KernowDamo

Right, so how do you fancy having Israel Lobbyist and Labour fixer Luke Akehurst as your next MP? How do you - if you are still involved with Labour in a local Constituency Labour Party - fancy having him or another member of the Labour National Executive Committee right wing, the sort of people who have barred socialist candidates from standing, rigged and imposed other candidates to represent Labour across the country, now be imposed on you and you will be expected to go out and campaign for them? Well it is apparently happening. After throwing any semblance of democracy out of the window to impose Starmerroid candidates upon various corners of the country, removing the say of local members, they being told to put up or shut or there is the door, but don’t forget to still vote for us at the same time, it seems some select seats have been kept aside for some members of the NEC themselves. Jobs for the boys so to speak, rewards for services rendered, nice safe seats and very much putting party before country when local members have no say and being safe seats, almost guaranteed to be making laws we all have to abide by should Labour win a majority. As authoritarian as they have been within Labour, that looks set to roll out nationwide with Starmer as PM. Right, so when Keir Starmer stood up the other day and called himself a socialist and a progressive many of us I’m sure either laughed at the article or swore at it, because there are Starmer lies and there are Starmer lies and this one was a whopper. Socialists have been purged, and if his stance on Gaza and having a manifesto basically copying the Tories homework is progressive, then we need far more radical change than I ever realised. It is of course a lie, he’s a red Tory providing cover for Israel, who got where is by lying his way to the top and now he wants to get elected by lying some more and it’s because those lies have never been challenged adequately in the media that he has got away with it, but a reckoning lies before him if he gets his way, gets where his ambitions want to take him, because the only place he can go from there is to fall. But in the same speech, he also swore to put country before party. Now many of us have asked well, which country would that be, this one or Israel because I wouldn’t bet money on it being this one and now with news that some of the final imposed candidates on luckless Constituency Labour Party’s are set to be right wing members, Starmer loyalists of the Labour Party NEC, set to be handed safe seats of varying sort or another, soon these people who have been handing down draconian rulings, suspensions and expulsions in the Labour Party, will be gifted a position where should Starmer win the keys to Number 10, they’ll be making laws governing the entire country, the UK being run like Starmer runs Labour now, with an authoritarian hardline rod of iron, the likes of which we may never have seen before. Give Labour and Starmer a majority at your peril. The news of these impositions has come via former Channel 4 reporter Michael Crick’s Tomorrow’s MP’s Twitter account and he made the very salient point that if Starmer is stuffing cronies such as these into the House of Commons, what will it look like when it comes to stuffing the House of Lords with more and how rough will they be – I’m paraphrasing there – so much for abolishing the Lords though eh? Crick has called it the final big selection fix, because he knows exactly how things are being conducted in Starmer’s regime and currently there are 11 safe Labour seats by his reckoning that still need to be filled and in line with that postulation regarding the House of Lords, more are being sought, by soliciting sitting MPs who might be interested in retiring in exchange for a seat in the House of Lords. Making room for even more imposed cronies virtually guaranteed under First Past The Post, to get elected. If you think Starmer would abolish a voting system that is enabling him to rig the future government like this, you’ve got another think coming. So who is in the frame then? Crick has furnished us with a list of names and there are several from Labour’s current iteration of the NEC appearing on it. Let’s start with Luke Akehurst though. Who fancies this guy as an MP. Akehurst is a guy who couldn’t even win selection for the NEC from his own local party in Oxford, he was reliant on right wing support from elsewhere to get where he is, so those who know him best, are the ones you’d likely best take note of. I’ve spoken of Akehurst in numerous videos. He is above all else an Israel lobbyist, He is the Director of We Believe in Israel, a promotional organ for Israel here in the UK, in fact the blurb on the We Believe in Israel website describes him as a Zionist activist and in a recent LabourList article, claimed councillors quitting Labour over Israel and Gaza, as they are in droves around the country, something else would be Labour voters ought take notice of, are misguided and should stay instead. Misguided? He penned that article on the 24th October last year, that was 5 days after the targeting of the Greek Orthodox Church of St Porphyrios, which killed dozens sheltering and was arguably one of the first attacks which had the world sit up and think hang on a minute, something is wrong here and of course in the months since, we’ve now seen so much more happen, so much categorically worse than that church attack which at time, was really shocking. Misguided he says. This guy makes Starmer look like he’s sitting on the fence over Israel. He's also a fixer within Labour, being a director of the right wing Labour To Win faction and Secretary of Labour First – really on the nose when Starmer is trying to tell us it is country first, yet looks set to impose Akehurst, reviled by so many Labour members as he is, in a safe seat somewhere, but unlike others on this Crick list, there’s no indication of where that might be and when Crick asked Akehurst if he was looking for a safe seat, he didn’t deny it. Akehurst is just one NEC name here though. James Asser is currently the Chairman of the NEC and the Deputy Mayor of Newham, a London Borough that has seen a succession of local by election defeats and defections, losing all of the above to the newly formed Newham Independents Group, Newham has been solidly Labour for years, yet in recent months history has been made as Labour lost local council seats to independents in Tahir Mirza and Sophia Naqvi, both formerly Labour themselves, unable to stomach the direction the party has gone in. Now both are standing for parliament, for East Ham and West Ham respectively, and Crick has Asser’s name linked to West Ham right now, despite the incumbent MP, Lyn Brown, still as far as I’m aware, standing for re-election. So is she one being offered a seat in the Lords? Who knows? Another NEC member on Crick’s list is Gurinder Singh Josan, not only an NEC member but another Labour First figure as well, so a mate of Akehurst. He’s a former Sandwell Councillor, a West Midlands patch regarded as a plaything of the Labour right for a long time, one notable example involving Josan was the allegations of bullying a blind party member by him and also having worked with local Tories to bring down a Muslim Labour councillor. Josan is also a board member of HOPE not Hate, supposedly to stand against racism therefore, but has often viewed as one of the perpetrators of false accusations thereof. His name has been attached to the Smethwick constituency, a new seat, having previously been abolished back in 1974, boundary changes are bringing it back. Ironically since this seat is taking in the entirety of the soon to be abolished constituency of Warley, where the incumbent MP, the right wing John Spellar is retiring, ironically Josan might still count as a lurch to the left! Other names Crick has put forward as Labour preferential candidates include Josh Simons, the director of Labour Together, the right wing Labour grouping representing MPs like Wes Streeting and Lisa Nandy, which counts amongst their board the ever pervasive Zionist Labour donor Trevor Chinn, who also financed Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign. He also featured in a video of mine from yesterday sharing a platform with anti Muslim journalist Melanie Phillips, as she went again attacked Muslims within Labour. And another is Gerard Coyne, who these days tends to go by Ged Coyne, presumably to hide from his serial losses in trying to take over the Unite Union. Some real peaches there too. Safe seats for awful people, but very much Starmer’s sort. Party before country, socialist my foot, authoritarianism, well they’ve been part of it haven’t they? A vote for Labour is a vote for the country to be run as this lot have been running Labour. A dictatorship in waiting and frankly as we see Starmer welcome in so many Tories to the party, it’s little wonder he feels so comfortable doing so, when he has surrounded himself by people who are little better. These people are everything Labour shouldn’t be about, everything wrong with Labour these days, and this video recommendation will offer up another example of that, involving our old friend Luke Akehurst, and the appalling comments he’s made against a former Jewish member of Labour and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so the matter of Diane Abbott and will she or won’t she be allowed to run for Labour might have pretty much just been answered if not in so many words. Despite the General Election campaign only having been underway for about a week now, the question of Abbott’s ongoing suspension, seemingly having lasted over a year now without any investigation actually happening, has been at a minimum incredibly disrespectful, but at worst, completely factional, intentional her very safe seat perhaps being lined up for a Starmer loyalist, a right winger from the NEC maybe as per my other video I put out today. But actually as it turns out, the investigation into Diane Abbott, relating to the wrong draft of a reply to a letter sent to the Observer, so completely over the top anyway, since it was an honest mistake she apologised for, was wrapped up 5 months ago. And yet Starmer is telling the media, he’s hoping it gets wrapped up soon. Right, so that was Keir Starmer talking to Nick Ferrari on his LBC show on the 24th May, so 4 days ago at time of writing, telling Ferrari that the matter of Diane Abbott and her suspension would have to be resolved by the 4th June, that she was going through a process, that the matter she had been suspended for had not yet been finally resolved, that the National Executive Committee will decide that in the end, it all has to be wrapped up quickly now. That last bit was the honest thing he said, because the rest was a barefaced lie it seems, I’m sure you’re shocked and surprised to hear that Keir Starmer is lying to the public yet again, but such is the findings of a Newsnight investigation, into this overlong, blatantly factional suspension. Diane Abbott in case you were not aware or had forgotten, wrote to the Observer in reply to an article posted in the Observer by writer Tomiwa Owalade titled ‘Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue, it’s far more complicated.’ However the wrong draft of said letter was sent to the Observer, which ended up coming across as implying that racism affecting non white people was somehow worse than that of racism suffered by some white groups, for example the GRT community, Jewish people. It was sent in error, Abbott held her hands up within hours of it being published as a mistake, apologising for offence caused, as you’d expect from such a statement, given how it could be taken. What she meant, as was clarified by Martin Forde KC, author of the Forde Report explained that he clearly understood what Diane Abbott meant, and that was that the racism suffered by non whites is as a result of their particular protected characteristic being very much more obvious as well as completely irrational and he’s right this really ought to be obvious to anyone. Starmer had Abbott suspended in a heartbeat, almost as if he couldn’t believe his luck, Abbott being one of his most vocal critics across social media, showing far more spine in challenging Starmer’s authoritarianism than anyone else seems prepared to. Abbott has as far as we the public have been aware, been suspended ever since. Claims an investigation was ongoing persist and indeed Starmer has just there to Nick Ferrari repeated that himself. Except it seems it isn’t true and it is a BBC Newsnight investigation that appears to have exposed Starmer’s lies in no uncertain terms as Newsnight presenter Victoria Derbyshire has tweeted out this morning: ‘NEW: I can reveal Labour’s investigation into suspended MP Diane Abbott’s racism comments finished 5 months ago A source says she was given a ‘formal warning’ in Dec ‘23 Ms Abbott was required to do an online ‘anti semitism course’ - which she did in Feb Yet source says she still hasn’t been told if she can stand as a Labour candidate at election I understand veteran MP is ‘angry, depressed & worn out’ by way she feels she’s been treated by Labour. Diane Abbott was suspended as a Labour MP 13 months ago after writing in The Observer that Jewish, Irish & traveller people undoubtedly experienced prejudice but that they were not subject to racism ‘all their lives’. She apologised at the time. The Labour leader condemned her remarks as anti-Semitic.’ Diane Abbott’s case was presided over and decided upon by the Labour National Executive Committee last December, so Keir Starmer is bare faced liar. They reviewed Diane Abbott’s case, what she said, her actions to that were measured up – an immediate apology and retraction - and their action was to recommend that Abbott complete an Antisemitism awareness course, which she did in February. That should have been an end to it. If that was the Labour NEC’s recommendation and she has completed that action, then restoration of the Labour whip should have already happened and for all we know it did, but with Keir Starmer now lying about the truth of this matter and knowing how he abused his own executive power to keep Jeremy Corbyn suspended despite being cleared of any antisemitic wrongdoing by the Labour NEC himself, is it again the case that Keir Starmer is the one keeping Abbott suspended? He is the one lying about it after all, why are you lying about it Keith if this doesn’t have a ring of truth to it? This also casts new light on an allegation made by the Labour right’s favourite go to hack Lee Harpin back in March, so after the NEC had ruled on her suspension and after she had completed the antisemitism awareness course, that she could have the whip back if she agreed to stand down at the next election, Harpin putting this out in a now apparently deleted tweet that: ‘My understanding of the Diane Abbott situation is a compromise deal could be reached whereby she has the whip restored at some point, while she also rules out standing again in Hackney at the election. No secret that at least 4 people already seeking to become candidate in that seat.’ A lovely safe seat that some Starmer shill could take, but Abbott has no intention of stepping down for Starmer, else she would have had the whip back if what Harpin said here was true, which is admittedly always a stretch in my view. It evaded him it seems that Abbott had already had her case heard and done as instructed. The whip should be hers again and it is a question now as to why this isn’t the case, it is also for the NEC to decide who can be candidates in the upcoming General Election, yet if Starmer is abusing executive power to keep Abbott suspended himself, something else he would be lying about therefore, they of course cannot do that. This is all on Keir Starmer it seems and Diane Abbott is fully aware of it, having tweeted out following Starmer repeating the same things he said on LBC to Radio 4 interview: ‘Just heard Keir Starmer on BBC Radio 4claiming that the decision to let [me] back into Labour has “nothing to do with him.” It has EVERYTHING to do with him.’ She is on the face of it absolutely right and it wasn’t the only gem of a statement to come from Starmer in that Radio 4 interview either as he said on the Today programme: ‘“It’s not a question of what I want... the days when the leader of the Labour Party rolls up his or her sleeves and gets involved in disciplinary cases are well and truly over.”’ Yet here he is, very much it appears to be doing just that and looks to have been caught out doing it. Keir Starmer currently has a personal rating amongst ethnically diverse communities, according to a recent poll by Ipsos Mori of minus 31 and here he is, apparently taking it upon himself and lying about it, trying to get rid of Britain’s first black female MP, trying it seems to force her out of parliament for no other reason it appears than petty factionalism. That score deserves to fall through the floor as news of this stunt he appears to be pulling spreads and if it truly looks set to blow up in his face, expect someone else to take the blame and carry the can for it, probably one of his whips, he doesn’t seem to ever make mistakes you see, always someone else’s fault. The deadline for Labour to appoint their candidate for Hackney North & Stoke Newington, Diane Abbott’s seat is the 4th June. That’s a deadline for Diane too. She either stands as an Independent, going down the same road as Jeremy Corbyn has, or be forced into retirement by Starmer, because at this point it would be by Starmer, he is after all, the only reason it seems now based on this bombshell, that she hasn’t had the whip back already. Starmer has claimed this case has had nothing to do with him. It seems it has had everything to do with him, him alone and nobody else, the NEC having done it’s job, this is all on Starmer and he must carry the can for it, must do the right thing by Diane Abbott, must show Labour truly is a democracy, because if this is not rectified, then Labour is clearly a dictatorship now and do we therefore really want someone like Keir Starmer to run the country, acting like this in his own party, treating the whole country like this if given the chance? Meanwhile if you want to learn more about the carrot being dangled before Diane Abbott over whip restoration from back in March, a particularly gnarly, wrinkly old carrot, bit limp, as it was, the full details of what amounts to blackmail can be found on this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so attacks by settlers on convoys of aid heading for Gaza are often posted stories on social media, from people laying down in the path of trucks, to blockading the entry points, slashing the tyres of the trucks and then destroying the aid they are carrying, a level of depravity that utterly disgusts us as we in turn on social media also see the images of those caught up in a man made famine, created by the Israeli state on the people of Gaza, mostly right now holed up in Rafah. As much as workarounds are trying to be attempted, with Israel refusing to police their citizens and stop their life threatening interference, the aid is still not getting in and those determined to block its path to people in desperate need too often seem to be in the right place at the right time to cause maximum obstruction and now it’s been exposed that there is a very good reason for that – the Israeli Security Forces are tipping them off. Right, so amongst all the scenes of devastation and desperate need we see in places like Rafah and Jabalia, where Israeli forces are still relentlessly pursuing what Benjamin Netanyahu still risibly refers to as Total Victory, as much as those scenes upset us, and anger us, anger directed both at the Israeli regime and out own government who incessantly support this atrocity, I would argue that what makes me just as angry, even more angry perhaps since it gets far less media attention are the scenes of Israeli settlers, I suppose even that is contradictory, settlers at any rate, so few of them actually tend to be Israeli by birth after all, they’re just as likely to be from Brooklyn, or Bethnal Green than from Israel itself. But such is the right to resettlement law Israel has, that the scenes of these people wherever they are from, these settlers, living on land that isn’t theirs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories so often, but Israel itself as well, though you can argue under which borders the differentiation lies, but settlers interfering with aid convoys intended for Gaza right now. This has been carrying on for almost as long as the genocide has. Stopping the aid, the excuse being the food, the supplies, they are all going to go to Hamas, when there are literal aid agencies, such as UNRWA, establishing where the aid is going, ensuring it is getting to those who need it. But of course UNRWA itself isn’t trusted by Israel, they’ve already attempted to bring about the agencies collapse by lying about Hamas ties the agency has, claiming they had proof that never saw the light of day and slowly but surely funding to them has been resumed, yet still we see these scenes of settlers blocking trucks, ensuring the aid is hindered that it cannot get through and now with Israel having seized control of the Rafah Border Crossing and closing it, illegally and in violation of peace accords it has with Egypt in so doing, the Camp David Accords, aid is more hindered than ever, directly so by the Israeli state in that case. Therefore to find out that Israeli security forces, the IDF, Shin Bet and whoever else might be implicated, have been tipping off the settler aid attackers as to when aid is due to be allowed through certain crossings, is probably going to surprise nobody, but of course this puts Israel blatantly in violation of the International Court of justice rulings which were laid down back in February that aid must be allowed in and that has been reinforced in additional rulings in March and this month, as Israel continues its assault on Gaza and particularly right now Rafah, where most of the population of Gaza remain trapped. Now the settlers that are chiefly responsible for the attacks on aid convoys are an organisation calling themselves Tzav 9, which formed via Facebook, these are settlers living in the Occupied West Bank, so on land they have no business occupying themselves, taken from Palestinians, around 400 of them now. These are Israelis – or settlers from elsewhere calling themselves such - incensed by the idea that aid should get into Gaza, that starving the population of much needed, food, medicine and other essential supplies was entirely justifiable, in light of the Hamas attack on October 7th. 8 months later, what they are doing is widely viewed as entirely disproportionate and genocidal, the reaction so far over the top, that over 100,000 Gazans, are dead missing or injured, mostly women and children and yet this lot continue to blockade aid and now we find out that the IDF and others have been helping them to co-ordinate their efforts to cause the maximum obstruction and maximise the famine being inflicted on innocent people. The vast majority of people in Gaza are not Hamas, over half the population are under 18, it’s a war on kids, has been from the start, Netanyahu’s Total Victory that he seeks is a war being waged on children. But co-ordinating with the IDF, the likes of Tsav 9 can put up roadblocks on the right roads ahead of the trucks coming and have time to get as many bodies as possible in the way to stop the trucks passing through. Their spokesperson to much of the media has been a French-Israeli called Rachel Toutitou and in coverage from the Guardian – shock horror, one of our papers has actually picked up this story, though it appears to have been deleted now, accessible only in other publications that have covered their story. Nevertheless, here’s an excerpt from Yeni Safak, a Muslim Turkish newspaper, referring to the Guardian article and the justification made by Tsav 9 and an admission that the IDF are feeding this group information: ‘The settlers claim the aid is diverted to Hamas, but the allegations have been rejected by relief agencies. "Yes, some of our intel comes from individual members of Israeli forces," Rachel Touitou, a spokesperson for the Tzav 9 group involved in attacks against aid trucks, told The Guardian. Distancing from recent arson attacks on aid trucks, she admitted that the group blocks the aid trucks in order to stop supplies reaching Hamas. The newspaper also spoke to Palestinian truck drivers carrying the aid to Gaza who described the attacks as "barbaric scenes." “There is full cooperation between the settlers and the army. We are shocked and surprised that the army did not provide us with any kind of protection. Even though they were present and watching what was happening. The army was at the service of the settlers,” said Yazid al-Zoubi, 26, a Palestinian lorry driver who was attacked by the protesters last week at Tarqumiya checkpoint.’ That attack last week was aid coming from Jordan incidentally, passing through the West Bank, which I covered in another video. Nevertheless, in spite of the incapacitation of the Rafah Border Crossing thanks to Israel, there is another option which has now been opened by Egypt the crossing at Kerem Shalom, which is situated at the point where the borders of Gaza, Israel and Egypt all meet, a three-way crossing, with 200 aid trucks and four fuel trucks due to enter via this way tomorrow. It remains to be seen if the settlers appear once again, to try and stop it, but every time they do, it is one more example, one more charge in the casebook building up against Israel, that not only have they been failing to deal with their settlers blocking aid that has been legally mandated to enter, but that they are actually accessory to these actions, aiding and abetting it as seems to be the case. To my mind this is butting heads against the wall, this is Genocide Joe trying to look like he’s doing something, since he had the one on one with Egypt’s Prime Minister Sisi to get this other crossing opened, whilst continuing to not hold Israel to account, instead set on attacking the ICC in preference, in response to the Chief Prosecutor there, Karim Khan, requesting arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant, therefore demonstrating that even now, even in light of this, he is on the side of Israel still and not their victims and therefore still there is insufficient pressure to bring Israel to heel and end this mess. For their part the ICC is standing their ground, perhaps there are more arrest warrants to come? Find out about that, in this video recommendation here for you to watch next if you are so inclined and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so for months the Labour Party has been dogged with examples of the Hierarchy of Racism that was exposed as pervading the party under Keir Starmer, as they prioritised fighting accusations of antisemitism over all other forms of racism, when of course in any sane world, such appalling conduct would be treated equally, whoever was the target. Anti-Jew racism has been a defining issue under Starmer for the Labour Party, the unequivocal Zionist dealing with that form of racism far and away above all other forms. You would imagine, during a General Election campaign therefore, that he would be going above and beyond to try and placate voters who feel aggrieved by this, to try and appear more even handed in his approach to dealing with racism, so many Muslim voters having left the Party, not just over the Party’s appalling views on the matter of Israel and Gaza, which will be a voting issue for many voters of all faiths across the country, but in the case of Muslim voters particularly, the issue of Islamophobia has been treated as far less important than antisemitism. But no, that doesn’t appear to be Starmer’s intention and an utterly shocking example of the Hierarchy of Racism in action has literally come up within days of the election starting, this is utterly appalling and the media have totally ignored it, yet it really does nail down how pervasive racism remains under Keir Starmer and who it is aimed at and who by. Right, so that was a short excerpt from a much longer video, which can be seen on YouTube, it’s from the Jewish Chronicle YouTube channel, which hosted a panel of Labour figures, Israel supporting Labour figures, plus the right wing Israeli resident and in according to some people ‘journalist’ Melanie Phillips, who is arguably better known for her extreme anti Muslim views, there to discuss the future for British Jews of a potential Labour government led by Zionist without qualification, Keir Starmer. The JC’s Jake Wallis Simons hosted, and sat alongside Labour Friend of Israel and former Labour MP Louise Ellman, the Jewish Labour Movement chair, Mike Katz and Josh Simons, the director of Labour Together, the right wing Labour grouping representing MPs like Wes Streeting and Lisa Nandy, which counts amongst his board the ever pervasive Zionist Labour donor Trevor Chinn, who also financed Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign. The JC might regard this panel as representative of Labour Party Jewry, but it’s a solidly right wing panel. Nevertheless, all three of these Labour figures have questions to answer following that diatribe, given what Melanie Phillips just came out with. This event took place mere days ago, following the announcement of the General Election and here you have the director of a group of right wing Labour MPs, the chair of the group in charge of dealing with Labour antisemitism, who spends most of his time seemingly accusing other people of being racist on social media and the former chair of LFI and another right wing former Labour MP, sitting alongside Melanie Phillips to begin with, but continuing to do so, without batting an eyelid as she said what she said. It began with an assertion many of us would agree with, that people want Keir Starmer gone, he is Tory lite, he offers little by way of change because he doesn’t think he has to and besides which, who trusts him to keep his word after all, but it rapidly deteriorated from there. Phillips claimed that Starmer wants to make Labour a moral party, which means it must have no issue with anti Jewish sentiment, with antisemitism and of course there is a reason the JC was hosting such an event in my view and it was to yet again put antisemitism on the table, keep the scam going of false accusation and equate antisemitism with anti Zionism. But Phillips wasn’t finished there. She said Starmer had to reconcile that with the fact he has a lot of Muslim constituents, MPs and members of the party and accused many of them as being anti Jew and anti Israel. Blatant Islamophobia therefore. Where’s the proof? And where was the reaction from the other