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Charge Us With Contempt Too, Say 40 People, If Climate Activist Prosecuted

August 17, 2023 Sandra Laville, The Guardian. , , ,
Forty people, including an Olympic gold medallist and a former police officer, are calling on the solicitor general to charge them with contempt of court if he prosecutes a social worker for holding up a placard outside a climate trial. The solicitor general is weighing up whether to charge Trudi Warner, 68, with contempt of court for a protest outside a crown court that was hearing a trial relating to direct action by climate protesters. She held up a placard stating: “Jurors: you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience.” Warner made the protest in March after a judge restricted defendants in a string of trials from mentioning the climate crisis, insulation or any motivation for their direct action.

Time To Start A Conversation About How We Tax Wealth

August 11, 2023 Peter Lazenby, Morning Star Online. , , ,
United Kingdom - The TUC has condemned a “tale of two Britains” which sees working people suffering “the longest pay squeeze in modern history” while bankers’ bonuses are at eye-watering levels and chief executive pay is surging. The damning criticism came as the TUC launched a blueprint to squeeze Britain’s multimillionaires for a “modest” proportion of their wealth and end the country’s “increasing wealth inequality.” The blueprint would raise £10 billion for the public purse and should be the “start of a national conversation about taxing wealth,” said TUC general secretary Paul Nowak. It would affect only 140,000 individuals — 0.3 per cent of Britain’s population.

New Laws Won’t Deter Protest Of One Of The World’s Largest Arms Fairs

August 9, 2023 Emily Apple, The Canary. , , , ,
Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), one of the world’s largest arms fairs, returns to the ExCeL Centre in East London this September. Since it started in 1999 DSEI has always seen repressive policing, with the Met Police showing clearly that their duty is to protect arms dealers, not facilitate protest. DSEI is personal to me. I’ve protested against this horrific fair since 1999. Over the years I’ve been arrested, harassed, and assaulted. I’ve organised and taken part in actions with people who later turned out to be undercover cops and corporate spies.

Sink The Floating Migrant Prisons, Let Them All In

August 7, 2023 Nathan Erderof, Left Voice. , , ,
A large “barge” (read: prison) for asylum seekers has recently arrived in the port of Portland, on the south coast of England in Dorset. The floating facility is called “Bibby Stockholm” and, beginning this summer, will “accommodate” around 500 male migrants between the ages of 18 to 65 for approximately 18 months. The aim is to keep these migrants offshore (preventing them from setting foot on English soil) while they wait for their cases to be processed. To counter immigration, the European Union and its Western allies — from Calais to the Greek islands, all the way to the Mexican border — have already transformed arbitrary territorial boundaries into walls of barbed wire and watchtowers, fashioning entire islands into migrant prisons.

Palestine Action Underground Launches On Third Anniversary

August 5, 2023 Palestine Action. , , , ,
Another year of Palestine Action; three years of sustained and effective direct action against Elbit Systems. Three years of mobilising and enabling the masses to strike back and refuse passivity. Three years of radical action and engaging collective power. Three years of unstoppable momentum, victories and, as a direct result, increased attempts by the state to quash the movement. This time, last year, our second anniversary report [1] was buzzing over the two Elbit closures, announced in quick succession at the start of 2022. We’re still incredibly proud of the victories at Oldham and Kingsway. They have not lost their zest because they represent, particularly in Oldham, the successful nurturing and building of community.

Cutting The Ties Between Higher Education And The Military

August 3, 2023 Nonviolence Radio Team, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
This episode of Nonviolence Radio welcomes @hellaJinsella from the UK peace organization, DeMilitarise Education, or dED. Jinsella has been actively working to raise awareness about the ties between higher education and the military. As these relationships have not generally been made public, military funding, and the accompanying environmental degradation the arms industry entails, has been able to thrive within universities without sustained challenge. DeMilitarise Education seeks to bring these connections to light. To this end, it has set up a database which tracks schools’ ties with the military and arms companies to be used as a tool to pressure the universities to break these damaging ties.

Revealed: Fossil Fuel Giants Are Using British Influencers To Go Viral

July 31, 2023 Dimitris Dimitriadis, Joey Grostern and Sam Bright, DeSmog. , , , , ,
Oil and gas supermajors including Shell and BP are using UK influencers to push false solutions to the climate crisis and manufacture a more family friendly image, DeSmog can reveal. The influencers have included a popular former BBC presenter, a polar explorer, and an exasperated father of five who needs a break and finds it in the form of BP’s rewards app. The campaigns have been deployed across a number of social media platforms and are part of a global effort to give “millennials a reason to connect emotionally” with oil and gas firms, and to tackle their perception as “the bad guys”. DeSmog analysed examples of more than 100 influencers being paid to promote fossil fuel firms worldwide since 2017, from the US to Malaysia, in campaigns that have reached billions of people.

