Ed Miliband hits back at Trump’s denials of climate change

Basit Mahmood 

13 November, 2024 
Left Foot Forward

The WMO has said that 2015-2024 will be the warmest ten years on record with the loss of ice from glaciers, sea-level rises and ocean heating acceleration.

Labour’s Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, has hit back at Trump’s claims that climate change is a hoax as he pledged to do all he could to ensure Britain is at the forefront of the Green transition.

Trump has often denied the evidence of climate change and only a few months ago called climate change ‘one of the great scams’ following the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 100 people, across the southeast US.

The world has seen increasing wildfires, droughts and record temperatures in recent years, with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issuing a red alert on the first day of the UN Climate Change Conference, COP29.

The WMO has said that 2015-2024 will be the warmest ten years on record with the loss of ice from glaciers, sea-level rises and ocean heating acceleration, while extreme weather, like Spain’s recent floods and hurricanes that battered the USA, is wreaking havoc on communities and economies across the world.

“Climate catastrophe is hammering health, widening inequalities, harming sustainable development, and rocking the foundations of peace. The vulnerable are hardest hit,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

Miliband was asked about President-elect Trump’s denial of climate change, to which he replied: “I don’t believe it’s a hoax. It’s real, just look at events in Spain. Look at the fact that we had a 40 degree day in Britain two years ago, look at what’s happening in the U.S. It’s definitely happening.”

Asked about what the government’s message will be to Trump, Miliband replied: “The 

message for us is we’re going to do what’s in our national self-interest’.

Must watch: Right-wing arguments on climate change dismantled in a single clip

Basit Mahmood 

Yesterday
Left Foot Forward

“Seriously, stop bringing problems to the table and start bringing solutions.”

The right have spent many years undermining the fight against climate change, from denying scientific evidence, to shifting the goalposts by claiming the policies designed to tackle catastrophic climate change are ‘too costly’.

With Trump winning the US election, some are feeling emboldened, as they try to pressure the Labour government to drop policies aimed at tackling climate change.

In the latest example of an attempt to discredit climate change policies, the founder of right-wing blog Guido Fawkes, Paul Staines, told LBC: “You can’t power a metropolis off batteries, it’s just not going to happen.”

Guardian journalist Zoe Williams replied: “Work has been done in the right-wing’s attempt to block measures to combat climate change.

“You follow it over a 25 year period, first it went climate change isn’t real, then it went climate change is real but it won’t be that bad, then it went climate change is real and it will be that bad and now it’s gone to climate change is real it will be that bad but there’s nothing that we can do about it.

“The fact is we have to do something, Keir Starmer might annoy you but we still have to do something, wind power might look a bit sketchy to you but we still have to do something…if it’s not working you have to find a way to make it work otherwise you end up with catastrophic climate events, which people are ending up with anyway, just look at Valencia.

“Seriously, stop bringing problems to the table and start bringing solutions.”

She went on to add: “You’re basically saying to people who believe in renewables, you can just give up your dream of renewables because it’s just not going to work, now the truth is Paul…if we move faster on hydrogen than we did under the Tory government, then we would have a framework for delivering hydrogen and we can start doing that now, if we moved faster on wind or batteries, all of these things would be achievable if we just moved faster.”

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

Right’s lesson from US election is ‘culture wars work’

By dividing and confusing the left, culture wars enable the wealthy to pose as anti‑establishment despite benefitting from the system



By Judy Cox
Saturday 09 November 2024 

SOCIALIST WORKER

The far right in Britain celebrated Trump’s victory. Tommy Robinson claimed he had turned cartwheels in his prison cell. Nigel Farage cheered at Trump’s watch party in Pennsylvania.

The Conservative Party too shared this delight. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch could not wait to nail her colours to Trump’s mast. She demanded that Labour foreign secretary David Lammy apologise for having once called Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”.

Keir Starmer and David Lammy offer no challenge to this right wing juggernaut. Their only strategy is to make concessions, to promise action on illegal immigration and to ramp up state racism. This will only feed the beast.

Others on the left see the election as a reason to stay away from “identity politics” and concentrate instead on economics. But the right will seize on Trump’s election success to stir up ever nastier culture wars.

It believes that Trump has established a new model of success with his vicious attacks on migrants and women and his posing as an insurgent outsider boldly standing up to the “elite”.

Culture wars are about forging new alliances between groups of people with different aims. They have the potential to unite racists and Islamophobes, sexists and anti-abortionists, transphobes, climate change deniers, anti-vaxers and apologists for the British Empire into one movement.

Those drawn to the right get a purpose and a sense of importance. The right tells them they are defending their families, their country and Western civilisation from “enemies within”.

Culture wars also create a bridge between the far right and the mainstream right.

The Great Replacement Theory, for example, promotes the idea that global elites are replacing white people with black and brown immigrants. The theory was spawned by Nazi ideologues but is now regularly trotted out by conservative politicians.

Tory former home secretary Suella Braverman speaks about “cultural Marxism”, a revival of a Nazi conspiracy theory. It suggests Jewish intellectuals are attacking the West.

Kemi Badenoch gushed over US billionaire conspiracy theorist Elon Musk, saying, “I think Elon Musk has been a fantastic thing for freedom of speech. I will hold my hand up and say, I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk.”

This was after Musk fed Britain’s racist riots by repeating claims of police collusion with the Palestine movement.

Culture warriors claim that the left has captured all the key institutions in society—universities, the media, the civil service, public services and even the cops. And, if the establishment is run by the left, only the right wing can be anti-establishment.

Badenoch argues that Western civilisation is in decline, strangled by the “liberal elite”. This bureaucratic elite dominates society, stifles entrepreneurial spirit and risk‑taking, she says.

“In every country,” Badenoch asserts, “the rise of ‘safety‑ism’, stifling of risk, and a bureaucratic class to regulate and control us and protect the marginalised is rising steadily.

“The result of this has been a collapse in average advanced economy growth rates, from 2.7 percent in the 1980s to 2.1 percent in the 1990s and just 1 percent in the 2000s and 2010s.”

This is the height of economic illiteracy, but it makes for easy‑sounding solutions. Just tear up the red tape, drive out the lily-livered civil servants and free the bosses to conjure up economic growth.

The aim of culture wars is to divide and confuse. They demobilise opposition to slashing the welfare state, to tax cuts for the rich and to enriching the very elite they claim to stand up to.

They allow the super-rich to pose as insurgent outsiders. And they have the danger of becoming far more than a debate among politicians and commentators.

Some among the culture warriors know that, sooner or later, these “battles of ideas” will have to be settled with fists and boots.

Trump and the American Nightmare

Tomáš Tengely-Evans explores why Trump’s lies proved so persuasive in the election

Friday 08 November 2024 

SOCIALIST WORKER Issue

The Rust Belt a damning indictment of the US governments’ failures (Photo: Wikimedia commons)

When Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, he dismissed Donald Trump as an “aberrant moment” in United States history. Trump’s landslide victory this week showed he is anything but.

Its scale was a shattering confirmation of a society in advanced stages of decay. Out of that decay and the Democrats’ failures, Trump and the far right are growing and pulling it rightwards.

More than 40 years of ­neoliberalism have built a traumatised, fearful and ­violent society. The US presents itself as a leader of the “free world”, but it’s a world leader in ­suicide rates, locking people up in prisons, gun violence and drug deaths.

Free market policies, pushed by Republicans and Democrats, depressed ­working class people’s wages, destroyed decent jobs and fuelled inequality.

