Palestinian lives matter!

picket outside Israel ambassador's London residence

by New Worker correspondent

Local campaigns across Britain are pressuring councils to divest pension funds from companies complicit in Israel’s genocide.
Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has released updated research revealing that Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) funds, administered by local councils across the United Kingdom, invest over £12 billion in companies enabling Israel’s genocide, military occupation and apartheid against the Palestinian Arabs.
Freedom of information requests have resulted in the most complete picture yet of the investments of 81 out the total of 86 LGPS funds. Hundreds of millions of pounds are invested in arms companies supplying Israel with weapons including BAE Systems, Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin and RTX Corporation.
The research, obtained through Freedom of Information requests, details the investments of 81 LGPS funds in companies which produce weapons and military technology used in Israel’s attacks on Palestinians; provide services or infrastructure that supports Israel’s unlawful military occupation; or conduct activity in Israel’s illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land.
Collectively LGPS funds invest over £450million in BAE Systems, which manufactures components for Israel’s F-15, F-16, and F-35 warplanes used to bomb Gaza. Over £80 million is invested in Caterpillar, which manufactures bulldozers used by Israel to demolish Palestinian homes, schools and hospitals. While over £90 million is invested in the RTX Corporation, formerly Raytheon, which produces 4,000-pound GBU-28 bombs used by the Israeli military.
For the first time, PSC’s research identifies investments in Amazon and Alphabet Inc (Google). This totals £4.7 billion, nearly 40 per cent of the value of all investments listed. Both companies work together to provide cloud computing infrastructure to the Israeli military and government, dubbed Project Nimbus. In addition, the research shows LGPS funds hold over £28 million in Israeli government bonds, therefore lending Israel money to carry out its atrocities.
The new research comes as campaigns calling for the divestment of LGPS funds from companies enabling Israel’s human rights abuses continue to gather momentum. Earlier this month Tower Hamlets Council passed a motion committing to divest its pension fund from arms companies, following a strong local campaign. While Bristol City Council has called for Avon Pension Fund to divest from arms companies, and companies active in Israel’s illegal settlements.
Lewis Backon, the Campaigns Officer at Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said “the scale of LGPS fund investments in companies that are complicit in Israel’s grave abuses of Palestinian rights is shocking. The deferred wages of millions of local government workers are going into companies enabling Israel’s war crimes, without their consent. But workers and residents are making it increasingly clear that they won’t accept their pension funds being used to fund companies complicit in genocide and apartheid. This year will see the LGPS Divest campaign grow as a force for justice for Palestine – divestment from Israel’s crimes is a moral and legal imperative that cannot be ignored”.

Welcoming the Chinese New Year!

by New Worker correspondent

Chinese Ambassador Zheng Zeguang joined tens of thousands of Londoners celebrating the start of the Chinese New Year in the heart of the capital last weekend. Some 800,000 people joined in the Spring Festival celebrations organised by the London Chinatown Chinese Association (LCCA) in Trafalgar Square, Chinatown and other landmark places. 
The LCCA has hosted Chinese New Year celebrations in Trafalgar Square for 24 consecutive years, making it the largest Chinese New Year celebration event outside Asia. This year's opening ceremony lasted for six hours, with lion and dragon dances enchanting the audience. Similar performances and more including parade floats were also organised in Chinatown and Piccadilly Circus, attracting tourists from all over the world who tasted first-hand the charm of traditional Chinese culture.
Ambassador Zheng said that the Spring Festival, the social practices of the Chinese people celebrating the traditional new year, has now been officially designated as part of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, which adds a particular meaning to this year’s grand celebrations. The Chinese New Year celebration is all about renewal, family unity, and prosperity. And this is exactly what people from across the UK and beyond have gathered here for--to celebrate peace, solidarity, friendship and collaboration. It also shows their support for China-UK friendship and cooperation.
He thanked the LCCA for its long-standing effort in promoting cultural, educational and commercial cooperation between the two countries, and extended best wishes for the Chinese New Year to the Chinese community, students and Chinese-funded institutions in the UK and to people across the UK and all over the world.

