Palestine will be free!

Anti-fascists on the march

by New Worker correspondent

Braving the dismal weather thousands of demonstrators marched through central London in support of the Palestinian cause last weekend. Over 100,000 protesters took part in what has now become a monthly feature in the capital’s calendar to rally for justice for the Palestinian Arabs and oppose war in the Middle East amid escalating tensions between American imperialism and its lackeys and Iran.
Labour MP John McDonnell praised the Palestine activists who had recently been on hunger strike in prison as “people with a heart rending conscience that could not stand by to watch the suffering of the Palestinians...so one action we should take is to demand that they are released. No one should be held on remand for over nearly two years. Protests should not be made a criminal act in this country”.
A few days later the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) was welcoming the news that six Palestine direct action campaigners have been cleared in the Israeli arms factory trial.
The six – who are part of the Filton 24 group of activists – were charged over breaking into an Israeli arms factory in Bristol in August 2024. The jury acquitted or failed to reach verdicts on charges faced by campaigners who took action against Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. PSC said “we're so relieved for Clare Hinchcliffe and all the families and loved ones of those cleared of charges for now. We call for the immediate release of all of the defendants who have been remanded in custody far beyond the legally permitted maximums on charges that are now proven to be unwinnable in court. The real criminals are not those taking direct action against Israel’s genocide – it is those arming it”.

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”.

Palestine: No Justice – No Peace!

 by New Worker correspondent

London comrades got a warm welcome when they joined hundreds of thousands who marched through London on Saturday in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Friends, old and new, were pleased to see us back on the street and NCP leader Andy Brooks was interviewed by Lebanese TV at the start of the demonstration.
    Some 250,000 people took part in the biggest demonstration of support for the Palestinian cause seen so far on the streets of Britain. The march, called by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Friends of Al Aqsa, ended in a rally in Hyde Park. There, amongst a sea of Palestinian flags and placards, left Labour MP John McDonnell and other speakers denounced Israeli aggression and call for justice for the Palestinian Arabs.
    McDonnell welcomed the current ceasefire that ended the bombing of Gaza, adding: “But let’s be clear, there will be no ceasefire in our campaign to boycott, disinvest and sanction the Israeli apartheid state.
    “The message is clear; we will not cease our campaign in solidarity until there is justice. So let’s make it clear, no justice, no peace”.

Tell the Truth on Climate change!

By New Worker correspondent

Climate change protesters disrupted transport throughout central London this week in street protests calling on the government to "tell the truth about climate change" and reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025. Hundreds of activists have been arrested in the protests that began on Monday, organised by the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement, aimed at shutting down the capital.

Earlier this month a group of XR supporters stripped in parliament during a Brexit debate and glued their hands to the glass of the House of Commons' public gallery to highlight the threat of climate change.

This week’s protests have caused traffic jams and grid-locks across the capital. London Underground services have been disrupted. British Transport Police say they’ve restricted passenger Wi-Fi connectivity at Tube stations in the interests of safety, and to prevent and deter "serious disruption" to the London Underground network. A senior police officer said: "Ongoing demonstrations are causing serious disruption to public transport, local businesses and Londoners who wish to go about their daily business.”

John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn’s No 2, tweeted his support for the activists. He said the disruptions “will be worth it” if it “moves us all a step further in tacking climate change”.

But fellow Labour member Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, says that although he "shared the passion" of the activists he was "extremely concerned" about plans that some of them had to disrupt the Tube.

Young activists who’ve set up tents in Waterloo Bridge, Parliament Square and Oxford Circus have put up road blocks on major roads and bridges whilst others have even glued themselves to lorries and trains to cause disruption and attract attention to the ecological catastrophe they believe is imminent if nothing is done to halt it.

Protesters targeted Shell’s London headquarters, gluing themselves to windows and smashing the glass revolving doors of the big oil corporation, and some 500,000 people were affected by the diversion of 55 bus routes as a result of the disruption on the roads.

Four climate activists even glued themselves to the fence outside Jeremy Corbyn’s house in north London. They said they were all Labour supporters but wanted the party to go much further on the issue. One of them, a 60-year-old man who walked from Stroud to take part in the London actions, said: “We are here because we are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and he is the best hope this country has got to get us out of this. But we need system change and a transformation of our consumer economy, and we know he is a person who has the authority and power to deliver that.” Parliament is in recess and the Labour leader was apparently not at home at the time.

The protests are not just limited to London. Other demonstrations have taken place in 80 other cities around the world. In The Hague in Holland activists swamped the International Criminal Court building; and police made 29 arrests when over a thousand climate change campaigners blocked one of the main roads into Edinburgh's city centre.

The British-based ecology movement plans to go ahead around the clock with its acts of disobedience until the end of the month. “Climate breakdown and ecological collapse threaten our existence. Another world is possible, and it’s just within reach. It’s going to take everything we’ve got to get there. So we’re pulling out all the stops and rising up in a full-scale Rebellion against this twisted system to save ourselves and the natural world from extinction,” they say in a statement released this week.

Extinction Rebellion was established following a call from a number of academics and veteran ecology campaigners last year to set up a movement that embraces Gandhi-style civil disobedience to take the movement to the streets and fire a common sense of urgency to tackle climate breakdown.

Head to Head with John McDonnell

By Theo Russell

Jeremy Corbyn’s Number Two, the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, discussed the challenges facing a future Labour government with Jenny Manson at the Clayton Crown Hotel in Cricklewood last week. Jenny is a veteran Labour supporter and co-chair of the  Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) movement that was established partly in response to the  Jewish Labour Movement's profoundly Zionist orientation. But the chair made it clear that the discussion would concentrate on Brexit, Labour’s answer to the economic crisis, and would not deal with any questions relating to Israel, Palestine or anti-Semitism.

