Protests to Demand Netanyahu's Arrest as Fugitive Israeli PM Welcomed by Trump

"Benjamin Netanyahu should not be welcomed to the United States! He should be arrested for war crimes," said CodePink.


Pro-Palestine protesters hold a banner calling for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a July 24, 2024 demonstration in Washington, D.C.
(Photo: Joe Piette/flickr/cc)

Brett Wilkins
Feb 04, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


The women-led peace group CodePink is set to hold bicoastal demonstrations this week as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his backers in the U.S. government ignore an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the right-wing leader, who stands accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Netanyahu arrived Monday in the United States, which has not ratified the Rome Statute governing the ICC, after crossing the airspace of European nations that are signatories to the treaty. The Israeli leader and Republican U.S. President Donald Trump are scheduled to hold a joint news conference Tuesday afternoon after meeting in the White House.

Later in the week, Netanyahu is set meet with Trump administration officials and congressional leaders, who recently spearheaded bipartisan passage of House legislation to sanction ICC officials for seeking to hold Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, accountable for waging a war whose conduct is also the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.

"No matter who is in power, the imperialist leaders continue to fully support and fund the Zionist entity's escalating genocide of the Palestinian people," CodePink said in an online announcement of a Tuesday afternoon protest in Washington, D.C., and referring to Israel.



"While both Trump and Netanyahu continue to publicly advocate for total ethnic cleansing, we must ensure that they do not convene in our city without the people taking a stand," the group added. "We reject war criminals being welcomed into our city. Join us on Tuesday to reject this meeting, which will inevitably advance their genocidal plans."

Groups including CodePink, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, and American Muslims for Palestine are also planning a Tuesday afternoon press conference to demand Netanyahu's arrest.

CodePink is also set to hold a demonstration outside Berkeley, California City Hall on Wednesday afternoon.

"War criminal Benjamin Netanyahu should not be welcomed to the United States! He should be arrested for war crimes," the Bay Area chapter of CodePink asserted. "We are speaking out against the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu and taking a stand against the U.S. funding of the Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people."

In addition to calling on the U.S. to "end all military aid to Israel," CodePink Bay Area condemned the Trump administration's plan to imprison tens of thousands of migrants in the notorious military prison at Guantánamo Bay. The White House confirmed Tuesday that U.S. officials have begun sending migrants from the United States to Guantánamo

Amnesty International said Tuesday on social media that "by welcoming Israeli PM Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the United States is showing contempt for international justice."

"The Biden administration flouted any efforts at international justice for Palestine. Now, by not arresting Netanyahu or subjecting him to U.S. investigations, President Trump is doubling down, welcoming him as the first foreign leader to visit the White House since the inauguration," the group continued.

"The U.S. has a clear obligation under the Geneva Conventions to search for and try [to] extradite persons accused of having committed or ordered the commission of war crimes," Amnesty added. "There must be no 'safe haven' for individuals alleged to have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity."



Human Rights Watch chief advocacy officer Bruno Stagno said in a statement Tuesday that "if President Trump wants to break with the Biden administration's complicity in the Israeli government's atrocities in Gaza, he should immediately suspend arms transfers to Israel."

"Trump said the hostilities in Gaza were 'not our war' but 'their war,' but unless the U.S. ends its military support, Gaza will also be Trump's war," Stagno added.

The National Iranian American Council (NIAC), meanwhile, expressed alarm at reporting that the Trump administration is preparing to ramp up his "maximum pressure" policy against Iran in an effort to stop the country from developing nuclear weapons and cripple its oil exports.

"Benjamin Netanyahu has played every single modern U.S. president to act against American interests and likes to boast, 'I know America, America is a thing that can be moved easily,'" NIAC president Jamal Abdi said Tuesday. "Only time will tell whether Trump will succeed in his efforts to end and prevent wars and be a dealmaker in the Middle East, or if [Netanyahu] will move Trump into a war with Iran that will torpedo his presidency and ensure another generation of American military adventures."

"Today, Trump has a rare and historic opportunity for peace—if he stands up to Bibi," Abdi asserted, using Netanyahu's nickname. "He has a chance to stabilize the Middle East and do what his predecessors tried and failed to accomplish: ending the forever wars that have bogged down the U.S. and American troops in the region for a generation."

"Or, he could bow to Bibi and allow the U.S. to be dragged into a catastrophic regional war that would torpedo his presidency and America's interests," Abdi added. "Netanyahu and fellow hawks will surely welcome the 'return' of the so-called 'maximum pressure' approach on Iran—even though it never went away—and work to ensure that it is implemented as harshly as possible to drive Iran away from the negotiating table and push the U.S. and Iran toward a disastrous war."

Trump Has Begun Deportation Flights to Feared 'American Gulag' at Gitmo

"The administration's claim that there is a migrant 'invasion' is unfounded, and its mislabeling immigrants as 'terrorists' is diversionary—and neither makes offshore detention lawful," said one rights advocate.