The US is now one of the most unequal societies in the world. Some 20 percent of wealth flows to the top 1 ­percent—and the top 0.1 ­percent holds roughly the same share of wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

Human suffering and pain lie behind those economic statistics. In 2022, a record 49,500 people killed themselves and the suicide rate was as 14.3 per 100,000 people. That was the highest rate since 1941—until the following year when it rose to 14.7.

Addiction rates are on a ­similar trajectory. The US death rate from drug misuse is the highest in the world at 18.75 per 100,000 people. The world average is 2.08 per 100,000. An epidemic of opioid addiction—flowing from Big Pharma drug-pushing—claimed the lives of over 100,300 Americans in the year ending in April 2021.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is a city that knows the toll of drug deaths all too well. For decades its ­skylines were dominated by the vast plants of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, once an icon of US capitalist prowess.

They shut in 1992 and very few of the thousands of steel jobs are left today. Vape stores, fast food ­franchises and boarded-up shops dominate Main Street.

Johnstown is one of many towns and cities that symbolise US decline and form the ­heartlands of “Trump country”. Trump has successfully fed off the accumulated anger and grievances at the effects of neoliberalism.

“Career politicians like Joe Biden lied to you,” Trump told people in Johnstown. “He abused you. He crushed you, your dreams and ­outsourced your jobs to China and distant lands all over the world.”

But Trump, a billionaire backed by a substantial section of big business, offers ­nothing for working class people whether white, black or Latino. So why has the far right, not the left, benefited from the crisis of the neoliberal centre?

First, Trump simultaneously feeds off the crisis caused by the neoliberal centre and builds on its ideas. Politicians justified those neoliberal policies with a liberal ideology that market competition and dog-eat-dog individualism were the basis of human flourishing.

In Neoliberalism’s Demons, US writer Adam Kotsko argues it “confronted us with forced choices that served to redirect the blame for social problems onto the ostensible poor ­decision making of individuals”. So, the response to the deep social crisis in the US can be more right wing solutions, rather than looking to a collective class response.

Mainstream politicians ­pushing racism to deflect blame for their own failures gives the likes of Trump fertile ground. For example, Kamala Harris celebrated the Democrats ­presiding over “lower undocumented immigrants and illegal immigration than Trump when he left office”. She criticised Trump for only building “about 2 percent” of the US-Mexico border wall.

Second, Trump and the far right play on nostalgia for the “American Dream”, a period most associated in the decades that followed the Second World War. It was an era of full ­employment, rising living ­standards and economic boom—the apex of US power in the world. But it was always a nightmare for black people, women and LGBT+ people.

The 1950s was the era of the racist Jim Crow laws in the Southern states, segregation and lynchings. It was the era that ­idealised the “nuclear family” with strict gender roles for women in particular. The ideology of the American Dream presented prosperity as a “birthright” for white Americans.

Many working class people did win the higher living ­standards they had in the 50s off the back of struggles. Workers’ militancy, such as the General Motors sit-down strike in 1936-37 in Flint, Michigan, had forced the US ruling class to make concessions.

Fear of greater revolt pushed the US government and sections of big business to come to an accommodation with trade union leaders. At the same time, they smashed the left for a generation in the “anti-Communist” witch-hunts of the 1940s and 50s. The idea of prosperity as a “birthright” chimed in the popular consciousness.

Trump’s infamous Madison Square Garden’s speech in New York this month dripped with racism and sexism and revealed the far right play book. He tapped into the social crisis facing millions of people, slamming Harris for ­“shattering our middle class” in “less than four years”. He latched onto that deep pain and twisted it against migrants.

“I will protect our workers. I will protect our jobs,” he said. In the next breath he said, “I will protect our borders. I will protect our great families.

“I will protect the ­birthright of our children to live in the ­richest and most powerful nation on the face of the earth.” The American Dream’s notions of birthright were ­interlaced with the deep racism of US society used to divide workers and the poor.

In 1965 Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King said the “Southern aristocracy gave the poor white man Jim Crow”. “When his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not ­provide, he ate Jim Crow, a ­psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man,” he said.

That too is part of Trump’s strategy. He has channelled a lot of people’s anger through whipping up racism, scapegoating migrants and deflecting it onto ­“liberal elites”. It diverts anger and ­attention away from the real elite—­billionaires, bosses and ­bankers—that Trump belongs to.

Four years ago, he promised a Johnstown rally, “We’re going to bring in tremendous numbers of factories.” That was a lie he didn’t deliver on, but he hasn’t lost support.

He promises to restore ­people’s worth and sense of status by going after criminals, drug dealers, migrants and the “woke left”.

This US crisis doesn’t have to benefit the right. Powerful social movements have rocked US society—for example, Palestine on the campuses, Black Lives Matter and the mass opposition during Trump’s first term as president.

Millions of people looked to Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and the “Squad” who call themselves democratic socialists.

They promised a Green New Deal that would invest billions into decent, well-paid jobs for working class people. That became Biden’s Build Back Better programme that curtailed those promises.

Then, Bidenomics effectively turned into an armaments programme with very few green jobs attached. But Sanders, AOC and Co. all defended Biden and the politics of working through the Democratic Party. They lined up behind an administration that deepened the crisis and did little for workers.

In the election, Trump’s message was “Make America Great Again”. The Democrats claimed that “America” was already great. People saw this lie—and the Democrats’ vote collapsed from 2020.

Instead, to combat Trump’s racist agenda, we need a left that doesn’t line up behind the Democrats and looks to struggle on the streets and workplaces.

We saw a glimpse of that with the recent Boeing and dockers’ strikes and there are big class battles ahead with Trump’s agenda. Alongside fighting the far right and racism, the left needs to pose a genuine alternative to capitalism.

In the 1930s Langston Hughes, the great black American poet, poked at those who used nostalgia for an imagined American past. “America was never America to me,” he said.

He said the real task was to “make America again”—to build a different sort of society free from the ravages of exploitation and oppression. “Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, the rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,” the people “must redeem” the country and its vast wealth.

We can only win that through struggle against the far right—and the system that produces it.

UK

A century of sensationalism and misinformation: The legacy of the Daily Mail

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

2 November, 2024

LEFT FOOT FORWARD


For its devoted readers, the Mail serves as a bastion of traditional British values. For its critics, the Daily Fail or the Daily Wail as it’s known, presents the worse curtain-twitching paranoia

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As the right-wing media uproar continues over the first Labour budget in 14 years, it’s a timely moment to reflect on how a century ago, the first-ever Labour government was toppled with the help of a forged letter sensationalised by the press.

What we now recognise as ‘fake news’ effectively originated on October 29, 1924, when the Daily Mail published the Zinoviev letter. The document, allegedly from the head of the Communist International in Moscow, purported to extend support to the Labour Party, triggering a political crisis that would change the course of history.

Ramsay MacDonald had led a minority Labour government for just nine months, proving that his party could be a responsible and formidable left-wing force. Yet, his Conservative opponents and their allies in the right-wing press sought to paint the Labour government as a dire threat to civilisation, alleging ties to the Soviet Union.

The closing stages of the general election 100 years ago was dominated by one of the most controversial letters of all time.

A history of misinformation

The infamous Zinoviev Letter, addressed to the British Communist Party’s central committee, was leaked to and sensationalised by the Daily Mail. Allegedly signed by Grigori Zinoviev, a prominent Bolshevik, the letter urged British and Irish communists to intensify their revolutionary activities, claiming that the Labour Party’s rise would strengthen relations with the Soviet Union. It suggested that a Labour government would radicalise the working class, positioning the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) favourably for a Bolshevik-style revolution.

On October 25, just four days before the election, the Mail plastered its front page with a headline, claiming: Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters: Moscow Orders to Our Reds; Great Plot Disclosed.

