Catherine White💙

[Michael Walsh @thatbloodyMikey]

Because The Primary Purpose of Every Mainstream News, Current affairs, Mid Morning & Political Panel Programme in UK Media, is to Lie, Launder, Provide cover for & manipulate public opinion on Behalf of the State as they ram through Brutal, life ruining measures Nobody voted for.

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

Btw, when they say spending money on defence, they really mean giving public money to private arms dealers.

[Michael Walsh @thatbloodyMikey]

Whichever end of the political spectrum you feel comfortable in, There is No fucking way you, or any Normal Human being should be OK with this.
If you're happy to Live in Poverty & watch others starve, While Warmongers are kept flush with wealth & Bombs, you need an intervention.

[Child of Alba 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @ChildOfAlba]

Once again, devolved nations are in ridiculous position of waiting for an English ruler to be installed, wondering what vindictive harm he’ll do us in the cause of serving England. Instead of being normal nations, shrugging & saying, “Nothing to do with us.”

[Republic @RepublicStaff]

Charles and William were part of a cover-up to help Andrew dodge accountability. They're all complicit - the royal family is a rotten institution. #NotMyKing #AbolishTheMonarchy #Epstein

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Este es el yate de la multimillonario Nancy Walton, la heredera del imperio de Walmart, ademas del yate de 300 millones utiliza un barco de servicio donde tiene a un catering para llevarle la comida en helicóptero y así no mezclarse con la plebe.

Mientras esta rica usa 2 barcos y un helicóptero solo para una tarde de playa, a ti te dicen que te duches en 2 minutos y que no pongas el aire acondicionado asfixiándote con 40° porque hay que salvar el planeta.

Esto es el capitalismo, donde los ricos pueden desayunar petroleo mientras tú bebes con pajita de cartón para no contaminar.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

The group that has the most sex offenders per capita.

Is the Far Right.

[The Lucky Heron @LuckyHeronSay]

Burnham is 'picking' fuck all. He’s being installed like a new kitchen.

[The Heartlands Tribune @Labourheartland]

There is a lot to be said about Andy Burnham.

And there are plenty of people already leaping to defend him, usually by attacking anyone who dares point out the obvious.

Here’s the thing...

Burnham has not been parachuted in to be handed the highest office in the land to save the people or rescue the country.

He has been brought in because the Labour Party machine has shifted up a gear in an attempt to save itself.

They are hoping the public will look more kindly on a different face, as if Starmer alone caused Labour’s collapse in support.

He didn’t...

Starmer was the face of bad policy, poor government, donor politics, managed slogans and contempt for the people. Changing the face will not change the direction.

And that is the real insult.

Labour has over 400 MPs. A supermajority. A whole parliamentary party supposedly ready to govern. Yet when the machine needed a replacement, it had to ship in a substitute from the old Blairite days.

Not one of them had the ability, authority or confidence to take up the challenge.

That is not renewal.

That's panic...

As for Burnham, for those of us that have no longer tied our self to Labour’s mast,
you don’t have to dig very deep to find the real Andy Burnham.

He is not some insurgent socialist waiting in the wings. He is a dyed-in-the-wool Blairite, a career politician forged in the New Labour machine.

Before Parliament, he worked as a researcher and special adviser. In government, he served under Blair and Brown. As an MP, he backed the Iraq War in 2003.

As Health Secretary, he inherited and defended a system already riddled with New Labour’s love affair with marketisation, targets, outsourcing and PFI-style thinking. That is the political soil he grew out of.

So let’s stop pretending Burnham represents a clean break from Starmerism.

He's not the antidote. He's the earlier variant.

A smoother voice, a better regional accent, a bit more warmth on camera, but still the same basic politics: manage decline, praise “partnership” with the private sector, keep the donor class calm, and call it change.

If Labour replaces Starmer with Burnham and expects the country to mistake it for renewal, they are insulting people’s intelligence.

New boss. Old machine...

#AndyBurnham

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

“Andy Burnham has spent years crafting a specific public myth. He is the 'King of the North,' the casual jacket-wearing, anti-Westminster populist who promised to smash the Whitehall bubble, reverse decades of devastating de-industrialization, and bring failing water utilities back under public control.”