Standing up to racism in London!

by New Worker correspondent

Thousands of people took to the streets of London last weekend to protest against a far-right march in favour of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the jailed racist who calls himself “Tommy Robinson”. Some five thousand anti-racists rallied in central London for the protest organised by Stand Up to Racism that was supported by the TUC, 17 trade unions, and a coalition of faith groups, national campaigns and Labour and Green politicians. 
The far-right demonstration, some 5,000 or so “football lads” and third-rate fascists – was a fraction of the 25,000 that marched at their most recent mobilisation in October. Eyewitness reports suggest infighting and rowing amongst the far right demonstrators. Anti racists argue this reflects tensions within the far-right camp, such as the distance Nigel Farage has attempted to create between his Reform Party and Robinson’s street movement, as well as other pressures amongst these far right groupings and individuals.
Eyewitnesses at the far right demo say they heard Islamophobic chants while Howard Cox, a former Reform Party London mayoral candidate, called for unity between the Faragists and Robinson’s followers, and echoed Trump’s release of the Capitol Hill rioters by calling for the release of all the August far right rioters in Britain. Another  speaker said “round them up and kick them out” and “start the deportation programme for those who refuse to assimilate”.
With the racists threatening to mobilise again on 22nd  March, Stand Up To Racism is only the more determined to turn our day of protest as part of the international World Against Racism day of action into a serious anti-racist mobilisation to continue to take on the far right and oppose them.
Weyman Bennett, co-convenor of Stand Up to Racism, said “Today we might not have brought the 20,000 strong demonstration we delivered in October, but with a much shorter turn around time and so early in the new year we are feeling energised, encouraged and determined in the fight to drive back the threat of the far right and fascists after today’s impressive showing.
“To see their numbers plummet so dramatically to something like a quarter of what they put on the streets in the autumn – it shows both the weakness and divisions on their side, and it shows we can continue to build a strong united force that can keep bringing to pressure to dissipate, demoralise and defeat them.
“This will take an enormous and ongoing effort, and a real seriousness – we must not be complacent. But take hope from today – what we do matters, we can, if we bring consistent pressure from a broad and united movement taking action – and we can turn this tide.
“In the week of Holocaust Memorial Day, we must remember the lessons of the 1930s. We cannot repeat the history that will lead to more future generations repeating the question: ‘But why didn’t everyone do something?’ – a united movement that exposes and opposes the fascists and calls out the racist swamp they operate in can stop them”.

Saying no to genocide!

by New Worker correspondent

On 27 January, International Holocaust Memorial Day, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), arranged an alternative memorial service outside the Polish embassy in London to call for the arrest of Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, who was attending the official service at Auschwitz, the former Nazi death camp in Poland. The Polish government had already promised to ignore the ICC (International Criminal Court) arrest warrant issued against Netanyahu for potential war crimes.
Interestingly the Russians, who liberated Auschwitz, have not been invited to the official ceremony for some years, while German politicians, representing the country that committed the Holocaust are honoured guests.
Two of the themes of the protest were education on other lesser acknowledged and unpunished crimes and genocides and the misuse of the Nazi Holocaust to prevent criticism of Israel and its actions.
Stephen Kapos is a Jewish child Holocaust survivor. As a child, he wore the yellow star, and avoided deportation from Budapest to the camps in 1945 by going into hiding. He was a long-standing Labour Party member, in the same local branch as Keir Starmer, until he was threatened with expulsion in 2023 for agreeing to address a Holocaust Memorial Day event that the Labour hierarchy disagreed with. So he resigned instead of being expelled.
Stephen has always supported the Palestinian cause and calls for the end of illegal occupations and since October 2023 he has spoken tirelessly for this cause; for a ceasefire, the end of weapons sales, and for the decisions of the ICC and ICJ to be implemented. He sees his Jewishness as central to his support for the Palestinians and he spoke of his disgust at the Nazi Holocaust being used to cover up and justify the ongoing slaughter in Palestine, and now Syria and Lebanon.
Clare Glasman from disabled advocacy group, WinVisible, spoke of how the Nazi Holocaust began with the dehumanisation of the disabled and sick before moving on to other marginalised groups in society, and how the Aktion T4 Euthanasia Programme, beginning in 1939, gassed disabled people in Germany years before the Final Solution and the extermination camps.
Other speakers from Rwanda, Vietnam and Kenya spoke of more recent genocides from direct experience, and the need to use these crimes as examples to prevent them happening again. A speaker from Colombia covered the New World from the arrival of Columbus to the African slave trade.
One constant across the speakers was that what the Nazis did in Europe was not new. Western countries had behaved the same way in Africa, Asia and the Americas for centuries. What was new was bringing colonialism to Europe, and treating Europeans in the same way as what was then seen as the ‘lesser breeds’. Across the globe, bourgeois politicians are using divisive rhetoric and tactics to divide people and set them against each other, aided by the media. All speakers spoke of the importance of people and communities under attack to stand together and support each other, how Palestine is the crucial issue of our time and the need for international support and solidarity.