The sensationalism proved effective, as Labour suffered a crushing defeat.

The headlines surrounding the Zinoviev Letter were the climax of `a relentless onslaught of inflammatory articles targeting the Labour government throughout the 1924 election campaign. Readers were led to believe that MacDonald’s government intended “to use British taxpayer’s credit and cash for the purpose of financing a gang of thieves and murderers who have usurped power in Russia [and] wish to destroy the British empire and our civilised system of credit.”

No accusation was too outrageous. One article even claimed that six cabinet ministers had been persuaded to accept Russian jewels hidden in chocolates.

Each day, the newspaper featured “an outstanding Conservative campaign poster released today from that party’s headquarters.”

But it was Zinoviev letter scandal that delivered the decisive blow to the Labour Party, creating one of the greatest sensations in the history of British election campaigns. Known as the “Red Letter,” it became the centre of intense speculation and controversy for years to come.

In 1999, new light was shed on the scandal, when an official report claimed that the letter was forged by an MI6 agent’s source and almost certainly leaked by MI6 or MI5 officers to the Conservative Party. The study by Gill Bennett, chief historian at the Foreign Office, and commissioned by Robin Cook, points the finger at Desmond Morton, an MI6 officer and close friend of Churchill who appointed him personal assistant during the second world war, and at Major Joseph Ball, an MI5 officer who joined Conservative Central Office in 1926.

The exact route of the forged letter to the Daily Mail will never be known, Bennett said, adding “in electoral terms, the impact of the Zinoviev letter on Labour was more psychological than measurable.”

Its route aside, the infamous letter paved the way for the Mail’s deplorable antics in the 1930s, another era of extreme political intervention by the newspaper.

Hurrah for the blackshirts

The Daily Mail was founded in 1896 by Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, and his brother Alfred. The Harmsworth family has a long history of supporting right-wing political parties, including the fascists in the 1930s.

In January 1934, the newspaper published what became one of its most infamous articles. Entitled ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’, the article celebrated Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. The piece was penned by Lord Rothermere. In it, he praised Mosley and the Blackshirts, seeing them as the correct party to “take over responsibility for [British] national affairs.”

Harold Harmsworth had met and admired both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and encouraged positive depictions of their regimes in the Mail and the Daily Mirror, of which he was a major shareholder.

A move to ‘distinguished discrimination’

The Mail may have changed its editorial line and moved away from explicitly supporting fascists and their regimes, but, as Global Justice Now notes in an op-ed about the Horrible history of the Daily Mail, the “racism and xenophobia remained a key part of their ‘journalism’ and has continued through to this day.”

During this summer’s far-right riots in Britain, the Mail was accused of hypocrisy for criticising Tommy Robinson, given the newspaper’s long history of sowing division and hatred. Images of past anti-migrant frontpages resurfaced online. Among them was an article from 2013, when the Daily Mail led with a story headlined “4,000 foreign criminals including murdered and rapists we can’t throw out… and, yes, you can blame human rights again.’ The article claimed that nearly 4,000 foreign murderers, rapists, and other criminals were roaming the streets, free to commit new crimes.

Another was from 2022, when the newspaper faced criticism from the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which accused it of exacerbating hatred by attacking Conservative leadership hopeful Penny Mordaunt for meeting the MCB’s secretary general, Zara Mohammed. The MCB accused the paper of peddling negative stereotypes against Muslims.

Hasan Patel, a strategic communications expert and former journalist, criticised the Daily Mail’s “Summer of Discontent” frontpage. He argued that the paper has significantly contributed to the climate of hate that fuelled the recent riots. “You have the @DailyMailUK acting like the #FarRight #FarageRiots was due to the Labour government, yet they as a media under Dacre have a lot to answer for in the way they have whipped up hate,” Patel wrote on X.

In 2016, the Daily Mail, together with the Sun, were singled out in a report on “hate speech” and discrimination in the UK. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) specifically criticised some UK media outlets, particularly tabloid newspapers, for “offensive, discriminatory and provocative terminology.”

Its report said hate speech was a serious problem, including against Roma, gypsies and travellers, as well as “unscrupulous press reporting” targeting the LGBT community.

The Mail’s long history of campaigning against the interests of the working people while claiming to be for them, also remains at play today. One example of this is how the paper’s current owner, Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, has the tax-avoiding ‘non-dom’ status and owns his media businesses through a complex structure of offshore holdings and trusts.

In 2015, the newspaper ran a smear campaign against Ed Miliband, in a bid to destroy his chances of becoming prime minister. Miliband had promised to remove non-domicile tax status. Little surprise there then.

The newspaper’s role as a propagandist for the Conservatives is even recognised abroad. In 2012, the New Yorker, wrote that the Daily Mail is more than just a newspaper, it is a “middlebrow juggernaut capable of slaying knights and swaying prime ministers.”

Representative of Britain’s deep sociopolitical divide

While its readership has declined from the two million copies sold in the 2000s, the Daily Mail still manages to sell approximately 800,000 copies per day . The MailOnline meanwhile attracts around 22 million unique browsers every month, making it the biggest and most engaged English-language newspaper website in the world.

It could be argued that opinions on the paper reflect the deep sociopolitical divide in Britain. For its devoted readers, it serves as a bastion of traditional British values, effectively voicing their concerns about issues such as the EU, immigration, and ‘benefit cheats.’

For its critics, the Daily Fail or the Daily Wail as it’s known, presents the worse curtain-twitching paranoia. ‘Pure xenophobia’ was how it was described in response to its outlandish outrage about England daring to appoint a foreign manager for the men’s football team

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Throughout its 128-year history, the Mail has established itself at the centre of Britain’s political landscape. But its reputation has been marred by a legacy of sensationalism and misinformation, with its most notorious episode occurring a century ago when it played a crucial role in undermining the Labour Party during a fiercely contested general election.

Today, many recognise the newspaper for what it truly represents, and its influence has waned compared to 1924. The relationship between any newspaper and its readership is complex, yet millions of ‘ordinary’ people still read it, doubtless finding that it shares and amplifies their concerns more effectively than other newspapers. Perhaps most alarming is the sway the Mail still holds over politicians. Many ministers find themselves asking, “What would the Mail say?” when contemplating any ‘liberal’ policy that might provoke backlash from the paper.

Former Labour MP David Blunkett summed the threat of media power well when writing about the budget in the Guardian this week, “[the Zinoviev letter] did enormous damage at the time, and is a reminder of just how fragile our democracy can be.”

Right-wing media watch – the budget under siege

I got a new laptop this week, and to my dismay, the default homepage was MSN, complete with a relentless promotion of right-wing articles.

All week, I’ve been bombarded with hysterical headlines about the autumn budget, with right-wing sources hogging the spotlight. It felt less like a news feed and more like a right-wing propaganda machine.

The Daily Mail took centre stage on the news carousel on the eve of the budget with the headline: “Backlash over budget plan to take national minimum wage past £12ph.”

The Express had a top spot too: “Labour slammed for ‘threatening British holidays’ with latest proposed stealth tax.” It’s quite the stretch to frame tax discussions as a holiday crisis, even for the Express

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But it was perhaps City AM that won the absurdity prize, declaring, “London jobs market hit hard due to ‘frenzy budget speculation.’” Ironically, their own sensationalism seemed to mirror the very panic they were criticising.

With such alarming headlines vying for users’ attention every time they log on, it’s no wonder that Keir Starmer’s approval rating has reportedly hit a “shocking record low,” as trumpeted by the Express.

I wasn’t alone in my contempt of the Tory media’s budget attacks. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee highlighted some gems, like the Telegraph’s claim that “Starmer has put the final nail in the coffin for British aspiration,” and the Daily Mail’s assertion of a “class war” against “middle Britain.”