A group of peace activists gathered on January 11, 2025, in New York City to protest the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
(Photo: Selçuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Feb 04, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

"America can and must be better than this," said U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal Tuesday as the Trump administration announced it had begun operating deportation flights bound for Cuba, where President Donald Trump has said he wants to detain undocumented immigrants at the notorious Guantánamo Bay naval base and prison.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the first flights authorized last week by Trump were underway, with the Department of Defense having deployed Marines to the U.S. base in Cuba on Sunday to begin expanding detention facilities.

Trump has called for the prison to be expanded to hold 30,000 people.

The flights announced Tuesday are the latest step in Trump's militarized anti-immigration operations, with 1,500 soldiers and Marines deployed to the southern U.S. border and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducting major immigration raids across the country.

According to reports, roughly half of the people arrested in cities such as New York and Chicago have had no criminal records and were guilty only of overstaying a visa or crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without going through a port of entry—civil violations of U.S. immigration laws rather than criminal offenses.

Last week, Leavitt said all undocumented immigrants, not just those who have committed violent crimes—whose arrests Trump had previously said would be prioritized—were criminals who had "invaded our nation's borders."

At Slate on Sunday, Pedro Gerson noted that Trump's "entire political rise is tethered to the idea that immigrants are invading the country and that only he can fix it."

"Trump intends to build in Guantánamo purposely to reify the same message that propelled him to power: Immigrants are criminals and they are here to hurt you," wrote Gerson. "But now Trump is going further: Some of these immigrants are not only criminals, they are equivalent to terrorists. Frighteningly, this move may also be Trump signaling an intent to strip undocumented immigrants of even more rights and treat them under similarly abusive conditions as recent Guantánamo Bay detainees have experienced."

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was vague in an interview with NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday about who exactly would be sent to Guantánamo Bay, commonly known as Gitmo, via military planes.

When host Kristen Welker asked whether "women, children, and families" would be imprisoned there, Noem reverted back to the administration's previous claim that it is "targeting the worst of the worst" and detaining people who "are making our streets more dangerous."

"After that, we have final removal orders on many individuals in this country. They are the next priority," said Noem. "We're going to use the facilities that we have."

"Setting up an American gulag in the Caribbean in response to forced displacement in the Americas is a shameful low in U.S. history."

The mass detention facility was built by the Clinton administration to hold 12,500 inmates, and became infamous during President George W. Bush's administration for its detention of suspects in the so-called "War on Terror." Detainees have been held without charges in violation of the U.S. Constitution and have been subjected to torture. Fifteen detainees remain at the prison following the Biden administration's transfer of 11 people to Oman last month.

Trump's planned expansion of Gitmo's prison would result in "a detention facility of unprecedented size in the American context," wrote Gerson at Slate. "The Tule Lake Japanese internment camp, for example, had a capacity of around 18,000. If the Trump administration actually builds the detention camp in Guantanamo, it'll double in size Auschwitz-Birkenau's original design and be bigger than Dachau and Treblinka combined."

As Yael Schacher, director for the Americans and Europe at Refugees International, said in a statement, the U.S. prison was also used to "inhumanely [detain] Cuban and Haitian asylum-seekers in the 1990s."


"The Trump administration's use of military planes to send immigrants to detention at Guantánamo Bay epitomizes the administration's gratuitously cruel, illegal, expensive, and burdensome approach to immigration policy," said Schacher. "Guantánamo's Migrant Operations Center, which the Trump administration is sending Marines to expand, is truly a black box that no nongovernmental organization has been allowed to visit."


"The administration's claim that there is a migrant 'invasion' is unfounded, and its mislabeling immigrants as 'terrorists' is diversionary—and neither makes offshore detention lawful," Schacher added. "Members of Congress should investigate the move as a misuse of military assets. Setting up an American gulag in the Caribbean in response to forced displacement in the Americas is a shameful low in U.S. history."

Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA, warned that mass deportation to Gitmo will "cut people off from lawyers, family, and support systems, throwing them into a black hole so the U.S. government can continue to violate their human rights out of sight."


"Sending immigrants to Guantánamo is a profoundly cruel, costly move," she said. "Shut Gitmo down now and forever!"

 UK

Take the train

Mike Phipps reviews How the Railways Will Fix the Future, by Gareth Dennis, published by Repeater.

In most developed countries, transport is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and road transport accounts for the vast majority of that.

Battery motors will not fix this crisis. Moreover, they keep the focus on private, individualised transport, maintaining existing social inequalities and benefiting existing power structures, including resource extractors. As previously reported on Labour Hub, so-called ‘green colonialism’ – the international grab for more environmentally friendly technologies is growing exponentially to meet demand – complete with child labour and the dispossession of indigenous peoples. As we concluded then, “Replacing individualised fossil-fuel transport with lithium-based electric vehicles is not sustainable. A reduction in consumption based on new collective models of transport will be required in the Global North.”

This means democratising and widening mass transit. Social mobility requires actual mobility: better transport can help reverse regional inequalities. Only rail can do this on an environmentally acceptable basis: the emissions of a train journey per passenger mile is a quarter of those of a car journey and one fifth of a plane’s.

