom built on the idea that hierarchy was natural. He set the stage for class war...

The crown answered it with the full theatre of the scaffold, because heresy against gentle birth was treason.

Ball didn't march alone. Wat Tyler led the rising: thousands of labourers, newly aware of their worth after the Black Death, rising against a wage freeze and a poll tax that charged a ploughman the same as an earl.

They won promises at Mile End. Within days, the king tore them up. Tyler was cut down at Smithfield. A month later, Ball followed him to the scaffold.

Serfdom died anyway, not from royal mercy, but because the market the lords tried to freeze couldn't hold forever.

Six hundred and forty-five years on, the gentleman has become the shareholder. The question hasn't changed because the answer hasn't changed.

They cut John Ball into four pieces and sent him to the corners of the kingdom. All they achieved was making sure his question reached every one of them.

So here's the question worth sitting with, not just the one Ball asked.

Have we actually changed since 1381? Or have we just become more comfortable with the same arrangement?

Read the death of John Ball here
👇
https://t.co/kQSStiI3SX

Tell me what you think in the comments.

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

Shabana Mahmood just proscribed the IRGC, bowing to the Israel lobby.

It’s part of a National Security Bill that could jail journalists for 14 years just for doing their jobs.

This is the most authoritarian UK government in modern history, shredding our rights at the behest of a foreign state.

They’ll come for your thoughts and opinions next @lornahosford

[Andrew Snowden MP 🇬🇧 @A_J_Snowden]

This is a charade. A political pantomime from Burnham.

We @Conservatives had an opposition debate tomorrow to vote that parliament sit JUST ONE extra day to ask the new PM questions about his plans

Labour just cancelled the debate😡

Burnham is hiding from the press and now MPs

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

ON THIS DAY, 14 July 1889: SOCIALISM DREW THE LINE

Capital would no longer be allowed to set worker against worker. That was the point of Paris, 14 July 1889.

Nearly 400 socialist delegates from twenty countries met there to found what became the Second International. They did not gather to abolish nations. They gathered to challenge the power of capital across them.

Today's liberals stole the language of working-class internationalism and turned it inside out. In their mouths, it now means open labour markets: corporations moving money, factories and workers wherever wages are lowest. That is not what Paris meant.

A German coal miner and a French textile worker were not each other's enemies. Different languages, different flags, same master. Same dust in their lungs, same brutal hours, same owners growing fat on their exhaustion.

Internationalism meant workers refused to be turned into weapons against each other. No strikebreaking across borders. No transporting scab goods. No slaughtering each other for the profits of kings and industrialists when the drums of war started beating.

The Paris Congress demanded the eight-hour day and set 1 May 1890 as a day of international workers' demonstrations. That is where May Day comes from.

The movement's answer on migration was sharper than anything coming out of Westminster today. At Stuttgart in 1907, the International rejected racial exclusion outright. But it also said plainly that employers were importing unorganised labour to undercut wages and break strikes.

Its answer was not a wall. It was organisation: stop the trade in strikebreakers, outlaw coercive contracts, set minimum wages, cut the working day, bring migrant workers into the unions with full and equal rights.

The target was the boss. Not the man who had just arrived.

That is the choice the establishment still hides from you. Corporate globalism treats human beings as freight, moved wherever they're cheapest. Cartoon nationalism blames the man who got off the boat yesterday and says nothing about the employer who put him on it, underpaid him, and used him to gut everyone else's wages.

Of course, liberals find it unsettling when left wingers like Bernie Sanders say the quiet part out loud: open borders is "a right-wing proposal" that right-wing people would love.

The old socialists rejected both. You can love your country and still know that a delivery driver in Chesterfield, a warehouse worker in São Paulo and a nurse in Tokyo are being squeezed by the same machine.

Solidarity was never about erasing borders. It was workers refusing to be used against one another, wherever they stood.

United we stand. Divided, we get robbed one wage packet at a time.

Full piece here: https://t.co/pR3Nmwn1aF

137 years on, which side do you think the left is actually on?

#openborders

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

The party that lectures the country about diversity still cannot bring itself to trust a woman with the top job.

In more than 120 years, Labour has never elected a woman as leader. Every other major political party in Britain has managed it. Labour, supposedly the great engine of equality, remains the glaring exception.

And now the same party has shown how little confidence it has not only in its women MPs, but in the entire Parliamentary @UKLabour.

Rather than hold a proper leadership contest, as they first stated, test competing ideas and allow the public to hear what comes next, Labour engineered a by-election to clear Andy Burnham’s path to Downing Street.

No real scrutiny. No contest. No public address setting out what he will do differently. No promises on the record that voters can return to when the slogans fade and the compromises begin.

We are told this is renewal. It's succession arranged behind closed doors.

It seems Labour can talk endlessly about representation, yet when power itself is at stake, the men still inherit the crown.

Diversity for the photograph. The old boys’ club for the leadership. #AndyBurnham

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

They are not taking water back into public ownership. They are changing the vocabulary.

Andy Burnham has been careful to promise “public control”, not public ownership.

Now Labour’s Lucy Rigby is boasting that Starmer has already increased “public control” over the water industry, including tighter rules on bonuses and pollution.

In other words, the private companies keep the assets. The shareholders keep the profits. The public keeps paying the bills and cleaning up the rivers.

The regulator may tug the leash, but the dog still belongs to the same owner.