Toynbee aptly noted that this is the same right-wing press that misled the Tories into picking another ‘small state’ and with zero self-reflection on their party’s worst ever defeat, ignores the curious fact that a majority of Sun, Express, Mail, Telegraph and Times readers voted Labour rather than Tory.

And on the contentious issue of national insurance contributions, the chastising Tory press conveniently neglected to mention a YouGov poll showing that a small majority oppose such tax increases.

As I navigated this landscape of sensationalism, I couldn’t help but question whether the true concern lay in the budget itself or in the media circus that surrounded it.

Either way, I hastily changed my default news feed, it now features a healthier mix of left-wing sources, providing a welcome escape from the right-wing clangour. As for Reeves’ budget, regardless of its content, the Tory press would have portrayed it as if Britain were on the brink of an apocalyptic abyss.

Smear of the Week – Tory press in a tizzy as Reeves ditches Nigel Lawson

In a week filled with media scrutiny aimed at the chancellor, it was no surprise that Rachel Reeves made the headlines for replacing the portrait of Nigel Lawson in No. 11. Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor was taken down and Ellen Wilkinson, a notable Labour politician and one of the first women to serve as a Labour MP, took his place.

This media outrage bore familiarity to the earlier backlash Keir Starmer faced for removing a portrait of Thatcher herself from No. 10.

The Telegraph reacted strongly, with a headline labelling Wilkinson as one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain without referencing the fact that she resigned from the Party in 1924 because of its rejection of a parliamentary route to socialism.

The Daily Mail, which, as we know, has of history of linking Labour to Soviet sympathies, derisively dubbed Reeves “Red Rachel,” criticising her decision to replace “tax-cutting Tory Nigel Lawson” with an “image of ex-Communist education minister from 1940s.”

Wilkinson, who represented Middlesbrough East and later Jarrow, was a pioneering advocate for trade unionism, social justice, women’s rights, and educational reform. In her all too brief time as education minister in the post-war Labour government, (she died aged 55, her poor health aggravated by unremitting hard work) she raised the school leaving age to 15, established the Emergency Training Colleges to train more teachers, improved grants for further education, and introduced school meals and free milk.

She also contributed to the establishment of UNESCO, and was instrumental in organising the ‘Jarrow Crusade,’ a march from Jarrow to London in protest of the economic hardships faced by the North East community.

Despite these notable achievements, the Tory press jumped on the chance to undermine Reeves, by framing her choice as a nod to communism, as Wilkinson was briefly communist.

Surely, for Britain’s first female chancellor, the choice reflects her commitment to replacing all the portraits in No. 11 with pictures either of a woman or by a woman. Why on earth would Reeves want Nigel Lawson staring down at her, who was hung there by Rishi Sunak during his time at No. 11, especially as his famous tax cutting budget also triggered a sharp rise in inflation just as the Thatcher government seemed to have got it under control?

Perhaps the right-wing media could use a refresher on girl power. Why let a male tax-cutting Tory overshadow her vision for a more inclusive future? Which brings us to another point. As I write this, we don’t know who will win the Tory leadership contest, but even if Kemi Badenoch wins, it’s hard to see her promoting feminism. As the late Jill Tweedie, a respected feminist writer said about Margaret Thatcher, “She might be a woman, but she ain’t no sister.”



Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch

How Devaluing Palestinian Lives Became a Western Obsession

Openly racist attitudes to the Palestinian people are pervasive in the Euro-American political mainstream, from the liberal center to the far right. This form of bigotry is a gateway through which old-fashioned colonial racism can gain new legitimacy.

By Daniel Finn

November 4, 2024

Source: Jacobin
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Some of at least 40,000 Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks.



In 2021, Peter Beinart wrote an article for Jewish Currents that noted that the term “anti-Palestinian” never featured in US political debate. As Beinart pointed out, this was “not because anti-Palestinian bigotry is rare but because it is ubiquitous . . . if the concept existed, almost everyone in Congress would be guilty of it, except for a tiny minority of renegade progressives who are regularly denounced as antisemites.”

The events of the last year have shown us how right Beinart was. If anything, he greatly understated the extent of the problem. Not only is anti-Palestinian racism ubiquitous — it is the most virulent and pervasive form of racism to be found in the Euro-American political mainstream, the one that can be expressed most blatantly, with the least stigma attached to it. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz and Viktor Orbán can all shelter under the same capacious umbrella, united by the belief that Palestinian lives are worth less than those of Israelis or the citizens of Western countries.

At first glance, the depth and breadth of such prejudice seems hard to explain. We are not talking about a relatively large and visible immigrant community, like Mexicans and their descendants in the United States, or Turks and their descendants in Germany. Nor is it a straightforward legacy of empire: Britain is the only Western country to have ruled over the Palestinians directly in modern times, and even there, the Mandate period has not left the same imprint on popular memory as the experience of colonizing Algeria has left in France, for example.

Hostility to Palestinians is clearly the flip side of a strong attachment to Israel on the part of Euro-American power elites. That attachment is not simply a question of hardheaded strategic calculations about the value of Israel as a Western ally in one of the world’s most important regions. It also reflects the ideological utility of Israel as the source of an immensely powerful discursive weapon, one that allows those who wield it to present racism as anti-racism and vice versa.

By drawing up a clearer picture of anti-Palestinian bigotry — what it is and how it works — we can develop a better understanding of some of the most harmful tendencies in global politics today.
Westernity

Soon after Israel began its onslaught against the people of Gaza, with thousands of civilians already dead, the Israeli tech firm Wix sacked a woman who was employed in its Irish office. Courtney Carey had described Israel in a social media post as a “terrorist state” that was engaged in “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza. The company subsequently had to pay Carey €35,000 in compensation for unfair dismissal.

It soon became clear that Wix had no objection as such to political advocacy from its employees. In fact, managers had specifically encouraged Wix staff to “support Israel’s narrative” on social media. The internal memo explained how important it was to “show Westernity” and exploit the fact that “unlike the Gazans, we look and live like Europeans and Americans.” This was all the more vital since “the number of deaths and bombings in Gaza will be significantly higher” than those suffered by Israelis on October 7.

The term “Westernity” is one of the keys to anti-Palestinian racism, which is part of a much wider antipathy toward people from the postcolonial Global South. We can see this form of prejudice on display in every rancorous debate about strengthening borders to keep out immigrants, whether the border in question runs along the Rio Grande or through the Mediterranean. The subtitle of Niall Ferguson’s triumphalist potboiler Civilization divided the world into two categories, “the West and the Rest,” and the champions of “Westernity” are determined to keep that line of demarcation in place.

This prejudice certainly overlaps with the idea of white supremacy, but it is not identical to it. The cause of Western geopolitical chauvinism will happily accept non-white champions, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Suella Braverman, the former British home secretary who incited a mob of fascists to attack those demonstrating against the carnage in Gaza. What matters is their commitment to uphold the present-day inequalities of the world system.

The alternative to blaming the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin America for their own poverty and slamming the door aggressively in their faces is a clear-sighted acknowledgment of the West’s malign impact upon the Rest. This story does not end with the legacies of slavery and colonialism. It carries on through countless forms of interference during and after the Cold War, from the organization of coups to full-scale invasions, not to mention the imposition of structural adjustment programs by Western-dominated bodies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Today the carbon emissions that the West has been generating for the past two centuries are transforming the Earth’s climate, with the heaviest burdens falling upon the countries of the Global South. Naturally, those who have benefited most from this shameful history — descendants of slaveowners, arms companies, fossil fuel giants — are determined to avoid any reckoning, whether that means atoning for the past or transforming the world system to prevent future injustices.