Rail travel is also much safer than using roads and does not have the same destructive impact on town planning.  It’s also a lot more efficient: the Victoria Line can carry ten times more people per hour than a six-lane motorway.

Demand for rail is increasing. London’s Elizabeth Line, opened only a couple of years ago, now accounts for one in five rail journeys in the UK. In the US, ridership and revenue are now at record levels.

The author favours publicly-owned railways on efficiency grounds, not just to eliminate wasteful competition and duplication, but to prevent the massive overcharging by  private contractors that takes place along the supply chain.

He also wants the industry devolved and democratised. By the end of this decade, one third of the world’s population will live in cities of more than one million people. So the control and oversight of the mass transit systems that they will need must be aligned to the elected cities’ devolved authorities.

This book is written in a lively, engaging style and it’s full of local detail. A recent interview, on Novara Media’s Downstream, revealed author Gareth Dennis to be a thorough and enthusiastic master of his subject, covering everything from station architecture to dedicated railway training colleges (he taught at one, but increasing student enrolment is difficult without a long-term government commitment to investing in the network).

Dennis was also the victim of a spectacular injustice in 2024 when Network Rail Chair Peter Hendy pressured the engineering consultancy that employed him as a railway engineer to fire him for publicly voicing safety concerns regarding overcrowding at London’s Euston Station, threatening to withhold public contracts from the company unless they did so. Dennis lost his job, while Hendy was later ennobled by Prime Minster Keir Starmer and brought into the government as Minister of State at the Department for Transport.

This book is full of interesting ideas. One area that I felt needed expanding, however,  was the issue of affordability. Dennis discusses the deterrent effect of complex ticketing systems and the iniquities of dynamic pricing, but hedges his bets a bit on the issue of abolishing fares.

There’s room here for a discussion about the way much of Europe subsidises air travel, compared to trains, putting the latter at an unfair disadvantage. A recent Greenpeace survey found flight prices were on average half those of train fares for the same routes – unsurprising, when one considers that airlines pay no taxes on kerosene and little tax on tickets or VAT, and their emissions are priced at a level below the social cost of carbon.

In 2019, a government briefing paper said the absence of an aviation fuel tax was seen by many as “an indefensible anomaly” – but nothing has changed. Instead, the aviation industry receives £7 billion in annual subsidies.

This is fixable, as Dennis acknowledges. Countries including Germany, Austria and Hungary have started to introduce ‘climate tickets’ which offer affordable train travel in order to encourage people to switch to rail. In Germany, a nationwide train and bus ticket was introduced in 2023 for just 49 euros.

Britian, even under a Labour government, seems to be a long way from such measures. Switzerland, on the other hand, moves nearly half of its freight by rail and has achieved the second-highest per capita passenger rail usage in the world, after Japan. So, why not here?

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

HEATHROW

“Economically bad, environmentally bad and socially bad”

HubMP2012

FEBRUARY 1, 2025

Reactions are pouring in to Rachel Reeves’ ‘growth’ speech – and her commitment to a third Heathrow runway in particular.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has backed a third runway at London’s Heathrow Airport as part of a new effort to get the UK’s economy growing. “In a wide-ranging speech to business leaders, she also backed expansions at Luton and Gatwick airports, as well as a ‘growth corridor’ between Oxford and Cambridge,” the BBC reports.

New powers in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill would cut the length of time it takes to get infrastructure projects off the ground, according to Reeves, who announced a range of new infrastructural projects.

Keir Starmer has vowed to get rid of a “thicket of red tape” that he claimed was deterring foreign investment, and the Government also plans to relax restrictions on big pension funds to encourage them to invest more in UK businesses.

Labour opposition

The third runway at Heathrow has yet to receive planning permission, but puts the Party leadership on collision course with many senior Labour figures who oppose it. London Mayor Sadiq Khan responded: “I’m simply not convinced that you can have hundreds of thousands of additional flights at Heathrow every year without a hugely damaging impact on our environment.”

Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP said: “This is such a huge political, economic & especially environmental mistake that sadly I fear it will inflict an irreparable scale of damage on the government.” He promised to convene a public meeting in the Heathrow Villages to discuss the situation.

Labour’s former Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn, Andrew Fisher, said a third Heathrow runway was “economically bad, environmentally bad and socially bad.” There were better things we could be building, he suggested, including a mass programme of council house building and home insulation.

Nadia Whittome MP suggested a forest twice the size of London would be required just to offset the Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton expansions. Zarah Sultana MP called  the decision a “complete U-turn at the expense of local communities and the planet –  reckless, short-sighted and indefensible.” Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn MP also voiced his opposition.

Labour’s former Parliamentary candidate in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Ali Milani, said: “It will act as a signal to all those watching around the world that we are not serious in meeting our climate obligations and critically, for those of us in the surrounding areas and in London, it means further deterioration of  our health and environment. Heathrow is already the single biggest source of carbon emissions in the entire United Kingdom.”