Jenny Manson is firm favourite to be Labour’s parliamentary candidate in the Finchley and Golders Green constituency at the next election, and a wide range of issues from a socialist perspective were taken up, including how a future Labour government will pay for its plans and how Jenny Manson as a future MP could help realise these.

The first question she put to McDonnell was why Labour failed to challenge the lie that the 2008 financial crisis was the caused by government over-spending.

McDonnell replied: “After the 2008 crash I called for the government to ‘nationalise and stabilise’ the banks, but when the banks were nationalised the government failed to take control of their boards of directors.

“As a result, the injection of massive amounts of quantitative easing into the banking system was to the advantage of wealthy asset holders, while the rest of the population saw their living standards slashed. Those who caused the 2008 crisis are not the ones who ended up paying for it.

“When Gordon Brown lost the election and resigned as leader there was a vacuum when the myth of the government over-spending and the deficit causing the crisis went unchallenged.”

Asked by why the Labour leadership had adopted “austerity light” under Ed Miliband, McDonnell said that this was “one of the issues that propelled JC [Jeremy Corbyn] into the leadership”.

He described Andy Burnham’s abstention in the vote on the Tory benefit reforms as “shameful” and said: “Added to that, at that time people didn’t understand the full implications of what the Tories were doing.”

McDonnell said that Britain had been starved of commercial investment, saying “corporations in Britain have funds of £700 billion which are not being invested. We plan to set up a Strategic Investment Board bringing together the Bank of England, trade unions and employers.”

He said Labour also planned to spend £49 billion on the NHS and to abolish university fees.

Speaking about the shocking levels of poverty after eight years of LibDem and Tory government, he said that in his constituency, Hayes and Harlington in West London, “there are people sleeping on the streets, families renting sheds and garages to live in, people living in abject poverty because of benefits sanctions and bans, and children are out on the streets every day getting into drugs and gangs because their parents work such long hours.

“We’ve seen an 83-year-old asylum seeker taken to hospital in handcuffs where he died, still in handcuffs, and only recently a homeless person died only yards from the Westminster parliament.

“Record numbers of children are being taken into care because of families collapsing and we have four-million children living in poverty, two-thirds of them in families that are working.”

Without an election and change of government, this situation is only going to get much worse. McDonnell warned that: “The Tories are now planning cuts of £1.7 billion in the autumn budget and the Local Government Association has said many local councils can’t go on much longer. We are now facing a situation in which the entire social fabric of our society is at risk.”

LRC: preparing Labour for power

Singing the Internationale at the close of conference

By New Worker correspondent

MEMBERS of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) met for a special general meeting in London’s Conway Hall last Saturday to debate the LRC’s continuing role within the labour movement.

The modern LRC was founded in July 2004 by left-wing members of the Labour Party, trade unionists and others with the aim of restoring the party to its founding purpose of defending working-class interests, fighting for social democracy and the public ownership of the means of production and distribution. It was named after the committee that founded the Labour Party in February 1900.

That aim has largely been achieved with the election of Jeremy Corbyn – one of the leading founders of the LRC – to the leadership of the party in 2016, his re-election after a challenge the following year, a mass influx of new Corbyn supporters into the party and at the end of last year the winning of a left majority on the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC).

It could be argued that the LRC has done its job – a task that seemed almost impossible in 2004 – but there are still battles to be fought. Some local authorities are still in the hands of right-wing Blairite Labour cliques who are wedded to Tory policies.

And the right wing is still committed to undermining Corbyn’s leadership, though so far all the plotting, slandering and double dealing seems only to have made his position stronger.

The first speaker on Saturday was Mick Brooks, the LRC’s political secretary presenting the National Executive Committee statement, pointed out that the LRC still has a vital role.

The mass organisation Momentum is doing great work campaigning for Corbyn to become Prime Minister and to counter the dirty tricks of old right-wing Labour MPs and councillors.

Mick Brooks said there was hope that the LRC and Momentum would be working together. “But,” Brooks warned, “the LRC is a properly constituted organisation; we have conference, we have elections. Momentum has a ‘democratic deficit’, which we hope will be resolved in due course.

“The LRC is not just a Jeremy Corbyn fan club. We are more about the policies and we need our own independence. For example, on the issue of Trident, we know Corbyn has always been in favour of nuclear disarmament. But currently the official Labour Party policy supports Trident so Corbyn is obliged to keep to that line.

“But we don’t have to make that concession and we can still campaign against Trident and keep reminding him until disarmament becomes official party policy.”

Mick Brooks warned that the radicalisation of the Labour Party is still in its early stages and is precarious. But the party is moving forward with the most left-wing leader it has ever had.

The debate was chaired by Matt Wrack, who is general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, about the Labour Party’s internal Democracy Review; about false accusations of anti-Semitism; about ending Labour councillors implementing Tory policies, especially in gentrification, demolishing council estates and replacing them with private luxury homes that the former residents cannot afford to live in.

A number of resolutions were discussed and voted on, including one from the New Communist Party on housing and the need to build more council homes, cap rents and raise tenants’ awareness of their rights in fighting evictions resulting from gaps in benefit payments by re-introducing the McKenzie’s friends of the successful anti-poll tax campaign. The resolution was passed unanimously.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell spoke briefly to the conference about the work of another conference he was participating in nearby discussing the economic nuts and bolts of taking utilities and services that have been privatised back into public ownership.

He spoke of new modes of public ownership, the creation of co-operatives involving workers in the rail, water and power industries and the users of the services in a way that would make it hard for a future Tory government to re-privatise them. He also spoke of compensating former shareholders of these industries by issuing Government bonds.

The conference finished with a rousing speech from Ian Hodson, leader of the Bakers’ Foods and Allied Workers’ Union, followed by the singing of the Red Flag and the Internationale.