The Unbearable Racist Chutzpah of the Observer: Two Letters arising from today’s edition

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The Massacre of Children in Gaza is not a Libel

Howard Jacobson’s article (Tales of infanticide have stoked hatred of Jews for centuries. They still echo today Observer 6/10/24) is evidence of an inability to reconcile support for Israel with a belief in himself as a moral person who would “never dream” of doing what the IDF is actually doing.

The deaths of children in Gaza is not a malevolent racist fiction, like the blood libel he refers to, but a horrific reality that is going on and on and on. When the names of all the people killed in Gaza that it has been possible to identify were published, the first fourteen pages were children under one year old. He knows this. Which is why it is so unbearable to see it night after night on the news; as he says “what you cannot bear to see done”.

But, lets be clear, “Jews” are not committing the genocide in Gaza. The Israeli state is. A growing number of Jewish people around the world oppose it, organise against it march against it. Howard Jacobson does not, chooses to identify himself with the state that is doing it, and that sets up the psychic stress between what that state is doing and how he sees himself. If Howard cannot bear to see this, he should oppose it.

Editorial

A year ago, in response to your first editorial about October 7th, I wrote you the following letter.

Since the turn of the century the casualty rate from the conflict in Israel Palestine has been twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Given that the suffering on the Palestinian side is so much higher, why does your editorial find calls for violent vengeance from Israel “understandable”, but consider that violent actions from Palestinians “defy comprehension”? 

Perhaps you should write another editorial explaining the asymmetry of your empathy.

Your editorial this year, describing the “unfathomable hatred” of Palestinians, and the questions that Israelis ask “reasonably enough”, begs the same question.

Pitch Imperfect – a bid for the Conservative Leadership

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Watching the “beauty parade” of the final four Tory leadership candidates standing at their conference this week was an exercise in mental masochism best summed up in the phrase “appalled, but compelled to look”. This is, after all, the Party that voted for the very strange Liz Truss the last time they had a chance, and has barely changed or reflected on the experience.

First up was Tom Tugendhat. He came across to me as a man who is sufficiently sensitive and intelligent to be clinically depressed by the things that he believes in. And oddly two dimensional, like one of those cardboard cut outs they used to have in cinemas pointing you to your seat in the lower stalls or, in the case of the Conservative Party, the upper dress circle. the victim of a definite charisma by pass operation. War hero as dweeb.

Then James Cleverly, who went down better than the others because he actually had a sense of humour. Jokes by numbers from the other candidates fell into dead air where they had expected – or longed for – laughs. But, just as he was coming across as a relatable human being, he would say something mind numbingly dim. Given the audience, that also went down very well indeed.

Then Robert Jenrick. A man who gave one of his children the middle name “Thatcher”. Cruel and unusual punishment for an innocent child. I wonder if he’d have painted over the murals in her bedroom if he thought it would garner him a vote or two. But, even as a cartoon villian, there is something fake about Jenrick. Trying much too hard without the capacity to make it. Auditioning to act a big role but without the authenticity to live it. If Tugendhat is a cardboard replica of himself, Jenrick is an AI generated hollogram, or possibly hollow gram.

And rounding off a grim morning, Kemi Badenoch. Like Suella Braverman, Badenoch ingratiates herself into a party of xenophobes by being even more xenophobic than they are. In Braverman’s case, trying to contain the resulting psychic contradictions makes her a walking nervous wreck. Badenoch, by contrast, keeps things crushed under an icy control that allows her to blot out the fact that, for the racists she is trying to appeal to, “stop them coming” is just the first step to “send them back” – and the “them” would include her.

Having heard all four pitches, there is a standard script that barely varies, that goes something like this, but with a few of the unspoken parts added.

My friends (checks back for dagger).

You should vote for me because I have a personal backstory that involves self sacrificing, hard working parents who enabled me to slip up the greasy pole of achievement in a way that most people won’t, and that’s their fault for not being their best self.

I will never apologise for our record of achievement in office, that has just led us to being turfed out on our ear with the lowest number of MPs since 1832; so the first thing I want to say is sorry…but it wasn’t our fault.

Everything we did in the last 14 years was constrained by the Left establishment in the civil service and next time we shouldn’t be so restrained and perhaps should lock some of them up.

But look at the positives. We got Brexit done! And hasn’t that been a success?