Northern MPs were critical of the Chancellor’s focus on the South east. Former Shadow Business Secretary Jon Trickett MP said: “Money has been sucked out of the Regions and into the South East for decades.  Long term cuts to transport spending in the North are effectively being used to increase investment in the South East and London…

“In order to reconnect with working class communities and rebuild trust in politics, the Labour government must avoid buying into the economic orthodoxy of the Treasury, whose restricted vision never seems to extend far beyond the M25. We need massive investment in the regions. The new Labour Government cannot simply be managers of an unjust and unfair economic system which has left so many people behind.”

A Momentum spokesperson criticised the Chancellor’s entire approach: “By relaxing planning constraints, pursuing Heathrow expansion at all cost, and enacting policies favouring private developers, asset managers and industry lobbyists, Reeves’s speech was deservedly praised by right-wing think tanks. Starmer became Prime Minister promising ‘change’ but in fact is continuing the same climate-trashing, pro-developer policies as the Tories.”

Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham was blunt: “The fact is that bending the knee to global billionaires, ‘unleashing’ corporate greed, has not delivered investment. We have historically low investment rates, the lowest in the G7. A different direction is needed.”

Pressure groups sceptical

Think tanks and pressure groups were also sceptical. Shaun Spiers, executive director at Green Alliance, said: “The economic case for bigger airports and new roads is highly questionable, and it’s crystal clear that pushing ahead with these will fly in the face of the UK’s climate targets.”

Beccy Speight, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds chief executive, agreed: “Some of today’s announcements put our climate targets at risk.”

Green New Deal Rising picketed the event and held up placards showing social media posts of Cabinet members explaining why they had opposed Heathrow expansion just a few years ago – including the Prime Minister himself. In 2020 he opposed a third runway at Heathrow because “there is no more important challenge than the climate emergency.”

The group said: “Even in the short-term, expanding airports will do nothing to boost our sluggish economy. Business passenger numbers have been falling for 20 years as business has moved online. All this decision will do is ensure a small number of frequent leisure flyers leave and spend their money outside the UK economy more regularly. That’s why previous expansions in airport capacity haven’t led to increased productivity or GDP.”

It added: “We just can’t have economic prosperity if we don’t get control of the climate emergency.”

“Rash, short-sighted” – Friends of the Earth

Rosie Downes, head of campaigns at Friends of the Earth, savaged the Chancellor’s vision, describing it as “the kind of dangerously short-sighted thinking that has helped cause the climate crisis and left the UK one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Giving the go-ahead to airport expansion by depending on new, unreliable technologies, like ‘sustainable aviation fuels’ would be a reckless gamble with our future and risks the UK missing critical climate reduction targets even if we rapidly expand renewable energy.

“Similarly, allowing developers to bulldoze their way through crucial nature protections and safeguards will further diminish our seriously under-threat wildlife and natural environment.

“The net zero economy is the UK’s fastest growing sector. The government should seize the huge benefits that building a greener future will bring through cheap homegrown renewable energy and warm well-insulated homes, not back damaging projects like airports and the Lower Thames Crossing.

“Sacrificing nature and our climate isn’t leadership: it’s rash, short-sighted and a sure-fire way to lose the trust of those who believed Labour’s election promises on the environment. Instead the Chancellor must embrace green growth.”

“Tax the super-rich” – Women’s Budget Group

Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, director at the Women’s Budget Group, said that prioritising physical infrastructure alone missed a critical barrier to a thriving economy.

“Our economy is being held back because people can’t access social care, get the right medical treatment when they need it, or because they cannot afford or secure a nursery place for their child. These services – our social infrastructure – are on their knees. Waiting for the economy to grow before investing in these services overlooks a critical point: public services are the backbone of a strong economy, not a consequence of it. 

“What’s more, the care sector is an inherently green sector: our analysis has shown that investment in the care sector could create 2.7 times as many jobs as the same investment in construction and produce 30% less greenhouse gas emissions. 

“We need to invest and grow our social infrastructure, and decarbonise our physical infrastructure. Expanding Heathrow airport is a worrying move from the Government, and flies in the face of our climate commitments. New research from the New Economics Foundation reveals such expansions would erase the climate benefits of the Government’s Clean Power Plan by 2050, with limited financial returns. We have long argued against the expansion of air travel.”

She concluded: “We urge the Government to honour their commitment to net zero, and their promise to call on those with the broadest shoulders. Easing the regulations around the non-dom tax regime – as recently announced by the Chancellor in Davos – is a step backwards. Last week, Oxfam’s latest inequality report showed that the total wealth of UK billionaires increased by £35m per day in 2024. Patriotic Millionaires’ recent G20 survey found 72% of millionaires support higher taxes on the super-rich to reduce inequality and strengthen public services. Taxing the super-rich would not only help fund the services and social security that women disproportionately rely on, it would also help close the gender wealth gap.” 

Growth won’t fix poverty

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation agreed that the Government’s dash for growth would not fix the UK’s underlying problems, tweeting that there would not be “progress on child poverty by 2029 even with high economic growth.”