Blaming the victims is far more appealing to them, especially at a time when there is constant pressure for social retrenchment, even in the richest economies of the West. After all, it is much easier for Western politicians to tell their citizens how lucky they are not to live in other parts of the world — while promising new measures to keep out those less fortunate — than it is to promise and deliver tangible improvements in their lives.

“Westernism” is the ideological expression of this preference. Although it comes decked out in cultural garb, it is ultimately a question of political and economic power. If we define the West as a culture or civilization, Mexico is obviously closer to that civilization than Japan, as a predominantly Catholic state where the main language of communication is a European tongue. But Japan qualifies for the US visa waiver program, while Mexico doesn’t, because of their respective places in the global pecking order.
The Spirit of ’92

The poisonous rhetoric that US conservatives direct toward immigrants from Central America shows that Christian heritage is no safeguard against demonization. However, anti-Palestinian racism certainly derives extra strength from the prevalence of Islamophobia and Orientalism in Western public culture. There are two main forms of politicized Islamophobia: a crude version peddled by the ultranationalist right, and a more sophisticated version that reaches much further into the liberal center.

The crude version promotes the idea of a trans-historic clash between the West and its Islamic adversary, both of which it presents as solid, unchanging cultural blocks. This, we are told, is a clash between good and evil, civilization and barbarism, modernity and backwardness. Its form may have altered since the century after the death of Muhammad, but its content remains fundamentally the same.

If you think nobody could actually believe something so flagrantly unhistorical, just consider the remark made by Viktor Orbán in 2015 as he rejected a proposal to admit refugees from the Middle East: “When it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go through that experience for 150 years.”

Orbán was referring to the period of Ottoman rule in Hungary. He sees (or claims to see) no meaningful difference between an early-modern invasion force and Muslim immigrants living in European cities today. In similar vein, the French far-right politician Éric Zemmour called his party “Reconquest,” in reference to the wars waged by Christian armies in medieval Spain to roll back, and eventually destroy, the Muslim-ruled area known as Al-Andalus.

This impressionistic line of argument relies upon a sleight-of-hand trick. It exalts supposed “Western values” like democracy, secularism, or the rights of women that clearly had no purchase in the time of Charles Martel or Ferdinand and Isabella, as if they were somehow always part of the Western cultural inheritance.

In reality, of course, these “values” only became hegemonic in Europe and North America (insofar as they are hegemonic at all) over the last couple of centuries, after long, bitter, and still incomplete struggles against the political ancestors of men like Orbán and Zemmour. Accepting the reality that the most important clashes are those that take place within rather than between civilizations would sink the crude version of Islamophobia below the waterline, so its advocates prefer to falsify the historical record.

The term “Judeo-Christian civilization,” another catchphrase of the Euro-American right, also relies upon ignorance of (or indifference to) history on the part of its intended audience. Needless to say, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity over the centuries has been anything but harmonious, and self-satisfied talk of “Judeo-Christian civilization” glosses over the long record of European antisemitism.

Israeli politicians seem to be very keen to apply this coat of whitewash to their political brethren in the West. When Spain announced its recognition of Palestinian statehood in May 2024, Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz launched a bilious attack on Yolanda Díaz, the deputy prime minister in Madrid: “If this ignorant, hate-filled individual wants to understand what radical Islam truly seeks, she should study the 700 years of Islamic rule in Al-Andalus.”

As anyone familiar with Iberian history could tell you, Spanish Jews enjoyed much greater toleration under Muslim rule, and the Catholic monarchs celebrated the final destruction of Al-Andalus in 1492 by ordering the expulsion of Jews from the country. Some of the refugees went to Salonika, which still had a large Jewish population speaking an archaic form of Spanish in the early twentieth century, before another product of Western civilization invaded Greece and began sending them to its death camps.

There is only one way of interpreting the comments made by Katz — he considers 1492 to have been a moment of liberation for the people of Spain. The trauma suffered by Spanish Jews who were forced from their homes at the point of a sword does not concern him in the slightest. This is a message that will go down very well with the right-wing forces in Spain and other Western countries that Katz understandably considers to be his natural allies.
Imperial Evasions

Crude Islamophobia feeds off the more sophisticated version that is standard currency among centrist political forces in Europe and the United States. Adherents of this school of thought will usually deny that they are hostile to Muslims. We can often hear them insisting that Islam is a “religion of peace” and stressing that they only have a problem with “violent extremists.” But they categorically refuse to discuss the destructive record of Western intervention in Muslim-majority states, especially those of the Middle East.

The most concise expression of this viewpoint came in a notorious tweet from David Frum, speechwriter for George W. Bush, which claimed that the US-led invasion “offered Iraq a better future” before its ungrateful people ruined this high-minded enterprise: “Sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.” Frum is no doubt well aware that the US occupation forces organized sectarian death squads responsible for gruesome atrocities, but he will carry on blaming Iraqis for the horrors they endured after 2003 until he draws his last breath.

More recently, Hillary Clinton used an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to accuse students protesting against Israel’s genocidal rampage of knowing nothing about history. She specifically reproached the students for not pointing the finger of blame at Yasir Arafat, claiming that her husband Bill would have long since delivered a Palestinian state were it not for Arafat’s unreasonable obstruction during the Camp David talks in 2000.

Robert Malley was part of the US team at Camp David and later served as Barack Obama’s chief negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. A 2001 essay on the failure of the talks by Malley and the Palestinian academic Hussein Agha might as well have been addressed to Clinton and her fatuous claim to superior understanding:


For a process of such complexity, the diagnosis is remarkably shallow. It ignores history, the dynamics of the negotiations, and the relationships among the three parties. In so doing, it fails to capture why what so many viewed as a generous Israeli offer, the Palestinians viewed as neither generous, nor Israeli, nor, indeed, as an offer. Worse, it acts as a harmful constraint on American policy by offering up a single, convenient culprit — Arafat — rather than a more nuanced and realistic analysis.

This denial of Western culpability makes it impossible to explain the rise of political actors generally referred to as “Islamists” or “Islamic fundamentalists” (terms that can obscure as much as they illuminate) in the contemporary Middle East. If we take the case of Iran as an example, the United States and its allies have their fingerprints all over the course of Iranian history since the 1950s, when an Anglo-American coup ousted the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Mosaddegh was a secular nationalist, flanked by the communist Tudeh Party. By the time the US-backed dictatorship of the Shah was overthrown in 1978–79, there was a new force in the Iranian opposition grouped around the leadership of Ruhollah Khomeini that wanted to establish a system based on their interpretation of Shia Islam. Although left-wing and liberal currents were also very much present during the Iranian revolution, it was Khomeini’s faction that was able to take power and suppress its rivals.

We can find variations on this story everywhere from Lebanon to Oman. Western states and their local allies have waged war on secular nationalist and left-wing forces, creating a vacuum that was subsequently filled by varieties of political Islam. In the case of Palestine, as late as the first intifada of the 1980s, the main challenge to Fatah’s leadership of the national movement came from left-wing organizations rather than Hamas, which was only founded in 1987. It was the enervating co-option of Fatah through the Oslo agreements and the marginalization of the Left after the fall of the Soviet Union that made it possible for Hamas to become a serious rival to Fatah.

While these facts are well known to anyone who has studied the history of the Middle East, figures like Hillary Clinton must ignore them because they cannot accept the systematically harmful nature of Western intervention in the region. This means they cannot provide a response to the arguments of crude Islamophobia, which lumps together all forms of political Islam, from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda and ISIS, before presenting them as the true face of Islam.