panellists? Nothing. Sat there po-faced. Labour’s hierarchy of racism happening before your eyes folks, right there. If the shoe was on the other foot and she accused Jewish people of being amoral and racist, they would have been on their feet shouting at her, but Muslims? Nothing. Is it any wonder as a demographic they are deserting Labour in their droves, when representatives of the party, people who put themselves forward as arbiters of morality and equality, by their own inaction expose themselves for lacking an interest in either, merely pushing their own agenda and that certainly isn’t in the interest of Jewish people either I would suggest, since so many under Starmer have been purged, so many have been revolted, so many are campaigning and indeed standing against him in no small part because of this. Phillips was cut off from continuing her diatribe by Jake Wallis Simons, after she implied it was Muslims who are going to bring down Starmer, because there are 4 milli0on of them in the country versus 280,000 identified Jews – her figures, I haven’t checked them, because frankly it isn’t the point – it’s a dog whistle and it was a disgrace and Phillips is a disgrace every time she gets platformed largely on the BBC, despite accusations and not without merit in my opinion as a conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe, claiming in a Jewish Chronicle piece that she wrote that Islamophobia is a bogus term that provides cover for antisemites. She is so far right, she was quoted multiple times by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik in his insane manifesto. These Labour figures chose to appear alongside her, as they do on more mainstream shows, which legitimises her and her views. I would be damned if I’d appear on a panel along with her, yet these leading right wing figures had no problem with that, nor it seems with trhe racism she just espoused as the video clip moved on to Jewish Labour Movement chair Mike Katz next to respond and although he claims to have multiple things he would have liked to have said to her, he chose one and that was not to defend Muslim members, to assure them that Islamophobia is real and the Labour Party does take it seriously, he instead opted to jump in and defend Keir Starmer, saying it was for the birds that he was somehow going to be deposed by some kind of left cabal. She didn’t actually bring up left versus right, she brought up British Jewry versus British Muslims. He didn’t even acknowledge the Islamophobia there in what she said. Phillips in another part of the video decided to also go through a number of Labour figures who had criticised Israel for what they are doing in Gaza and have been over the last seven months, attacking Kate Osamor, Richard Burgon, John McDonnell – a theme of attacking SCG left wing Labour MPs there funnily enough, but also Sadiq Khan, Richard Parker the new West Midlands Mayor all for the crime of criticising Israel, but then she apparently lives there these days, despite being London born, but then she also claimed to be one of those Jews too afraid to walk on the streets of London now when she sees Palestinian flags, as she claims it wants her gone. She got a round of applause for that. Where that clip I showed ended, where Jake Wallis Simons jumped in and brought up quite a lot of political leaders being deposed, Katz took that as an opportunity then, to attack Jeremy Corbyn, calling him wholly inadequate. You know what Mikey, do you know what I find wholly inadequate? Your response to Melanie Phillips being Islamophobic. More interested in attacking the Labour leader of four years ago now is just pathetic, and this is the guy Starmer put in charge of dealing with antisemitism. Its no wonder the Forde Report deemed his organisation’s ability to do so inadequate. All I can gather from this is that Labour to this day, those in charge are more interested in remaining in charge than anything else, including dealing with societal issues like racism in an even handed manner, when they obsess over just one kind of it, prioritise it, have been criticised relentlessly to change their ways, to dismiss other forms of racism by putting antisemitism first, when it only became such a massive issue for Labour when right wingers chose to use it as a blunt instrument to clobber a left wing leader the establishment didn’t want and rubber stamp the, I would hope becoming more obvious fact, that Labour is an obstacle to change, not a representation of it. This panel utterly disgraced themselves not just by sitting with Melanie Phillips, but by failing to hold her horrendous views to account. THAT is how Keir Starmer and his Labour Party purport to have eradicated antisemitism, but at what cost with regards to other forms of racism? THAT it seems is what we can expect from a future Labour government. If Jeremy Corbyn is still living in the heads of some in Labour though, I’m sure the fact he’s standing as an independent now is driving them mad! However given their candidate for Corbyn’s seat is a millionaire private health CEO, the sheer level of how out of touch Starmer’s Labour is, is practically screaming in our faces! Find out all about Corbyn’s pitch and his wealthy rival in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so both the Tories and Labour have decided to target young voters, but whereas Sunak seems intent on driving away what few of them might support him in a bid to woo older voters instead, pitching young against old, Keir Starmer prefers his old established trick of seemingly choosing to lie to them and act like he’s offering young people something, opting to put a big fat sweetener on the table for some would be voters, pitching an idea that has proven popular amongst teen voters or would be voters for a very long time. The problem Starmer has though, is that this particular pitch for the youth vote is already being exposed as a cynical ploy and a promise to ditch later like so many others, because as much as he’s promising something lovely with one hand, he’s already taken something away with the other and is arguably about to make that particular broken promise a whole lot worse. Right, so Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have in recent days, early days of the election campaign, outlined some of their intentions as far as young people and young voters go and their opposing approaches certainly exposes their party attitudes towards the youth vote and despite their policies and how they will run the country being virtually identical, they have very different attitudes towards young voters and that clearly stems from where the youth vote has gone in recent years. Very few people below the age of 40, never mind the teen voters or young adult voters that are the focus of this video, look towards the Tories anymore, that’s been a trend for a long time now, removing their ability to study in Europe was a smack in the teeth, hiking their tuition fees already has been another, so it simply isn’t a demographic that the Tories appeal to, therefore they’ll keep on punching down on them it seems. In fact according to YouGov, the Tories are no longer the most popular party amongst anyone below the age of 70 and if that isn’t indicative of a party that is dying out, I don’t know what is. However it does reflect Sunak’s policy move towards young people, and that is a pitch to reintroduce National Service. The last people who actually did any of that, literally are over 70, the last conscripts, were those born before the 1st October 1939, so these would be people aged 85, or will turn that this year, or over. The idea of today’s youth, in fact anyone under the age of 40 for the most part, being proud to serve in the armed forces by force, in an attempt to foster a sense of national pride, when this country is led by politicians acting like global pariahs and operating in the interests of the rich and not ordinary working class people is farcical. The very reason young people don’t want to vote for you, is because you disgust them and everything you stand for disgusts them and they certainly I would imagine – I certainly would feel like this – they have no intention of risking their lives for rich people, who have blighted the lives of them and their families. Conscientious objection would I should think, be rife and I’d certainly rather go to prison than see any of my kids called up for this sick joke. It is at the end of the day though, a headline grabbing gimmick, because just like the General Election being called itself, The Tory Party, had no idea Sunak was going to announce this. It would also cost and estimated £2.5bn and that is totally uncosted. Sunak is so desperate right now, to not be the Prime Minister that oversees the death of the Tory Party in all but name, he will promise literally anything, in a bid to attract voters, and this one is pathetic, but also shows the youth vote is not one he knows he can win, so better to just target them to win the votes of older people instead. It would be churlish to not point out the fact that for years, in the name of cuts and austerity, the Tories have slashed our armed forces troop numbers and now seem intent on using our kids, to fill the gaps. Over 14 years of Tory misrule, our armed forces have been cut by 27%, from 100,000 to 73,000 soldiers, to the point Sir Patrick Sanders, the Chief of the General Staff has said we might need a citizen army, if for example as these people keep saying, Putin invades, but to which Sunak responded as being an unhelpful intervention, yet now, it’s conscription making an appearance in the Tory manifesto. Free soldiers in the form of our kids making up for Tory cuts. Over my dead body. Keir Starmer’s pitch to the young is nothing to write home about either though, because on the face of it, he’s lying again to get what he wants, before probably breaking his word once more later on. It is his defining characteristic after all, his word is worthless: He is now making the pitch to reduce the voting age from 18 to 16 on the basis that 16 year olds can go out to work, they can pay tax, therefore they should be able to vote. Sounds great on paper, would cost nothing more to implement and sure the argument is that we’re in a General Election campaign now, new announcements come at such time, so perhaps this is something Labour have been planning for a while, unlike Sunak’s announcement, which has shocked everyone apparently within his party. However, there are issues here. First and foremost is the issue of whether you can believe anything Starmer says. Even if it ends up written in the manifesto, be wary of how such things get worded. He has weaseled out of previous pledges on national television down to how things are phrased, for example his pledge to renationalise water, when he rowed back on that and was picked up on it, he disputed the allegation, denied it, because the pledge didn’t actually say renationalise, it said take back into public ownership and he sat there and argued the two were different things. Equally, the manifesto will likely not mean anything anyway, certainly no more than Starmer’s word, because as always happens, ways and means and circumstances after they get elected will mean they can no longer deliver. It always happens, it certainly will with Starmer. But underlining that in this pitch to woo young voters, is that he might give the vote to 16 year olds, but he might also be about to not only no longer axe turion fees – another broken pledge, but might be about to do a Nick Clegg and hike them again as well: Bridget Phillipson will be Starmer’s Education Secretary as things stand was asked on BBC Question Time this week if Labour would rule out tuition fee hikes, now that they have ruled out scrapping them and she couldn’t do so. Bearing in mind this is a party that has already ruled out a wealth tax on millionaires and billionaires to make up spending shortfalls, here are Labour now threatening to lump even more debt on the shoulders of our kids as one of their chosen alternatives. Political choice. She said on Question Time this was a really unpalatable choice, she didn’t want to do that, but wouldn’t rule out doing it. Rachel Reeves fiscal rules for our kids, no wonder she’s being referred to this week not so much as a Red Tory, which we know she absolutely hates, but is being directly compared to Margaret Thatcher now, in the choices she looks set to make if Labour gain a majority. So young people have a choice between the main two parties, between one that wants to apparently conscript them into the army and another that will give future younger voters the vote earlier than they might have done, but for those that can vote this time around, they are looking at tuition fee hikes in all likelihood and yet Labour remains the favoured party, according to that same YouGov poll amongst young voters and actually right now, it is for all voters under the age of 70. However, there has been a shift in this same poll, regarding voters under 40 and although Labour remain the most popular party amongst this age group, where previously the Lib Dems enjoyed a significant youth vote, they’ve frankly never won it back after THEY hiked tuition fees when they went into coalition with the Tories in 2010. What has happened is the Green Party have now filled that niche. In all age groups under 40, the Greens now occupy second place to Labour. Now you might look at that and think well they’re well behind, I would remind you that polls show a trend more than actual figures that are gospel, they are always estimates based on their own methodologies and these vary from one pollster to another, so this indicates a shift to one extent or another, made all the more remarkable, by the fact the Greens get barely any media attention, too much focused on Reform UK, even now, who barely even made a dent at the local elections, look set on losing their one MP who was a defector anyway, and given it was Lee Anderson, they can have him and frankly that is testament to the Greens use of social media and that their policies are online all the time, via their website, so nobody needs to wait until manifestos come out to see what they stand for. For example, where scrapping tuition fees goes, here’s what current policy, decided by Green Party members as all policy is, says: ‘Abolish fees in Further Education and all courses in FE would be provided for free at the point of use. Write off all outstanding debt and resulting interest related to 24+ advanced learning loans provided by the student loans company to fund tuition for level 3 and 4 courses. Increase the funding per student in Further Education to match that in schools. Initiate a swift transition from the current start stop funding arrangements to a long term funding process for Further Education provision over a 10 year period. Place all funding bodies back under the democratic control of local authorities/regional bodies. As part of the transition to the Universal Basic Income, reintroduce an Education Maintenance Allowance at a level which would be effective in supporting disadvantaged students, and through a system which was clear and transparent, and not open to inconsistency in application. Protect and improve the current support provision for disabled students.’ How this would be paid for, which no doubt many will be thinking, will be by increasing the proportion of public expenditure given over to education. It will simply be a bigger priority, than current parties regard it as. Other moves will be to integrate grammar schools, academies and free schools into the national system and block any more being created, ending this two tier system of education the Tories have created. They will also scrap the charitable status for private schools as well as levy VAT and Corporation Tax on them. There are frankly just better offers for young people than the snake oil being sold by Sunak and Starmer and I hope more come to realise that, as well as other demographics, who will be able to see where their taxes could and should be better spent than what they are now. Keir Starmer’s lies meanwhile are becoming a focus of attacks on Labour in this election, and frankly it isn’t before time he was made to answer for these. With so many to his name, everyone should be asking themselves why should I trust this man? As this video delves into as a recommended next watch, and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so both the Tories and Labour have decided to target young voters, but whereas Sunak seems intent on driving away what few of them might support him in a bid to woo older voters instead, pitching young against old, Keir Starmer prefers his old established trick of seemingly choosing to lie to them and act like he’s offering young people something, opting to put a big fat sweetener on the table for some would be voters, pitching an idea that has proven popular amongst teen voters or would be voters for a very long time. The problem Starmer has though, is that this particular pitch for the youth vote is already being exposed as a cynical ploy and a promise to ditch later like so many others, because as much as he’s promising something lovely with one hand, he’s already taken something away with the other and is arguably about to make that particular broken promise a whole lot worse. Right, so Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have in recent days, early days of the election campaign, outlined some of their intentions as far as young people and young voters go and their opposing approaches certainly exposes their party attitudes towards the youth vote and despite their policies and how they will run the country being virtually identical, they have very different attitudes towards young voters and that clearly stems from where the youth vote has gone in recent years. Very few people below the age of 40, never mind the teen voters or young adult voters that are the focus of this video, look towards the Tories anymore, that’s been a trend for a long time now, removing their ability to study in Europe was a smack in the teeth, hiking their tuition fees already has been another, so it simply isn’t a demographic that the Tories appeal to, therefore they’ll keep on punching down on them it seems. In fact according to YouGov, the Tories are no longer the most popular party amongst anyone below the age of 70 and if that isn’t indicative of a party that is dying out, I don’t know what is. However it does reflect Sunak’s policy move towards young people, and that is a pitch to reintroduce National Service. The last people who actually did any of that, literally are over 70, the last conscripts, were those born before the 1st October 1939, so these would be people aged 85, or will turn that this year, or over. The idea of today’s youth, in fact anyone under the age of 40 for the most part, being proud to serve in the armed forces by force, in an attempt to foster a sense of national pride, when this country is led by politicians acting like global pariahs and operating in the interests of the rich and not ordinary working class people is farcical. The very reason young people don’t want to vote for you, is because you disgust them and everything you stand for disgusts them and they certainly I would imagine – I certainly would feel like this – they have no intention of risking their lives for rich people, who have blighted the lives of them and their families. Conscientious objection would I should think, be rife and I’d certainly rather go to prison than see any of my kids called up for this sick joke. It is at the end of the day though, a headline grabbing gimmick, because just like the General Election being called itself, The Tory Party, had no idea Sunak was going to announce this. It would also cost and estimated £2.5bn and that is totally uncosted. Sunak is so desperate right now, to not be the Prime Minister that oversees the death of the Tory Party in all but name, he will promise literally anything, in a bid to attract voters, and this one is pathetic, but also shows the youth vote is not one he knows he can win, so better to just target them to win the votes of older people instead. It would be churlish to not point out the fact that for years, in the name of cuts and austerity, the Tories have slashed our armed forces troop numbers and now seem intent on using our kids, to fill the gaps. Over 14 years of Tory misrule, our armed forces have been cut by 27%, from 100,000 to 73,000 soldiers, to the point Sir Patrick Sanders, the Chief of the General Staff has said we might need a citizen army, if for example as these people keep saying, Putin invades, but to which Sunak responded as being an unhelpful intervention, yet now, it’s conscription making an appearance in the Tory manifesto. Free soldiers in the form of our kids making up for Tory cuts. Over my dead body. Keir Starmer’s pitch to the young is nothing to write home about either though, because on the face of it, he’s lying again to get what he wants, before probably breaking his word once more later on. It is his defining characteristic after all, his word is worthless: He is now making the pitch to reduce the voting age from 18 to 16 on the basis that 16 year olds can go out to work, they can pay tax, therefore they should be able to vote. Sounds great on paper, would cost nothing more to implement and sure the argument is that we’re in a General Election campaign now, new announcements come at such time, so perhaps this is something Labour have been planning for a while, unlike Sunak’s announcement, which has shocked everyone apparently within his party. However, there are issues here. First and foremost is the issue of whether you can believe anything Starmer says. Even if it ends up written in the manifesto, be wary of how such things get worded. He has weaseled out of previous pledges on national television down to how things are phrased, for example his pledge to renationalise water, when he rowed back on that and was picked up on it, he disputed the allegation, denied it, because the pledge didn’t actually say renationalise, it said take back into public ownership and he sat there and argued the two were different things. Equally, the manifesto will likely not mean anything anyway, certainly no more than Starmer’s word, because as always happens, ways and means and circumstances after they get elected will mean they can no longer deliver. It always happens, it certainly will with Starmer. But underlining that in this pitch to woo young voters, is that he might give the vote to 16 year olds, but he might also be about to not only no longer axe turion fees – another broken pledge, but might be about to do a Nick Clegg and hike them again as well: Bridget Phillipson will be Starmer’s Education Secretary as things stand was asked on BBC Question Time this week if Labour would rule out tuition fee hikes, now that they have ruled out scrapping them and she couldn’t do so. Bearing in mind this is a party that has already ruled out a wealth tax on millionaires and billionaires to make up spending shortfalls, here are Labour now threatening to lump even more debt on the shoulders of our kids as one of their chosen alternatives. Political choice. She said on Question Time this was a really unpalatable choice, she didn’t want to do that, but wouldn’t rule out doing it. Rachel Reeves fiscal rules for our kids, no wonder she’s being referred to this week not so much as a Red Tory, which we know she absolutely hates, but is being directly compared to Margaret Thatcher now, in the choices she looks set to make if Labour gain a majority. So young people have a choice between the main two parties, between one that wants to apparently conscript them into the army and another that will give future younger voters the vote earlier than they might have done, but for those that can vote this time around, they are looking at tuition fee hikes in all likelihood and yet Labour remains the favoured party, according to that same YouGov poll amongst young voters and actually right now, it is for all voters under the age of 70. However, there has been a shift in this same poll, regarding voters under 40 and although Labour remain the most popular party amongst this age group, where previously the Lib Dems enjoyed a significant youth vote, they’ve frankly never won it back after THEY hiked tuition fees when they went into coalition with the Tories in 2010. What has happened is the Green Party have now filled that niche. In all age groups under 40, the Greens now occupy second place to Labour. Now you might look at that and think well they’re well behind, I would remind you that polls show a trend more than actual figures that are gospel, they are always estimates based on their own methodologies and these vary from one pollster to another, so this indicates a shift to one extent or another, made all the more remarkable, by the fact the Greens get barely any media attention, too much focused on Reform UK, even now, who barely even made a dent at the local elections, look set on losing their one MP who was a defector anyway, and given it was Lee Anderson, they can have him and frankly that is testament to the Greens use of social media and that their policies are online all the time, via their website, so nobody needs to wait until manifestos come out to see what they stand for. For example, where scrapping tuition fees goes, here’s what current policy, decided by Green Party members as all policy is, says: ‘Abolish fees in Further Education and all courses in FE would be provided for free at the point of use. Write off all outstanding debt and resulting interest related to 24+ advanced learning loans provided by the student loans company to fund tuition for level 3 and 4 courses. Increase the funding per student in Further Education to match that in schools. Initiate a swift transition from the current start stop funding arrangements to a long term funding process for Further Education provision over a 10 year period. Place all funding bodies back under the democratic control of local authorities/regional bodies. As part of the transition to the Universal Basic Income, reintroduce an Education Maintenance Allowance at a level which would be effective in supporting disadvantaged students, and through a system which was clear and transparent, and not open to inconsistency in application. Protect and improve the current support provision for disabled students.’ How this would be paid for, which no doubt many will be thinking, will be by increasing the proportion of public expenditure given over to education. It will simply be a bigger priority, than current parties regard it as. Other moves will be to integrate grammar schools, academies and free schools into the national system and block any more being created, ending this two tier system of education the Tories have created. They will also scrap the charitable status for private schools as well as levy VAT and Corporation Tax on them. There are frankly just better offers for young people than the snake oil being sold by Sunak and Starmer and I hope more come to realise that, as well as other demographics, who will be able to see where their taxes could and should be better spent than what they are now. Keir Starmer’s lies meanwhile are becoming a focus of attacks on Labour in this election, and frankly it isn’t before time he was made to answer for these. With so many to his name, everyone should be asking themselves why should I trust this man? As this video delves into as a recommended next watch, and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so finally the absolute boy that is Jeremy Corbyn has put not just Islington North, but the entire nation out of it’s misery at last by officially announcing that he is going to stand as an independent candidate to defend his seat. Corbyn has been the MP for Islington North since 1983, he’s not the retirement type, he’s consistently delivered locally as an excellent constituency MP and enjoys a level of popularity there as a politician, that seems a completely alien concept to most of us, who have MPs who are utterly self serving and useless. Little wonder therefore that he has consistently enjoyed massive majorities won for the Labour Party, a party that no longer wants him on purely factional terms, and equally no longer wants anyone like him either, choosing to impose their candidate for Islington North upon the local Labour Party, yet still expecting those members to campaign for a candidate, they neither know or want necessarily. Therefore it should come as little surprise that a Corbyn win is predicted, another seat Starmer is throwing away therefore, for no other reason than a personal vendetta against he left, the very people he pretended to be like, to get where he is today, for the sake of the Red Tories retaining control of the party. Is that really more important to them than winning power, because the treatment of Corbyn, would certainly imply that. Right, so it is official as of this morning, Jeremy Corbyn has released a video announcing his intention to stand as an Independent candidate for Islington North, having up until this point remained a Labour Party member, just arbitrarily excluded from the parliamentary party, forbidden from sitting as a Labour MP. It was churlish, childish nonsense and all on Keir Starmer because Corbyn was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Labour National Executive Committee for his comments relating to the findings of the EHRC investigation into Labour over antisemitism allegations, and was cleared, because they were always nonsense, always a scam and if the right wing panel had found otherwise, given the EHRC defended Corbyn’s right to be critical of it, it would likely I imagine have landed the party in court. None of this was good enough for Starmer, the man he once referred to as his friend – dishonestly of course - almost immediately had the whip withdrawn again by Starmer, in an abuse of his executive powers and so it has remained the case ever since. Still remaining a Labour member however, he could choose to put himself forward to stand as the Labour candidate once more, something else Starmer took action to avoid, by bringing a motion to the Labour Party NEC and seconded by Birmingham Ladywood Labour MP Shabana Mahmood, also somewhat perversely given what she did, the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, to single out Corbyn as the only Labour member in the country, barred from standing as an MP. They were literally making this up as they went along and given this passed, Corbyn could not stand as an MP, but more importantly to him I’ve no doubt, but also to the local party, they were barred from picking him and they frankly didn’t want anyone else. That says a lot about the man, but also an awful lot about Starmer, his petulance and his control freakery, along with those around him. So it has been a bit of a will he or won’t he go Independent story for quite a while now. Until now of course, because by announcing his intention to stand as an independent, Jeremy will have now ended his decades long tenure as a Labour Party member, a membership he has held since he was 16 years old. The comic passing itself off as a newspaper called the Daily Express is gleefully saying Corbyn has already been expelled for his announcement, if true, Labour acted within the hour to do so, couldn’t move fast enough, but I’d still wait for that to be confirmed elsewhere before I believed it, which hasn’t happened at time of writing, however given his treatment, I could well believe Corbyn didn’t bother to resign before declaring, what difference does it make to him? To Starmer and his supporters though, this might seem like a day to celebrate being finally rid of him when Starmer never had the guts to expel him fully, but it will now become one of the focal points of the election. If Starmer loses it to Corbyn, it is going to be a massive embarrassment to Labour and will no doubt overshadow any victories he gets, especially if it’s a picture we see replicated elsewhere, for example Labour’s loss in Rochdale to George Galloway in a by-election when all his focus was able to be turned on that one seat, yet now, he won’t be able to do that and that will make more seats more vulnerable as more people are turned off by Starmer’s Torylitism, his binning of everything he stood for, and the litany of lies to his name that will now be exposed and put to him in no uncertain terms. Rishi Sunak isn’t asking for weekly TV debates with him without reason, there is so much ammunition to throw at Starmer, already a poor public performer that he’s going to struggle, not that Sunak won’t get the same back in turn. Of course the difference this time for Corbyn is that he won’t have that party support behind him anymore and the huge majority he has built up for Labour means on paper Islington North is one of the safest Labour seats in the country. How much of that is down to him the man and how much on brand recognition will be the test, but having been the MP for 40 years there, he’s a familiar face, he has relationships across the constituency with multiple organisations, you are hard pressed – and goodness knows the media have tried looking – to find people with a bad word to say about him and that is borne out by the expected response from local Labour members. They are incensed that they’ve been stopped from choosing their own candidate, in fact all remaining Labour vacancies are going to be imposed candidates now by the Labour National Executive and many will choose to campaign for Corbyn regardless, facing expulsion if they don’t resign over the matter first, yet the expectation is many members will do just that and those numbers will swell as people from across the country, will descend on Islington North to campaign for Corbyn. Despite having been caught somewhat on the hop like everyone else was when Sunak suddenly called the election, lots to do in a small amount of time, it hasn’t stopped polling predictions for the seat being called in Corbyn’s favour. Stats For Lefties – which might sound like an on the nose biased outlet on the face of it, but which is actually run by a Green like me has in their modelling predicted a win for Corbyn taking 40% of the vote, with Labour coming up short on 34%, it is very much a two horse race, Starmer vs Corbyn in effect and this is why this loss, if Labour do indeed lose it, will be a stark reflection on Starmer, who even if he does as is far and away the most likely scenario now, become the next Prime Minister, he will have no honeymoon period, and already widely disliked as he is, Labour, when people who don’t get it now, finally realise what we are all saying, that Starmer’s Labour are a bunch of Tories who will do nothing to make your lives better after 14 years of Tory misrule, will plummet in popularity fast, especially if more notice gets taken of what other, smaller parties are saying, the Greens for example, but Independents like Corbyn should he get elected too, offering alternatives to more of the same misery, which both main parties will then be seen as offering no alternative to. Also working in Corbyn’s favour is as I mentioned before, the imposition of a candidate by Labour upon Islington North, though they have boxed clever insofar as their chosen candidate, along surmised Starmer favourite, so very much aren’t Corbyn by any stretch and for as much as they haven’t parachuted in someone from elsewhere, the chosen candidate is nonetheless carrying some baggage into this, which will be rapidly exposed in the eyes of voters. Labour’s choice is a guy called Praful Nargund, who I’ve discussed in previous videos, who is the millionaire head of a chain of private health clinics, specialising in IVF treatment as well as a local Islington Councillor and with Starmer set on continuing the privatisation of the NHS, the optics of this choice, which may given the nature of his business have had IVF treatment outsourced to it potentially by the NHS, and people will certainly want to know if he is standing not for the HS, but more privatisation of it and indeed whether he’s been a beneficiary of that. That would be an absolute gift to the Corbyn campaign, I’m not convinced Nargund has got what it takes to take on Corbyn whatsoever. Nargund frankly must have some ego, or they’ve got some brass neck to stand against Corbyn and they deserve the drubbing I sincerely hope they will get in the end. Corbyn is standing again to continue to fight for all the social justice issues that drew so many of us to him when he took over the Labour Party. He’s always been the genuine article and seeing how quickly Starmer betrayed everyone who backed him on false pretences when he ran to be Corbyn’s successor and how swiftly they have destroyed what Corbyn tried to return Labour to, a party for the many and not the few, shows how much that party is distancing itself from the change this country needs. As much as it must be a wrench for Jeremy to have finally cut himself loose from Labour, he did it because that’s how far gone Labour is now, that a guy like him, well respected, experienced, with a desire to change things and not be part of the establishment order, who stands with us and not with them, can no longer be tolerated in that party. Never before has Labour been a bigger obstacle to change than it is today under Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn, however he does in this election, will be a campaign long symbol of Labour’s fall into a gang of establishment yes men for vested interests and should he retain his seat as I’m sure he will, with the support he will have, even if Starmer becomes PM, Corbyn will stand there as a symbol of what Labour once was and what this country still needs, a party of the ordinary working class and that Labour is absolutely no longer it. People in this election defending their seats, defending their parties will be judged on their records. Keir Starmer certainly will be.Already his litany of lies over the last four years, his deceit and dishonesty is rapidly going to become the Tory attack lines, and the worst of it all is that they’ll be right about what they say about him too. With Corbyn they had to attack and smear the man, because they couldn’t challenge the policies. Starmer’s policies change with the wind, a Tony Benn weathervane and not a signpost. In Islington North it will be Labour weathervane vs Corbyn signpost, but check out the track record of lies that weathervane whoever it is will have to defend and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so enormous news has literally just broken this afternoon as the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to cease all military actions in Rafah and to leave the enclave immediately after South Africa earlier this month brought to the attention of the ICJ once more the state of affairs and the actions of the Israeli forces in Gaza, making this the third time now that preliminary orders have been handed down to Israeli in order to alleviate the humanitarian crisis that they have created in Gaza, as well as seeking to attempt to rein in the death toll, which keeps growing ever higher on a daily basis. Although more provisional orders had been handed down by the ICJ against Israeli in March, it was felt that these did not now fully address the situation in Gaza now and that the conditions for a new emergency order had now been met. Right so this is breaking news, literally it broke some 20 minutes ago at time of writing and there was no way frankly I wasn’t going to say something on this, because it’s a big step up from the International Court of Justice here, they have effectively ordered a ceasefire as far as Rafah is concerned, the sheer number of people stuck there and the Israeli army showing no signs of preparedness to back off meaningfully meant a new order to be instigated. On the 10th May, South Africa submitted the following three requests for additional provisional orders to the ICJ: ‘The State of Israel shall immediately withdraw and cease its military offensive in the Rafah Governorate. The State of Israel shall immediately take all effective measures to ensure and facilitate the unimpeded access to Gaza of United Nations and other officials engaged in the provision of humanitarian aid and assistance to the population of Gaza, as well as fact-finding missions, internationally mandated bodies or officials, investigators, and journalists, in order to assess and record conditions on the ground in Gaza and enable the effective preservation and retention of evidence, and shall ensure that its military does not act to prevent such access, provision, preservation or retention. The State of Israel shall submit an open report to the Court: (a) on all measures taken to give effect to these provisional measures within one week as from the date of this Order; and (b) on all measures taken to give effect to all previous provisional measures indicated by the Court within one month as from the date of this Order.”’ This afternoon, the ICJ returned it’s verdict: ‘(1) By thirteen votes to two, Reaffirms the provisional measures indicated in its Orders of 26 January 2024 and 28 March 2024, which should be immediately and effectively implemented. (2) Indicates the following provisional measures: The State of Israel shall, in conformity with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by civilians in the Rafah Governorate: (a) By thirteen votes to two, Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (b) By thirteen votes to two, Maintain open the Rafah crossing for unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance; (c) By thirteen votes to two, Take effective measures to ensure the unimpeded access to the Gaza Strip of any commission of inquiry, fact-finding mission or other investigative body mandated by competent organs of the United Nations to investigate allegations of genocide; (3) By thirteen votes to two, Decides that the State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order, within one month as from the date of this Order.’ All measures passed by thirteen votes to two, so a thumping majority of the ICJ judges, the two dissenters being the Israeli representative judge Barak and as usual the Ugandan ICJ judge and now vice-President Sebutinde. The 13 judges backed an agreement that a red line had been crossed in Rafah and that the situation was exceptionally dire there and with 800,000 displaced people at least in Rafah now, the numbers there always seemingly fluctuating, but certainly the majority of the surviving population of the Gaza Strip, and the President of the ICJ, the Lebanese judge, Nawaf Salam reportedly saying that he does not believe Israel when they claim to by providing safety and humanitarian access, stating that he had seen no evidence of that. As such the order being handed down is a strong one and a very welcome one. Israel must immediately stop its offensive and military operations in Rafah and withdraw it’s troops. Border crossings must be reopened as soon as possible to get humanitarian aid in and of course this is particularly relevant to Rafah since Israel took control of the Rafah Border Crossing and closed it, stopping all aid getting in. They’ve now been ordered to reopen it, specifically the Rafah crossing in the ICJ ruling and to keep it open and also that UN observers can get in and investigate before evidence of possible war crimes is lost, so the UN are now going in to Rafah it seems as Israel are ordered out of it. There’s no wiggle room for Israel here now. They have in no uncertain terms been told to get out of Rafah, open the border crossings to let aid in and allow fact finding missions in. It very much feels like we’re in do it or else territory now and you just get the feeling Netanyahu will be sitting there saying or else what? To this ruling, but actually the word coming from Al Jazeera in the immediacy of this ruling is to convene an emergency meeting, but already the far right of Netanyahu’s coalition are gobbing off, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich having been quoted by Al-Jazeera as having said: ‘…that those who demand that the state of Israel stop the war, demand that it decree itself to cease to exist. “We will not agree to that,” he said. He added: “We continue to fight for ourselves and for the entire free world. History will judge who today stood by the Nazis of Hamas and ISIS.”’ Such is Netanyahu’s problem. With insane voices like that who will never accept this ruling at all, he either risks losing them, or losing the likes of Benny Gantz and his National Unity Party, who have given Netanyahu 3 weeks to come up for a plan for Gaza for after the war or they are pulling out of the coalition. Everything the ICJ orders in order to bring about an end to the atrocity, Netanyahu likely only sees as an end to his government, That’s the problem and he deserves to be in the mire he’s in. South Africa are vindicated once again, once more the lone voice in the world standing against apartheid and standing up for the rule of international humanitarian law. Tenacity and perseverance is paying off and Israel are more and more being seen for being a rogue pariah state for their actions along with all of those determined to carry on supporting them. Hamas have welcomed the news reportedly as well, although they would have preferred Israel to have been told to get out of Gaza completely, rather than just Rafah, but at least for the majority of people there, there is now a chink of hope. What of Genocide Joe in all of this too? This order from the ICJ is binding, the US are signed up to the ICJ of course, so to still side with Israel now assuming Israel don’t budge, a move I to be honest am expecting, then that would be a war crime, no ifs or buts at that point. That said, if reports regarding Biden’s stance on Rafah and that Israel should not go in are true, then he really ought to at this point to do the right thing, but since when has doing the right thing ever stopped him so far? At this moment in time, nothing concrete has come out. No doubt this will be followed up on as more reaction come out, but this is huge news, great news, that needs to stand. Meanwhile as we wait and see what Biden’s view of the ICJ ruling is going to be, he’s already attacked the ICC, International Criminal Court, also at the Hague, for requesting arrest warrants for Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant, but given the US is not involved in the ICC he really ought to just butt out of that one and know his own place. Get the details of that story in the video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so nothing quite says I’m innocent like threatening the organisation seeking arrest warrants against you, but that very much appears to be what Benjamin Netanyahu has done on camera to International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, but this is just one example of the screaming fallout coming from some politicians and spokespeople following the announcement that the ICC is pursuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three figures from the Hamas leadership on different, separate charges. Nonetheless, the accusation is that the ICC is committing moral equivalence on this issue, and indeed if the charges were the same, there might be an argument for that, but they aren’t, so there isn’t. There are two separate cases here, one against Hamas leaders and one against Israel’s, the ICC is literally doing it’s job and some in the world so wedded to Israel’s existence that its conduct even down to committing war crimes gets excused, that now sanctions or worse are being threatened against a literal court. Nobody doing this, should be taken seriously as world leaders and actually, they could be committing crimes and risking arrest warrants being issued to them too by carrying on as they are: Right, so that was Benjamin Netanyahu there saying that he is not concerned about his ability to travel, even though should an arrest warrant be issued, he would be arrested – or should be arrested – if he lands in one of the 124 countries that are state parties to the Rome Statute, the foundation upon which the International Criminal Court is built upon, including this one; but he is worried about the Chief Prosecutor’s ability to travel. Well why would that be then? He’s not in danger of being arrested for war crimes, so what does he have to fear then? What are you saying? Sounds rather threatening to me, very poundshop mafia of you, it would be a shame if you left the Hague, you might have an unfortunate accident kind of vibes. In another clip he compared the potential prosecution of him to prosecuting George Bush over 9/11 or FDR over WWII, emphasising an argument of moral equivalence here, because Hamas are being prosecuted as well as Israel, but it’s afalse equivalence because prosecution is being sought for them separately on separate charges. What the ICC has done, is dare to it’s job and fulfil it’s actual remit and done so despite pressure being put on them to stick to Africa and thugs like Putin and not prosecute western allies. It’s not a case of who do this guy Karim Khan at the ICC think he is, it’s who those refusing to acknowledge the truth of these potential prosecutions and those trying to excuse it that really need asking who do you think you are? As much as Netanyahu is trying to excuse himself and threaten the ICC prosecutor, calling the ICC and Karim Khan antisemitic, calling the charges on him as being the same as levying charges on the Jewish faith, the same weasel excuses Zionists always come out with, he’s sadly very much not alone: So speaks a man who seems dead set on losing to Donald Trump in November if he carries on with this frankly insane narrative of denying what is obvious to every sane person on the planet now. Genocide Joe Biden, knows better than the ICC on what counts as genocide, because sure he does, the emperor is now completely naked. Selective application of international law, a complete denial of anything Israel ever does no matter how much that death toll rises. Now the US are not signatories to the Rome Statute, or the ICC, so frankly they can butt as far as what the ICC does, but being America, of course they won’t. There is now talk of Biden’s Democrats working on a bipartisan deal with the Republicans to levy sanctions against the ICC over this prosecution, which is a headscratcher – what can they possible issue sanctions over? Anyone who interacts with the ICC based in America and vice versa could have that blocked or impeded, from civil rights organisations, to lawyers and investigators, which could carry civil or criminal penalties for anyone who does. As for those working at the ICC elsewhere, any assets they might hold in the US could be frozen and they or their families could be banned from travelling there. All in all, what the US can do is enforce their own petulance essentially, and in blocking an internationally recognised criminal court from discharging its duties, only serves to make itself look like a bigger global pariah than it already does. Then of course there is the whole Hague Invasion Act business, good grief can you imagine the US literally attacking the ICC, which is part of the UN? There is no spin or optics that could save the US from consequences for that surely and for what when it all comes down to it? Saving Israel. Putting Israel and its needs and wants despite its conduct before America effectively. Personally I can’t see things going that far, but also, just what is the limit of Biden’s slavishness towards the apartheid state. Denial of genocide is just a sick joke at this point. Equally however, the ICC needn’t just take such threats as these on the chin, because it has options of recourse too and the issuing of further arrest warrants over conduct such as this can’t be ruled out either and this brings us back to that Rome Statute again that the ICC is built on. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is a vast document, comprising 128 separate articles, the informal version of which still stretches to almost 90 pages, but the specific article within it that some politicians are crossing the line over with threats of sanctions for doing its job, threats against individual persons as Netanyahu appears to have done on camera, is Article 70, which covers offences against the administration of justice. Interference in the courts duty in other words and specifically within Article 70, it is Part 1(d) that is applies here to my mind: ‘Impeding, intimidating or corruptly influencing an official of the Court for the purpose of forcing or persuading the official not to perform, or to perform improperly, his or her duties.’ I’d call threats of sanction or against a person directly who works for the court intimidation or corrupt influence. I’d also suggest Part 1(e) could be relevant too: ‘Retaliating against an official of the Court on account of duties performed by that or another official.’ Now the matter of jurisdiction again has to be demonstrated, but threats against the court directly, surely must count, you would think they would, but that has to be proven apparently, that is part 2 of Article 70, but the maximum punishment that can be meted out by the ICC in relation to all this is 5 years imprisonment. It would be entertaining to see how Biden copes with being arrestable in 124 countries because he won’t stop backing a genocidal apartheid state, but there we are, he is asking for it right now. Butt out of legal concerns that don’t involve you or your country, or you might find they soon do if and when you end up on the receiving end. It is not just US politicians or British politicians making fools of themselves for the sake of Israel though, however the US and UK both face national elections this year and an intriguing possibility has been raised by Workers Party of Britain MP George Galloway in a tweet he’s posted: ‘British politicians who have backed the actions of Netanyahu now the subject of Arrest Warrants for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity are themselves thereby complicit in those very crimes. They will soon be asking for your vote. Hoping to make you complicit too...’ Now I’ve spoken about the issue of complicity in my other video that I released today, where a dossier on some 22 officials, British and Israeli, including it is alleged 5 government officials, MPs, which the evidence compiled by the ICJP, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians has handed to the police, Scotland Yard’s war crimes division to investigate possible charges of complicity in war crimes. Now, it’s reasonable to assume this will all take a while to investigate, but with Sunak now having finally called the General Election, is voting for a politician allegedly considered complicit in genocide, potentially being investigated for it, also making you complicit as a voter, by voting for them? Voting for such a person unknowingly being investigated, I would suggest not, but if we find out they are under investigation prior to the election, well, that could be different. Now obviously our votes are anonymous, so we needn’t fear prosecution for it as individuals, but vote that person in, vote them into power potentially, well, I suppose it could in theory invite sanctions on the country, given we as a nation would have given them a mandate despite any such charges. I’m not a lawyer of course I could be wrong, I also wonder how enforceable such a measure might be, please do correct me if you know different, but it seems that it is at least plausible sounding and besides anything else to knowingly vote for an MP facing charges of complicity in war crimes, do you really WANT to vote for such a person, and if so, well, what does that say about you? I certainly wouldn’t be, nor any party they were a part of, especially if said party, didn’t pull them from standing to begin with! Something else to think about if nothing else. Fortunately there are alternatives and a Jewish former South African ANC MP by the name of Andrew Feinstein has created much excitement as he’s finally announced his intention to stand against Keir Starmer in Holborn & St Pancras, Starmer himself having been caught on film supporting Israel’s right to cut water and power from Gaza, despite denials since. Feinstein is Starmer’s worst nightmare, find out all about his official campaign launch on this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks

Right, so normally I wouldn’t give the comic book that passes itself off as a newspaper called the Daily Express a second glance, it’s content often the most far-fetched silliness going, however, a story they’ve carried is getting carried by other right wing sources as well, so perhaps on this rare occasion they’re onto something and what they are onto is absolute Tory panic as overnight it is being reported that a group of incandescent Tories are racing against the clock to stop the General Election from happening in July. It doesn’t matter if they hold it in July, or hold it three months later, as a party, they are done for and actually there’s a small part of me that hopes they succeed, because if they do, the damage to them will be all the greater. But can they actually stop it and how can they do that, when the King has already given his assent? Right, so clearly Rishi Sunak, our erstwhile drowned rat of a Prime Minister has finally it seems found a shiver for his spine and called the General Election for the 4th July, however it also seems that this has all happened as a bit of a surprise to his party. He had informed his cabinet ahead of his announcement, so they all knew, but the backbenches, fearing for their seats as they rightly should be are not happy at all at the prospect of democracy removing their sorry hides from the gravy train they’ve happily been riding at our expense. As such, overnight reports have come in that a group of Tories, unnamed of course, so obviously caveats there, that a group of Tories, seeing this move by Sunak as absolute madness and Nick Watt of Newsnight posted possibly the most BBC explainer possible explaining the reaction to Sunak’s announcement: ‘A Tory rebel source tells me: Letters are going in calling for a no confidence vote in Rishi Sunak after reports of an imminent general election announcement. Another Tory source: panic in the tea room. Nobody was expecting this. “Everyone mortified,” the source told me.’ Don’t you just love how afraid of democracy this bunch are? You’re flailing in the polls, so somehow we have to stop this happening, like that is going to help you. Letters of no confidence is the answer, let’s install yet another unelected, mandateless Prime Minister who can then call this election off, that’s the answer! It really isn’t people across this country are absolutely sick of you. 14 years of absolute misery and people are desperate, even formerly Tory voters, to give you lot your marching orders, but this time they are against the clock to do so if they’re going to pull this stunt off. Previously we’ve seen the Tories take weeks to pick their new leader and inflict another Prime Minister on the country that nobody voted for, because as much as we only officially vote for a local MP, who will be Prime Minister still shapes the thinking of many people when they go to vote. This time they won’t be able to do that. The dissolution of parliament is happening as things stand, next Thursday, 30th May, so the campaign begins officially on the 31st, so a new Prime Minister would need to be installed by then. Therefore there can be no contest, no time for that – or can there? I’ll come back to that prospect in a moment – but for my point here, they would need around somebody that all the disparate, fractured wings of the Tory Party, from the One Nation Tories, to the ERG, can agree on and fear for their own seats, well that would be a unifying issue I suppose, especially for a nasty, self serving bunch like this lot, though obviously should, the remote possibility exist that the Tories can still win this election, there will likely be further dissent over that leader once in power again. Strong and stable it would be anything but. Of course to even get that far, the letters of no confidence have to go in and be sufficient to trigger that vote of no confidence. Apparently since Sunak’s announcement, they have indeed been flying in, so in the sweetness stakes, nothing quite tops starting a General Election like the prospect of the Tory leader, facing a no confidence vote before it even gets off the ground. Why should the public vote for Sunak, when even his own parliamentary colleagues want him out? Great optics guys, truly first class. So, where we are, with a week to go is letters going in, they really need to hit target today, which several ‘Tory sources’ are claiming will happen and then it is a case of the 1922 Committee chairman Graham Brady to tell us all that the threshold has been met, 52 letters I believe it is at this moment in time. Now Tory MP Simon Clarke said back in March that that threshold had nearly been met, so how many more letters are actually needed to hit target? Well we don’t for sure, because Graham Brady is the only one who knows and it is at his discretion as to when he announces that threshold has been met. So although desperate Tories might be sending letters in, there is no guarantee Brady will do anything with them before next Thursday. Brady himself is stepping down at the next election, so on the flipside, he might announce the threshold has been met straight away, he has nothing to lose himself, he gets a few more months on MP wages if it gets stalled, but equally he might be ready to shuffle off now and prefers that option. There’s no forcing when a declaration of a vote of no confidence has to happen, so these letters can keep going in, the threshold might get met, and Brady announces next Thursday after the dissolution of parliament and not a thing can be done about it then, since at that point there are no MPs. Of course another possibility, another angle to this story, is that, upon getting wind of Sunak calling the General Election there are reports that that in itself has triggered more letters of no confidence and Sunak calling it yesterday, in the pouring rain, hardly the most opportune moment to announce, he could have waited another day or two surely you might think until there was better weather, but maybe he really couldn’t. If Brady had given the heads up that the threshold had been reached, then Sunak calling the election when he did, was his last gasp attempt to hang onto power. I’m not completely sold on this, there are reports that Sunak has not been happy in the role for a while, he hasn’t turned things around for his party, none of his horrible policy announcements have resonated, he’d have done better to have called an election after he got in and was still in a relative honeymoon period, but instead he did a Gordon Brown and has been punished for that in part, his policies have been rancid, rotten and racist, there’s no getting away from the fact he has been a chronically awful Prime Minister. But let’s assume that the letters are in and Brady announces this swiftly. What then? Well as I said, they need a new PM and they need a single candidate to just walk into the role, no time for a contest, but even if they install somebody, say, Penny Mordaunt for example, her name was being bandied about a while back let’s just pick her as a for instance. Can she actually stop it still? Sunak has already been to see old sausage fingers himself, the King, his assent has been given to dissolve parliament, but the writs to actually do so are not yet written and dissolution is still a week away. Installing a new leader, if they can do it in time, can choose to revoke the Election. That would again require informing the King of that intention and the intention to form a government again and ask his permission to do so, under the Lascelles Principles, which govern the actions the King can or cannot take, there remains the theory at least that he could refuse to revoke or assent to a new unelected government, the grounds to do so would be that this would be an affront to democratic rights, and I think there’s a case for that in this scenario certainly, but that then opens up a constitutional can of worms and Charles may not choose to do that. If he agrees though, then the Election is off. It’s completely new territory here, never been done before stuff. Now, another possibility, is that the Tories will spend the summer actually having a leadership contest if Sunak gets deposed, he still has to lose that vote of no confidence of course, that’s just the assumption I’ve made until this point, though I struggle to see how he’d survive one, but instead of agreeing a single new Prime Minister, between the disparate Tory groups, they agree a caretaker candidate specifically chosen to just call the election off and then trigger a summer long leadership contest, whilst trying somehow to turn their fortunes around whilst they very publicly show how badly they are yet again falling apart. You can imagine how popular that will make them, not. Whether these Tory rebels actually succeed or not, the damage is getting done anyway. Just the fact this is being talked about is damaging them, Sunak being undermined damages them, a vote of no confidence as we go into a General Election is catastrophic for them, they’ve 14 years of lying and wrecking the country that they have to try and defend and calling the election off for a new leadership contest, will practically have people taking up torches and pitchforks I should think. If they go down that road, they still by law have to call the General Election by the end of next January, they are just delaying the inevitable and making matters even worse for themselves going down this route, so for that reason I don’t mind if it end up coming to pass, though I fancy the odds of that are very remote, a lot of ducks need to get in a row to pull it off. But ultimately the Tories will lose even more badly if they delay now, than if they just suck it up and take it on the chin as one of their former leaders famously said. Meanwhile I covered Sunak getting drenched calling the election in this video recommendation here, you’ve no doubt seen plenty of coverage of this already, but here’s my take on it and if you’ve got this far I’d like to think you enjoyed the content, perhaps enough to like share and subscribe whilst you’re here and watch a bit of the channel and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so if anything is going to come to define Labour’s campaign for this General Election, Victoria Derbyshire’s interview with Starmerroid Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds demonstrated exactly what that was, and the big thing the media now clearly as well as other parties will fixate on is Starmer’s non-existent relationship with the truth. Starmer has such a massive litany of lies to his name now, that every one of them, as many of us on the left knew they would eventually, are going to catch up with him and be used against him and pointed out that if he has lied so often about so much ,that he is inherently so dishonest, how can you believe anything he promises now in his bid to win power? And as Reynolds showed and Victoria Derbyshire exposed, Labour cannot answer this. Right, so that was Victoria Derbyshire, one of very few current affairs presenters on the BBC worth rating, hold Jonathan Reynolds feet to the fire over Keir Starmer’s record of lies since he became Labour leader and Reynolds tried all the politicians tricks to deflect and talk about something else, but she was having absolutely none of it, who did Reynolds think she was? Laura Kuenssberg? And she had the file, she didn’t have to dig that deep I wouldn’t imagine to expose just how much Starmer has lied about. Reynolds was asked why should people trust Keir Starmer when he has rolled back on so many things and he couldn’t answer it. He tried to talk about Starmer turning around the Labour Party, when what he has done is turn it into another Tory Party and denied change, and choice to the entire country by aping the Tories. Starmer calls himself the change candidate now, but it’s a sick joke, because he is absolutely more of the same. Reynolds also tried to claim that Starmer hasn’t gone back on his word and when pushed claims the damage to the economy has forced their hands. As ever this is an economic lie itself, there is always money and there would be plenty available for the government to access if they increased taxes by levying a wealth tax, but they won’t do that, because they are Tories and when they won’t touch their money but will keep hammering up, we know who they really intend to serve and if you’re still in denial about that, keep asking that question of why they won’t instigate a wealth tax to put the country back on it’s feet. Derbyshire put Reynolds through the ringer reeling off all manner of broken pledges and promises and of course some of these go back years, before the Truss budget which remains their convenient scapegoat and includes stuff that as Derbyshire also pointed out, wouldn’t cost anything to implement anyway, so why go back on them? Scrapping the House of Lords is one classic example of that. Get rid of it and instigate an elected senate instead, an elected upper chamber, saving us money and ditching this preposterous concept of life peers and hereditary peers, which is completely undemocratic. Starmer promised it, then binned it. No excuse for that. The list of things Starmer once promised and has gone back on is sizeable though and it will be a ball and chain to hammer Starmer with over and over throughout this campaign. He promised a 5% tax on high earners but he now won’t do it, he promised to abolish universal credit and replace it with a system that actually works and treats people like human beings, that’s out too, now he’s keeping it. He was going to end benefit sanctions, that’s gone. He pledged to defend the NHS, now he wants more privatisation involved in it, having once upon a time cited his own mother, a nurse, as his reason for shunning private health and backing the NHS. Amazing what tens of thousands of pounds in private health donations can do to change someone’s mind and go back on their word over. He also promised to roll back outsourcing, but given that word has been cover for privatisation, and he wants more private sector involvement, that’s out too. He was going to abolish tuition fees, but just like Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems, he’s gone back on that too. He had a £28bn flagship Green New Deal on the table for years and that got scrapped too, the environment clearly secondary, not least underlined recently by Labour voting against a Lib Dem motion to clean up our polluted waterways. Starmer is also on record as allegedly having said he hates tree huggers when presented with a green energy deal plan by Ed Miliband. He plans for GB Energy to be created a nationalised energy generator and distributor, but it won’t be a supplier to us, it’ll supply the same privatised energy companies we have now, so they’ll get the benefits of a socialised energy distributor, to maximise their profits, because the savings will not trickle down to us. They never do. He also won’t reverse Sunak’s new oil and gas licences, despite promising no more of them. He promised no more illegal wars, yet is happy to play dress up in fatigues and support Israel committing genocide in Gaza, possibly the single most poignant issue causing Labour damage to it’s vote and having declared himself long ago a Zionist without equivocation, will never deviate from that support. He promised to renationalise Royal Mail, rail energy and water, he’s still just about clinging onto rail, the rest clearly too Corbyn like to go down the same road of. He promised to defend freedom of movement, now he wants to stop the boats too with a new Border Security Command, instead of doing the humane thing of opening up safe routes to asylum so nobody needs boats anymore. He promised to strengthen workers rights and trade union, repealing the anti trade union laws we’ve seen introduced over the last several decades, but that has been watered down too, to just those most recently introduced and again, you’ve only got his word for that and by now if you aren’t questioning the value of his word then there is probably little hope that you ever will. He promised to scrap the charitable status of private schools, that is out now as well, despite these schools blatantly not being charities and very much for the elite, now instead choosing to impose VAT on them instead. He promised to scrap the cruel poverty inflicting two-child benefit cap, but will now keep it instead, choosing to intentionally leave nearly a quarter of a million kids in poverty, for no good reason than Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules won’t allow for that money to be spent on this. I thing we need a better party, with better fiscal rules then, because this is a choice, those rules are arbitrary, this is just callous cruelty against people too young to vote. He promised to devolve powers from Westminster, but he can’t even let his own local parties choose their own candidates, interfering at every level, but especially at parliamentary level. Possibly his biggest ever lie though was to provide opposition to the Tories, when in actuality, he’s taken Labour and become them instead. And above all else, just like Jonathan Reynolds there, he will deny it all until he’s blue in the face, will not take responsibility, will not acknowledge mistakes, will point at others, because when things go wrong, it is never his fault. There will never be any answers for any of this, from Keir Starmer or anyone campaigning for Labour or for election as a Labour MP, because any attempt to cover up or dismiss or dispute the lies he’s told, will be lies themselves. Labour is utterly reliant on being the get the Tories out vote, because they stand for nothing and will stand for nothing in effect throughout this campaign, since nothing they say, nothing that will be written in their manifesto can be believed because of how big a liar leads the party. This will I hope be brought up again and again and again and to Starmer’s face at that, because he’s been given an easy ride for too long and now he needs to face a reckoning for it. Meanwhile as the Labour selection contest continues in Islington North to replace Jeremy Corbyn, Corbyn himself faces expulsion, for, when you drill down into it as I have in this video recommendation here, the crime of being a socialist! Have a watch, stay with the channel some more and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so parliament is getting dissolved on the 30th May before the Tories manage to dissolve any more of this country and finally the chance to get this most corrupt government of my living memory certainly out of power and pray God we make sure that this time it is for good. But with Keir Starmer waiting in the wings, putting an offer to the country barely any different to the Tories we’re hoping we’re ridding ourselves of, will it truly be the case we’ve got the Tories out if we just let Starmer in, or is it nowhere near the sealed deal the 20+ point poll leads Labour currently enjoy think it is and can we actually achieve the only meaningful result that could bring about the changes we need – a hung parliament? Right, so if Rishi Sunak wanted to come out with a fitting slogan on the steps of 10 Downing Street tonight, he could coin the phrase and walk in the footsteps of his Red Tory predecessor Tony Blair and go with ‘things can only get wetter’ as the heavens opened and drenched him, whilst music from outside attempted to drown him out. The rat comparisons will no doubt come out on social media, Sunak very much looking like a drowned one by the time he finished droning on, when all we really wanted to hear from him was confirmation of what the media were spouting beforehand, that US Independence Day is the date, 4th of July, here’s hoping it will prove to be a permanent independence day for the UK, from ever electing another Conservative government ever again. There’s a multi million pound media room in there now thanks to Boris Johnson isn’t there? It’s not like he had to get soaked, but heck, who didn’t enjoy it just a little bit! His speech of course was peppered with hilarious hypocrisy, and frankly there’s very little he could say to convince anyone to like the man, let alone give him their vote now. He’s done, he knows it, he’s apparently called this election early, seemingly determined to run away from it for as long as possible, because he isn’t enjoying the job and perhaps he’d get more job satisfaction if he wasn’t constantly finding some one here or a group of people there to blame for all the ills in the country? He made numerous claims, all of which were nonsense, I’ve picked out a few. Claiming he was responsible for restoring economic stability was a good one, when we’ve literally just climbed out of recession and economic growth has been choked off completely for years, barely registering anything, because incomes have been slammed, benefits cut, people’s spending power has plummeted, so they haven’t spent, they have made their money work, the rich have been on the make for years, they just offshore their money, it doesn’t work either therefore, it’s all completely backwards. He calls it economic stability, he’s impoverished the nation, but having just made a sweet extra £121m himself, being one of the elite, the impossibly rich, he hasn’t the faintest notion of what it is like to struggle and is, as someone from the ordinary working class, the biggest reason not to back him – he simply doesn’t know what it is like mto walk a day on your shoes. Our energy bills sky high, he blamed that squarely on Putin, instead of acknowledging that he basically subsidised the companies scalping us when bills were too high for most of us to afford, instead of taking them back under national control and ending the absurdity of those shareholder dividends, because god forbid they don’t get their cut even as many chose between heating and eating. But Russia doesn’t excuse his inaction. He attacked China, for being what? Too competitive. It was your party, taking turns with Red Tories that decimated manufacturing in this country. It’s never been restored, stop being so wet. Oh whoops you couldn’t it was chucking it down wasn’t it? Inflation is down, yep, great, that simply means the rate of prices going up has slowed, not that they aren’t still going up. You had zip, zero, nada to do with that, yet you’re still claiming credit for it. It also isn’t down as much as the Bank of England forecast, so is that your doing too? Migration continues to be weaponised as does immigration, he’s stopping the boats when he isn’t, he’s getting people off the ground and to Rwanda, when he’s literally having to pay them to get them to go. He attacks Putin again over global stability, he was careful to only mention middle east tensions rather than pick sides today, so perhaps the arrest warrants issued against Hamas and Israel leaders has given him pause for thought on his own complicity in that. He’s talked of record NHS funding, when it’s the wrong argument to make – there might be more money going in, but with so much outsourcing after 14 years of the Tories, privatisation by another name, so much of that money too is ending up in shareholders pockets, it’s just that the shareholders get away with sporting the NHS logo. It’s a con, the money isn’t going into the service, it is making rich people richer again, same s**t different day. He claims we’ve harnessed the opportunities of Brexit, just months after more import and export red tape came in, driving prices up again. He said he has prioritised energy over the environment and net zero and said it like it was a good thing, when all it really did was spell out that he and his party are just a danger to the planet. He hailed welfare reform, which given how lethal it has proven for far too many in this country, should land him and many in his government behind bars, not elected to power. He is the man of bold action, he’s the man with the plan, despite having no discernible plan to benefit this country, just enrich others like himself and too often that has been himself when the name Infosys comes up time and again in relation to government contracts, the family firm of his wife of course. But flip all of that and you come to Keir Starmer, who has launched his campaign by repeating all of the same, tired, dull, boring soundbites we’re sick and tire of hearing from him. He’s the change candidate, vote for change by voting Labour he said in his snorefest of a speech. I was Director of Public Prosecutions he said, I ran the Crown Prosecution Service he said, as if we haven’t heard it a thousand times already. That isn’t a change, that’s more of the same and according to those who worked under you there, you were unpopular and your reforms there were pointless. He repeddled his six fixes, which I covered in a video the other day, I won’t go over them again here, but they are all a complete scam and a con. He claims he wants to serve, that his were a party of service, yet never has there been any sign that Starmer is anything other than an authoritarian liar. He binned everything he stood for, he’s had more relaunches than Cher has had facelifts, and still people can’t stand him. There’s a reason for that, you can’t trust him and nobody thinks much of the torylitism that is all he’s selling now. The one honest thing Sunak said in his speech was that Starmer will do or say anything to get into power, he lusts for it and will do or say, ditch or scrap whatever he thinks he has to, to get elected. Service? The only person he is in service to is himself and ensuring that nothing actually for this country if Labour get elected. Therefore the goal here, the best hope to come out of this General Election, is a hung parliament as we saw in 2010. Labour will be the largest party, of that there is little doubt, but they can be denied a majority and the frighteners have been put on them as local elections bore themselves out. L:abour’s headline poll leads are nonsense, they aren’t reflective of the whole country, there are areas where Labour should be scoring big wins and instead have lost by-elections, have lost councillors and are not gaining those Tory votes Starmer has been chasing, the only consistent thing about him in 4 years, his pursuit of Tory votes. He’s lost Labour ones along the way, in fact he’s spurned them, suspended them and expelled them in too many cases. Little wonder therefore, that according to LabourList, Labour still don’t have candidates for more than 100 seats. Better get some parachutes strapped to some Starmerroids fast. Heck, Paul Mason might be in with a chance still at this rate! Independent candidates rallying for change are springing up all over the country, but time is very much now against them. The Green Party has surged again in local elections and they are chasing more MPs. Labour lost a safe seat to George Galloway and his Workers Party of Great Britain who are also targeting other seats and yet all the mainstream media can talk about, is the threat to the Tories posed by Reform UK, who’s only MP is a defector set to very much lose his seat. We’ll bid farewell to the Leeanderthal, Lee Anderson and of course they won just 2 council seats nationwide in the local elections. A non-entity party, of people for whom Sunak is too much of a leftie and deserve a wide berth and not national mainstream recognition. This is a General Election where real change is going to be hard to achieve, but it’ll come from embracing alternatives and avoiding mainstream parties, of all colours, because whether that rosette is blue, red, or yellow, it’s still a bloody Tory. Will the country choose differently, or will we have another 5 years of the same, be it Sunak or Starmer in charge? Well it might not even be Starmer if the campaign begun yesterday by Andrew Feinstein takes off, the former South African ANC MP turned arms sales campaigner, who has lived in Starmer’s patch for the last 23 years, and is now ready to re-enter politics in a bid to stop Starmer from reaching power, even if Labour does, find out all about that story in this video recommendation here, though no more donations lease, because of the election being called, spending restrictions now apply and well, Feinstein hit target in a day, say’s it all about Starmer doesn’t it! And I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks

Right, so as news of the five applications for arrest warrants between Israeli leaders and Hamas leaders is slowly digested around the world by various leaders of one country or another, here in the UK, our pro Israel politicians on both sides of the House of Commons in both the Tory Party and Starmer’s Labour ought to be feeling a little nervous right now, because if those arrest warrants are granted on the basis of the evidence collated and presented to the ICC by the Chief Prosecutor, then charges of complicity in war crimes will soon follow, the intent to prosecute already having been laid out in no uncertain terms by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians and their Director Tayab Ali, himself also a top lawyer for the prestigious Bindman’s, a world leading human rights law firm. Ali has said in light of the arrest warrant requests that ‘accountability has begun’ and that justice is coming, so just how nervous should a number of our MPs. Not least the leaders of both main parties be about this? Right, so complicity in war crimes, oddly enough is a crime in and of itself and the ICJP, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians have been kept rather busy embarrassingly for all of us, keeping tabs on what our politicians have been doing and saying that may end up leaving them open to accusations of being complicit in genocide. Tayab Ali of human rights law firm Bindman’s and Director of the ICJP has put our MPs on notice at this point, following these arrest warrant requests from the ICC, saying: ‘Warning to UK Members of Parliament. We warned you that Israel was committing war crimes. We put you on notice that if you were complicit we would seek to prosecute you. It is probably too late for most British MPs as the ink of history on your potential complicity is almost dry and you already made your decision whether or not to support war crimes. We warned you that the ICC issuing arrest warrants for war crimes was real. So is complicity in those war crimes. It is time for each individual MP to make their position perfectly clear. If you remain complicit in war crimes by providing political cover or material support we will work to hold you personally accountable in accordance with the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court Act right here in the UK. We pledged to make MPs accountable in court for their actions. Accountability has begun. We will add to it this week. Justice is coming….’ Adding to what they’ve already collated, well like I said they’ve been busy at the ICJP, as they have today put out a press release regarding a dossier they’ve compiled, some 60 pages long with an additional 800 pages of evidence and naming some 22 individuals, including 5 senior government officials and handed it over to Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Division: ‘Mere hours after the International Criminal Court (ICC) announcement to pursue arrest warrants for Israeli politicians, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) submitted a Complaint to Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Team, It supplements an existing complaint issued in January 2024, that is still being considered by Scotland Yard, and names twenty-two individuals, including now five senior government officials. The complaint is believed to be one of the most comprehensive complaints submitted to date to Scotland Yard in relation to Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza. The 60-page complaint has been annexed with a further 800 pages of evidence, collected from first hand eyewitnesses, expert reports and expert evidence from nineteen medical professionals who have worked in Gaza since October. The evidence was collected by ICJP’s investigative and legal teams, including a former British police officer, who submitted the evidence to British police force standards. The complaint prepared by ICJP lawyers with evidence collected by former met police investigators, addresses the crimes of ‘starvation as a weapon of war’ and ‘wilfully causing great suffering to a civilian population’, both illegal under British and international law. The development comes shortly after the International Criminal Court announced their decision to pursue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, which also included ‘intentional starvation’ as one of the named alleged war crimes. This latest Complaint, which has been in the making for months, addresses Israel ‘wilfully causing great suffering’ and using ‘starvation as a weapon of war’. Both are war crimes under UK legislation. Because of the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’, the UK has jurisdiction over such crimes regardless of where they were committed. Both crimes are also prohibited under international law, including under the Rome Statute and Geneva Conventions. Having today submitted extensive evidence of the crimes of starvation and wilfully causing great suffering, this newest complaint requested that the responsibility and complicity of these 22 individuals is also evaluated in regards to the newly raised evidence of crimes– this included members of Israel’s War Cabinet, Israeli politicians, British nationals who are members of the IDF and British officials and politicians. The latest Complaint also raises the name of a fifth senior government official as an alleged perpetrator in these crimes for their potential accessory liability in aiding and abetting the crimes raised. The alleged criminal acts are prosecutable in the United Kingdom and will now be considered by Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Investigation Team before a decision is made by them whether to open a formal criminal investigation, which could see alleged perpetrators questioned, arrested and prosecuted. ICJP Director Tayab Ali said: “Complicity comes in many forms, whether that be providing political cover, encouraging criminal acts or supplying weapons. We intend to ensure that allegations of war crimes against suspected Israeli war criminals and those who enable them are prosecuted, whether that be at the ICC, in the UK or across the globe. We will ensure that there will be no place for suspected war criminals to hide, especially not the UK. We’ve done everything we can. We’ve compiled stacks of high-quality eyewitness and expert evidence, drafted to the highest standards. Now it’s in the hands of those who can deliver the accountability we so desperately need to see.”’ 22 individuals, including Israeli politicians, members of the Israeli war cabinet, nine of these individuals are apparently British nationals currently fighting in the IDF, four are government ministers and fifth senior government official allegedly a perpetrator in aiding and abetting war crimes that have been raised in the report. None are obviously named for legal reasons and it would be unwise to try and guess publicly for the same reason, but I’m sure we will all look at the government and consider who might be implicated and at the opposition benches too, if any Labour figures could be included, having walked in lockstep with the government all the way thusfar and certainly in response to the news that the ICC is seeking arrest warrants. The Tories have been particularly stupid in their responses, not least Rishi Sunak who has literally said the findings of the International Criminal Court are unhelpful. Even Starmer hasn’t gone that far, even Labour has drawn the line at directly attacking the ICC, but Sunak seems to be living proof that money can’t buy you common sense, he probably regards it as another one of those foreign courts, even though we’re signed up to the ICC and the Rome Statute ourselves and still thinks he speaks for all of us, when the genocide being meted out by Israel, triggering those arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant, should rightly appal us all and well, it just gives us an opportunity to remind Sunak that nobody voted for him to be PM, or to give him a mandate. I also wonder if it includes the guy who told ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan that the ICC was built for Africa and thugs like Putin and not allies of the West, who knew it wasn’t supposed to be a proper court and of course it is hilarious to see the ICC being accused by the likes of Netanyahu as being a kangaroo court, when instead, it is sticking to its remit, it is seeking to prosecute both Israeli leaders and Hamas leaders on separate charges, taking a completely even handed approach to this, yet still they get accused of taking sides as this video recommendation will tell you all about and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so if you are the sort of person who still listens to ill informed right wing political pundits via mainstream media, you might be surprised at all of this, thinking Jeremy Corbyn had been expelled from Labour ages ago, they do keep repeating this line, but it is not true, Jeremy Corbyn remains so far as we are aware at time of writing, a Labour member. Keir Starmer arbitrarily blocked him from sitting as a Labour MP, because he’s petulant and ridiculous and frankly terrified of Corbyn, a man who can draw huge crowds wherever he goes, even to this day, 4 years after leaving the Labour leadership post, whereas Starmer’s audiences are more akin to a wake and his speeches about as lively as our dearly beloved waiting to be laid to rest. But now it seems Starmer might have found his opportunity to rid himself of Corbyn, just before Corbyn might be about to leave anyway to stand as an independent to defend his Islington North seat, because Starmer would rather try and take credit for Corbyn actually being expelled, then just letting him leave. The trouble is, if Starmer does this for the reasons given, over a donation Corbyn received, then it an be reflected back on Starmer tenfold. Right, so what has Jez done to upset Keir Starmer so much this time then Damo? Well, still drawing breath pretty much does that on it’s own, Corbyn very much still living rent free in Starmer’s head as his predecessor, despite all the accusations made against him to remove the risk he posed to the establishment, as he remains infinitely more popular than the cardboard Tony Blair, that Starmer now appears to be. The matter boils down to a donation Corbyn has received from grassroots organisation, We Deserve Better, which is frankly calling out how awful both the Tories are, have been and still will be, as well as Starmer’s Labour barely being any different. A short bit of blurb on their website reads: ‘The Tories are toast. Starmer’s Labour will win the next General Election by default but they aren’t offering any solutions to the Tories’ ruinous record. We deserve better than this race to the bottom.’ And there’s few of us on the left who would disagree with that. Certainly they’ve been given a bit of a profile by Owen Jones, who has left the Labour Party to throw his support behind this group and despite my own issues with Jones, I don’t disagree with him here. Fundamentally, this group is raising money to help support both Independent candidates and Green Party candidates to win in key seats, they are helping to fund them in as much of a way as possible and examples of those they are supporting right now are Leanne Mohamad, the Independent candidate taking on the awful Starmerroid Wes Streeting and the Green Party Co-Leader Carla Denyer, who is seeking to rid us of another Starmerroid, Thangam Debbonaire in Bristol Central. But they have also donated to Jeremy Corbyn, despite him having not left the Labour Party, nor having officially declared that he is running as an independent, though the fact he has accepted this donation, might imply that is very much his intention, we are of course still waiting to find out if he is going to go for it, especially now that Starmer has opened up selection proceedings to replace Corbyn as Labour’s candidate for Islington North. In a sign that paranoid Starmer has been keeping an eye on everything Corbyn related looking for an opportunity, the moment Corbyn’s register of financial interests got updated, and a £5,000 donation from We Deserve Better was featured, showing Corbyn clearly accepted the donation, again stoking the flames somewhat that an independent challenge from him is imminent…and by that I mean some point this side of the General Election getting called, as soon as the unelected PM Sunak stops running away from it. Given that We Deserve Better are backing antiestablishment candidates, in and of itself, I don’t really see that this donation will work to exclude Corbyn, the group declares that it is backing socialist candidates, the gray area here is that Corbyn isn’t actually at this moment in time a candidate at all, her certainly won’t be allowed to stand in Islington North, not even members are getting a say in who their candidate will be, because the Labour NEC has taken over selections. There is zero democracy going on at all at selection level, it would appear any where in the country at this point. So the donation implies that Corbyn is a candidate then, but without a candidacy, can Labour prove that is what this donation was intended for? Corbyn hasn’t declared an independent challenge, he’d have to left Labour already to do so, perhaps he isn’t going to despite claims to the contrary from the likes of We Are Collective, who have him listed amongst their list of socialist candidates that they are backing, but is caveated by the words if stands next to his name. Until it finally comes from Corbyn’s mouth that he’s standing, nobody actually can be sure. I suspect it will come, I hope it will, but at this moment in time there is no definitive candidacy. So ultimately, all Corbyn has done is accept a donation from a grassroots socialist organisation, that is backing candidates to stand against Labour, but Labour as far as I can see, cannot say this, at least not yet about Corbyn. Yet this donation, might be what they use against him, to expel him. Starmer’s opportunity to say we cannot tolerate him any longer if he is taking donations from anti Labour organisations. The thing is, that wouldn’t wash either. Corbyn is still a Labour member, he just happens to be a socialist. Starmer would literally be expelling him on the grounds that he’s a socialist. That is literally the only parallel that can legitimately be drawn from this donation right now. Politics Home, a media outlet long critical of Corbyn, said this on the matter: ‘PoliticsHome understands that the party is looking at the donation, and Labour sources have suggested that Corbyn now faces possible exclusion from Labour. Party rules state that any member “declaring an intention to stand in a public election in opposition to a party candidate” faces auto-exclusion from the party. It is also against the rules for a member to support “any political organisation that the NEC in its absolute discretion shall declare to be inimical with the aims and values of the party’ But Corbyn has not declared such an intention, at least not yet, but to be talking of auto-exclusion seems a bit premature and little bit like the right wing Red Tories now running the party, especially the National Executive Committee, now basically seen by many on the left as the personal fiefdom of Israel Lobbyist Luke Akehurst, are jumping to conclusions a bit quick, but of course we’ve seen groups be proscribed by the Labour Party before, Labour Against The Witch Hunt, Resist, Socialist Appeal and others and Labour members retrospectively expelled due to having spoken to such people, film director Ken Loach probably the most high profile example. If the NEC decide to proscribe We Deserve Better, and use the same retrospective abuses to expel members, then Corbyn could well be booted out, but ultimately his only crime will have been to have been a socialist. Labour the Democratic Socialist Party, which would abuse its own democratic rules, to expel a socialist. At that point, they should be taken to court for false advertising! Is this a bit of a stretch? Well let’s see what Luke Akehurst has said about We Deserve Better then: ‘Luke Akehurst, a member of Labour’s national executive committee, said: “I suspect this project will be as unsuccessful as every previous breakaway from the Labour Party, whether to the right or previous left-wing formations that disappeared without a trace after a brief flurry of media coverage. I am disappointed that Owen Jones who used to make thoughtful contributions to debate on the left, not least holding nuanced views around issues to do with Israel and anti-semitism, has ended his membership in this way. There’s something rather pathetic about backing a random collection of Green and independent candidates who are seeking to undermine Labour just at the point where we’re headed towards an historic general election victory.’ That was in response to news that Owen Jones had left Labour and thrown his lot in with this group, but I would argue there is nothing precluding Labour members from joining and supporting socialist candidates. The Labour view, as far as Akehurst’s word carries any weight, and many suspect his word carries an awful lot of weight these days, is that this group are pathetic and that backing Greens and Independents when Labour verges on historic victory is just seeking to undermine that. They really do hate democracy these days don’t they? If you don’t like the competition, put a better offer to the country in then and stop persecuting people on the left and stop shamelessly ripping the Tories off like a bad tribute act. The entitlement of this twerp is mad. It isn’t your turn for power, win the election first, it isn’t yours by default and given how little you offer by way of meaningful change to the people of this country, you don’t deserve it. We do deserve better. Labour might figure this move is doomed to fail, but with so little on offer from Labour and people equally sick of the Tories and not wanting more of the same, I’d argue there is an appetite for people to look elsewhere. The local election results certainly implied that is true, so often though that doesn’t extend up to parliamentary level. But people are angry, they are fed up and if grassroots organisations, if Independent candidates and Green candidates, who so often of course lack the media coverage they ought to get, that their smaller right wing rivals often get far too much of, can benefit from this and get their messages across, which extra funding will help with, then people who might not pick on their messaging otherwise, who might out of apathy decide to stay at home and not bother to vote, might find a reason to think otherwise, goodness knows Labour are giving plenty of people reason to stay at home instead. Speaking of, it’s not just voters being turned off Labour and members being booted out for ridiculous reasons, Labour’s elected officials are too. Labour rely on boots on the ground, a grassroots movement to get elected, yet now see grassroots movements organising against them. They are losing that local support to other parties, but also their elected officials too, as they have been bleeding away from the party for years now under Starmer, but this appears to be speeding up as this video here will tell you all about the most recent departures and their reasons for doing so and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so news that has echoed around the world now is that the International Criminal Court, the ICC have finally, after much preamble and apparent delay, now submitted applications for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his defence minister Yoav Gallant, and three key members of Hamas as well, Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, better known as Dief, the Commander in Chief of Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades and Ismail Haniyeh, the Head of Hamas’ Political Bureau. There’s no cogent argument that the ICC here is acting in the interests of one side or the other, despite claims to the contrary, the threats the ICC despite showing even handedness and even the claims that it isn’t supposed to be a proper court, but merely a western device there to promote their interests and use against Africa and thugs like Putin. The ICC has more work to do beyond Hamas and Israel, but this move by the ICC is far, far cleverer than at first glance it might seem, and I have to take my hat off to the Chief Prosecutor, for showing some real guts and playing the game he’s going to have to in order for any justice to be seen. Right, so first off, having made several videos questioning ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, for what has seemed like dragging his heels, given how quickly we’ve seen the ICC’s sister organisation at the Hague, the ICJ, leap into action on the matter of Israel and Gaza, I feel the need to acknowledge that actually, he’s owed an apology. He’s played an absolute blinder here, has got pro Israel politicians screaming up the walls and Netanyahu doing his typical turn of basically just calling the ICC antisemitic, but for every berk slamming his decision to apply for arrest warrants for both Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the fact he’s also applied for arrest warrants for three key Hamas operatives as well, completely undermines any argument, that the ICC is taking sides. It simply isn’t. On top of that, part of what has taken so long to get where we are now, is that Khan knew he’d have to have every T crossed and I dotted on the evidence gathered, in triplicate probably, so as to leave no room for doubt at all, that there was a case here to answer and in that light had assembled a team of leading human rights lawyers to work on the case as well, including as it happens Amal Clooney, someone who has come in for a bit of flak due to her silence on the matter of Israel and Gaza, but of course doing what she’d been doing, she clearly couldn’t, so a lesson there for the celeb blocking people, that silence isn’t always complicity. In a lengthy statement, which I’m not going to read, the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor, Karim Khan, has outlined the remit of his investigation, which is only from the events of October 7th onwards and the charges he plans to bring against the aforementioned individuals. For the three from Hamas, the charges he has requested arrest warrants on the grounds of read: ‘Extermination as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(b) of the Rome Statute; Murder as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(a), and as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i); Taking hostages as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(iii); Rape and other acts of sexual violence as crimes against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(g), and also as war crimes pursuant to article 8(2)(e)(vi) in the context of captivity; Torture as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(f), and also as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i), in the context of captivity; Other inhumane acts as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(l)(k), in the context of captivity; Cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i), in the context of captivity; and Outrages upon personal dignity as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(ii), in the context of captivity.’ Certainly these are the accusations made against Hamas, that we have heard much of, clearly the ICC has evidence of these to bring forward and indeed as much as we talk about Palestine being occupied territory and the Palestinian people have the right to resist that occupation, actions such as these, do not excuse I feel. We know they took hostage, we know why, but being signatories to the ICC, Palestine, be it the West Bank or Gaza, know this is off limits and of course everything else listed there should be obviously be prosecuted if proven. Same goes for Israel though. The ICC Chief Prosecutor and his team bring forward the following charges against Netanyahu and Gallant: ‘Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Statute; Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health contrary to article 8(2)(a)(iii), or cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i); Wilful killing contrary to article 8(2)(a)(i), or Murder as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i); Intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as a war crime contrary to articles 8(2)(b)(i), or 8(2)(e)(i); Extermination and/or murder contrary to articles 7(1)(b) and 7(1)(a), including in the context of deaths caused by starvation, as a crime against humanity; Persecution as a crime against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(h); Other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(k).’ Now the problem Israel have, is that these charges have all very much played out on camera to the public eye, because whereas the charges against Hamas relate to the events of one night on October 7th for the most part, for Israel’s leaders, it’s been 7 months of optics. We know aid is being blocked, we know setters are responsible in no small part for this and we know the Israeli government has done nothing to stop them. Causing great suffering, just look at the numbers of women and children killed or permanently maimed as a result of their actions. The scale of the deaths speak for themselves, 40,000 dead Gazans, 70% of them women and children. Extermination and murder, the mass graves in hospital grounds are what immediately spring to mind there. And as for persecution, well that’s been a 76 year long crime, but certainly the forced displacement is what I think of first off. Israeli crimes seem far more obvious because we’ve watched them play out on our screens for months and so I think the application for arrest warrants here are the most likely to go through, though I imagine as I said, with the work that has gone in, the time spent of preparing this case, I’d be surprised if any were denied in the end and if, so, particularly those Israeli ones, I’d suspect political interference at play. The reaction to these applications for arrest warrants though from the rest of the world kind of implies that the reality of the situation hasn’t been lost on many others either and the go to excuse for Israel right now, particularly from US and UK spokespeople and politicians is that the ICC has no remit to prosecute Israel. No calls that they are innocent except from the Eylon Levy’s of this world, certainly calls that the ICC are racist, because of course some will have said that, but trying to say the ICC has no jurisdiction or worse, that this isn’t what they were created for, really does show some fear and some hands being played by politicians who have, through their support for Netanyahu and his regime, made themselves complicit in genocide. I’m going to park that issue for now, I’m going to cover that in another video, but what they are saying about the ICC is just false and downright offensive when they come out with lines like, the ICC ‘is built for Africa and thugs like Putin’ and not for the West and it’s allies: So the ICC is just a club for the West to beat others with, but not their allies then? Well Karim Khan has said absolutely not and is acting accordingly. I’d love to know which political leader decided to opine in such an offensive manner, they have no place leading a brass band, let alone be in power in a nation state. But on that point of jurisdiction, if that is the go to position of those still seeking to defend Israel, now skating on very thin ice with regards being found complicit in the genocide Israel is engaged in. Palestine is a signatory of the Rome Statute, the UN recognise Palestine as a state, the UK and US do not, but just because they don’t acknowledge a Palestinian state, that to them it is all Israel and some occupied territory that Israel controls, it’s only about them and because Israel are not signatories, that means the ICC has no jurisdiction. Well, the ICC found jurisdiction against Russia, against Putin, and that was celebrated and welcomed, thus proving the ICC is viewed as a device supposed to act in western interests and not actually an arbiter in global law, but the current chief prosecutor says otherwise and thank goodness for that. Now we wait and see if those arrest warrants get granted and what the response to that will be. Meanwhile as Israel predictably loses it’s mind over this latest move, they’ve carried on attacking Gaza as well as the West Bank and are still attacking aid trucks as they come in, Settlers now choosing to cripple aid truck by wrecking the tyres and then looting and destroying the goods being carried, thus proving these charges being levied by the ICC, check out that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, Keir Starmer will now officially be having a very, very bad day as Jewish former African National Congress politician under Nelson Mandela, turned global arms sales campaigner Andrew Feinstein IS going to stand against Keir Starmer at the next General Election. He has now formally announced his decision to stand after much consultation amongst local groups and his fellow residents of Holborn and St Pancras and the response has clearly been a positive one, meaning a guy who could be described as Keir Starmer’s worst nightmare, a candidate who is everything he isn’t, will be taking him on at the General Election and the people of Holborn will actually have a decent socialist, not to mention honest candidate to vote for. Right, so this is amazingly good news, a good news story, I seem to so rarely offer up these days, news of a positive nature but Andrew Feinstein, after weeks of will he or won’t he conjecture, following an endorsement from the anti Starmer campaign group OCISA, Andrew Feinstein is going to stand at the General Election as an Independent candidate against Keir Starmer. For those unfamiliar with him, Andrew Feinstein is the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors and is a massive longtime critic of Keir Starmer. He is a self described proud leftie Jew. He is an activist, film maker and author and also a former politician in his native South Africa, however he now lives in Holborn and St Pancras. In South Africa, he was elected to stand for the African National Congress under the then leadership of Nelson Mandela in the very first democratic elections held there in 1994, his time as a South African MP largely spent working as an advisor on economics and finance and served on the finance committee there. Notably, Feinstein introduced the first ever motion on the Holocaust in South African history, stating that previous suffering by the Afrikaners at the hands of the British, or of the Jews by the Nazis in no way justified the brutal oppression suffered by black South Africans or Palestinians. This was back in the 1990’s now. Feinstein stood down from South African politics in 2001, resigning in objection to the failure to investigate the corrupt South African Arms Deal, which was notable in its corruption due to procurement. Think Covid VIP lanes but with guns. Feinstein wrote a book on the subject called The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. He moved to London after his political career in South Africa ended and has been no less busy here albeit in a less legislative manner. He’s the director of Shadow World Investigations, formerly Corruption Watch UK, specialising in the global arms trade, but also investigates other forms of corruption. He’s also a board member of one of my favourite alternative news outlets Declassified UK. He’s a staunch opponent of apartheid in all it’s a forms, a lifelong supporter of the plight of the Palestinian people, which his native South Africa have shown too by taking Israel to the International Court of Justice. So, we have standing against Starmer, who supports the state of Israel unequivocally, a guy who has drawn direct comparisons between what Israel continues to do against Palestinians, with the apartheid he saw in South Africa committed by whites against blacks. We have a guy who has written extensively on the global arms trade, and is director of an organisation which investigates this, standing against Starmer, who still backs arms sales to the Israeli regime. We have Starmer, who claims to stand against those critical of the so-called Jewish state and claims to have eradicated antisemitism from his party, standing against the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors, who has called out Israeli atrocity, like many other Jews have, who declare action abhorrent and not in their name and not in the name of their faith. We have a guy standing against Starmer who walked away from his life as a politician in South Africa, because he put his own principles first, standing against Keir Starmer, a guy who’s principles seemingly change depending on the weather. Andrew Feinstein is everything Starmer isn’t, he is his worst nightmare, which makes Feinstein absolutely the candidate to back. When the outlook of British politics has been so poor, and certainly not helped by Starmer and the party he leads no longer offering anything like hope or change, Feinstein’s candidacy, now made official offers that. If anyone is capable of toppling Starmer, despite the massive majority he has, Feinstein I believe is the guy to do it and without his seat, Starmer cannot become Prime Minister. Feinstein has penned a piece in Declassified UK, all of which is a blazing piece, a brilliant article and I absolutely recommend going to their website and reading all of it, but here’s an excerpt: ‘Our democracy is in crisis. The two main parties are virtually indistinguishable in their offers of permanent austerity, forever wars and environmental degradation. Keir Starmer, the MP for Holborn and St. Pancras where my family and I have lived for around 22 years, is emblematic of this crisis. His politics are mendacious, unprincipled and in the interests of his billionaire donors rather than the constituents he was elected to serve. I have seen real leadership in action: I was privileged to serve under Nelson Mandela as an MP in South Africa. His leadership was selfless, principled, accountable, transparent and honest. Everything that Keir Starmer is not. His almost immediate abandonment of many of the ten progressive pledges on which he was elected to lead the Labour Party is a clear sign he cannot be trusted. Starmer has now gone a step too far by refusing to support an unqualified ceasefire and a halt to arms sales to Israel amid the greatest human tragedy since World War Two: the genocide being committed in Gaza. How is it possible that a former human rights lawyer, who must see the horrific images that we all view on our screens every day, has not even commented on the highest court in the world’s interim ruling that Israel is likely committing genocide and ethnic cleansing? The ICC’s decision to seek an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, including “starvation of civilians, wilfully causing great suffering and cruel treatment”, casts Starmer’s support for a siege of Gaza – cutting off water and power – in an even more appalling light. His attempts to deny such support, despite video evidence confirming it, smacks of a remarkable lack of honesty or contrition. He has backed the Conservative government’s indefensible position on the crisis, rather than demanding an end to the carnage, to occupation and to apartheid – the only route to a just peace in the region. The Labour Party’s appalling stance on Gaza has fuelled a concern, enunciated most explicitly in a report written by Martin Forde KC, that the party operates a ‘hierarchy of racism’. It oxymoronically expels life-long anti-racist Jews, supposedly to combat antisemitism, while taking little if any action against Islamophobia and anti-black racism. As Nelson Mandela opined: “You are either against all forms of racism and discrimination, or you are part of the racism problem.”’ Can you imagine that guy going toe to toe in a local hustings against Starmer? Laying all of that out and demanding answers from him over these and more to his face? Heck, you could sell tickets and people would queue! Also, in light of those arrest warrant requests now having come from the International Criminal Court, will complicity charges be making their way to Starmer in the near future along with others? But also there is the matter of Holborn needing a good local MP again. Starmer has caused division and introduced the same authoritarianism to local politics there as he has sown nationally in the Labour Party across the country and no doubt everywhere, should he reach power. The response on social media to this announcement today has been swift and overwhelmingly positive. Sarah J Packwood tweeted out: ‘"It is time for politics to serve the people" - Andrew Feinstein. I so want to see Andrew Feinstein defeat Keir Starmer in the GE. He is standing against him in Holborn and St Pancras. Calling on all socialists & other progressives to get behind him & support his campaign!’ Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush echoed my sentiments in his tweet, saying: ‘Andrew Feinstein is a pro-Corbyn/pro-Palestine Jew whose ancestors were killed in the Holocaust. As a politician in South Africa, he opposed Apartheid and worked alongside Nelson Mandela. And he's standing against Starmer in Holborn & St Pancras. He's Starmer's worst nightmare.’ And the Liverpool Community Independents have written: ‘Good to see former ANC MP and advisor to Nelson Mandela Andrew Feinstein standing against Starmer.’ It is good to see, incredibly good to see and many others have tweeted out how they’ve already donated to Feinstein’s crowdfunder, also opened today on Go Fund Me, the Andrew Feinstein Campaign, so let’s see how quickly that target can be achieved. Campaigners and volunteers for Andrew’s campaign will be out in force across Holborn and St Pancras from around 4:30pm today at the train stations, armed with leaflets so if you live there make sure you don’t miss out on them, campaign groups having given Feinstein their endorsement already include We Are Collective, For the Many and OCISA, so this is campaign is out of the starting blocks and already flying, if that doesn’t underline just how much appetite there is to see change, for hope and to see the back of a dishonest overly ambitious, self serving charlatan like Keir Starmer, who the media have given far too easy a ride, and needs to be held to account for his conduct, I don’t know what does. This is one election campaign all eyes should be on, one of the most important contests of the General Election. This is the one that could send shockwaves to establishment interests, that we’ve all had enough.