Only in Scotland, it argued, were child poverty rates expected to fall by 2029, largely thanks to the Scottish Child Payment and efforts to mitigate the two-child benefit limit. It concluded: “Any respectable child poverty strategy must include action on social security including to abolish the two-child limit and introduce a protected minimum amount of support to Universal Credit.”

Its new report UK Poverty 2025 is published today. It finds that more than one in five people in the UK (21%) were in poverty in 2022/23 – 14.3 million people. Of these, 8.1 million were working-age adults, 4.3 million were children and 1.9 million were pensioners. Poverty is deepening, the report finds.

Sign the petition against Heathrow expansion here.

Image: Heathrow Airport. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heathrow_Airport_(7006948360).jpg Source: Heathrow Airport Author: Ed Webster, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

UK Public  service general practice – time for a radical new agenda

 

HubMP2012

FEBRUARY 2, 2025

The Westminster Government has signalled its intention to produce its Ten Year Plan for the NHS in Spring 2025. In response Doctors in Unite have outlined its radical vision of what this future NHS should look like in its recently published document Public Service General Practice.

The NHS does need radical change which addresses both the failures of a dozen years of  financial Austerity and a dysfunctional fascination with the capacity of ‘the market’ and for-profit health care to address our needs. This can be achieved only by a fully funded public health service.

Our health service must provide care in a timely way that responds to the present unacceptable levels of ill-health and which promotes healthy living and well-being.

Public Service General Practice provides a vision of how this can be delivered in a way that is consistent with the founding values of the NHS. It supports the call of General Practitioners Committee (England) for a new GP contract. But this new contract cannot just be about the reform of the independent contractor contract. It must also offer GPs the opportunity to be part of a genuine public service, salaried primary health care team that provides care in a community setting, in line with need and which has a strong focus on promoting public health.

Its key messages are:

Investing in primary care services is cost-effective at a societal level. Worldwide evidence is that the stronger the primary care system, the stronger the overall health system is to improve health outcomes, reduce costs, and maximise equity for the population. The NHS Confederation estimates that for every £1 invested in primary care, at least £14 is delivered in productivity across the working community.

Investment in public health similarly is highly cost-effective. Most health care interventions that improve life expectancy and healthy life expectancy are delivered at community levels with primary care as the crucial partner.

Market failure must be recognised and addressed. The Government role is always one of stewardship of a health system for its population. There are many different models of financing and providing such services globally. In the UK, General Practice is commissioned by the NHS via a variety of contracts. This has inherent risk of market failure, which carries a high price for patients, especially for those with the greatest needs. A national NHS salaried contract must be introduced. It is not sufficient to rely on the independent contractor route to ensure equitable access and quality of care.

Continuity of care: continuity of care must be at least as important a goal as access to care because it reduces mortality and inequalities in health outcomes.

The GP is crucial and not just a cog in the multi-disciplinary primary care team. The role of Specialist Generalist as the clinical leader for the primary care team is fundamentally what makes primary care in the UK so efficient, cost-effective and highly productive. It cannot be fragmented and adequately replaced by transactional encounters with a multitude of professionals. A multidisciplinary team without GP leadership is more expensive and less effective.

A primary care pilot of joint general practice / public health posts should be undertaken.

Resources should be allocated according to need, using more sophisticated methods than the outdated Carr Hill formula to ensure that capacity distribution is planned and not left to the vagaries of the market.

Among its conclusions, the report notes: “Staffing numbers need to increase to both address current pressures and the growing burden of unmet need. This needs to be delivered in new or upgraded facilities which are appropriate to a 21st century primary care team. These facilities should be capable of being community assets where patients can be seen in a comfortable, convenient and timely way. They must be capable of hosting a full range of personal medical and public health provision. In renewing this infrastructure, pro-active priority must be given to where facilities are least fit for purpose. It is also crucial we must avoid repeating the pitfalls of PFI and LIFT which have proved to be totally unfit for purpose.”

The full paper can be downloaded here.

Dr Coral Jones, Chair of Doctors in Unite, said:  “The Labour government has not come up with an effective plan for the NHS which addresses the multiple problems of acute care, ambulance services, community services, mental health nor the inadequacies of social care. 

“So far the pronouncements have been made about reducing waiting times. The plan is to increase the private sector, rather than using money to rebuild a NHS public service which is publicly planned and publicly provided. The Starmer/ Streeting vision is one where the NHS will remain ‘free at the point of use’, but the NHS risks becoming a brand behind which private companies operate for profit, thereby diverting funds from the NHS.”

“A Socialist Identity in Parliament”? The Campaign Group of Labour MPs, 1982-2015

Ahead of a seminar on 11th February, Alfie Steer explores how Labour’s parliamentary Labour left organised from the 1980s to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

In March 1988, on the eve of his final bid for the leadership of the Labour Party, Tony Benn addressed a meeting of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, who he nicknamed his “foul-weather friends” [Benn, Diaries, 23 March 1988].

It was an apt descriptor. While a bewildering number of campaigns and organisations came and went during Labour’s three decades of marginalisation, one constant was the Campaign Group. Formed in the fractious aftermath of the 1981 deputy leadership election by Benn and his small gang of parliamentary supporters, it also remains one of the last organisational legacies of Labour’s ‘new left’.