Police crackdown on Palestine protesters

by New Worker correspondent

Leading anti-war campaigners and scores of other protesters were arrested last weekend as the police moved to break up a massive Palestinian solidarity demonstration in central London. The rally in Whitehall was called after the Metropolitan Police, under Zionist pressure, banned a planned march on the BBC claiming it would cause serious disruption to services at a nearby synagogue. 
In response, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) announced plans for a rally and a peaceful protest against this anti-democratic ban. On the day the demonstrators were confronted with extremely heavy-handed and aggressive policing. With less than 24 hours’ notice, the police had imposed a series of complex restrictions preventing people from assembling at various points on Whitehall at different times of the day – notably an area at the centre of Whitehall from which rally participants were excluded for part of the day to allow space for a children’s marching band to proceed up and down. As a result a number of people were arrested, without warning, on flimsy pretexts including simply for inadvertently standing in this central area at the wrong time.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, a maverick Labour MP, were issued cautions by the Met and interviewed on Sunday. Chris Nineham, the vice-chair of the Stop the War campaign, was dragged off with 76 others and though Nineham and some of the others have been bailed others remain in custody. Nine have been charged with public order offences including PSC director Ben Jamal and Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, Piers.
Ben Jamal said he would "vigorously contest" the charges against him and described the scenes on Saturday as "a huge assault on the right to freedom of assembly and to protest".
The Met claim the protesters had forced their way through a police cordon to march towards the headquarters of the BBC after ending their 100,000 strong protest in Whitehall. But Corbyn  said “this is not an accurate description of events at all. I was part of a delegation of speakers, who wished to peacefully carry and lay flowers in memory of children in Gaza who had been killed.This was facilitated by the police. We did not force our way through. When we reached Trafalgar Square, we informed police that we would go no further, lay down flowers and disperse. At that point the Chief Steward, Chris Nineham, was arrested. We then turned back and dispersed. I urge the police to release all bodycam footage and retract its misleading account of events”.
 Stop the War national officer John Rees said “this is a direct assault on freedom of assembly and democracy. The police’s actions, including their false statements after the event, are deeply troubling. We demand the immediate release of all those arrested and remain resolute in our campaign for freedom and justice for the Palestinian people”.

Standing together for the unemployed

by New Worker correspondent

Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group (KUWG) campaigners picketed the Harlesden jobcentre last week to give out leaflets to claimants about the help KUWG can provide. The Group focuses primarily on combating benefits injustices through advocacy in individuals' benefit claims, and on demonstrations that emphasise that there is hope when we come together.
The KUWG recognises that the struggle of the employed and the unemployed is one and the same, but it also affirms that smear stories and marginalisation add to the isolation experienced by the unwaged. The campaign was started by Tom Mellish, a TUC official, some 15 years ago in collaboration with the Willesden Trades Council and it has been going ever since.

I.5 is Dead!

by New Worker correspondent

Two members of Just Stop Oil, the direct action climate campaign, were arrested last week after they spray-painted the words “1.5 is dead” on the grave of Charles Darwin in London’s Westminster Abbey. 
The protest followed the news that 2024 was the hottest year in human history, with the average global temperature rising by 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 
One protest organiser, Alyson Lee, told reporters “2024 was the hottest year on record. We have already passed through the 1.5 degree that was supposed to keep us safe. Millions are being displaced. California is on fire.  And three-quarters of all wildlife has disappeared since the 1970s”.
 Alyson, a 66 year-old retired teaching assistant from Derby, said “ten years on from the Paris Agreement, we have already exceeded the so-called safe temperature rise of 1.5 degrees, and are heading for over 3 degrees of warming. This rapidly accelerating crisis means huge parts of the world will become unable to support life, resulting in millions of refugees, social collapse and extinction for countless species”.
She believes Charles Darwin would approve of their protest “because he would be following the science, and he would be as upset as us with the government for ignoring the science”.
The other protester, Di Bligh, a 77 year-old former CEO of Reading Council said “Darwin once said ‘it is not the strongest of the species, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works cooperatively against common threats’.
“Last year was the hottest since modern humans evolved. If we do not work together to rein in the corporations and billionaires driving us beyond our means, humanity will not be able to adapt to what is coming. We are on course to lose everything, and politicians are doing nowhere near enough to prevent it. How many will we have to bury as a result of climate breakdown and who will be left to mourn them?”

