Chris Mein

Living life one slice at a time.

[Tom London @TomLondon6]

This is horrific

If you are in Starmer’s Cabinet you should resign in protest

In fact, Labour MPs should resign the whip

Any Labour members should leave the party

Labour is an accomplice to GENOCIDE

[Tehran Tadhg @TadhgHickey]

I dream of a world where politicians are held accountable for their deeds, not one where artists are held accountable for their words.

[Niz @NizMhani]

Incredible. So, to be pro-Israel, you have to be convinced that ALL these people are lying to you...

📍Reporters Without Borders.
📍Doctors Without Borders.
📍The World Health Organisation.
📍Oxfam.
📍Save the Children.
📍The World Food Programme.
📍UNICEF.
📍Human Rights Watch.
📍Amnesty International.
📍B'Tselem.
📍The UN.
📍The ICC.
📍The ICJ.
📍The Red Cross.
📍London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
📍The Lancet Medical Journal.
📍Haaretz (Israeli paper).
📍+972 (Israeli investigative magazine).
📍Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, Haim Bresheeth, Yosefa Loshitzky and other holocaust scholars.

What an entirely untenable, irrational, illogical, unreasonable, distorted position to hold.

[Nadeem Ahmed @Muqadaam]

“We are witnessing the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians”

Retweet if you agree with Corbyn

[Nadeem Ahmed @Muqadaam]

Retweet if you agree with Corbyn

[Mohaned @mohaned_mmfilm]

Mark Ruffalo's comment on Hamdan Ballal getting attacked and abducted.

[Dystopian Times @DystopianTimes_]

When a country commits the largest child massacre in its history and the media doesn't bother to report this, you have a broken and complicit media

[Dystopian Times @DystopianTimes_]

If you're coming into my mentions to explain, "no, the people who blow up cancer hospitals are the good guys actually", please re-evaluate your life

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Gary Lineker on Gaza, "It's the worst thing I have seen in my lifetime. Constant images day in, day out of children losing their lives."

"But the minute you raise your voice against it you get accused of being a supporter of Hamas."

[Hamza Yusuf @Hamza_a96]

Heartbreaking scenes in Gaza. Shame on the world.

[Robert Peston @Peston]

The government says it wants to make significant savings on welfare payments to the disabled and help the disabled into work.

The point, say all ministers - led Sir Keir Starmer - is not to harm the disabled, but to free them from a life of dependency.

That, they claim, is why this is a truly “Labour” reform — and not just brutal cuts engineered by Rachel Reeves because she needs billions in savings so as not to breach arbitrary, self-imposed fiscal rules on the assessment date of 26 March.

Is any of this plausible?

The first thing to say is the point of fiscal rules should be to help focus minds in government about how best to share scarce resources between different important resources. They should not set hard deadlines for making decisions with potentially profound consequences for the lives of millions of people.

We’ve already seen an example of the political dangers of trying to rush through changes to personal independence payments (PIP) and the health related elements of universal credit - because one element that was particularly upsetting to Labour MPs has already been dropped, namely a one year freeze on PIP payments.

But as my colleague Anushka Asthana has been exclusively disclosing for the last ten days, this was only one part of the welfare reform package.

The other elements were to restrict entitlement to personal independence payments, while cutting the health-related universal credit payments and recycling those UC savings into an increase in the standard rate of UC.

You can see in this the simple story and perhaps simplistic story about welfare payments to the disabled that the government believes and is trying to tell.

First, that hundreds of thousands of people receive cash to help with their living and mobility costs, but don’t “deserve” it.

Second, that the structure of UC payments provides too great an incentive to disabled people to sign themselves off work to get the health-related benefits top up.

Starmer will doubtless take comfort from the fact that - according to polling by the Good Growth Foundation - 60% believe the system provides too much support to people who don’t want to work and 39% think that it’s too easy for people to get benefits who don’t need them.

But popular belief does not make it true.