Although Labour’s parliamentary left had organised in groups and factions for much of the Party’s history, including the Socialist League, the Bevanites and the Tribune Group, the Campaign Group saw itself as an entirely new organisation of left-wing MPs. A 1985 leaflet listed its aims to provide “a socialist identity within parliament”, but also to “build a campaigning function within the PLP”, and to “forge links with the labour and trade union movement outside.”

Alongside the more immediate factional divisions between Labour’s ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ left in the early 1980s, the Campaign Group’s formation was sparked by a deeper ideological discontent with the established practices of its left-wing predecessors, with the officially autonomous Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), and even with the Westminster majoritarian system itself. Rather than being the only arena of political contestation, the Campaign Group saw Westminster as just one part of a wider struggle, and Labour MPs as just one part of a mass movement. This implied a political strategy based on dedicated socialist activity in the Commons, but also the cultivation of a powerful grassroots movement outside of it.

Starting with 23 MPs in 1982, the Group’s membership would reach a peak of 43 by 1987. Its MPs would maintain a busy parliamentary schedule, presenting dozens of early day motions and private members bills to the Commons between 1983 and 1985 [Labour Herald, 4th October 1985]. In 1988 alone, Tony Benn would also present five of the most radical private members bills of the era, using them as tools of political education to demystify parliamentary procedure, and make hoped for changes “almost tangible”. Before long, the Group had also established itself as the PLP’s most consistent backbench rebels. From 1983 to 2010, the Campaign Group would be involved in three-quarters of all Labour parliamentary rebellions.

Outside of the Commons, the Group held weekly meetings open to external speakers, which could include students, trade unionists, feminists, social workers and foreign delegations. From 1984 to 1987, the Group published a book and seven policy pamphlets, and from 1986 was also producing a monthly newspaper, Campaign Group News, with a circulation of around 4,000 by 1987. By that same year, approximately 100 local Campaign Groups had been set up around the country, with some, such as in Scotland, Manchester and Teesside, producing their own publications and organising local conferences.

While far removed from power, and treated with explicit hostility by Party leader Neil Kinnock, the Campaign Group therefore appeared as a substantial presence in parliamentary and Party life. If Benn’s hair’s breadth defeat to Denis Healey in 1981 would prove to be the high point of the Labour left’s factional power for the next thirty years, this was not quite so clear at the time.

By establishing local Groups and forging connections with wider social movements, the Campaign Group demonstrated a major departure from the insular parliamentary focus of its immediate predecessors, most notably the Tribune Group. The common desire to, in Jeremy Corbyn’s words, “be there on the picket lines and at the workplace level” [Benn, Diaries, 11th July 1983] demonstrated a new conception of an MP’s role as a supportive auxiliary to, rather than necessarily the leaders of political struggles.

Tony Benn would similarly describe the Campaign Group as a “resource” or “paid officials of the labour movement” [Labour Briefing, June 1986], rather than as traditional political leaders. Through their privileged position in Parliament, a national profile and easy access to the media, Campaign Group MPs also emphasised their role in providing a voice for otherwise marginal causes.  As Diane Abbott described it, “the thing about being an MP is you’ve got a platform, people listen to you.” [Socialist Action, 10th January 1986]. Similarly, according to John McDonnell: “We campaign within Parliament so that the campaigns which are excluded by the Westminster elite and the media get a voice and some recognition.” [Guardian, 23rd July 2007].

Another major departure was clear in the Group’s attitude to the parliamentary system itself. For one, Campaign Group MPs exhibited little deference to the niceties or rituals of parliamentary procedure, and through various acts of protest, both individual and collective, they contributed to a significant uptick of ‘disorderly’ behaviour within the Commons by the 1980s.

More substantively, while key figures of Labour’s ‘old left’, like Aneurin Bevan, had embraced Westminster’s majoritarian system as the essential weapon in the struggle for socialism, the Campaign Group took a more critical view. This would be demonstrated in one of its early publications, Parliamentary Democracy and the Labour Movement (1984), which called for the transfer of all Crown prerogatives to the decision of the House of Commons, and even the direct election of Labour Cabinets by an electoral college at the Party’s annual conference. While the transfer of prerogatives like the power to declare war constituted a firm assertion of the parliamentary supremacy, transferring the power to call elections, or even freely appoint the Cabinet, were also drastic restrictions on Prime Ministerial power and patronage.

Though previous iterations of the Labour left had been happy to use the Westminster majoritarian system virtually unreformed in the name of socialism, the Campaign Group was more circumspect, conscious of how the discretionary powers of the executive had often been used to moderate Labour programmes and discipline backbench rebels, as seen in the 1970s, rather than ensure their implementation. Proposing that Party conference elect the cabinet also underlined a desire to integrate the officially autonomous Parliamentary Labour Party into the full participatory, decision-making structures of the wider party. This illustrated the integral ‘new left’ belief that Labour’s parliamentarians were but the privileged delegates of a wider mass movement and therefore had to be directly accountable to it.