We’ve been saying we want to get immigration down for 14 years and now we mean it. I will set a cap/legal limit, regardless of the damage that will do. If we start running out of construction workers, fruit pickers, care workers or nurses, thats the price we pay for not having quite as many foreign sounding people on the bus. Always remember. Queuing, and grumbling in queues, is a Fundamental British Value, and we intend to give people the chance to be in many, many more of them, going forward.

And we will pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, because we are Fundamentally British and don’t see people born elsewhere as completely human. After all, we are the Party of the family, except when it comes to the brightest and the best from the rest of the world, who we will generously allow to migrate in to work for us, but not allow to bring their family with them.

And shouldn’t they be grateful to live among such Fundamentally British tolerant people?

Because no country has given the world as much as we have, from industrialisation to the internet (I won’t mention all the cultural things because thats just Hippy dippy Left wing nonsense) so, let’s face it conference, they owe us. Perish the thought that we took anything for ourselves at the time.

So, we should be proud of our History. All of it; especially the parts we should be ashamed of. The slave traders, whose statues proudly adorn our public spaces, owners of dark satanic mills, plantation owners, rack renters, leaders of punitive expeditions and arms dealers made this country – and our Party – what it is today. We stand on their monstrous shoulders and should be proud to do so.

But now, we live in a more dangerous world, so we will make it safer by increasing UK arms spending to 3% of GDP. After all, this country only ever acts militarily in self defence. I learned this myself on active service in Iraq and Afghanistan and, indeed, Luton.

And we will stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel, as it bombs its neighbours into the stone age, because if you can’t stand by an ally when it is commiting a genocide, what kind of fair weather friend are you?

And we have been such a friend to Ukraine that when there was a chance to secure a peace settlement within two months of the war starting, we made sure they didn’t sign up. I now pledge them £3 billion a year in continued military aid – a boost for our Fundamentally British arms industry – for as long as they can keep press ganging their men to fight.

I am not a climate denier, but I am a Net Zero sceptic. So, the problem is real, but we have no plans to deal with it. We made a mistake to set targets without plans, so the solution isn’t to develop a plan, but to abandon the targets. That’ll sort it. Hopefully none of you were flooded out this week or, if you were, you were here and didn’t notice.

And we cannot be content with the managed decline of our economy. Let us shift the burden from the broadest to the narrowest shoulders; as a reward for all that hard work that makes those of in this hall so smugly well off.

Because we believe that you, and hard working families, should keep more of your money, and less of it should go to people who don’t work hard, like train drivers and teachers and doctors.

Relieving the tax burden on the wealthy has nothing to do with our corporate paymasters, and everything to do with encouraging people to build businesses around their kitchen tables (with or without an Allen key from ikea). Because nothing enables small business success more than liberation from paying for burdensome regulations like too much maternity pay, or being held back by health and safety gone mad. Risking two, three many Grenfells in the future is part of the brave new world of uncertainty that we should embrace with enthusiasm, as it sorts out the sheep of enterprise from the goats of failure.

Winners gonna win. Losers gonna lose.

So, let us beat the drum for capitalism, which is taking the number of food banks and people sleeping rough to ever greater heights.

God save the King….And God help us all…

Starmer through the looking glass

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The hypocrisies and biases of a political stance are often revealed starkly by keeping the grammar of a statement intact but reversing its terms. The result puts whats being said, and, crucially, what isn’t, into a sharp relief.

This is very clear in Keir Starmer’s statement on the Iranian retaliation for succesive Israeli assassinations and terror attacks and their latest assault on Lebanon.

For ease of understanding I have kept in the original word in brackets.

“I utterly condemn this attempt by the Israeli (Iranian) regime to harm innocent Palestinians (Israelis), to escalate this incredibly dangerous situation, and push the region ever closer to the brink”

“It cannot be tolerated. We stand with Lebanon (Israel), and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression. Israel (Iran) must stop these attacks”.

Israel (Iran) “has menaced the Middle East for far too long, chaos and destruction brought not just to Palestine (Israel), but to the people they live amongst in Lebanon and beyond.”

“We stand with the people of Palestine (Israel) and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression,” adding that Britain supports “the Palestinian People’s (Israel’s) reasonable demand for the security of its people.”

Idiocies of the Week

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Its Conservative Party Conference week, so we are spoiled for choice.

Liz Truss announced that she wasn’t going to back any of the 4 candidates for Party leader. The sighs of relief from the candidates could be heard from coast to coast.