‘The Tower Has Fallen;’ A Win For Anti-Gentrification Movement

July 28, 2023 Ax and Niko Georgiades, Unicorn Riot. , , , ,
“This is a huge victory for Brixton … Brixton has defended itself from further gentrification,” said Jordi, an organizer with the #FightTheTower campaign. The proposed construction of what’s been called Hondo Tower, or Taylor Tower, has been withdrawn. The project was to be a 20-story building built right next to Brixton’s vibrant Pope’s Road street market in London. This particular movement, #FightTheTower (FTT), is now considered one of the most effective, persistent, hard fought and victorious anti-gentrification struggles currently held in the United Kingdom. Unicorn Riot previously explored the history of Brixton, the planned tower and the anti-gentrification movement.

Poverty In Britain: From Feudalism To Neoliberal Capitalism

July 27, 2023 Henry Heller, Canadian Dimension. , , , , , ,
The sixteenth century saw the beginnings of capitalism in England. The capitalist relation—employers buying labour and workers selling their labour power in exchange for wages—more and more became the norm looked upon by the upper classes as, among other things, the solution to the growing problem of poverty and vagabondage. Certainly charity was offered to the poor. But the poverty of the destitute was held to be their own fault. Therefore, accompanying such charity, a series of Tudor parliamentary statutes including the comprehensive Statute of Apprentices of 1563 forced those without property to find work rather than to remain idle.

Leaked Files Suggest Hidden British Hand In Latest Kerch Bridge Strike

July 24, 2023 Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone. , , , ,
On July 16, a predawn assault on the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea with mainland Russia left two civilians dead and a 14-year-old injured. As advisors to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hinted at Ukraine’s culpability, Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed his finger at Kiev and vowed revenge. The attack was the second attempt at destroying the Kerch Bridge in less than a year. On October 8th 2022, a suicide attacker remotely detonated a truck bomb on the bridge, killing three and inflicting such severe damage the vehicular crossing remained closed until February this year, while railroad traffic resumed in May.

Assange Is ‘Dangerously Close’ To Extradition For Revealing Crimes

July 18, 2023 Marjorie Cohn, Truthout. , , , , , ,
For nearly five years, publisher and journalist Julian Assange has fought extradition to the United States where he faces 175 years in prison for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes. Instead of protecting freedom of the press, to which he pledged allegiance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Joe Biden is continuing Donald Trump’s prosecution of Assange under the infamous Espionage Act. James Ball is one of at least four journalists that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI are pressuring to cooperate with the prosecution of Assange, Ball wrote in Rolling Stone.

Activists Won’t Budge Until Starmer Stops ‘Backsliding’ On Environment

July 17, 2023 The Canary. , , ,
Activists from the group Green New Deal Rising have staged more sit-outs targeting Labour Party MPs. The group has vowed to protest outside their offices every week until the party takes “bold action” on the climate crisis. It follows several instances of what the group describes as Labour “backsliding” on its environment promises – as well as people from the campaign disrupting a speech by Keir Starmer. One of the latest climate-related actions also took place outside the office of Scottish Labour MP Ian Murray. According to the group: Similar protests were also staged in London, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Brighton, Cardiff and across the Midlands, targeting other members of the Shadow Cabinet.

The UK-Rwanda Pact To Keep Migrants From Crossing The English Channel

July 16, 2023 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. , , , ,
UK officials have been trying to ship African and Middle Eastern migrants to Rwanda since June 2022 despite successful legal challenges mounted by immigrant rights advocates, including intervention by the European Court of Human Rights . At the end of June, three UK Court of Appeal judges said Rwanda could not be considered a “safe third country” where migrants from any country could be sent, but the government has vowed to appeal . One thing is clear about this policy. Its real purpose is to stop migrants from crossing the English Channel for fear of being deported to Rwanda.

The Future Is Now: Rethinking Public Ownership

July 15, 2023 Ursula Huws, Resilience. , , , ,
Something momentous has happened, according to recent opinion polls. After 40 years of reluctantly accepting the Thatcherite mantra that there is no alternative to the market, the British public declared that they had had enough. In August 2022, Survation polling for the campaign group We Own It revealed that 69 per cent were in favour of publicly-owned water, 65 per cent for publicly-owned buses, 67 per cent for rail, 66 per cent for energy, 68 per cent for Royal Mail, and a whopping 78 per cent for the NHS. With public sentiment matching the vigour of an emboldened labour movement, there is a feeling that some of the past socialist ambitions are again political possibilities.

Inscrutable Sanctions

July 14, 2023 Erik Mar and John Perry, Consortium News. , , ,
The U.K., along with the U.S. and Canadian governments and the European Union, has created a sanctions regime targeting around 40 countries across the globe. While economic sanctions against states are best-known, they also include thousands of individuals whose assets have been frozen or confiscated, their travel restricted and their ability to do business constrained. Typically, names are added to a government’s sanctions lists with no prior warning or “due process.” The individuals affected are in practice unable to challenge their inclusion, since it would require expensive legal action in different countries with an uncertain chance of success.
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