While the Campaign Group’s membership and organisation would fluctuate and decline after 1985, riven by political divisions and personality clashes, a consistent feature of its activity remained this radical scepticism toward Parliament, and a far less paternalistic attitude to the role of Labour MPs within it. This would encourage an innovative and, despite countless setbacks, failures and outright disasters, a robust factional strategy that can, as my paper aims to demonstrate, go some way in explaining the highly unlikely election of Jeremy Corbyn, one of Benn’s “foul-weather friends”, as Labour leader in September 2015.

Alfie Steer is completing a doctorate on the history of the Labour left from the end of the miners’ strike to 2015. His paper on the Campaign Group of Labour MPs will be presented at the Institute of Historical Research’s ‘Parliaments, Politics and People’ seminar on 11th February, 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm. More information on how to attend here.

Image: Socialist Campaign Group News Frontpage from March 1990. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Socialist_Campaign_Group_News_Frontpage_from_March_1990.jpg Author: Pipenetal, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Fresh thinking needed from the left

HubMP2012

FEBRUARY 5, 2025

We can all can get dispirited by the sloganistic and ritualistic offerings of some on the left in response to today’s crisis. We need new thinking about the situation we face, suggests Alan Simpson.

Traditional production economics has already pushed us past some of the climate boundaries humanity must learn to live within. Consuming less and sharing more must occupy more of our analytical time than we’ve given it. Of course, that’s easy to say, but it carries little meaning to the poor who struggle to earn enough to survive on. It also carries less and less weight with those in fragile employment.

The big challenge for the left, as I see it, is in founding a politics that unites the planet, the proletariat – the traditional working class – and the precariat – those in fragile employment, often unorganised. Unless we include the latter, we will see increasing numbers of (younger) insecure workers drawn towards the politics of authoritarian leadership.

My take on this is threefold. First, we have to rebuild democracy from the base. Social media moguls – and authoritarian governments – have become adept at spreading doubt and mistrust via the internet. The abject quality of national political leadership aids this process, but public cynicism and mistrust is now at record levels. So we will have to rebuild trust and accountability from a local level outwards. Some issues skip past this process more easily than others – for example, taking back ownership of water and rail – but others are more nuanced and multi-layered.

The second is my belief that the main problem is in the left’s key failure to grasp the shift in the Thatcher/Reagan era from production capitalism to finance capitalism. Today’s most wayward excesses live within the Wild West of financial capitalism. Our failures to address and control this are at the root of disempowerment that then pervades society and the world of politics.

And my third, and most perplexing, point concerns the labour movement. We’ve lived off the Lucas Aerospace Plan for more decades than we were entitled to, without ever really embedding it within the precepts of organised labour. Many parts of the union leadership are quite conservative when it comes to this kind of creative thinking.

In his lone battle to maintain Labour’s climate commitments, Ed Miliband often finds himself with barely a union leadership to lean on. In the face of threats to existing production mentalities, the rank and file left have gone silent on the transformative thinking needed to avoid climate breakdown. As Jeremy Corbyn discovered to his cost, when the forces of reaction came for him, trade union leaders were amongst them, particularly on environmental and defence issues. How we tackle this is something Labour has largely ducked.

Organisationally, the left may have taken something of a beating in recent years. But that doesn’t mean it can’t do some fresh thinking of its own.

Alan Simpson was Labour MP for Nottingham South from 1992 to 2010. His various articles and other writings can be found on his blog here.  

Image: https://www.picpedia.org/highway-signs/v/vision.html License: Creative Commons 3 – CC BY-SA 3.0 Attribution: Alpha Stock Images – http://alphastockimages.com/ Original Author: Nick Youngson – link to – http://www.nyphotographic.com/ Original Image: https://www.picpedia.org/highway-signs/v/vision.html

More questions than answers

FEBRUARY 4, 2025

Mike Phipps reviews Reclaiming the Future: A Beginner’s Guide to Planning the Economy, by Simon Hannah, published by Pluto.

This book is written in the spirit of what Sam Girdin called “establishing popular confidence in the feasibility of a socialist society.” It’s a worthwhile objective.

Hannah has a good diagnosis of the problems and evils of the existing economic system and draws on the writings of Marx and Lenin and the experiences of the last century to show how the struggle against capitalism can prefigure socialism. Like the Plan drawn up by Lucas Aerospace workers to challenge the closure of their factory in the late 1970s, he cites Italy’s GKN workers who occupied their plant and proposed their own alternative green production plan in 2023.

Hannah foregrounds the centrality of class relations, which is fine, but his correct insistence on a global struggle tends to make these antagonisms look very general – between “the vast mass of humanity who do the work and those who control how the work is done and how the surplus is used.”

The reality is that the financialization of capital is changing the contours of the global class struggle. The rise of rentier capitalism means that for many the exploitation they suffer lies as much in the rent extracted from them and the indebtedness they incur as in the surplus value expropriated at their workplace.