Tony Blair’s trajectory since 9/11 is a revealing study of liberal Islamophobia steadily losing ground to the cruder version, in this case within Blair’s own head. An academic who was enlisted to give Blair a crash course on Iraqi history before the invasion found him to be “someone with a very shallow mind, who’s not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people.” As he grappled with the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq, Blair needed an explanation for the problems of the Middle East that would fit comfortably into his puddle of a mind, ideally one that could be summarized in a single word. Since there was no place in his worldview for the term “imperialism,” Islam would have to do instead.

Obama’s understanding of the region, set out at length in his conversations with Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic, is more refined in its mode of expression, but ultimately just as superficial and self-serving. At one point, Obama told Goldberg that young people from the Middle East could learn a thing or two from their counterparts in Southeast Asia, who were “not thinking about how to kill Americans.” The fact that the occupation of Vietnam ended when Obama was still a child, while the occupation of Iraq was still ongoing during his presidency, did not feature in his analysis — nor could it have done so, if he wanted to perform his role as manager of the US foreign policy apparatus.
Redefining Antisemitism

Anti-Palestinian racism thus falls within these wider circles of prejudice, but it also has a life and a logic of its own that makes it especially potent. To make sense of this, we have to discuss the concept of the “new antisemitism” that Israel and its supporters have promoted so tirelessly since the beginning of the century. This shift in the focus of pro-Israel advocacy came at a time when Israeli government officials were abandoning the pretense that they would ever allow the formation of a Palestinian state, making it vital to change the terms of discussion.

According to the “new antisemitism” theory, hostility to Jews in the modern world predominantly expresses itself through attitudes toward Israel. It is impossible to respond to this line of argument without being presented with concrete examples of what is supposed to be unacceptable. Nobody is reckless enough to claim that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, so there must be a point at which such criticism becomes illegitimate. The Israeli state and the groups that support it in the West claim the exclusive right to determine where we should draw the line.

Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League in the United States can articulate this theory in the language of modern social justice activism, talking about the right of ethnic minorities to define their own oppression. However, their true goal is to deny one particular group the ability to discuss their own oppression, let alone define it. The history of the Palestinian people for the last century has been inseparable from the history of Israel and Zionism, so every statement about Israel is also a statement about the Palestinians, even (or especially) if it does not mention them at all.

This is one of the key distinguishing features of anti-Palestinian racism. It can certainly take the form of hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric and support for the mass killing of Palestinians in the name of “Israel’s right to defend itself.” Yet it can also reveal itself through rhetorical jiu-jitsu exercises, branding people as antisemites because they accurately describe what Israel and its Western backers are doing.

The cynical misuse of antisemitism charges to smear Palestinians and those who defend their rights is well known and well documented, so we will limit our survey to a couple of recent instances. On October 6, the Observer, a British liberal newspaper, published a column by the novelist Howard Jacobson. Jacobson claimed that it was a “blood libel” to state that Israeli soldiers were deliberately killing children in Gaza, on a par with the fables used to justify medieval pogroms. In a follow-up interview, Jacobson made it clear that he had no intention of engaging with the evidence — so far as he was concerned, it was inherently antisemitic to accuse Israel of trying to kill children, so the conversation could stop there.

The Observer’s sister paper, the Guardian, published a very different kind of article on October 24. Based on careful reporting rather than reckless innuendo, it showed that the University of Michigan had enlisted the state’s attorney-general, Dana Nessel, to bring criminal charges against Gaza solidarity protesters when local prosecutors were reluctant to do so. As the Guardian’s Tom Perkins explained:


The revelations raise new questions about potential conflicts of interest. Six of eight [university] regents contributed more than $33,000 combined to Nessel’s campaigns, her office hired a regent’s law firm to handle major state cases, the same regent co-chaired her 2018 campaign, and she has personal relationships with some regents. Meanwhile, Nessel received significant campaign donations from pro-Israel state politicians, organizations and university donors who over the last year have vocally criticized Gaza protests, records show.

Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, had previously criticized Nessel, accusing her of singling out the campus protesters for unusually harsh treatment: “I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it.” Tlaib was right, of course, although she erred on the side of generosity by presenting Nessel as a gullible dupe. This no doubt explains why Nessel decided to launch a cynical diversionary campaign, ably assisted by CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, slandering Tlaib as an antisemite.
Return of the Repressed

Jacobson and Nessel did not invent this debating tactic, they merely borrowed it, and we could cite any number of similar outbursts, delivered from the commanding heights of the Western public sphere. The redefinition of antisemitism by Israel and its supporters has created an upside-down world where staunch opponents of racism can be depicted as genocidal bigots while obnoxious demagogues pose as champions of the oppressed. This inversion has proved to be immensely valuable for the two blocs of right-wing and centrist forces that together dominate the political terrain in Europe and North America.

For the Right, the attraction of this mode of discourse is clear. It allows them to revive the crudest forms of bigotry that have been progressively delegitimized by the success of movements against racism and colonialism since the early twentieth century. Before those advances, it was considered perfectly respectable to deride the very notion of human equality.

Just consider a remark made by Winston Churchill about the Palestinian people in 1937 that has become deservedly notorious:


I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia.

Churchill deemed it entirely natural for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to supplant those he viewed as inferior beings. This is a more blatant and unvarnished expression of racial prejudice than you will hear from modern-day politicians like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, but Churchill would not have thought twice about delivering it.

Anti-Palestinian racism is a gateway through which old-fashioned Churchillian bigotry can enter the mainstream once again. Right-wing politicians and media commentators show all the signs of exhilaration at being able to use the standard tropes of colonial racism against the Palestinians, depicting them as primitive savages against whom Israel must wage a ruthless war in defense of Western civilization. The British pundit Douglas Murray, smirking and gloating his way through a genocide while publishing lachrymose tributes to the moral integrity of the Waffen SS, is a representative figure.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is another morbid symptom of this regressive tendency. As Adrian Daub has pointed out, it would be quite wrong to speak about German backing for Israel in terms of misplaced historical guilt, when there is far more evidence of glee: “For all the apocalyptic rhetoric, this has been a moment of liberation rather than repression for many German writers and politicians.” Few people have been more gleeful than von der Leyen over the past year. Her stance harmonizes neatly with the growing rapprochement between Europe’s Christian Democratic parties and the far right.

The Euro-American right combines support for mass murder in Gaza with hostility to democratic rights at home. Murray’s champion Suella Braverman and her Tory colleagues have demanded a police clampdown on British protests against the slaughter, which they cynically defame as antisemitic “hate marches.”

In reality, they see the protesters as the most visible manifestation of a treacherous fifth column, comprised of those who consider all human lives to be of equal value. The right-wing effort to present solidarity with Gaza as an exclusively Muslim cause, in Britain and other countries, is a threadbare exercise in projection, designed to conceal their own chauvinism.

The Anti-Palestinian Front

The right-wing bloc would not have the same impact without the complicity of the political center, from the Democratic Party in the United States to the German Greens. The motivation of the centrists is a little more complex than that of their right-wing counterparts. These political actors have made a strictly circumscribed, representational form of anti-racism into part of their brand, regularly deployed at election time to heighten the contrast with their right-wing opponents. At the same time, they are staunchly committed to maintaining the alliances of their respective states with Israel.

With the fig-leaf of notional progress toward a “two-state solution” no longer available to them, amidst the total collapse of Labor Zionism into the arms of its Likudnik rivals, it was becoming increasingly difficult for avowed liberals and social democrats to rationalize their support for Israel without coming clean about their contempt for Palestinians. In this context, the “new antisemitism” discourse came as a blessing to them, and they were delighted to embrace it, since it allowed them to express an objectively racist position with the verbal trappings of anti-racism.