Stop Ukrainian Nazism!

 

by Theo Russell

A candlelit vigil was held in Whitehall last Saturday to remember the thousands of journalists, bloggers, politicians, activists, priests, pensioners and sportspeople who have been arrested, and many tortured or murdered, since the February 2014 NATO-backed coup in Kiev.
The event was organised by the International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS), which has been campaigning for six years in solidarity with anti-fascists and democrats in Ukraine who have been arrested for opposing the war, organising Second World War commemorations, allegedly working with Russian forces such as organising humanitarian supplies or corridors, or simply for posts on social media.
In January 2024 Chilean-American blogger Gonzalo Lira died in prison in the eastern Ukraine city of Kharkov, where he had been imprisoned for eight months charged with “justifying Russia’s war efforts” in Ukraine. He had lived in Ukraine for many years with his family and was a globally known critic of the Zelensky regime.
Despite calls for his release from the likes of Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, the US government and their embassy in Kiev took no action to help him. The British and EU governments stayed silent too.
Only days after Lira’s death an 82-year-old citizen, Yuri Chernishov, received 15 years in prison with all his property seized – effectively a life sentence – on charges of sending information on Ukrainian troops to an alleged Russian contact. Footage from the courtroom shows him shouting at his jailers and branding them “fascists”.
Since 2014 Ukraine has been a corrupt and lawless state, with Banderite (Ukrainian fascist) organisations like the Azov Battalion and Hitler-admiring Right Sector. penetrating the army, police and intelligence services.
Many civilians have been beaten and tortured in secret prison camps where it’s common for them to be kept standing up in holes in the ground for days on end. The evidence is all available on the web in photos, videos and eyewitness accounts for anyone to find, but the Western mass media shows no interest.
There has never been any investigation into the killing of over 40 peaceful anti-fascist protesters when the Trade Unions House in Odessa was surrounded and petrol bombed by a mob of nationalists and football “ultras” on 2nd May 2014.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have received long prison sentences, with all their property confiscated, for “crimes” such as posting Soviet era greetings on social media, for continuing in their jobs as teachers, railway, gas and health workers in areas which were under the control of Russian forces.
After the Russian intervention in February 2022, areas recaptured by Ukrainian forces were “cleansed” by Kiev’s forces and far-right units, and many local officials and ordinary citizens were brutally murdered.
One such case was reported in March 2022 by the Daily Mail: “The pro-Russian mayor of a city in eastern Ukraine who welcomed President Vladimir Putin’s invasion was 'shot dead' after being kidnapped from his home. Several mayors and other Ukrainian officials have been killed since the outbreak of war, many reportedly by Ukrainian state agents after engaging in de-escalation talks with Russia”.
Many other local officials suffered the same fate, including in the town of Bucha, near Kiev, where the deaths of people shot by a punitive police unit led by a notorious Russian fascist were attributed to Russian forces in our media.
The whole world knows that since 2014 the new pro-NATO regime in Kiev has treated Russian-speaking Ukrainians as second-class citizens. Over 20 per cent of Ukrainians consider Russian their native language, but around 80 per cent also speak and read Russian.
Russian has been removed as an official language in Ukraine. Russian books, banned in all educational settings and libraries, have all been destroyed by the authorities

Free Gaza Medics!