​But as he prepares to enter Downing Street as Prime Minister, the mask has officially slipped. Burnham has handed the keys of Number 10 to his new Chief of Staff, James Purnell—the ex-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, a former BBC executive, and the CEO of Flint Global, an elite corporate lobbying outfit that protects private water companies from state takeovers and was recently sold to a private equity firm notorious for price-gouging the NHS.

​This appointment exposes the absolute hypocrisy behind Burnham's carefully managed rhetoric on devolution and public control. Before he even steps foot inside Number Ten, we must demand a full, unvarnished list of all James Purnell's corporate conflicts of interest—because right now, devolution and reindustrialization is the bait, and corporate capture is the switch.
​
Editor: Ranjan Balakumaran @financialeyes

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

From the outset of his leadership of Labour in 2020, Starmer had worked assiduously to purge the party of its left wing over criticisms of Israel – under the guise of addressing a supposed “antisemitism crisis”.

It hardly came as a surprise, then, that he alienated swaths of the British public with his first foreign-policy test – in Gaza.

In late 2023, as opposition leader, when he had a chance to distance himself from the Tory government’s illegal collusion with Israel, Starmer shocked even sections of his party’s right wing by declaring that Israel’s denial of water, food and power to millions of Palestinians was an act of “self-defence”.

A former human rights lawyer, Starmer was excusing an unquestionable war crime.

The International Criminal Court would later issue an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing him of crimes against humanity over the starvation blockade of Gaza endorsed by Starmer.

Once in office, Starmer proved no better. He repeatedly denied that the situation in Gaza was a genocide, even though he himself had argued before the International Court of Justice in 2014 that a Serbian attack on the Croatian city of Vukovar 23 years earlier was a genocide. That attack was many orders of magnitude less destructive than Israel’s erasure of Gaza.

Starmer refused even to admit that Israel was committing war crimes in the enclave – not least, because to do so would have required him to stop colluding in those atrocities.

His government continued to sell arms to Israel, and allowed Israeli arms manufacturers such as Elbit Systems to operate factories in the UK to build killer drones for use in Gaza.

British planes transported large shipments of weapons to Israel that helped level the tiny territory, while also carrying out endless surveillance flights over Gaza to supply Israel with intelligence used to obliterate the enclave.

At the same time, Britain provided diplomatic cover for Israeli crimes, including at the UN Security Council, and welcomed Israeli generals and politicians suspected of war crimes.

But most significantly of all, the Starmer government went further than the Conservatives in cracking down on basic and long-cherished rights to speech and assembly to stifle protests against what a consensus of experts concluded early on was a genocide by Israel.

In this regard, Starmer appeared to be extending to the wider public the dirty-tricks, antisemitism smears he had used against Corbyn and his supporters.

In the previous Conservative government, home secretary Suella Braverman had branded anti-genocide demonstrations in London that attracted hundreds of thousands of Britons as "hate marches".

Starmer’s first home secretary, Yvette Cooper, not only continued the theme but recruited Britain’s draconian terrorism laws to further chill the protests.

Journalists and political activists who criticised the government’s complicity in genocide had their homes raided by police at dawn, and faced the threat of up to 14 years in jail for “supporting terrorism”.

Next, Cooper proscribed as a terrorist organisation the direct action group Palestine Action, which targeted Israeli factories hosted on British soil that make killer drones to be used in Gaza.

It was not just the first time in British history that a direct action group had been proscribed. In a related legal first, the judge in the trial of four Palestine Action activists sentenced them this month as terrorists, even though none had been convicted of a terrorism offence or of causing intentional violence.

A popular backlash was inevitable. Thousands of elderly Britons – from vicars and lawyers to doctors and army veterans – took to the streets in protest at an unprecedented assault on civil liberties.

In a clear indication of the deeply authoritarian instincts of Starmer and his government, the police were sent in to arrest the protesters en masse. They now face charges of “supporting terrorism”.

Meanwhile, the government announced it was preparing to scrap the right of many defendants to trial by jury – one of the most important safeguards against the dangers of state overreach.

It was hard not to conclude that the government’s urge to dispense with juries followed from the fact that juries had shown themselves far less ready than judges to convict those caught up in Starmer’s wholesale assault on rights of speech and protest.