In the Global North especially, the old proletariat, the basis for mass democratic socialist parties, is shrinking, throwing these movements into perhaps terminal crisis. In their place, as Guy Standing argues, we see the growth of a new mass precariat, defined by insecure, unstable labour, volatile earnings and in some cases a lack of guaranteed citizenship. The lack of an organised labour movement encompassing this class means its support for socialist ideas is far from automatic.

Hannah’s discussion of the route to a more rational, eco-socialist society is short and doesn’t really go beyond what Lenin and Trotsky said on the subject, which is problematic. Yes, it’s positive to raise demands that transform a defensive struggle into one that raises the possibility of an alternative economic system. But counterposing to piecemeal reforms a revolutionary approach, one which recognises the class nature and repressive character of the state apparatus, is ultimately inadequate if it can’t fully explain how, or to what extent, the necessarily authoritarian character of a social revolution inevitably taints the new society it seeks to give birth to. Likewise Hannah’s insistence on a revolutionary party won’t do, if he can’t take on board the legitimate reasons why those in struggle distrust self-styled ‘vanguards’ with readymade programmes, whose attitude to the real movement is all too often manipulative and parasitic.

To be fair, Hannah’s book is not really about the path to socialism as much as how a transitional society might be organised. His vision for this is a sustainable, democratically planned economy – coming from below, not gifted from on high – meeting human needs. The weakness with his discussion of rational workplace planning is that it assumes an economy largely based on commodity production – which feels less true than it once was.

If socialist theorists in the past have been cagey about setting out their blueprint for the future, it is for good reason. First, declaring something is not the same as making it a reality. Hannah talks of a workers’ government taking control of the economy and dismantling the market. But market relations are not identical to class exploitation and may actually be necessary in a transitional society.

This is where a deeper grasp of economics might come in handy. Hannah references ‘war communism.’ He talks of abolishing unemployment – easier said than done – scrapping personal debt like mortgages or credit cards, which might prove problematic, and seizing the money of the wealthy – although “the rich ‘taking their money abroad’ is mostly irrelevant as the state bank can just print more money.” This feels economically illiterate: having once lived in a country suffering hyper-inflation, I can say it’s no fun – especially for the poor.  Rationing, says Hannah, could be used to tackle rising commodity prices. This, however, fuels a black market and enriches its operators.  

Understandably, Hannah can’t prescribe what form a revolutionary government might take, but historically revolutionary crises have tended towards a “commune or committee-style organisation of the masses”. Initially, this is true, but it’s worth probing the reasons why this rarely lasts.

He proposes some challenging measures the government might enact, including abolishing the police. I get the point that the state repressive apparatus is utilised in a way that benefits the ruling class, but dismantling the laws protecting capitalist private property might be a better place to start.

There is a difference between looking radical and achieving useful results. Hannah suggests confiscating second homes to help solve the housing crisis. But the real crisis is one of affordability, not shortage of units.

The big question that Hannah has to grapple with is: how much planning? How much socialisation of production? There is a logic to having small businesses in the service sector, but if a fish and chip shop (his example) that grew substantially were likely to be collectivised by its workforce and integrated into a larger unit on efficiency grounds, then why would its original capitalist owner be particularly interested in seeing the business grow? Of course, this opens the wider issue of what role there might be for incentives and financial inequality in a socialist society.

I don’t wish to be negative – after all, these are big subjects to wrestle with. The flaw is that Hannah’s frame of reference is too narrow: he repeatedly scours the early years of the Russian Revolution for clues, but perhaps this is not just self-limiting, but entirely the wrong paradigm?

The second half of the book should be stronger, but then it is on safer terrain – refuting the many arguments that have historically been levelled against socialist planning. The most challenging one is the role of markets in determining the price of a commodity and the way market mechanisms generate more data than is available to central planners. Hannah’s rejection of these ideas is based more on showing the flaws of the working of global markets in practice than on the superiority of a system that supersedes market principles entirely. This blunts his critique considerably.

Some interesting issues are discussed along the way, for example “shadow pricing” – but Hannah shows himself to be both traditionalist and ultimatistic, for instance towards the concept of a universal basic income. He supports those who disdain the idea, essentially because it does not address other problems intrinsic to capitalism and is therefore somehow reformist. There is an unfortunate tendency throughout the book to divide policies into revolutionary and reformist, the latter damned by this categorization.

Hannah touches on other interesting debates which probably need more exploration. Taking its cue from Marx, revolutionary socialism traditionally envisaged a massive expansion of the productive forces. A modern greener approach, however, requires us to consider ways of reducing economic activity to limit energy usage and environmental degradation. The author does not solve this issue, although he is clearly right to say that “any reductions in economic activity must occur within the context of reducing global inequality.”

Hannah is to be commended for setting out his stall, but he is asking us to take a huge amount on trust. There’s precious little here about the real world of trade unions or local government and what can be and has been rationally planned with some success and with very limited resources. Perhaps such initiatives are in the dumpster marked ‘reformist’ – but the threat of a good example can be more potent than a raft of fully worked out theories.

Or as Marx wrote, “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.