by New Worker correspondent

Pro-Palestinian activists interrupted their seasonal celebrations to join an emergency vigil in London's West End on 28th December against the Israeli military's systematic destruction of hospitals in Gaza. The vigil in Piccadilly Circus was organised by the Health Workers 4 Palestine campaign that was co-founded by a group of doctors in October 2023 to combat the censorship they experienced, when standing up for the rights of Palestinian health workers and the rights of Palestinians to healthcare.
On 27th December Israeli troops raided the Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last major health facility in Northern Gaza, removed all the patients and staff, and set fire to it. Hussam Abu Safia, the director of the hospital, was arrested and is still in Israeli detention.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a statement saying it was is appalled by the raid. "The systematic dismantling of the health system and a siege for over 80 days on North Gaza puts the lives of the 75,000 Palestinians remaining in the area at risk". The statement added that "some people were reportedly stripped and forced to walk toward southern Gaza". The Gaza Ministry of Health says that now all three public hospitals in Northern Gaza, the Kamal Adwan, Beit Hanoon and Indonesian hospitals, have been "taken out of service by Israel’s offensive". On 4th January WHO Director-General  chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency had received “no updates on the safety and wellbeing” of Hussam Abu Safia.

Sinn Fein: reunification “a marathon, not a sprint”

Chris Hazzard speaking

by Theo Russell

Sinn Fein MPs Pat Cullen and Chris Hazzard briefed their London supporters on the party’s future last Monday at a meeting in the House of Commons in Westminster, discussing the disappointing election results in the Irish Republic last month and prospects for ending the island’s partition.
Sinn Fein has fought four elections this year – two in the north of Ireland, a general election in the Republic, and European elections – an experience which Hazzard described as “very busy and stressful“. Sinn Fein is now the leading party in the North with Michelle O’Neill the First Minister of the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly. 
On the border question Hazzard said “All the parties in the Republic say they expect to see a united Ireland in the next ten years, but Fianna Fail and Fine Gael (who have run the Republic since 1945) are in no hurry to deliver this”.
Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Féin’s leader in the Republic, has had talks about reunification with Labour and the Social Democrats, who have 22 seats in the Dail between them.
Hazzard said Sinn Fein is “working well with the Labour Party left and other independent TDs, and we know that many Fianna Fail’s grass-roots members are unhappy with their leadership’s refusal to talk to Sinn Fein”.
Sinn Fein’s current policy on ending partition is based on discussion and dialogue to ensure that all parties, above all the Northern Unionists, feel included. Hazzard described it as “a marathon, not a sprint”.
He added that if the partition of Ireland ends “the North will automatically become part of the European Union, and there have already been some polls in the North in favour of reunification”.
In the 2020 Irish election Sinn Fein went from 23 to 37 seats – one seat below the winner, Fianna Fail – and may well have taken first place had it stood more candidates.
This was a totally unexpected success which shook the reactionary political establishment in the Republic, but in the November election Sinn Fein failed to follow through, gaining only two seats.
Hazzard put the party’s loss of 100,000 working class votes down to its policies on immigration and transgender rights. “In the working class areas of Dublin our vote didn’t desert to other parties, they just didn’t turn out for us”.
He pointed to the example of the Scottish National Party’s alienation of many of its voters because they saw the focus on transgender issues as irrelevant. “We need to understand working class views on transgender issues, and we didn’t appreciate the level of anger in working class communities over the handling of migrants”.
Since Brexit very large numbers of asylum seekers have entered the Irish Republic through the open border with the North, with an enormous impact on a country of only 5.4 million people.
Hazzard said “our government failed to put any system in place to deal with asylum seekers who were sent into poor working class areas. And people saw that they were being accommodated while nothing was done to help the many homeless Irish people in Dublin”.
“The ruling parties used the issue to create a wedge in the working class in the same way as Farage has done in England, but in the election Sinn Fein took the far right head on and they made no gains, they didn’t even come close”.
As so many times in its history, Sinn Fein is looking to move on from its setbacks in the Republic by learning the lessons and understanding the needs of working class people.

 

End Israeli Aggression!

by New Worker correspondent

NCP leader Andy Brooks joined other activists from International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS) who were making the connection between the wars waged by NATO imperialism in Gaza and Ukraine at a Palestinian rally in Parliament Square last weekend. And throughout Europe tens of thousands of other protesters were also on the street condemning the ongoing Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip. Thousands participated in demonstrations in Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Utrecht, Milan, Aarhus and Geneva. And in London in support of the Palestinian people, and to demand a ceasefire and the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged Palestinian enclave.