Kemi Badenoch – and has no one noticed that her name is an anagram of Bad Enoch (its even in the right order) – said that she was shocked that so many recent immigrants to this country “hate Israel”. Given that Israel has spent the last year killing over 41,000 people and bombing Gaza to rubble, accelerated the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, been indicted for genocide at the International Criminal Court and, to return its 60,000 internal refugees to their northern border, has just killed another 1,000 people in Lebanon invaded the country and displaced a million people there, what’s not to love?

Her team in the leadership campaign released an odd pamphlet arguing that 21st century politics is different from 20th century politics because – although everything can best be understood in the form of a triangle – in the old days the triangle was divided horizontally and the bottom of society supported the Left while the Right defended the top, today the triangle is divided vertically; to indicate that both Left and Right have support from top to bottom, but without any acknowledgement that the right still defends the interests of the people at the top, while it is the role of the Left to fight for the bottom.

Confused? You will be. Just to make things even clearer, in their diagram the Left is on the Right and the Right is on the Left. This might indicate that the Tory Right approach the world in an inverted way, but it also might simply be a Freudian slip, implying that somewhere deep in their heart of hearts they know that the Left is, ultimately, right.

Another way of looking at it is that they don’t know which way is up. Bottoms up chaps!

Another gem from Badenoch is that her way of dealing with the problem that highly educated people tend to lean Left is to have fewer highly educated people. All those “pointless university degrees” that make people think have got to go.

Meanwhile, Miriam Cates, speaking on Politics Live, unravelled the full insanity of the Right’s line on immigration. On the one hand the country can’t afford to have all these people coming in, but at the same time it needs people coming in to fill job vacancies because, in Cates’ view “we’re not having enough babies”. So, the country isn’t full up after all. Breed damn you! Breed!

Jo Coburn, the anchor of Politics Live, noted that the Tories were obsessively discussing immigration while most of the electorate are concerned about energy bills and the cost of living, the NHS and the state of public services; without reflecting that Politics Live itself obsessively discusses the issue “we can’t talk about” almost every time it comes on. Anyone would think there was an agenda somewhere to push this under everyone’s noses at every opportunity, carpet bombing us with BS.

Robert Jenrick – a small, cheap embodiment of petty minded mean spiritedness, best known for his order as immigration minister to paint over a mural in a child refugee centre to make it less welcoming – dropped an honest bollock when he said that the problem with the European Court of Human Rights is that it meant that UK Special Services were having to shoot terrorists rather than arrest them because the EHRC would order them released. While this is an absurd claim in itself, its notable that none of the people who criticised Jenrick for this statement denied that UK Special Forces do indeed breach the Geneva Convention in this way. There are a number of cases from Afghanistan that the SAS kept locked away for years to maintain the fiction that they didn’t happen. But its now well known that they did. But to everyone from his rivals for the Tory leadership to “a Labour source”, its just terribly bad taste, and awfully insulting to our brave boys to say that they have done what they have done.

Jenrick also criticised the police for dealing with peaceful demonstrators calling for an end to genocide and a ceasefire in Gaza more gently than rioters who were trying to burn refugees alive in hostels, threw bricks at the police, attacked people in the streets and trashed their neighbour’s houses. Quite inexplicable.

And two from last week.

A delegate at the Reform Conference, interviewed on Politics Joe, opined that the rivers are polluted, not because of the water companies failing to invest – “I think they are being scapegoated” – or too much toxic runoff from farmers overfertilising their fields – its because all those immigrants are coming over here and overwhelming our overloaded sewage system with all their poos. Talk about S*$t.

And David Lammy at the UN last week saying “I know Imperialism when I see it”. A question for David. When you go to work as the British Foreign Secretary at the Foreign Office, and you walk past that statue of Robert Clive, and stride along corridors resplendently decorated with paintings of Britannia and all the rest of it (which you can see here), perhaps through the “Durbar Court”, and you look at all that, what exactly do you see?

Hostages and casualties – a matter of proportion.

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Travelling on the bus up Golders Green Road, the hoardings just opposite Grodzinski’s bakery (now modernised but smaller than it was) are covered with A3 posters of the Israeli hostages. 97 of them are still alive. If you were to stick pictures like this of them up alongside the road in a single line they would stretch for approximately 100 metres. About the length of three semi detached houses side by side.

