by New Worker correspondent
Two Palestine Action hunger-strikers on the brink of death have called off their protest but six others are still refusing to eat. The Palestine Action hunger strike began on 2nd November. The prisoners who are refusing food are: Qesser Zuhrah and Amu Gib who are on day 46 of hunger strike, Heba Muraisa who is on day 45, Teuta Hoxha on day 39, Kamran Ahmed on day 38 and Lewie Chiaramello on day 24. They are all refusing food as they await trial for their direct action protests in support of Palestine.
In Parliament Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Independent Alliance bloc, was once again ignored by Starmer & Co. He told the media that “the hunger strikers are at risk of death. I asked the minister if he would do the bare minimum and meet their lawyers – a demand shared by over 50 MPs and Peers. His response? “No”. MPs laughed along. They should be ashamed of themselves”.
Meanwhile another Corbynista MP has staged a protest outside a Surrey prison demanding urgent medical care for a hunger striker there. Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana said Qesser Zuhrah was critically ill with an immediate risk of dying after refusing food for 46 days. The MP called for an ambulance and the prisoner was transferred to hospital. Ms Zuhrah is on remand at Bronzefield jail awaiting trial on charges linked to the activities of the banned Palestine Action direct action group.
Protesters staged a banner drop in front of the BBC office in Glasgow to call on the Corporation to end its silence regarding the pro-Palestine political prisoners on hunger strike in the UK prisons. The ‘No Pride in Genocide Glasgow’ group said they were calling on the BBC to end its silence about the hunger strikes. In a move as unsurprising as it was shameful, rather than end its silence the BBC chose to quietly remove the banner, without mentioning it or the political prisoners it supported, in its news coverage.
The silence of the BBC and most of the other bourgeois media on the hunger strikes, and the wider issue of the Starmer government’s internationally-condemned political imprisonment without trial of the ‘Filton 24’ anti-genocide activists, is part of an evident campaign of ‘omertà ’ on the topic of Starmer’s campaign on activists and journalists who speak out or act against Israel’s slaughter of innocent Palestinians, many of them women and children. Despite the inclusion of many journalists, often Jewish, among his targets, the voices of the ruling class that pose as the “independent” media refuse to cover it.
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| Mick Lynch at the Grand |
by New Worker correspondent
Mick Lynch got a rousing welcome at the ‘Enough Is Enough’ rally at the Clapham Grand in Battersea, south London last week. The venerable Grand, a historic venue outside Clapham Junction station that opened as a music hall in 1900, was once able to take a 3,000 strong audience. Later conversions to a cinema and a bingo hall as well as modern health and safety regulations has cut that capacity by almost two-thirds. But the now restored theatre was packed to the gills for the London launch of the campaign that seeks to lead the fight-back against cost of living hikes not seen for a generation.
Well over a thousand people had come to hear the RMT transport union leader speak about the wave of strikes sweeping the country and the growing resistance to the austerity regime. Hundreds more were left outside the doors as the hall had reached its current 1,250 capacity.
Lynch said the Enough Is Enough campaign “never started off as a political movement“ but the mood of the country has now made it one. The Tories had “assumed that our members and all workers wouldn’t fight for our rights, but they were wrong”.
“Unions must lead, we can’t wait for the politicians. We need to get out into the communities and the former red wall to assist them to campaign. We need to show them how to organise. Our job as activists and trade unionists is to lift them, give them hope and get them out on the streets.
“Join a union and join a campaign. Move the workers into campaigning and convert it into a wave of solidarity and industrial action across Britain.”
Lynch urged “every union, community organisation, every grass-roots organisations — whatever it is — to fight back against this austerity”, adding that since this current administration “act in their class interests, it’s time to act in our class interests”.
His words were echoed by Eddie Dempsey, another senior RMT full-timer, Zarah Sultana the campaigning Labour MP for Coventry South, and Michael Rosen, the poet and writer who is an outspoken supporter of Jeremy Corbyn.
Enough is Enough was founded by trade unions and community organisations determined to push back against the misery forced on millions by rising bills, low wages, food poverty, shoddy housing – and a society run only for a wealthy elite.
The campaign is calling for a rise in the national minimum wage, a path to £15 an hour, a real public sector pay rise and an increase in pensions and benefits. It wants a return to the pre-April energy price cap of £1,277 per year; the nationalisation of the energy companies and increasing investment in renewable energies.
By reinstating the £20-a-week universal credit uplift, and universal free school meals, along with a new independent regulatory body to hold the government to account, as well as a wealth tax, the campaign hopes to end food poverty too – while providing 100,000 council homes a year.