Right, so Joe Biden hasn’t had the best of weeks. The US is being thrown out of Niger, for not eliminating terrorists there in exchange for US troops being allowed to stay in the country, whilst also telling the Nigerien government not to do deals with Russia or Iran or they’ll walk away. Well, you’re being told to get out, so good going. Then there is the news that Biden is considering lifting sanctions on an Israeli businessman, who’s business model seems to basically consist of exploiting the Congolese over the last 3 decades for their mineral wealth, because Biden wants access to that mineral wealth too. Both these stories I’ve covered in recent videos. But now, where sanctions are possibly getting lifted on a wealthy Israeli rotter, Biden wants to impose sanctions again, though not on this Israeli chap, nor sadly on Israel itself, which needs a good sanctioning in my view and the view of many others. No, the sanctions are set to be place on India and just like Niger, it comes down to business dealings with Iran yet again. Right, so Joe Biden is now threatening sanctions on India, a big economy, powerful country, because they’ve done an investment deal with Iran and the US doesn’t like it and as always throws it’s weight around to get it’s own way, because still it believes that what it says on this planet should go and everyone should listen to them. It is petulant, weak and erodes diplomatic relations, it doesn’t strengthen them, but frankly this isn’t Biden’s part of the world, it has nothing to do with the US, it has everything to do with India and it’s issues with Pakistan and much like Israel and Palestine, the British Empire caused most of the problems. I’m not going to go into the history of Partition, but where people were divided based on ethno religious grounds, to form what is now the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, hostility has ensued over the years between them and India, not necessarily to the same extent as with Israel and Palestine, as in their case there is disputed territory between them, whereas Israel are intent on ethnic cleansing and seizing Occupied Palestinian Territories for Israel, that is if you listen to the hard right factions of Netanyahu’s government and certainly have been paying close attention to the goings on in Gaza. India and Pakistan have gone to war with each other on numerous occasions over the likes of Kashmir, peace treaties have been signed in between, but it’s always been a case of it’s a matter of time before things flare up. Now India and it’s decade long ruling Prime Minister Narendra Modi aren’t above reproach in and of themselves either. Modi is an authoritarian, many ethnic minorities in the country feel persecuted by him, he is ardently right wing, so you’d imagine he’d get on well with US administrations, and largely has. However India is also a founding member of BRICS, so has never sought US approval for it’s actions and doesn’t ask for any now. The original BRICs lineup after all, forming the initials, Brazil, Russia, India and China. Despite strong Russian links, the US have maintained a relationship with India, but now they are investing in Iran too, that’s the last straw? Iran is also a member of BRICs now. Where it began with 4 countries in 2006, it is now 9 members strong, with South Africa joining in 2010, changing the name at that point from BRIC to BRICS, and then at the start of this year, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joined too, so that BRICS now encompasses some 30% of the planet and 45% of the global population. It is a very significant if still recent trade bloc and it doesn’t need the US. More and more it seems these countries are shunning them. Therefore with Iran now being part of the bloc, an opportunity to bypass Pakistan for trade opportunities has presented itself to India, which is where we get to the crux of matters. Right, now, in order to have trade negotiations with landlocked Asian countries, the ‘Stans as they are often colloquially referred to, India has to use Pakistani ports. The road to Afghanistan for example, leads through Pakistan, to the north of India lies the disputed territories of Jammu and Kashmir, which obviously therefore can’t be used, so it is either through Pakistan or massive detours through China and other ‘Stan countries to get to Afghanistan and I single Afghanistan out, because they are cited as one of the trade partners India want better access to in a recent Al-Jazeera article. Iran lies to the west of Pakistan, shares a border with them, but also does so with Afghanistan, therefore a new trade route via Iran would benefit India hugely. As such, India have just signed a 10 year deal to do up Iran’s Chabahar Port, to boost those trade ties with Afghanistan and other land locked countries beyond, Iran also has a border with Turkmenistan for example, with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan beyond. Lots of opportunity. You’d imagine India wanting to trade with Afghanistan, the Taliban then as that would be, would be more of an issue for the US frankly than India doing a deal with one of their BRICs trade partners, but no, Iran is the issue and frankly at this point and at this time with the US again moaning about anyone having diplomatic or economic ties to Iran, you automatically question why that is and at what point this actually becomes all about Israel again. Well the US haven’t overtly come out and said this, they do have enough beef with Iran as it is, but frankly why should their problem be anybody elses, its that old Mandela adage again, why should your enemies be our enemies ands clearly having been admitted to BRICs, Irana re not seen as the enemy of any of those countries, but sanctions from the US for any other nation dealing with Iran, would give them an excuse to and of course the US will be labelled massive hypocrites if they push ahead with sanctions against India over a trade deal with a trade partner, when they still won’t sanction Israel whilst committing genocide. More and more Biden’s administration are looking weak as a result of their support for Israel on the global stage. India risk sanctions if they do, bleat the US administration, stamping their tiny feet over it, spitting their dummies, throwing their toys out of the pram. India for their part have basically said grow up, though the actual wording was that the US should not take such a narrow view of this deal and would communicate the benefits of it to the US. The benefits don’t matter to them, it’s a but Iran moment again for them. This has been a plan for a long time, US sanctions on Iran prevented India going ahead with this back in 2003 apparently, but now they are in the same trade bloc, a new trade bloc that back then didn’t exist, things are very different now. For one thing, the US will want to continue dealing with India as they are a massively fast growing economy, but if they choose to impose sanctions, they’ll be cutting their own noses off to spite their faces, since India can probably shrug off the fallout and the new deals set to open up to them in inland Asia would probably be seen as a price worth paying if the US can’t get over itself. So what is Biden going to do then? If he imposes sanction on India over Iran, he will lose out more, the US will lose out more. India’s economy is booming right now, they’ll shrug it off and Biden will look even weaker than he already does trying and failing to throw his weight around as the US global influence continues to diminish. If after all of this rhetoric, the US doesn’t impose sanctions, why should anyone fear doing business with nations the US don’t like? The trouble is if you make threats and you don’t follow through, you just look weak. If you follow through and damage your own country more, then you just look stupid. It’s way past time the US stopped thinking it is the Big I Am, because, especially in light of everything that is happening with regards to Israel and Gaza since October 7th and the refusal to place sanctions on them, refusing to allow the UN to take measures via the Security Council, with the US using it’s veto, the nation seen more and more as the problem, is the US itsels, so why should anyone take any notice of their hypocrisy, when the biggest elephant in the room right now, is their inability or unwillingness, to do the right thing by Gaza and by Palestine and its people? If India flip them the bird at the end of the day, well they’ve brought that on themselves as well. Sanctions should be being placed on Israel, yet undermining Biden hugely is the thought of lifting them as is being mooted in regards to an exploitative Israeli billionaire’s interests in the mineral wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, wealth the US needs which also underlines their vulnerability by burning bridges with big economies like India’s. Find out all about that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so Wes Streeting has this morning reminded us he’s a rancid little liar jumping to Keir Starmer’s tune as he chose to defend why Labour will not scrap the cruel poverty imposing two child benefit cap. You see, when it comes to national spending, how an elected government chooses to use public money, our money, this always comes down to a matter of choice. Dishonest politicians, dishonest parties will always make the claim that there is no money left, when the truth of the matter is, they can spend as much as they choose to create. We live in a country that controls it’s own currency and the means of production of it. If you print too much that can stoke inflation, but that is what taxation is for. So called taxpayers money doesn’t pay for anything, it’s simply a brake on inflation by taking money out of the economy as the government puts more in to it, so quite clearly when a politician says there is no money left, it simply isn’t true. When a politician says another party will bankrupt the country, it simply isn’t true and when Wes Streeting says combatting child poverty by scrapping this cruel tory device that even Suella Braverman says needs to go now, that is a political choice and a decision Labour are choosing to make. So what makes them any better than the Tories who introduced it? Right, so that was Wes Streeting, Keir Starmer’s health minion being rolled out on the Sunday morning media rounds, talking to the Trevor Phillips on Sky and first off, if you’re the sort of person who decides to bring up child poverty by invoking the Archbishop of Canterbury, inferring him calling for all parties to scrap it is none of his business and he should be more concerned with getting people into church on a Sunday morning, then you have no intentions of seriously broaching this subject, what an appalling excuse for a human being you are. No wonder Starmer welcomed him back into the party, no investigation required after Phillips was suspended over alleged Islamophobia, but Streeting, although not choosing to attack the Archbishop on a Sunday morning, he actually defended his right to virtue signal he called it – his job isn’t to virtue signal, it’s to appeal to the likes of you and try to find a sliver of humanity – subsequently lapped up the cue to be able to say well we are committee to reducing child poverty, whist not saying how and when pushed on this comment by the Archbishop and Streeting’s defence of him as to whether he would be saying yes to him, Streeting ended up stating in no uncertain terms Labour will be keeping child poverty, because Labour can’t fund it. That is what this amounts to. No semblance of an impartial lead up into this question, some hand-wringing and then an admission that Tory policy that has driven up child poverty and failed to get more people into work will actually be staying because, well we can’t afford to fix anything, the Tories have wrecked the economy. This is exactly what the Tories were saying about Labour in 2010, they fixed nothing except to set fire to public services, drive all of our bills up, inflict 14 years of hardship upon those with the least in the name of there being no money left and yet here is Labour now under Keir Starmer, saying exactly the same thing now about the Tories. At what point do you choose to make a different choice, because that is what it comes down to. This country was blown to hell during WWII and we weren’t told there was no money left then to put things back together were we? We were in a far worse financial situation, back then, but different choices were made. Attlee decided that under-consumption rather than over-production were the causes of economic collapse previously, and therefore embarked on a mission pushing for public ownership and wealth redistribution. He raised pensions, created social security, wages went up, sick leave was increased, encouraging more people back into work, all whilst restricting prices and restricting rent. Fully 20% of British industry was under public ownership, including mining, electricity, gas, steel and rail. Subsidised public housing came on offer, loans for housing were increased, all led to a million new homes being built. New nursery schools, university scholarships, free school meals, free education, increased teachers wages. The creation of the NHS is undoubtedly what this government is best remembered for and I’ve skipped loads, because this is I’ve used as an example of what is possible, what can be done by a government with the will to do it and Starmer’s Labour have none. Attlee did all of this and more in just 6 years, a single parliament basically, because the money is always there at the end of the day to do it with. There’s just no intention on Labour’s part to do it. On one part it comes down to the fact Starmer is a coward. He is afraid of bad press, he is afraid of Tory criticism, he is afraid that that criticism might jeopardise his chances of getting into power. So instead of promising pretty much anything, he chooses to tinker, to mildly change things that the Tories have done, and is therefore as a result so similar to the Tories in what he says he stands for, on what he puts on offer, that there is barely any discernible difference between the two parties. It is because he is constantly chasing this position of not giving the Tories any clear water between the two main parties, that he has also ended up in the ridiculous position of constantly being exposed as breaking his promises to the country. What the Tories think of him and his promises seems to matter more to Starmer than what the country actually does, it is what has prompted his pursuit of Tory voters too, under the Mandelson assumption that Labour voters and those on the left will still back Labour with nowhere else to go. Well they are going. Labour councillors continue to quit seemingly on a daily basis up and down the country, refusing to be sullied by this disgrace of what passes for their former party, members have gone as well in droves, both willingly or been pushed out as they choose to voice dissent and well, that can’t be allowed. But allowing kids to remain in poverty? As much as the national focus appears to be much more on the likes of Israel and Gaza and the disgust with the Labour Party is focussed on that, to my mind nothing underlines just how nasty a party Labour is than how it chooses to treat those who don’t have a vote, those too young to have a say, because the two child benefit cap is an assault on children and to say you have no money left to deal with this, scrap it, especially when Labour did originally say they would – well it seems Starmer and Co have calculated they needn’t bother because they aren’t likely to lose many Tory voters over this. To be honest, I think there is an element of doubt in how safe those poll numbers have been making them feel. The local election results showed that actually Starmer isn’t capturing all those Tory votes and he is losing support from the left to other parties or to the multitude of independent candidates springing up around the country, but clearly not enough that they are prepared to leave 250,000 kids in poverty, that lifting this cap would drag them out of. Coming from Wes Streeting however, this somehow comes across as even worse. This is a guy who grew up in poverty, a single parent household on a council estate, who has spoken of his childhood previously, but this week he was interviewed about all of this by the Independent who gave him a chance to plug his autobiography – God knows who’d buy that – called One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up, literally describing the poverty he grew up in, yet now is a politician, a shadow minister in a party, set to inflict more of that on hundreds of thousands of kids. Nothing, nobody exemplifies doing well and pulling the ladder up behind them quite like Wes Streeting does. I’d feel sick to my core to be inflicting the upbringing I had if I’d had it so tough as that on others in the here and now and I certainly don’t claim to have had it as tough as Streeting, despite having grown up through Thatcher’s far too long rule, but in no way, shape or form, would I knowingly accept doing that to others and then going on TV and defending it. All this boils down to is more of Rachel Reeves nonsense, self imposed fiscal rules, to sound sensible on the economy, when all it really means is nothing will change. This is totally affordable if Reeves would tax the rich and allow the freedom to spend more, just look at Rishi Sunak as an example – he’s increased his wealth it’s been announced by £121m, yet paid just £0.5m in tax, a 0.004% tax rate, so it is obvious - but she won’t because she’s a Red Tory, who takes advice from George Osborne and belongs, just her economic plans, in the toilet. She’d rather see kids in poverty, than tax people like Sunak more. Streeting is an absolute disgrace as well though, who betrays his own background and does so to climb that slippery pole of ambition he’s got. He is therefore amongst the very worst of MPs and very much needs deposing from his seat and there just happens to be a very special young lady who plans to do just that, Leanne Mohamad, a British Palestinian is challenging Streeting for his seat and you can find out all about what makes her such a serious threat to Streeting’s future ambitions in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so for all the talk of their needing to be sanctions placed on Israel as the Gaza genocide continues, here comes Genocide Joe, set to lift sanctions instead and of course it is because he and his administration, not to mention the US itself will benefit from doing so and as always seems to be the case, there ends up being a Billionaire businessman involved, one that has been sanctioned for corrupt business practices, having cheated an African nation out of their cut of the profits. The fact the businessman involved also happens to be Israeli, a guy who has literally made himself a billionaire off the back of impoverished Africans means the optics of this are even worse, but to get one up on the Chinese as this story seems to ultimately boil down to, Joe Biden thinks lifting sanctions on this awful individual is a price worth paying. Right, so this is a story that is going rather underreported, but the White House are reportedly considering lifting the sanctions placed on an Israeli billionaire businessman so awful in his alleged practices, that the sanctions were actually placed upon him by Donald Trump, and if you’re so corrupt that Donald Trump can’t stomach you, that does speak volumes. Of course it would be dishonest of me to not note that Trump later on lifted the sanctions on this guy himself, just days before he left office, Gertler had hired Trumps own lawyer Alan Dershowitz, to win this reprieve, only for Biden to put them back in place within two months when he came to office. However now, things have changed, Biden wants something and seems to think the way to get it, is to lift the sanctions on this wrong’un himself. Now far be it from me to imply that Israeli’s having been born, raised and living in Israel see nothing wrong in punching down on people they consider inferior or worth less, but given how Palestinian people are treated by them, considered less than human by many of them, that this is an inherent way of thinking amongst these people. I would like to think the masses of Israeli protesters disgusted with their current government and wanting Netanyahu’s resignation, show most of them are better than that, however looking at this billionaire and how he gained his fortune, it’s easy to think that some at least, really are raised to think they are better than others and that lesser beings are there to be exploited. The man in question is called Dan Gertler, founder and president of DGI Group, Dan Gertler International and is the grandson of the founder of the Israeli Diamond Exchange, the world’s largest diamond exchange as it happens, so it’s a family of means, but Gertler has very much built on that himself, though very much built on the backs of others as that is. To be honest you can say that about all billionaires, it’s such a vast sum of money nobody can actually earn that in a lifetime, but only through exploitation. There’s exploitation and there is Dan Gertler though. Gertler has invested heavily primarily in diamond and copper mining activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has been doing so since the 90’s, whilst also having major interests in Congolese gold, cobalt, oil, agriculture and banking industries, much of this possible due to his close ties with former Congolese President Joseph Kabila, who served as President between 2001 and 2019, so a significant span of time during which Gertler was active in the country. The relationship was considered corrupt. Gertler operated what was basically a monopoly, on copper and cobalt – 60% of the world’s cobalt reserves are in the DRC, so he quickly made an absolute fortune, he held sway over which companies got mining licences, he was a key emissary for Kabila and his government, very much feet under the table sort of stuff. He popped up on the International Monetary Fund’s and World Bank’s radar by 2012, as they froze loans to Congo when the Congolese government refused to publish details between state owned mining firms and Gertler’s and when one of Gertler’s partners, the Eurasian Natural Resources Company, or ENRC, bought themselves out of their partnership with Gertler at a cost of £340m, it soon became public knowledge that Gertler’s mining operations and his personal fortune were from "looting Congo at the expense of its people". Gertler’s own response to all of this was to give an interview in which he said: ‘I should get a Nobel prize. They need people like us, who come and put billions in the ground. Without this, the resources are worth nothing.’ The money not enough then, you deserve a prize for it too then? Not if you get sanctioned into the floor over it by the US, which is what happened to him in 2017, lifted briefly by Trump as aforementioned, but now sanctioned again. So why is Joe Biden now considering lifting the ban on this widely regarded as corrupt businessman, especially given the optics of him being Israeli given what Israel is currently doing and that Biden is overtly supporting, arming, supplying, to a far greater tune than any other nation going. It’s a bit hypocritical that a guy like Biden who shows such preferential treatment for Israel at the expense of Palestine, has sanctioned a guy who has looted Congo at the expense of it’s people. You’d think they had more in common than at first sight, perhaps that is the issue? Well the issue actually seems to be China. Yes, let’s shake this video up some more, we’ve gone from the US to Israel to Africa, let’s got to China with this story as well, because the crux of the matter, is the mineral wealth in the DRC and due to Gertler’s actions leading to Western sanctions, on the flipside has been the fact Gertler is so entrenched in DRC mineral deals and influence, access to Congolese mineral wealth has become a lot harder for them, but not for China. The copper and cobalt deposits are crucial components in the manufacture of electric vehicle batteries and the West is finding itself increasingly reliant on China to get these minerals from, they having a significant foothold in Congolese mineral access themselves, they after all aren’t sanctioning Gertler. So in the name of remaining competitive over the matter of EV mineral components and completely unwilling to get over the China are bad, they’re mates with Russia boo hiss, kind of an attitude, the Biden administration is now looking to lift sanctions on Gertler, in a bid to just get him out of the way and by doing so will effectively be rewarding him for decades of alleged exploitation. No seizure of assets, no nothing, let him walk away with his apparently ill gotten gains, lift sanctions slightly to the point he can sell off his assets, keep all that money too and then sod off back to Israel essentially. Here’s an excerpt from Regtechtimes, a tech media outlet, explaining the deal: ‘The proposed arrangement, as revealed by anonymous US officials, involves limited sanctions relief for Dan Gertler in exchange for his complete withdrawal from Congo, including surrendering his royalty interests in key mining projects. This strategy aims to sever Dan Gertler’s ties to Congo’s mining sector, thereby potentially paving the way for more transparent and ethical investment practices. Key components of the deal include: 1. Relinquishment of Royalty Streams: Gertler would need to give up his royalty interests in major mining projects, such as those controlled by Eurasian Resources Group (ERG) and Glencore Plc. 2. Auditing and Escrow: Gertler would be subjected to an audit of his assets, with half of any proceeds from royalty sales being placed in escrow. 3. Legal Concessions: As part of the agreement, Dan Gertler would be required to drop lawsuits against various individuals and organizations that have investigated his activities, including members of the Congo Is Not For Sale consortium. This proposal underscores the Biden administration’s pragmatic approach to foreign policy, balancing the need to uphold anti-corruption standards while advancing strategic economic interests.’ Now the aforementioned Congo Is Not For Sale Consortium are not happy at all with this, arguing that allowing Gertler to walk away with the profits of his corruption only perpetuates corruption and there is also the distastefulness of choosing to negotiate a deal with someone who appears to have conducted his business for decades with scant regard for the morals or ethics of his actions and thusly that reflects on any deal which allows him to walk away with his plunder and when the only reason really at the end of the day the Biden administration can point to over this being to pint over at Xi Jinping and say but China, it’s all very weak and pathetic. The other side of this is would Biden go down this road if this guy wasn’t Israeli as well. Does that have any bearing on any of this and people will absolutely ask that question, especially of the Biden administration who are far too close to the Israeli government, but then all US administrations seem to be that. The timing of all of this may just be unfortunate coincidence on Biden’s part, but it means questions will be asked as to what his motivation to do this and do this now really are. This is the Biden administration getting involved in another African nations business, it didn’t go so well for them doing this further north, up in Niger as I spoke about in this video here, the Nigerien government so fed up with the Americans – and again, Israel comes into this story too – that they’ve just thrown the US out, a recommendation for your next watch if you care to stick with the channel and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid, Cheers folks.