As of April this year, Israel was holding 3,660 Palestinian prisoners in adminstrative detention, that’s to say without trial. Hostages by any other name. Rarely mentioned on the news. No imperative to release them. Effectively invisible. No pictures of them up on hoardings anywhere. But if you were to stick them up in a single line of A3 posters, it would stretch for about 1,220 metres. On a street of semis that would not stop at number 6, as it would with the Israelis, but at number 73.

If you were to stick up posters of the Israeli victims of the Oct 7th attack on the same street it would not get so far. About 400 metres, just to number 24. You could walk it in a couple of minutes. Doing the same for the 41,534 Palestinians killed so far in Gaza since, and you’d need a road more than ten kilometres long. Walking at an average 3mph it would take you more than two hours to get to the end.

Carer’s tales

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There are rhythms to the deployment of carers. Some arrive according to a rigid timetable set by tablets. If a certain medication has to be taken at regular intervals, with no more than a 10 or 15 minute variation, the carer has to turn up at those times.

This tends to mean that the carer who arrives is more often than not the same one. They have their regulars and a regular schedule so they can get from one client to the next on a predictable timetable. They are, of course, not paid for travel time and the pressure to get from one job to another can lead to road accidents. One we know was trying to save a second or two and crocked her car gliding into the one in front, damaging it enough for it to be out of action for a week. She was unable to get work until it was fixed because they are all dependent on cars to get from one job to the next. She now drives very carefully because the pressure isn’t worth it.

Because they travel by car, they come from quite a range of places, from Forest Gate in the West to Canvey Island in the East. One had moved from a flat off Tottenham Court Road in the heart of London down to Purfleet – because the housing is more affordable – and taken the job for the excitement; explaining that “Nothing ever happens in Purfleet”.

Pay for each visit is presumed to match the half hour or 15 minute slot that the company is paid for. This does not always match reality. If a client has a medical emergency it can take longer, so there has to be a scramble to fill the slots that are down the line. If all goes well, the routines of getting a client onto the commode, sorting all that out, getting them washed, dressed and chatted to can be done more quickly. In the case of housebound people with no family support, the last job is the only social contact and conversation they will get all day and is a crucial part of the job.

One that came to ours a few days ago said that she has a core of bedbound people who are her regulars. Somehow she has got into the habit of singing to them, and taking requests. Some of the old ladies like the Ronettes, and bands like that, but she has one old gentleman who is into heavy rock and usually wants something by Metallica – which is truly above and beyond.

Some carers are chatty, some quietly get on with things and converse functionally. Most are pretty upbeat. Most of them are women. Many are black. Most of the white ones have tattoos. There is a high turnover. A core of veterans keep things going while newcomers either adapt or, finding it too much, leave.

Some of them wear fans around their necks because, even during a heatwave, some of the clients have their heating on, and cranked up high.

None of them are in a union.

I complement one on her pair of colouful converses and she says that she loves them, has 14 pairs, but is now boycotting them because of Nike’s sponsorship and partnership deals with Israel.

Several have said they like coming to us because we are friendly and take an interest. Many of the clients have dementia, so can be terrified and aggressive. Some are racist and don’t hold back about it even though they are being looked after – possibly because they are being looked after and resent it. This is sometimes the case with relatives too.

If the family is covering meds and, to a lesser extent, food, the schedule for visits can swing quite wildly, with the getting up arrival ranging from slightly before 7am one day to well after 9am the next. During the Summer holidays schedules get stretched because carers with children have them on their hands, but as Winter approaches they also get harder to fill because its getting dark, dank and miserable and, people get ill.

Some of the overnight crews, who are always in twos and arrive in the wee small hours to give bedbound people a turn, or deal with pads, can be loud – car door slams, a conversation that would be loud for the middle of the day erupts up and down the path to the back door, a scrabble for the door lock, the door goes crunch and the loud conversation imposes itself on the living room downstairs for a while, before the whole thing repeats itself in reverse on the way out. Others arrive with the stealth of Ninjas, but greater consideration. Some of them close the side and front gates on the way out. Some let them swing in the breeze.

Aromatherapy in Thurrock, and other bits and bobs.

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Overheard in Boots.

“If she says she caught thrush from sitting on a toilet seat, she’s doing it all wrong.”

Walking down to town I am passed on the other side of the road by an elderly Irish bloke I chat to sometimes, absolutely bombing along in his mobility vehicle. He hurtles off up the sharp incline of Cromwell Road, leaving me limping behind eating his electric dust.