This rhetorical maneuver, which presents meaningful solidarity with the Palestinians as a sinister threat to Jews, also proved to be extremely useful in the fight between centrists and their left-wing challengers. We have seen it deployed again and again over the last decade — against Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, and Rashida Tlaib and other left-wing Democrats in the United States. It is much easier to demonize politicians like Corbyn, Mélenchon, and Tlaib with false allegations of antisemitism than it is to openly state the grounds on which centrists deem them unacceptable: namely, their support for popular redistributive policies that would previously have been the common coin of social democracy.

The attacks on the Left and the Palestine solidarity movement would be much less effective if they only came from the Right. Centrist politicians and their media outriders, from CNN to the Guardian, play a crucial role in legitimizing anti-Palestinian racism and punishing those who take a stand against it.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) might have shelled out nearly $30 million to unseat Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, but it would still have been a waste of money if the group could only put MAGA Republicans in the ring against them. Without politicians like Bowman’s challenger George Latimer offering their services, the anti-Palestinian front would be a strong yet minoritarian presence in the United States and other Western countries. In turn, the centrist political establishment is very happy to accept support from the Israel lobby, whether that means campaign donations or a steady supply of bogus talking points with which to condemn the Left.

The idea, recently expressed in the Atlantic, that the Western left suffers from an unhealthy and disproportionate “obsession with Israel” turns reality on its head. It is the forces of the center that have become increasingly obsessed with demonstrating fealty to Israel so they can denounce their left-wing rivals. This has been one of the defining themes for Starmer’s leadership of the British Labour Party.

In France, it was center-left figurehead Raphaël Glucksmann who broke up an alliance with La France Insoumise (LFI) last autumn because he didn’t like Mélenchon’s views on Palestine. The Nouveau Front Populaire that bested the far right in this summer’s French parliamentary election had to be cobbled together at short notice because of Glucksmann’s divisive, sectarian gambit — one that he would dearly like to repeat in the near future.
Knocking on the Doors

As with the two varieties of Islamophobia, the centrist version of anti-Palestinian racism has a built-in tendency to drift further and further to the right, growing ever shriller in its stigmatization of those who will not accept that Palestinian lives don’t matter. This puts centrist politicians out of step with their electoral base.

In the United States, Democratic voters are much less sympathetic to Israel than their Republican counterparts, and the same distinction holds true for Labour and Conservative supporters in Britain. The Biden administration has sought to conceal its ongoing support for mass killing in Gaza behind a Potemkin facade of cease-fire talks, but there is a limit to how long you can maintain such deceptions. Under these circumstances, Western power elites are more likely to escalate repression than they are to respond to pressure from below.

Punitive measures against Palestine solidarity have coincided with a wider crackdown on climate activism. Right-wing political actors and their centrist enablers despise those involved in such work for much the same reason that the apartheid regime in South Africa detested and harassed white members of the African National Congress. They are affirming the basic humanism that most people in the West still subscribe to, judging by the polls that show how limited support for Israel’s genocidal massacre actually is, once we get beyond the stifling conformism of political and media elites.

The Colombian president Gustavo Petro has repeatedly noted the connection between slaughter in Gaza and the worsening climate crisis. At last December’s COP28 summit, Petro reminded his listeners that maintaining or expanding the current level of carbon emissions would inevitably lead to climate breakdown, forcing millions or even billions of refugees to flee the worst affected regions:


This immense exodus will evoke a response in the North. We can already see it in the anti-immigration policies of rich countries and the rise of the extreme right within them. Hitler is knocking on the doors of European and American middle-class homes, and many of them have already let him come in. The exodus will be responded to with tremendous violence and with the same barbarism we are seeing in Gaza, which is the rehearsal of the future.

Petro’s nightmare is Benjamin Netanyahu’s dream. Over the last year, opponents of Netanyahu’s butchery have repeatedly invoked the judgement of history, telling his accomplices and apologists that they will be remembered in the same light as those who once carried water for apartheid. Netanyahu is making a very different calculation: he clearly hopes that the global egalitarian tide is going out, having reached its high point with the liberation of South Africa, giving way to a new era in which the unequal valuation of human life can be defended without any euphemisms, just as it was during the heyday of European imperialism.

From the current standpoint, it would be foolhardy to predict which of these two scenarios is more likely to be realized. There was a time when it seemed like apartheid in South Africa would never end; there was a time when it seemed like apartheid in the West Bank would never last for as long as it now has, with no apparent end in sight. But we should be absolutely clear about what is at stake, and how disastrous it will be for humanity if Netanyahu’s vision comes to pass.

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

UK

Keir Starmer Will Always Side With Capital Against Workers

A recent controversy involving DP World showed how keen Keir Starmer’s government is to prostrate itself before firms that trample over workers’ rights. 

Starmer’s economic agenda relies heavily on “de-risking” private investment with public money.

By Jonny Jones

November 1, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Keir Starmer, as Leader of the Opposition of the United Kingdom during the: Repowering the World Session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2023 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, 19 January.

When Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won office in July of this year, there was precious little in the party manifesto that offered hope that things were going to get better. Two promises that stood out amidst nearly 150 pages of vague platitudes were a commitment to rebuild Britain’s “crumbling” infrastructure and a range of reforms to workers’ rights.

Both pledges were thrust onto center stage in early October as Labour unveiled its “Make Work Pay” legislation. At the same time, Starmer prepared for an investment summit at which DP World, which describes itself as “a leading provider of smart logistics solutions,” was due to announce a £1 billion investment in its London Gateway port in Essex.

On October 9, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh denounced DP World’s subsidiary company P&O Ferries as a “rogue operator” for illegally firing 786 staff in 2022 and replacing them with agency workers on lower pay. Within days, DP World had decided to shelve the London Gateway announcement, leading to a flurry of corrections from government sources.

“Louise Haigh’s comments were her own personal view and don’t represent the view of the government,” was the comment from an official in Starmer’s office, while Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the BBC, “No, that is not the government’s position.” Starmer himself made a statement to that effect, leading DP World to issue the following statement:


Following constructive and positive discussions with the government, we have been given the clarity we need. We look forward to participating in Monday’s international investment summit.
Public Risk, Private Gain

Behind this rather farcical display of grandstanding and backtracking lies a serious contradiction. Labour has pegged its approach to the social crisis facing Britain to achieving higher levels of economic growth. They hope to do so through an expansion of infrastructural investment, ripping up current planning rules, and boosting labor productivity, which has stagnated since the economic crash of 2008.

Labour has announced a new National Wealth Fund to drive infrastructural investment. Yet the main source of investment will be the private sector. Instead of building nationalized infrastructure, the fund aims to attract £3 of private investment for every £1 of public money, with public funds de-risking the private investment. The economist Daniela Gabor has likened this approach to getting investment giant Blackrock to rebuild Britain, privatizing “housing, education, health, nature and green energy — with our taxpayer money as sweetener.”

At the same time, Labour claims to be committed to a major improvement in workers’ rights. Its case for labor market reform, according to Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, draws upon “a mountain of economic evidence that fair pay and in-work security are crucial, not only to fairness and dignity but to our productivity too.” However, many of Labour’s pledges on this front have already been watered down, delayed, or subject to consultation with business before implementation.