This is an extract from my latest article Burnham must break with Starmer's dishonest politics. Find a link to the rest of the article in the reply post ⬇️

[Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg]

Scotland is the only nation in the World Cup that does not have its own broadcaster.
Even Curacao and Cape Verde do.

[Jason Reid @JasonReidx]

Well if you will insist on bringing up old matters, Harriet, let’s give this another airing!

[Gary Spedding @GarySpedding]

On any given day there are Israel advocacy organisations holding meetings or events inside Parliament.

If you spend enough time in Portcullis House you will see Israel advocacy groups holding back-to-back meetings with MPs. What is more interesting about these types of meetings is that constituents are not made aware that their MP is meeting with Israel advocacy organisations because it is happening down in Westminster and MPs are not obliged to publish their meeting schedules for public scrutiny despite being publicly elected representatives. There are many MPs meeting pro-Israel organisations on the down low.

There are briefings happening every few days on Israel that are targeted at pro-Israel MPs.

But this machine goes way deeper - the friends of Israel organisations attached to individual political parties and the APPG on Israel are super active. Both Labour & Conservative friends of Israel have full time paid staff members who often double up as paid support staff for MPs and Lords. This gives them free access to the Houses of Parliament and the Westminster Estate.

Further to this, the Israel advocacy groups in parliament often identify politicians and even parliamentary candidates to recruit - offering them varying levels of support in exchange for them joining their voices & votes to the pro-Israel side in Parliament.

On a more sinister note, the friends of Israel groups in Parliament have what are 'spokespeople' (e.g. identifiable pro-Israel MPs and Lords) and then they also have silent members who do not openly state their position on Israel-Palestine.

Those 'silent' members often sign up to receive info, event invites and briefings from the pro-Palestine groups that operate in Parliament and will even attend pro-Palestine events so as to report back on what is being pushed for from the pro-Palestine side.

I have also personally witnessed friends of Israel staffers running around Parliament trying to book rooms before pro-Palestine MPs get the chance so as to force the events that are to be hosted into smaller spaces.

I also know from personal experience that sometimes it isn't the MPs at all but rather a staff member working for an MP who then leaks pro-Palestine mailings to friends of Israel groups.

I found the above out myself when I tracked the briefings I was sending into Parliament and how many times an email was forwarded then opened by a third party (some of the IP addresses showed as being in Israel).

If you want to talk about Israel's influence on UK Politics start by looking at the groups and organisations operating inside our Parliament and within our political parties. Ask them where they get their funding from and how they can afford to pay full time staff members.

Look more closely at the members register of interests for their staffers as well.

All of this needs thorough investigation and proper transparency.

[The National @ScotNational]

History will remember him as the unremarkable former human rights lawyer who offered carte blanche to the gravest crimes of our age – and did so against the expressed wishes of the British people. Good riddance, Sir Keir, writes Coll McCail ✍️

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

Jeremy Johnson, who sentenced four activists as terrorists, is once again trying to convict their defence barrister for contempt of court

by @skwawkbox
https://t.co/JtntWfVWNK

[Howard Beckett @HowardRBeckett]

Starmer batted off questions when 167 Iranian 🇮🇷 school girls were murdered by 🇮🇱 & 🇺🇸

He batted off questions about 20,00 🇵🇸 children murdered in Gaza 🇵🇸

He batted off questions about 🇮🇱 starving children in Gaza 🇵🇸

But when it comes to losing his job

He is moved to tears.

[Declassified UK @declassifiedUK]

Keir Starmer has maintained the UK's secret military agreement with Israel throughout the genocide and during thousands of Israeli attacks on neighbours.

Try finding mentions of this agreement in the UK national media.

https://t.co/b9FCTz1uzb

[Samantha Asumadu @SamanthaAsumadu]

This is very... stark

[Media Lens @medialens]

BBC political reporters, Becky Morton and Brian Wheeler, managed to write 3,000 words on how Starmer ‘failed to connect with the public’ without once mentioning the Gaza genocide.

One of the many reasons that Starmer is deeply unpopular with the public is his complicity in Israel’s massive crimes against humanity.

That BBC reporters deem this not worth a mention just tells us how divorced they are from reality.

Client journalism and the Westminster bubble need to be rooted out.

https://t.co/H33v7mjuT2