And before going further into the nitty gritty, it is worth doing a quick economic reality check.

It is a fact that the proportion of British people in employment has fallen since Covid and, unlike many other rich economies, has not recovered to 2019 levels. But the proportion of British people who are working remains high by international standards.

According to the OECD, in the third quarter of 2023 the UK ranked fifth in the world, with an employment rate of 74.9%, well ahead of the US for example, and behind only Iceland, the Netherlands, Japan and Germany.

Even if it is a laudible ambition to encourage more people into work. The UK’s is not an economy whose failure is that too few people are working.

The grotesque failure of the British economy is hardly a mystery. It is that living standards for those in work have barely increased for more than 15 years and too many of those in work receive too little to pay even for food, energy and other essentials.

Pretty much every competitor country whose employment rate has recovered to pre-covid levels has higher productivity and higher wages than the UK. Which might tell you that Britain’s problem is not that its benefit system is skewiff but that it’s the labour market itself that is broken, that remunerated toil in Britain delivers inadequate incentives.

And by the way, we don’t have a benefit system in the UK that is remotely generous or lavish by international standards. 1/2

[Tom London @TomLondon6]

THE BRAVE journalists and editors at Israeli paper @haaretzcom are doing a far better job of exposing Israeli war crimes than any mainstream media in the UK

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

An entirely mendacious message lay at the heart of this week’s coverage by the BBC of the 80th Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations.

The British state broadcaster asserted throughout the day that the voices of the few remaining survivors of the Nazi extermination programme were still being heard “loud and clear” in western capitals. Those survivors – now in their 80s and 90s – warned that the genocide of a people must “never again” be allowed to take place.

As if to bolster its claim, the BBC showed western leaders – from Britain’s King Charles III, to Germany’s Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron of France – prominently in attendance at the main ceremony at Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death camps, where more than a million Jews, Roma and other stigmatised groups were burned in ovens.

As a counterpoint, the BBC highlighted the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been excluded from the ceremony for ordering the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Steve Rosenberg, the corporation’s Moscow correspondent, underscored the irony that Russia, so visibly absent, was responsible for liberating Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 – the date that eventually came to be marked as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But hanging over the proceedings - and the coverage – was a heavy cloud of unreality. Had those western leaders really heard the message of “never again”? Had media outlets like the BBC?

There was an unwanted ghost at the commemorations. In fact, tens of thousands of ghosts.

Those ghosts were the children shredded by US-supplied bombs; the children who slowly suffocated under the rubble of their destroyed homes; the children whose bodies were left to rot, picked apart by feral dogs, because snipers shot at anyone who tried to retrieve them; the children who starved to death because they were seen as “human animals”, denied all food and water; the homeless babies who froze to death in plunging winter temperatures; and the premature babies left to die in their incubators after soldiers invaded hospitals and cut off the power.

Those ghosts were every bit as present at the ceremony as the mountains of shoes and suitcases – separated forever from their owners – lining the corridors of the Auschwitz museum.

Western leaders were determined to look back at the crimes of the past, but not to look at the crimes of the present – crimes they have been so deeply complicit in perpetrating.

This an extract from my latest article How the West hides its Gaza genocide guilt behind Holocaust Day remembrance. The link to the full article is in the post below ⬇️

[Dischord @Prae54Rae]

This is still one of my favourite posts. A straightforward message that all Scots need to hear. Our future is being stolen by another country, so why put up with it? Our country belongs to us and no one else!

[Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil @ivan_8848]

Bookmark this.

Keep this.

Remember this.

Watch it often.

Memorize it.

Learn it.

Understand it.

Grasp it. Believe it. And never forget it. Ever.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

There is a very simple reason why the UK government refuses to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza.

If they did, they would be admitting their own complicity in one of the greatest crimes of our time.

End all arms sales to Israel, now.

[Tiberius @tiberiusfiles]

Social media is plastered with ‘Lest we forget’ by people who are ignoring a genocide