Labour’s response to DP World’s bluff is indicative of which way the party will jump in government when faced with a clash between workers and big business. This is important because DP World has form as a “rogue operator” with regards to workers’ rights long predating the P&O debacle. The firm has nevertheless enjoyed state support because its infrastructural investments have been central to the growth plans of successive governments.
“A Massive Vote of Confidence”

While there is a widespread view that Britain has a “light touch” approach to the regulation of its privatized port system, in fact, the state intervened multiple times to assist the establishment of the London Gateway port. It received planning permission in May 2007, just over a year after DP World acquired P&O. The proposed port was a major element of New Labour’s Thames Gateway Regeneration Initiative. Then transport minister Gillian Merron hyped “the significant impacts that this major development will have in the growth area.”

One key area of concern when the port was announced was the potential traffic stress it would cause on junction 30 of the M25, the major motorway that forms a ring around London. Planning was granted on the condition that London Gateway’s owners would fund an upgrade to the roads that was expected to cost somewhere in the area of £100 million.

After DP World was exposed to the fallout of the 2008–9 economic crash, the company announced that the London Gateway development was “under review” and told the British government that it should provide approximately £100 million of investment required to improve roads as it was a matter “of national importance.” Regional public bodies tasked with ensuring growth in the Thames Gateway area lobbied the government to deliver the improvements. DP World subsequently negotiated an agreement that allowed the firm to fund a minor upgrade to the road instead, costing around £10 million.

Later in 2009, the East of England Regional Assembly and East of England Development Board secured a £12.7 million grant from the European Union toward the cost of dredging the Thames estuary. This was meant to increase the depth of channels and accommodate the large container ships London Gateway was hoping to attract.

A loan of £300 million from the European Investment Bank finally assured the project could go ahead. As building began, Labour prime minister Gordon Brown hailed London Gateway as


a massive vote of confidence in the UK’s economic recovery and in this region. UK Trade & Investment and other Government departments have worked closely with DP World over a number of years to make this project possible.

While the state had bent over backward to ensure the port could be opened, DP World was far less accommodating to the interests of dockworkers seeking to exercise their rights to union recognition when the port opened.
Choke Points

From the Great Dock Strike of 1889 to the unofficial action by rank-and-file trade unionists that secured the release of the Pentonville 5, dockworkers have a long history of union organization in Britain. In 1989, Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government targeted the dock workforce, and the subsequent strike was defeated. This resulted in the loss of over 80 percent of the dock labor force, and almost all of the trade union activists. It took years of organizing to rebuild a solid union presence on the docks.

When the London Gateway port opened in 2013, the trade union Unite, which represents most port workers in Britain, had hoped to reach an agreement with DP World to gain similar recognition status as prevailed in other ports. However, DP World gave them short shrift, saying that they would only recognize the union if staff decided to set up a union themselves, while refusing Unite access to the workers onsite. One logistics industry publication reported that the company wanted to employ dockers who were “untainted by bad practices at existing ports.”

Unite ran a long “leverage campaign” against DP World, protesting noisily outside the offices of DP World and its supply chain customers in the hope of pressuring them to accept recognition. By the time London Gateway welcomed its first ship in November 2013, there was no agreement in place. It took the intervention of rank-and-file dockers blockading the ship at its first port of call at Algeciras in Portugal to force DP World to allow Unite into the port.

Even after DP World formally granted access, Unite found their progress frustrated by union avoidance tactics. While I was researching their organizing drive, London Gateway workers told me that the firm resisted union recruitment on site, emailing and speaking to dockworkers to dissuade them from joining the union. They used “propaganda,” which included showing footage of union activists from other ports jumping on a car carrying Boris Johnson, who was then the mayor of London, while they were protesting the company’s anti-union stance.

Although the union eventually reached the legal threshold for recognition, the company still refused to deal with them. Unite had to apply to the independent statutory authority responsible for adjudicating union recognition to overcome DP World’s objections.

In 2018, frustrated by DP World’s failure to address several areas of concern the union had, dockers decided to take action one weekend by targeting “choke points” in the supply chain — slowing down the operation of the giant cranes that lifted containers from ships. As one union member at the port told me:


On that Monday, the ball started rolling with management. Suddenly they wanted to listen and talk to us. It literally changed the next day.

In the ten years since, the Unite branch at London Gateway has grown in strength and depth. They have spread organization to several other departments at the port, including outsourced dockworkers employed by a contractor on lesser terms and conditions than the core workforce.
“Difficult to Discern”

In the wake of Britain’s departure from the European Union, Boris Johnson’s Conservative government announced that it would create several freeports across the country. These freeports, modeled on special economic zones (SEZs), are spaces where the authorities suspend normal tax and customs rules in the interests of boosting growth and creating jobs.

DP World enthusiastically promotes its involvement in SEZs. Yet even the World Bank has reported that such zones are places where union rights are often “legally constrained or de facto discouraged.” DP World is owned by the Dubai government, and trade union organization is illegal in Dubai and across the United Arab Emirates.

DP World London Gateway is a major partner in the Thames Freeport, which will receive “up to £25 million seed funding from government and potentially hundreds of millions in locally retained business rates.” In late October, Starmer declared the government would expand the scheme, making five already designated freeports fully operational for tax and customs breaks. He also confirmed it would push ahead with an “investment zone” in the East Midlands previously announced by the Tory government. This is a region where much of Britain’s logistics infrastructure is concentrated as part of the so-called “Golden Triangle.”

While Starmer claims the expansion of the scheme is based on “Labour’s laser focus on growth,” the evidence for this is extremely weak. The Office for Budget Responsibility suggested in 2021 that tax breaks associated with the already existing freeports in England would cost the government £50 million every year, in return for such a small impact on GDP from the freeports that it would be “difficult to discern.” These freeports, subsidized by public money, will merely “shuffle jobs and activity around,” as James Meadway points out, rather than create new opportunities for working-class people.
Rogue Operators

Freeports are a symptom of a much wider malaise in global capitalism. The state’s retreat from public provision has led to a big increase in the role of capital in providing critical infrastructure, increasing its political power and sway. Indeed, as Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson suggest, capital increasingly operates as a political actor, working with and through the state to produce territories such as SEZs and freeports “of its own accord.”

Two interconnected processes over the last half century have accompanied dramatic changes to global production and capitalist planning. The logistics revolution has greatly increased cargo mobility, while offshoring from the Global North to the Global South has led to a new international division of labor that relies on complex, dispersed production networks. Increasingly, infrastructural investment in the Global North is based on logistics — ports, distribution centers, roads, trains — to keep the flow of products moving through territories where manufacturing has diminished.

It is this shift that underpins the efforts of successive British governments to placate DP World’s demands, as the company’s big investment in logistics brings jobs and infrastructure. However, behind the summits and headline announcements, logistics firms are all too often “rogue operators,” as Haigh put it, when it comes to workers’ rights. Amazon is another prime example of union-busting tactics in the logistics sector.

In part, this stance is motivated by fear of how effectively workers could exercise power in the sector. Kim Moody has argued that supply chains rely on millions of workers to keep the wheels of profit turning, giving those workers tremendous potential structural power. As Katy Fox-Hodess has shown, to exercise such power, workers need to find ways of organizing effectively, building in the workplace as well as forming alliances with wider social movements.

Such alliances also strengthen movements. The global movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has sought to block infrastructural targets, such as train stations and factories. Recently, dockworkers in the Greek port of Piraeus refused to move ammunition bound for Israel. Activists could learn from the Block the Boat campaigns in Oakland how best to strategically target the Israeli war machine in collaboration with organized logistics workers.

Labour’s commitment to a new deal for workers rings hollow as the Starmer government rolls out the red carpet for private finance to reap the profits of new infrastructure. But the lesson from workers at London Gateway is that strategic thinking and tenacious organizing can win big gains, even in the face of multinational logistics corporations.