“Public control” sounds reassuring while leaving the basic structure of privatisation untouched. It is management, not transformation. Regulation, not ownership. The same failed model with a fresh coat of political varnish manifests as public control.

And Rigby says Burnham will set out the details in the “coming weeks and months”. So much for a leadership contest. We are apparently expected to accept the new prime minister first and discover his policies afterwards. The excuse is, he's sticking to the manifesto...

Change, they call it.

The shareholders remain. The sewage remains. Only the name over the door changes.

#AndyBurnham

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

“Stability” for whom? Certainly not the people losing their jobs.

When Rachel Reeves entered the Treasury, unemployment stood at 4.1%. It is now 4.9%.

Youth unemployment has risen from 14% to 16.2%.

Tom Swarbrick put the obvious question to Labour’s Lucy Rigby: if Rachel Reeves leaves office with more people unemployed than when she arrived, is that really a legacy to be proud of?

The answer was the usual Westminster fog machine: blame the inheritance, mention mortgages, repeat the word “stability” and hope nobody notices the figures.

But the working class cannot pay the rent with political talking points. A young person shut out of work, education or training does not experience “economic stability”. They experience lost wages, lost confidence and a future being quietly stolen.

Labour promised growth, secure employment and change. Instead, unemployment has risen while ministers congratulate themselves for managing the decline.

Stability was the promise on the poster. Insecurity was the policy in power.

#RachelReeves

[Jonathan Hinder MP @Jonathan_Hinder]

Yes.

Pro-growth tax reform.

[LabourWomen’sDeclaration @LabWomenDec]

“The damage done by this [Amnesty] report is huge. Bad actors continue to share archives online, and the lies & threats targeted at FWS & other groups are increasing as a result.
We believe a correction and apology is the very minimum we should all expect”
https://t.co/kSGEkKP8hq

[Declassified UK @declassifiedUK]

Britain's Undercover Policing Inquiry has revealed that BAE Systems offered the Met Police money to spy on protesters in the 1990s.

Detective Chief Inspector Dell, who managed the notorious Special Demonstration Squad between 2001-2005, made the admission while discussing his earlier work in C-squad - the Special Branch department that dealt with protest.

Britain's Undercover Policing Inquiry has revealed that BAE Systems offered the Met Police money to spy on protesters in the 1990s. Detective Chief Inspector Dell, who managed the notorious Special Demonstration Squad between 2001-2005, made the admission while discussing his earlier work in C-squad - the Special Branch department that dealt with protest.
Dell denied that Special Branch took the money, stating: “Even though the Branch could well have done with the money, they made the offer to the Commissioner, obviously, and it had to be declined”.

By 1997, BAE Systems had embedded its own corporate spy, Martin Hogbin, at CAAT. Hogbin remained at CAAT until 2003. CAAT’s Media Coordinator, Emily Apple, said: “BAE Systems went to extraordinary lengths to spy on anti arms trade campaigners, and intrude into our lives."

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

Yes its good that we're finally getting #TheHillsboroughLaw, but when govt minister Catherine Atkinson claims its "so personally important" to Keir Starmer, why has it taken 2 years to get to this point, & why did the govt try to water it down?

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

"Always look for the truth from the ground up, rarely from the top down. Journalists are never real journalists if they are the agents of power, no matter how they disguise that role. Real journalists are agents of people!" - John Pilger

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

If rapists are not classed as dangerous offenders, what the hell are they?

Sophy Ridge asked the question Labour did not want answered: if the Government says the “most dangerous offenders” are excluded from early release, why does that not automatically include sexual offenders?

The minister moved to the inherited prison crisis. Ridge cut straight through it: “Why are you not excluding rapists from the dangerous offenders? What the hell? They are dangerous, aren’t they?”

Women are told to trust the system. Victims are told lessons have been learned. Ministers give speeches about safety, violence against women and girls, and putting victims first.

Then, when asked why rapists are not simply excluded from early release... nothing...

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

The police told us what this wasn't before they knew what it was.

On Saturday, the public was assured the death of Ann Widdecombe was not terror-related. Nothing political. Counter-terror officers were only "assisting."

By Monday, terrorism police were running the case. The 28-year-old suspect from Rotherham has been re-arrested under terrorism powers. The Home Secretary is updating the Commons this afternoon.

Nobody forced the police to rule anything out. They could have been straight with the public: a murder is under investigation, we are keeping an open mind, and we will update you when we know more.

Instead they declared what it wasn't, then reversed themselves within 48 hours.

That is how you feed a conspiracy theory, not how you starve one. Every reversal teaches the public that the official account can't be trusted. And all the while, the same message: do not speculate.

The speculation isn't created by the public asking questions. It's created by answers that don't hold for two days.

A woman is dead. A man is in custody.

But the public is entitled to ask why the story keeps changing.

Full report
👇

https://t.co/2z22itzJgK

#AnnWiddecombe

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

When I was elected into Parliament with my very average grades from my very humble background, I honestly thought that I was going to be surrounded by the brightest minds and political operators in the country and for a while I was worried I’d be out of my depth.

It took me about a week to realise the place is full to the brim of entitled idiots with little to no concept of the real world that they are supposed to represent.

They lack life experience. It is a game to many of them and one they are rigging to win.
It’s not fit for purpose.

@LauraSmithCrewe