Right, so following the local elections, which were underwhelming for Labour, clearly a party that needs to make inroads into the Tory vote, yet saw them lose three fifths of that vote split away to the Lib Dems, the Green Party and to Independents. They underachieved despite claims and in no small part the main issue being cited is of course the Party’s indefensible position on Israel and Gaza, but as much as that in and of itself has been enough of a subject of disgust and dismay for many Labour members and ordinary voters, it can also be seen as symptomatic of a greater Labour crisis, which is that there is a complete moral vacuum at the top of the party. It is run by awful people, with awful beliefs, who promise little but Tory lite tinkering in exchange for your vote and demand through absolute authoritarianism that those elected under the Labour banner, do exactly as they’re told or else. It is that that has led to no fewer than nine Councillors having quit the party since the local elections, May turning into a month of Labour implosion, as nothing changes, not the stance on Israel and Gaza and certainly not the diktat being handed down. More councillors will consistently bleed away, so if they can’t stand Labour any more, active representatives of the Party, why would you still want to vote for them, for them to carry on doing the same, but able to do it to you and do it nationwide? Right, so Labour is a moral vacuum and it is driving not just voters and lay members of the party away, but increasingly we’re seeing local Labour representation disappearing too and to lose no fewer than nine councillors since the local elections – and these are just the ones I’ve been made aware of, such things don’t always make the news – but those that have, have been excoriating in their reasoning and the party reaction hasn’t always been conducive to proving them wrong, if anything in some instances doubling down just proves the councillor in question right. Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire has seen Labour crumbling for some time, the latest Councillor to abandon Labour there actually being the fifth to do so just this year and having held local elections this year, it’s not a good sign that within 2 weeks of being elected as a Labour councillor, Musarrat Khan has quit the party, citing Keir Starmer’s continued lack of an apology for his ongoing stance on Gaza, the inference being made in a BBC article covering the resignation of Cllr Khan being that this comes down to Keir Starmer’s watered down amendment to the SNP permanent ceasefire motion called in February, that stitch up, the allegations of leaning on Speaker Lindsay Hoyle and his Labour amendment being called, when it went against standing orders to do so, ended up passing, simply calling for a ceasefire that lasts, the permanence of it removed, but the ability for Labour MPs to say they called for a ceasefire is now there, ignominious as that might be. Cllr Khan also cited the welcoming in to the party of Natalie Elphicke as another reason she felt she could not continue to represent the party, and frankly I don’t blame her – when a hard right Tory is welcome, but the likes of Diane Abbott look set to be replaced because their suspension for stupid factional reasoning will never be lifted. Socialists out, hard right Tories in? That isn’t the Labour Party and the Starmer faction will never relinquish control again so it will never functionally change from now being a Tory lite obstacle to change desperately needed in this country. Labour’s response was to say that Cllr Khan had been administratively suspended two days prior to her resignation, implying she was jumping before pushed, but that was just 8 days after she was elected to Kirklees Council. She was a valid candidate on the 2nd May, but by the 10th she was suspended? Why is that then? No comment. Undermining Labour’s position all the more on that score, is the fact Khan was on the shortlist to replace outgoing Huddersfield MP Barry Sheerman, so not only was she in good standing, she was highly rated too. Labour lost control of Kirklees Council in this years locals, another example of an underwhelming performance, now they’ve lost another councillor there already, and it seems rank dishonesty, more Tory MPs being welcomed into the Labour Party and Gaza are to blame for this, all amounting to more examples of the moral vacuum in Starmer’s Labour. Literally the day after Khan’s resignation, 5 Labour Councillors quit in North Wales, Flintshire and again this comes down to moral vacuum, though not Gaza for a change in this case. We’ve become accustomed to Tories in government certainly, having been found to have breached the rules on multiple occasions, probably the most corrupt British government we’ve seen in our lifetimes, where once upon a time when you got found out, you were expected to tender your resignation. Now it doesn’t happen, they get forgiven and carry on. That sadly sends a message out to the country that this is suitable conduct and it seems that has extended to local levels too and not unique to the Tories when Labour officials are doing it as well. Now this is a staunchly Labour controlled council, no local elections here this year, however it is still the beginning of the administrative year and therefore a new Council leader had to be elected, but with accusations by some within his own party, an unnamed Labour cabinet member was accused of misleading backbenchers, failing to correct the record and demands were made that they resign. The lead accusing councillor, Cllr Alasdair Ibbotson, said: ‘One can get away with quite a lot in politics, but it’s a hard and fast rule, whether in Parliament, the Senedd or council chamber that one does not lie to or mislead the chamber and one does not lie to or mislead a committee. Where such a thing occurs, there is a strong principle and convention in this country that where a cabinet member or minister does the same, they must resign from that position. These are issues of fundamental honour. Unfortunately, earlier this year, a cabinet member, and it could be accidentally or inadvertently, misled a committee. He has chosen not to correct the record and not to stand down. The reason this convention exists is that councillors can only have faith in what they’re told by those in leadership positions when there are consequences where wrong information is provided.’ The result of this was, when it came down to it, Ibbotson and 4 others felt they couldn’t in good conscience stand by their party and so for the sake of this chronic individual remaining in his post, whoever it is, Labour lost 5 of their councillors over this, crossing the floor and forming a new independent group. Moral vacuum, it is spreading, it isn’t just at parliamentary level this Starmer style of politics has become an infestation, a disease, but also at local level too. And then there is the latest example, as three more councillors have quit just this week, in Hackney, Diane Abbotts patch and they chose to do it in the best most hard-hitting way they could have done, by announcing their resignations from the Labour Party on Hackney Borough Council, by going to the Hackney Divestment Camp set up in the Borough to make their announcement, and announce that they were setting up a new Independent socialist group on the council, the Hackney Independent Socialists, citing Starmer’s U-turns on policy areas, including trade union freedoms, his ‘Sir Kid Starver’ policy of keeping the two child benefit cap, his support for more NHS privatisation and his treatment of their local MP, Diane Abbott, but also heavily cited Gaza in their thinking and that not only do Starmer’s Labour continue to support arming Israel, but that they do so even as the regime moves into Rafah, with all the horrors we’ve borne witness to already, nothing moves the party position on this. Labour’s response to these three quitting the party though and standing as independents? They’ve had the brass neck to tell them to resign their seats and contest by-elections! So, when can we expect the three Tory MPs that have defected to Labour to do that then? Christian Wakeford is 2 years overdue now, Dan Poulter and Natalie Elphicke though, come on, where are the demands for a by-election there then? Absolute rinsing hypocrisy and zero acknowledgement of the reasons these councillors have felt the need to leave. Are they just more fleas being shaken off? That is how Labour like to refer to people walking away from the party these days isn’t it? Meanwhile Starmer announced his first steps of a Labour government this week, six fixes as he also called them, how these fixes are more like stitch ups and first steps makes him sound like a toddler, frankly a toddler probably has more political aptitude and is definitely more honest about it too. Find out about the latest relaunch of Starmer’s leadership, which is what it really was here in this video recommendation and I’ll hopefully catch on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so this story really does underline just how much credibility the US and the Biden administration are losing their clout on the global stage over what is going on in the Middle East and that this extends beyond that region, it’s becoming a global issue for America, because for as much as the US are getting rinsed for basically being Israel’s biggest cheerleaders, they are still going around acting like they are the planet police for peace and prosperity, despite actually being the leading cause of anything but and to that end, they’ve been given short shrift in no uncertain terms in Africa, for trying to lay down the law to one nation there as to who they can and cannot do deals with themselves. Well with the US arming Israel and keeping the genocide in Gaza going, the Africans were having none of it, and they’ve just thrown the US army out on their ear, but to listen to mainstream sources, you’d think it was all Russia’s fault. Right, so the US are getting chucked out of a West African nation and the way most media are telling it, it’s all down to Russian interference, but if you listen to what the actual government concerned have to say, they tell a slightly different story. We are in Niger, you don’t hear much about Niger in the news do you? But the US have given them major beef and they aren’t having a bar it. Following on from the events of 9/11, there was of course the war on terror, pursuing bin-Laden, Al-Qaeda, which rose to prominence following the deposing of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, then ISIL, but later on after they were largely routed in the Middle East, they found strongholds in northern and western Africa, the removal of Gaddafi in Libya for example, led to a power vacuum which terrorist elements soon filled, but equally the instability in many West African nations enabled them to take root their too and so by 2013, the US established a deployment of troops, around 100 of them to start with, but this has since grown to nearly 1000, in order to deal with Isil and Al-Qaeda groups that were terrorising the region and were basing themselves out of a region called The Sahel, which is like a belt across northern Africa, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Red Sea, and is basically the boundary between the Sahara Desert and green more tropical equatorial regions further south. Co-operation to eliminate terrorist threats in Niger, by terrorist groups displaced from the Middle East, this should have been win-win situation for both. Niger had US troops on able to deal with these groups who were killing their people now and the US had a base from which to conduct further missions to deal with these groups for good. OK, fine. As long as that is actually what happens. Well, the accusation now, is that it hasn’t. That the US have not dealt with these groups properly, adequately, yet maintain a presence in Niger, without living up to their side of the bargain. You can understand they might be a bit aggrieved about that. Now despite the US presence, and what hasn’t helped the US position certainly, is the fact that they apparently were sat on their hands whilst a military coup took place in Niger last year, which deposed the socialist and first ever Arab leader of Niger, Mohamed Bazoum. I daresay the ousting of a socialist wasn’t something the US were going to cry much over, so you might wonder if they chose to let this happen or were they slacking off so much they just didn’t notice? Whatever the truth of the matter, things have blown up in their faces somewhat, as the military takeover and the self proclaimed President of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland, bit of a mouthful, Abdourahamane Tchiani. At this point the US appeared to notice something had changed, didn’t it seems like the idea of a military takeover, they don’t have a long history of being good news, not to mention there’s nothing democratic about them of course and chose to freeze security support and their counter terrorism activities. The new Nigerien administration then decided to cut all diplomatic ties off to the US, then come last month, Niger demanded all US troops leave the country now as well. Throw them out and if the mainstream are to be believed, they’re now going to be replaced by Russia. A Putin plot no doubt! It has a lot more to do with the fact the US had withdrawn their security and counter-terrorism duties, yet still chose to remain in the country, despite that literally being the reason they were allowed to stay there. That is the extent of most mainstream coverage of why Niger are throwing out the US, but it isn’t all of it. Despite essentially squatting in their country at this point, the Biden administration, were still trying to dictate who the new administration of Niger, could open up diplomatic ties with. We’ve seen this before. The US saying if you talk to them I won’t be your best friend, its playground stuff, but when Niger are getting no benefit from you being in their country any more AND you’re trying to tell them who they can have relations with instead, it isn’t going to wash. BUT, it isn’t Russia that are the issue here, it isn’t Russia the US have apparently been warning Niger off over, that’s just a very convenient narrative for the media to cover, because it is very easy and very popular to hate Russia, hate Putin, but when the truth drags us back to the Middle East again, all of a sudden it becomes much less clear cut. You see it isn’t JUST Niger talking to Russia that has given Biden and Co so much consternation, it is because Niger is talking to Iran too. Amazing that so many media outlets can mention Russia but not Iran. Iran of course are opposed to Israel, not least because they are aiding for example the Houthis in Yemen and their blockade of the Red Sea, but of course Israel attacked their embassy in Syria and retaliation was meted out, the US shot down drones and missiles from Iran flying through Iraqi airspace, coming to Israel’s aid. Niger are not pro Israel, they had bilateral relations up until 2002 before they were terminated, Niger has for a long time viewed Israel and Palestine in exactly the same light as apartheid South Africa, they voted yes in the famous 1975 UN resolution which determined that Zionism is a form of racism and their views since have not shifted. Now it seems allying themselves with a more proactive opponent of the Zionist regime really does have the US in a flap, but the US support for Israel given what has happened for the last 7 months, well, I wouldn’t want you on my doorstep either! Here’s an excerpt from Iranian media outlet Press TV, which quotes an article from the Washington Post, however the US outlet of course was one that omitted to mention Iran: ‘Niger’s prime minister says the termination of military cooperation and bilateral relations between his country and the United States was due to American threats and Washington’s opposition to the African nation's partnership with Iran and Russia. Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine told The Washington Post in an interview published on Tuesday that the US had tried to dictate what countries Niamey can have close relations with and had not justified its military presence in the West African country. Underlining the US failure to combat terrorism in Niger and the Sahel region for a decade, Zeine said, “The Americans stayed on our soil, doing nothing while the terrorists killed people and burned towns. It is not a sign of friendship to come on our soil but let the terrorists attack us.” Zeine said the United States' tone and behaviour toward Nigerien officials were the “primary reason” for the broken relations. The Nigerien prime minister criticized US officials’ call on Niamey not to engage closely with Iran and Russia as they were two of Washington’s adversaries. Zeine said he had been given an ultimatum by the US administration to have security with Washington or be close to Tehran and Moscow.’ If you go off with Russia and Iran we can’t be friends anymore threaten the US and Niger basically say, well go home then. It’s like Nelson Mandela said: ‘One of the mistakes, which some political analysts make, is to think that their enemies should be our enemies.’ It’s one more in a growing list of examples of the US being on the wrong side of global consensus right now and again showing that actually more and more countries are growing not just fed up with them, but no longer fear them either. The US failed to do what was asked of them, they had a position in West Africa no doubt for their own ends as well, Israel is their foothold in the Middle East and why they are so devoted to them, is for that reason, but with Niger having this ongoing issue with national security amidst remnants of Al-Qaeda and ISIL still active, if the US can’t do the job they promised, yet are arrogant and entitled enough to try to dictate domestic policy to you when in your country, then they aren’t much of a friend. This appears to be the position of the Nigerien government right now, this is the point they’ve reached and the US are being thrown out over it and frankly with their immovable attitude regarding Israel, regarding Iran and Russia and by all means this isn’t a video extolling those countries virtues, there absolutely are plenty of reasons to criticise them, however no matter which way you look at this, the US have again only got themselves to blame for what has happened in Niger and you have to wonder, well who is it going to be next? How many more diplomatic crashes are there going to be, because of Israel, because fundamentally, this fall out, this cut off of diplomatic and military ties now, all comes down to the US placing their Israel relationship above their relationships with others. And yet despite attacking Iran and Niger considering entering into diplomatic talks with the theocracy, the US has actually been begging them for another favour and AGAIN it all comes down to helping Israel, even as the genocide rolls on, the brass neck of them is crazy, find out all about that story in this video here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so it looks like no matter how desperate you might be to maintain control of your government, things are cracking up for Benjamin Netanyahu and it all comes down to what the eventual outcome for Gaza actually is. Netanyahu cannot afford to let up on this war in Gaza that he has begun, in a bid seemingly to keep himself in power, he has led a seven month long and counting genocide in the Strip, all supposedly in retaliation for a one night incursion by Hamas on the night of October 7th, always massively disproportionate a response as it has been and an ulterior motive has long been surmised, but with the ICJ now examining a plausible case for genocide against Israel, with arrest warrants potentially heading his way as well from the ICC, with attacks coming from all around Israel militarily, from the likes of Lebanon, to Iran to the Houthis in Yemen, causing economic damage too, relying on the bank of Uncle Sam for forever and a day won’t last forever. But when it comes to not at all hiding Israel’s true intentions for Gaza, there are splits opening up in government, because now this can of worms has been opened, how it gets closed there is no agreement on and this is why it is impossible to negotiate with Israel right now, with some absolute mad men who will never accept anything less than seizing Gaza for themselves, something no country on Earth, if you take them at their word at any rate, will allow. And to point to a perfect example of such a mad man, you only need look at the loosest of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ministerial cannons, the minister for security Itamar Ben Gvir, increasingly throwing his weight around in Netanyahu’s government, making a speech demanding the colonisation of Gaza. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu is becoming increasingly isolated even within his own government. Time after time he has given in to demands from the hard right elements of his government in order to keep his coalition together, the only thing keeping him in power and out of jail it seems at this point, however it isn’t exclusively coming from the likes of Ben Gvir, but we’ll start with him anyway. We’re becoming more familiar with this loudmouth in the press and on our screens, Itamar Ben Gvir, the Minister for Security, and leader of the far right Party Otzma Yehudit, an extremist, ultranationalist party, utterly anti-Arab, it’s a racist Jewish Supremacist party and Netanyahu chose to go into coalition with that, for the sake of taking back power. There is no limits it seems to what he’s prepared to do to be in control. But keeping such godawful people happy in order to keep the coalition together, has been an epic act of juggling, and for as much as you might do things, awful things, to placate people like him, in doing so, you lose support elsewhere and that is what we’re seeing. Three days ago was Israel Memorial Day, the anniversary of the state’s founding, on the 14th May 1948 and speeches were given by both Netanyahu and Ben Gvir, but where Netanyahu found himself heckled by those opposed to what he was doing, one man apparently shouting at him that he was garbage and saying that Netanyahu killed his children. But Ben Gvir picked his audience a little better, because he chose to attend his fan club, he chose to address those who seem to worship the ground he walks on, he chose to attend a rally held by the Nahala movement, hard right Israeli settlers that I’ve spoken about in other videos, led by Daniella Weiss, quite the Israeli name there, but what do expect when your parents came from the US and Poland. She was actually born Palestinian for all her devotion to Israel, because Israel didn’t exist when she was born, so she’s a bit of a walking hypocrisy really. Anyway, Ben Gvir was treated to a heroes welcome by Nahala as he always is and told them absolutely what they wanted to hear: Three broken ribs from a recent car accident in case you weren’t aware of that reference, but stood behind a podium reading ‘Colonisation in Gaza will bring security. Returning home’ Is saying the quiet part out loud. Go into Rafah, commit assassinations all received to rapturous applause. Gaza was up until 2005, settled by Israeli’s there were some 21 settlements there. We know Nahala want them restored, we know they want to build more, we know they want the Palestinians removed from Gaza and it to be assimilated into the Israeli state, Daniella Weiss herself thinks Ireland would be a nice place for the Gazan people, for example. Ben Gvir didn’t get everything his own way though. His speech to setters in Sderot might have gone down well, but when he travelled to Ashdod, he was pointed at by woman and called a criminal, which his rhetoric and the actions he’s not only sanctioned, but celebrated absolutely are. It’s not just from his far right coalition partners that Netanyahu is struggling though, it’s happening with his closer ministers too. Take his defence minister Yoav Gallant. Always a happy looking chap, a permanent expression giving off he who smelt it dealt it vibes. He, like Netanyahu is one of the three Israeli figures who are allegedly facing arrest warrants from the ICC, and whether this has prompted a swipe at his boss, very uncharacteristically or not I don’t know, but it could be he’s also sick of the hard right dictating to the boss and the boss jumping every time they do, that threat of collapsing the government always on the table from them. This is a guy in Netanyahu’s own Likud Party, so are the cracks happening not just in the Israeli government, as unstable as it is, this was always a distinct possibility, but is it actually happening inside Netanyahu’s own party too? So what’s he said then Damo? Well, in light of Ben Gvir’s comments, it seems a line has been drawn by Gallant and it adds weight to the thinking that what Ben Gvir was saying might actually be the plan, or certainly under consideration, because Gallant has said under no circumstances would he set up a military government to run Gaza. It seems there might actually be no plan right now for what happens afterwards and this appears to be coming as a surprise to some Israeli ministers, but as has been said by me and many other commentators, Netanyahu can’t afford for this to stop. Gallant wants to know what happens when they’ve eliminated Hamas, Ben Gvir has said what he wants, Gallant has said he’s not having a bar of that, Netanyahu is undecided. How does he weasel out of this one? Well it gets worse for him. Two other ministers, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot have come out in support for Gallant on this point and they too come from another coalition party, National Unity, so that’s another potential whole party that could fracture away. Worsening the situation further is that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has come down on the side of Ben Gvir, he’s also far right, so no surprise really, but he heads another coalition party, the Religious Zionist Party. So you have all these different coalition parties, Netanyahu has been holding seven separate parties together, to keep himself in power and more and more it is looking impossible for that to be sustained. And it gets worse from here too. Ben Gvir has popped up again now demanding that Netanyahu fire Gallant over what he’s saying and saying that he must be replaced to achieve the wars goals. But what are those goals? Netanyahu doesn’t seem to know and more often than not, it is what Ben Gvir says that goes. He’s said: ‘From Gallant’s point of view, there is no difference between whether Gaza is controlled by IDF soldiers or whether Hamas murderers control it. This is the essence of the conception of a defense minister who failed on October 7, and continues to fail even now. Such a defense minister must be replaced in order to achieve the goals of the war.’ Will Netanyahu sack a member of his own party in government to placate a coalition partner, who will probably threaten to collapse the government again if he doesn’t get his way? This government is totally unsustainable and it looks like it could be reaching a point of no return. Of course Israeli plans for the seizure of Gaza are nothing new, the plans to do it, were drawn up years ago and now the person who actually drew them up is in a position to enact them too as this video recommendation will tell you all about and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so the country is crying out for change so says Keir Starmer as he unveils a Tony Blair style pledge card that people can carry around with them to remind them of what he stands for at this particular snapshot in time and indeed have a tick chart of the lies he told in exchange for your vote as he ends up breaking every single one of them as he has broken every promise, pledge, vow, oath, guarantee, declaration or list thereof on previous occasions. Starmer since becoming leader has not stuck by a single thing he has ever said he stood for, he stood on 10 pledges to become Labour leader, pretending he was continuity Corbyn and instead has morphed into cardboard Tony Blair, now having formally announced candidacy selections for Corbyn’s replacement in Islington North, he’s put the final nail in the coffin that he is in any way an honest or trustworthy individual. So in which case, when he’s made and binned so many policy positions before, his 6 fixes for Britain, strikes me as an unfortunate choice of words, because he’s fixed the Labour Party for the establishment and for the right wing, fixed it so it is now Tory light and anything but an alternative to the Tories and will do the same to the country if given the chance. Right, so speech this morning from Keir Starmer, preaching to the faithful, we had the person who is actually in charge Rachel Reeves do a turn at the podium bleating about being a banker, not playing fast and loose with the finances when she’s not actually it seems prepared to spend on much at all, small state Tory politics, but what else do you expect by someone who goes to George Osborne for advice on how to be the chancellor, others spoke too before she let Starmer say his piece, pushing these 6 fixes, which are frankly a sick joke, not just because of how mundane, how Tory and how tone deaf to the needs of the country they actually are, but as much for what Starmer clearly isn’t prioritising instead. You have to bear in mind if these are the 6 things going on the flashcards, the 6 key items that are defining Labour going into the next election, then these are the things foremost in Starmer’s mind right now that he believes will win him the election and looking at them, he’s still banking on not being Rishi Sunak to deliver him into Number 10, because functionally he’s just taken stuff that the Tories have been saying. There’s no implication he’s listened to ordinary people, what matters in their lives, though there’s a veneer of trying to imply that in a couple, though actually when you think about it a bit more deeply as I have here, there’s nothing there. For one, none of these are actually policies, of course they aren’t, there’s zero detail to any of them. These are aspirations, things he wants to achieve and it’s all very safe ground too, anything remotely controversial, anything the Tories or other detractors might pick on don’t get a look in. So let’s look at these six fixes, you probably won’t be surprised to know if you watch regularly I will have found issues with them, but that really is because Starmer never fails to let people down when they need somebody who’s going to champion something actually transformative and positive that will change lives for the better, not to mention the running of this country. First fix is to deliver economic stability. Starting as vaguely as he ever does really, what exactly does that tell us? The economy is on the floor right now, we’re just dragging ourselves out of recession, growth was minimal before that and has been for years where the Tories have starved the country of investment, generating economic returns. Starmer’s fix is to maintain that stability. Quite the aspiration, to just keep us out of recession! Functionally it is a promise to not rock the boat, not do anything radical, basically promising to not crash the economy which really is a high bar isn’t it? Combine that with all the stuff Rachel Reeves has ruled out because of her stupid fiscal rules, so forget about any real changes to levels of government spending and investment again. We’re promising more of the same on the economy, just without the Liz Truss screw up. That is all this fix amounts to. The second one is to cut NHS waiting times, now this is probably the one that is of any of them actually something decent, waiting times must be cut, nobody disagrees with that, the knock on effect to the economy for one, is significant, people waiting for operations or treatment for various conditions unable to be economically active because of their health hold ups and of course aside from the whole economic picture peoples lives are at stake, so if Starmer can get waiting lists down, then great, but how? 40,000 new appointments a week he promises, but no information on how fast it will happen. How is he going to do this? We know where Labour are saying funding is coming from, the non dom and tax avoidance crackdowns that Reeves has pledged, that is basically paying for everything Labour is promising, demonstrating just how little that will be and how little intention Reeves has from deviating from Tory style levels of investment, but what will this money be spent on to get waiting lists down? We need staff from overseas immediately, because that’s the only way this gets fixed fast, along with the investment in what they need. The problem is, with Wes Streeting waiting in the wings desperate to roll out more private provision, my fear, is that all of this cash is going into private health coffers for them to deliver this and they won’t be able to, they simply don’t have the capacity. Cash is one thing, what Labour do with this cash they raise from non doms and tax dodgers is quite another. The third fix is red meat for the Faragists, launch a new Border Security Command. This is effectively throwing border force under the bus, because this is what they do already surely? This already exists, just renaming it and changing the remit perhaps isn’t going to fix anything, especially when the fix in regards to our borders is being dictated by hard right narratives over stopping the boats. Rishi Sunak staked his premiership on this more than anything else and he’s failed completely, because the only way you stop the boats is to make a new legal route for asylum, so nobody needs the boats anymore, nobody needs the people traffickers, people can safely, without risking their lives, make their claims and be judged on them. Combine that with a new returns policy with the EU, which doesn’t require rejoining to have one, and we don’t even need to home all successful applicants here. That is the humane thing to do. No mention of that here. Instead in his actual speech, Starmer bleated about being Director of Public Prosecutions, taking down such gangs, but you can’t get them all, more will always spring up, trying to act all tough when you sound like David Beckham on helium at the best of times just makes what he actually said all the more ridiculous. But then there is no actual mention of stopping the boats either, so this whole Border Security Command is just a means to an undefined end. We can surmise the end as I’ve done here, but Starmer avoids saying it. What is also avoided is how exactly this new Border Security Command will be any different to what we already have in border force and how will they be more successful when this is basically just carrying on from where the Tories leave off, there’s no real difference in how both party leaderships are approaching the issue of migrant boats. Starmer loves talking about sticking plaster politics, accusing the Tories of sticking plaster solutions, when that is blatantly what this fix is, because it isn’t clear it is actually fixing anything at all. The fourth fix is setting up Great British Energy, a nationalised energy provider, but as we already know, because this was not a new announcement, this will not be a direct supplier to the public, it will instead be a generator and distributor to established and very much privatised energy providers. By providing energy at a cheaper price to these companies, Starmer is thinking energy bills will drop for all of us. Classic Thatcherite nonsense, it is trickle down economics. It has never worked, it won’t work here, the energy providers will pocket extra profit and tell Keir Starmer, thank you very much. There are no guarantees this will benefit us at all because of how it is being designed and when it fails, for I’m certain it will, Blue Labour as this lot is, will say well we tried nationalisation and as we always said, it never works, but it isn’t really nationalisation for us, but for the energy companies instead. The fifth fix, is to crack down on anti social behaviour. Ahh, so it’s something to crack down on is it? This fix isn’t a fix, it’s pig ignorance when anti social behaviour is dealt with by addressing the underlying causes. What opportunities are there for young people? What happened to all of our youth clubs? Instead of addressing that, Starmer talked of people afraid to open their front doors or go out at night. Starmer in his speech has framed this as a safety issue rather than a societal and political failure of young people. More police, special officers on the streets. Completely missing the point. Rather than having been failed and recognising that, Starmer is of the view that such young people should just be criminalised. This isn’t a fix at all, it’s another failure and he'll make it bigger. The sixth and final fix is to recruit 6,500 new teachers, paid for by removing the tax breaks on private schools. That money raised implies more teachers, yet the fix itself just says 6,500 new teachers. It doesn’t say additional teachers. Teaching has become oppressive, so many are leaving the vocation all the time? This isn’t about 6,500 more, just 6,500 new ones. Is this really addressing the issue, the language is a fudge, not a fix. But look at what didn’t make the grade is as much something to fixate on as what he did pledge to fix. Poverty at all levels and all age groups, cost of living crisis, living standards, disability rights, workers rights relegated to not being a pledge card priority. Climate change and the environment, green investment, well Keir Starmer does hate the tree huggers. He’s avoided foreign policy entirely, which is especially pertinent to a lot of people right now given what is going on in Gaza, Starmer’s pro Zionist leanings well known. Nothing on housing or child care, he avoided mentioning the renationalisation of the railways and right now, with sewage outflows all over the country, an outbreak of Cryptosporidium in schools for crying out loud in Devon, ignoring water renationalisation is a massive failure too. He's binned the abolition of tuition fees, he’s binned higher taxes for the top 5% of earners, he’s binned benefits reform and scrapping universal credit. He’s keeping the two child benefit cap, he’s thrown out freedom of movement, he’s talked about wind farms, but he also refuses to roll back new oil and gas licences in the north sea, there was nothing on ecological breakdown, my God you can go on. All of these are less important by omission or have just been ditched. Which would you prioritise? This was a cowardly, safe speech, containing very little, a pledge card containing vague details to avoid criticism, given they are so open to interpretation, though that failed because, well, I wrote this video didn’t I? This is a nervous Labour Party, the polling figures are garbage, the local election extrapolations proved that, they have a lot of challengers from the Greens and from Independents and are losing ground where they shouldn’t be because of Starmer more than anything else. He’s electoral kryptonite in so many ways and they’re right to be worried, they deserve nothing less and they sure as hell don’t deserve to be elected to power with a majority when they are offering so little and you can check out this video recommendation here which will explain a bit more about why Labour’s polling isn’t really as great as many pollsters are saying it is and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so the US, having taken Israel’s side as Iran retaliated against them for taking out their embassy in Damascus, completely unprovoked, having taken to the skies to take out Iranian ordnance being fired towards Israel, towards military targets they had designated, having even asked Iran if they would mind afterwards if they would just let Israel shoot them back, do no damage, bomb a couple of shepherds huts or whatever an empty hangar somewhere perhaps and then not fire back so that Israel cans ay they won and the West can propagate the myth that Iran are the bad guys and that the media narratives their pliant client media about Iran attacking Israel unprovoked must therefore be true. Well Iran said no of course, I daresay they had a bit of a giggle about it, but now the US after all of that, has gone back to the Theocratic state and their ayatollah and are begging for another favour from them and they’ve got some real brass neck to be asking this, but also implies that actually dealing with this little problem of theirs is costing them dearly. Right, so the US have according to AP called on Iran to stop arming the Houthis, but without any good reason as to why they would do that. It’s barefaced cheek quite honestly, where was the US support in condemning Israel for striking Iran? The US tried to convince Iran to let it go, but of course, they can’t do that, it’s not in their nature and it triggered the first strike from Iran on Israel, military strikes, including the Nevatim air base south of the West Bank, where Netanyahu keeps his Air Force One knockoff, Wing of Zion and also where it is widely surmised a lot of munitions from the likes of the US is delivered onto Israeli soil, courtesy it is also widely suspected, of the UK air base on Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri. Even after Iran struck Israel, in what was seen as a restrained attack, something of an intelligence gathering exercise, since the damage was minimal, but of course everywhere Israel retaliated from Iran now have location information, which could be used by allies. For example, you might not have heard of a successful drone strike by Hezbollah in Lebanon, which managed to evade Israeli defensive systems and successfully take out an Iron Dome missile battery, worth some $50m. The drone was worth something like 5 grand. Was that success due to Iranian intelligence gathering? Well, possibly, you wouldn’t have bet money on the drone would you? But now the US have the nerve, the brass neck, to once more ask Iran to stop arming the Houthis in Yemen. Now I’ve done a few videos on Houthi activity, harassing ships, blockading the Gulf of Aden, the southern Red Sea and the narrow stretch of water in between, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. They’ve targeted pro Israeli ships as well as US and UK shipping because they fired on them to try and stop them from attacking shipping, unsuccessfully and although there have been Houthi caused casualties now, not to mention ships getting sunk, far more Houthis have been killed operating in solidarity with Palestine, with Gaza and they’ve still no intention of letting up. It isn’t in their nature to ever quit. They might be one of the poorest Arab nations on Earth, but they’ve fought far wealthier far more powerful countries to a standstill, and have successfully created a naval blockade in the Red Sea without even having a navy! They’ve made history on that score. But of course much of that stems from having Iran as their backers. For Iran to have openly attacked Israel directly themselves was a first, they do tend to operate through proxies like the Houthis, like Hezbollah, frankly it’s western arrogance to expect them to jump when we tell them, because they are a hugely powerful and influential nation in the Middle East. You don’t have to like how that nation is run, a religious sectarian theocracy as it is, there all manner of legitimate criticisms that can certainly be said about Iran, but as the US fully know as well as other nations in the West insistent on being in charge, or trying to be, despite also supporting a genocidal apartheid regime that disgusts people globally, not just in the Middle East, all that needs to be done to stop the Houthis attacking and harassing shipping in the Red Sea, is to stop Israel committing genocide in Gaza. It is a very simple choice. Do the right thing and the Houthis stop. Carry on enabling this death and destruction and they will continue to hit you economically. It is so easy, it would be so simple for Genocide Joe Biden to cut off the arms and the funding until Israel gets out of Gaza. Instead, it is being reported, that another $1bn of military aid is going to head Israel’s way from the US and they’ve now officially come to the position that despite what Israel have done, that it isn’t genocide! White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan literally stood at a podium and said: ‘We believe Israel can and must do more to ensure the protection and well-being of innocent civilians. We do not believe what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. We have been firmly on record rejecting that proposition.’ Well that’s in stark contrast to the initial findings of the International Court of Justice, back in February, so perhaps they might like to weigh in? Perhaps the ICC might like to draw up a few more arrest warrants and send them to Washington? The US have literally found that there are potential breaches of International humanitarian law with regards to weapons they’ve sent to Israel, but still say it isn’t genocide. They are making this s**t up as they go along and yet they think they’ve got a leg to stand on, to ask Iran to stop arming the Houthis. It’s just mad. They’ve said the Houthis must not be arms because their attacks on shipping is reckless. 1.6m people in Rafah, another £1bn in military aid for Israel to potentially drop on them, where else are they going to drop it after all? Oh yes, Israel missed a bit, oh look we’re still getting attack from Hamas in those places, we’d better get them again, I’m sure Americans must be delighted they are paying for all of this once again, Biden really does love blowing your cash on genocide doesn’t he? They’ve destroyed pretty much the whole of the rest of the Gaza Strip, now it has to be pounded into atoms, it’s certainly not the Houthis I’d consider reckless any more and for this claim to be coming from the US administration, well it is just sick at this point isn’t it? The cynic in me wonders, given a report from Middle East Monitor is saying that the presence of Hamas battalions in Rafah have been ruled out, despite claims by Netanyahu that they are there, so perhaps they’re bottling a full assault on Rafah, but plan to continue by going back to other areas they’ve already struck? Keeps the war going which keeps Netanyahu in power, but we will see, perhaps his hard right coalition won’t accept withdrawal from Rafah, though until that happens I won’t believe it myself. It’s a thought though isn’t it? Since the Houthis decided to ally themselves with the Gazan people and fight with them; since the instigation of their blockade in the Red Sea, they have attacked more than 50 ships, seized one and sunk another. Where possible, they have rescued crew and treated them well, though sadly in at least one instance crew were killed. It hasn’t been the Houthis aim, if it were, many more would have died and they wouldn’t be rescuing people but they have and they still do. We do know that their weaponry has increased too, from cheap drone strikes, they’ve since been given access to submarine drones, as well as cruise and ballistic missiles, undoubtedly from Iran, Iranian arms supplies have been intercepted by the US and allies as they’ve attempted to deliver them, so we know it is going on and certainly I’ve not seen any denials from Iran about that, but since arriving in Rafah the Houthis have announced that they plan to expand the scope of their attacks. As things have reached a more critical point in Gaza, so the Houthis are saying they will ratchet up their actions another notch and with bigger weaponry with better range, they are certainly threatening as much. Here’s an excerpt from USNI News, that being the United States Naval Institute, saying: ‘The Houthis will target any ship it believes is connected to a company supplying Israel and block it from passing through the Red Sea if Israel invades Rafah in the Gaza strip, its military spokesman announced via social media Friday. The Houthi threat also includes targeting any ship heading to Israel that it can reach with its missiles and attack drones, including those approaching the country from the Mediterranean Sea, Houthi Brig. Gen. Yahya Sare’e said via a post on social media site X. “If the Israeli enemy intends to launch an aggressive military operation against Rafah, the Yemeni Armed forces will impose comprehensive sanctions on all ships and companies that are related to supplying and entering the occupied Palestinian ports of any nationality and will prevent all ships of these companies from passing through the armed forces’ operation zone regardless of their destination,” Sare’e said in his post.’ So that’s the Houthi spokesperson, many people will be familiar with him by now from news clips, Yahya Sare’e and he’s implying that the Houthis now have the capability to reach targets arriving from the Mediterranean Sea. If true, then theoretically there is no safe docking in Israel at all and given Israeli trade is so heavily reliant on sea trade, being on such poor political terms with it’s neighbours because of it’s conduct, it’s occupation, it basically being a Western nation in effect, just in the wrong place and nothing quite sums that up than to remember that on today of all days, as Palestinians around the world mark the 76th anniversary of the Nakba, an event that continues to this day, the catastrophe as it translates to has never actually ended and 1.6m displaced people starving to death in Rafah waiting for the end as circumstances seem to be, nothing spells that out more than more images of that suffering today as it is every day, that this is a catastrophe that is very much ongoing, livestreamed daily as it still is. Will Iran stop arming the US? Well I can’t find any source implying that they’ve thusfar dignified this request with a response, however the Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi made a statement on Tuesday where he basically the blood of the 15,000 martyred children in Gaza, the proportion of the death toll that are children, so many of those living in Gaza being under 18 after all – and despite attempts to whitewash those figures as we’ve seen lately as well - will spell end of Zionism. Doesn’t sound like they plan on helping Israel or anyone allied to them one iota. The power to end all of this is in the hands of the US. Instead they are going to keep coughing up money to keep it going and other nations in the Middle East will continue of course to resist that. The US have of course already gone with begging bowl in hand to Iran already, much of their excuse making now a repeat of then and frankly they got short shrift for that too, the thought of Iranian retaliation on Israel made them rather nervous and so it should have done, all the details of that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.

Right, so Sharon Graham, the General Secretary of Unite the Union has for quite some time been giving Keir Starmer the benefit of the doubt time after time when it comes to her unions support for his party, for the party of course that was built by the trade union movement, for ordinary working class people and therefore if they aren’t at the heart of Labour policy, trade unions, should be giving them a wide berth. Sharon likes to draw red lines for Starmer when he pushes her limits, or appears to, though those red lines appear to shift faster than Starmer ever seems to and so we come to what was ostensibly Labour’s last actual pitch for working class people, which was Labour’s New Deal for Workers. Well the red lines were drawn again and for the last week she’s been quite critical of the draft plans she’s seen, yet yesterday, all of a sudden, she seems to think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. So what exactly has changed then Sharon? Other than you yet again, being seen to be too close to the Starmer regime? Right, so Sharon Graham, General Secretary of the Unite Union, my union, everyone should be in a trade union, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t criticise or hold them to account and Graham for me has been a disappointment from the get go and she’s racked up quite the resume of reasons for that. For example, when independent film Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie was out last year, famously banned from Glastonbury, but workarounds were found, the whole thing is now available on YouTube if you haven’t already, Graham banned it from all Unite properties, on the basis it was antisemitic, despite nothing of the kind being true, the film combats racism, combats the racism inherent in false accusations, and on one occasion when a screening was due to happen in Bristol, a book-signing by investigative journalist Asa Winstanley and his excellent book Weaponising Antisemitism was also cancelled and banned. The film and book were both heavily criticised by the Israel Lobby, they were in no small part responsible it seems for Glastonbury pulling the screening of the film, so all in all it smacks of colluding with the Lobby there, and certainly being onside with Starmer when it comes to fighting antisemitism. Then there was the time she tried to cancel the annual pro Palestine fringe event at Labour Conference, placing the official responsible for it under investigation as a result, Then there was the time she decided to ban Unite officials and Unite livery from being shown at pro Palestine protests and demos. One of her team, for it is not just she, allegedly threatened a soon to be retired regional official with the loss of their pension bonus if they didn’t cool their support for Gaza, that was March just gone. She’s also resisting being subpoenaed right now in an employment tribunal case in Ireland, accused of being a bad employer, with a guy who was returning to his post following a battle with cancer, and not just any guy, but the top official for Unite in the whole of Ireland, Brendan Ogle, on the grounds of his treatment and what has been said about him by union officials. Not only is she resisting giving evidence in this tribunal, despite literally being one of the accsued, she’s employed some of the most expensive lawyers on the planet to defend her, rather than the law firm the union retains services of in Ireland, which are good enough for anyone else in the union, but not for her it seems and the cost to members, is allegedly somewhere in the region of 150K euros a day. On top of that, she has been accused by the Unite national officers group of showing contempt for union staffs collective agreements, taking an anti-trade union stance and attempting to use legal action to intimidate staff with grievances and at least one Union branch has passed a vote of no confidence in her in Brighton, which passed unopposed, citing their reasons as being betrayals on anti-racism, Palestine, harassment and dignity at work. As for Starmer, she has consistently been seen as being too close to him and despite comments to hold him to account and to not take Unite money for granted, she has carried on funding his regime, even inviting him to Unite Conference to speak, and allegedly telling delegates there to either sit down and shut up if they attended his speech and if they couldn’t do that, then to go elsewhere. But let’s get to the here and now. Starmer’s Labour in customary style has looked at it’s one remaining reasonable policy position on workers rights and a deal for workers under a Labour government and have been watering it down. His new version of the deal states that there will be consultation with businesses rather than workers and the unions. This has led to Labour coming to a position of no longer seeking to ban zero hours contracts, but instead right to a contract reflecting the most recent work patterns of a worker. You can see how a business might be able to abuse that, for example to keep someone on a zero hour contract, they might only give them work every other week. That’s ridiculous, but that appears to be how it would work. Probabationary period were supposed to be being done away with as well but that now isn’t happening, fundamentally, whilst we wait for the full paper to come out, it has changed completely and on the 8th May, just 1 week ago to the day at time of writing, Unite published an article calling it unrecognisable, which in customary Sharon Graham style, was her attacking Labour retreating on the matter: ‘It looks like all the warnings Unite made earlier about the dangers of Labour rowing back on its pledges for the New Deal for Workers have been proved right. This new Labour document on the New Deal, issued to the unions on Monday, is a row back on a row back. It is totally unrecognisable from the original proposals produced with the unions. Unrecognisable. Workers will see through this and mark this retreat after retreat as a betrayal. “This new document is turning what was a real new deal for workers into a charter for bad bosses. Labour don’t want a law against fire and rehire and they are effectively ripping up the promise of legislation on a new deal for workers in its first 100 days. Instead, we have codes of conduct and pledges of consultation with big business. Likewise, the proposal to legislate against zero hours contracts is watered down to almost nothing. “In truth this new document is not worthy of discussion. All unions must now demand that Labour changes course and puts the original New Deal for Workers back on the table.’ Strong words. She can talk the talk and has carried on attacking this since on social media too. The following day, she put out a tweet quoting a Big Issue article also slamming Labour’s watering down of workers rights, saying: ‘This new Labour Party document on the New Deal, issued to the unions on Monday, is a row back on a row back. It is totally unrecognisable from the original proposals produced with the unions. Unrecognisable.’ She really doesn’t seem to like it at all does she? Has she finally seen the light? Well something certainly happened, because by yesterday in an LBC interview with Fraser Knight, she came out with this: So she hasn’t seen the words on the page, so, she’s been told stuff by Keir Starmer or his team and taken his word for it? You consider Keir Starmer’s word worth something then do you Sharon? Wow, that’s quite something. OK she wants to see it in print, but actually from what you say in that clip, you don’t appear to have actually been promised anything new over what you were kicking off over before, moving things forward isn’t the same as reassurance and correction, but that’s quite the change in tune coming from her compared to just a week ago. The New Deal is being put forward by Labour and it will be a very, very good thing for workers she also said, but you’ve just implied you’ve got nothing on paper yet so how can you be so sure? It got worse from there though. Knight asked her about those two things Starmer had watered down, zero hours contracts being banned and fire and rehire and all she could say, is that they’ll go back to the NPF document and use that as a guideline. That refers back to the National Policy Forum document, the big annual policy making conference that includes the trade unions with Labour and that turned into such a circus last year, several union reps walked out of it. That’s the guideline is it? That’s the framework? That’s the touchstone as you put it? Oooh little bit cringe now. Got worse when you also said you’ve got to keep holding Labour’s feet to the fire, singe Keith’s toes if he goes too Tory you’d imagine, because from my perspective as a lay member of the union, you’ve never done anything of the sort and this isn’t doing that either. Every time you seem to meet with Starmer, or his team, no matter how vocal you might have gotten through social media or other union channels, you seem totally placated again afterwards, yet Starmer never changes and so far even on this, nothing has actually changed that can pointed to in a solid form. You’ve been given spoken reassurance it appears and lapped it up, to the point you are now saying to camera this could be a very good thing for workers, that what you’ve been told could be good for workers and good for business when in my experience, that’s is rarely ever the case. It strikes me that Starmer has seen you coming and knows exactly what to tell you each and every time. We do need to see the writing on the page, we need to know if you actually have got something meaningful out of Starmer on workers rights, or whether as I strongly suspect, nothing has changed and you’ve sadly made the mistake of believing what Starmer told you. How many more times must that happen before you actually pull union funding? Do you know what makes this commentary from Graham all the more ridiculous sounding now though? That her change in stance towards Labour’s watering down of their New Deal for Workers came following the week that Starmer literally welcomed a hard right trade union basher like Natalie Elphicke into the parliamentary party. Unions should be packing up and abandoning Labour for welcoming Tory MPs in, even more of them, with more allegedly waiting to defect too, not standing there and saying he’s doing a good job in effect. Sharon Graham felt the need to gloss over the NPF documentation, what came out of the National Policy Forum and called it the touchstone, she wanted to skip over it very quickly, didn’t want to bore you. Well it’s not boring and what went down last July in that meeting should very much be better known about, Unions went ape at Labour and you’re holding it up as the foundation for what comes next? Find out all about what happened there and union reactions in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.