The trees on Cromwell Road now look almost primeval, with huge boles you couldn’t put your arms round anymore. Oak. Lime. Massive crowns hissing in the wind. At the brow of the hill there used to be a Horse Chestnut, magnificently flowered in May and the source of many a childhood conker. Now gone, diseased and rusted and eventually chainsawed, leaving a sawdust and a naked stump; and the road looking like a smile with an extracted front tooth.

Further down the hill a bloke built like a silverback gorrilla – arms like hams, big belly, a neck with one of Rusell Kane’s “Essex triple ripple” rolls of muscle – is drilling and hammering insulation panels on the outside of a house as though he is attacking it. Despite the power in his body, he carries an air of nervous truculence about him.

The street name plate by the car park outside the Tae Kwando Centre at the foot of the hill, pointing to a pair of houses evidenty constructed as an afterthought to fill in a bit of spare space overlooking the Titan pit, is a rhyming couplet. “Quarry View – Nos 1 – 2”. As mind worms go, this is the road sign equivalent of “baby shark”.

As I pass the war memorial opposite the old police station (now posh flats and renamed “The Old Courthouse”; which has a slightly Western feel about it to me) workers from the council are planting out dense blue banks of lavendar in the flower beds on either side. The waft of aromatherapy is almost overwhelming even from the other side of the road.

The vista approaching Wallace Road across “The Field”. More homely state than stately home.

In the playing field opposite the house, now glorified as “Hathaway Park”, a strikingly tall woman stands alone on the bank of grass, bright green in the sunlight, looking up towards the redbrick facades of Wallace Road – a proletarian version of the entrance to Blenheim Palace – wearing a chador from head to foot in the same celestial blue as renaissance painters used for the Virgin Mary – so a sort of Muslim Blue Nun. he is alone in a sea of green, and looks as though she has been beamed down from the heavens. It looks like a still from a film. The staginess of everyday life.

Things my Grandmother used to say.

On the News. “Not to worry, it won’t happen here”. On the “nothing ever happens in Grays” principle.

On illness. “What’s moveable’s curable”. Which, I suppose means that if you’re not dead, you can be fixed.

On the elasticity of the perception of time. “It don’t half get late early, don’t it?”

Fear and Loathing on Kilburn High Road.

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Chatting to some stall holders at the Brent Green Day at the Kiln Theatre about how the vibe inside it, quiet, prosperous, with a clientelle that is evidently well to do – drifting over from various manifestations of Hampstead perhaps – is such a striking contrast to the hard bitten, impoverished, tough dramas of everyday life on the streets outside. The Kiln puts on a lot of challenging drama, addressing some of those issues, but rarely engaging with the people they affect, in a sort of performative bubble, it seems to me.

Outside Tescos a woman sits on her knees begging. A bearded, slightly wild eyed, man marches past and snarls “Why don’t you get up off your arse and get a job? How about that?” He marches on feeling better about himself no doubt. The woman just stares.

Further up, outside a pawnbrokers, a ragged looking bloke with wild looking hair and some missing teeth sits astride a Lime bike waiting for something and mutters at me as I walk past. I ask him what he said and he repeats “Do you buy gold?” I am wearing a preoccupied expression, a crumpled shirt, with at least one curry stain, and carrying an overfull rusksack and Morrisons plastic bag. I’m not my idea of a gold dealer. Deep cover perhaps? Or perhaps a different sort of “gold”?

Eyeless in Gaza – a curious moral blindness

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When shameless Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu calls the UK government’s block on just 30 of 350 arms export licences to Israel a “shameful decision”, he is speaking as a man indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and corruption, including including breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud, in Israel’s own courts. Watching him its hard to imagine that he has any self awareness at all.

He also seems incapable of grasping that his description of Hamas, as “a genocidal terrorist organization that savagely murdered 1200 people on October 7”, begs the question of how anyone objective would define his own armed forces; who have killed 40 times as many people since. A lot of weight is being put on the adverbs and adjectives in this description. Are those 40,000 deaths not murders? Are the killings not savage? Are the people of Gaza not being terrorised? Is this not genocidal? The International Criminal Court has made an interim ruling saying that it is.

The comment on this limited ban below by UK Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis (in italics) is similarly morally compromised; which is shown when you consider the situation in the round (not in italics).

“It beggars belief that the British government, a close strategic ally of Israel, has announced a partial suspension of arms licences, at a time when Israel is fighting a war for its very survival on seven fronts. The “war for its very survival” takes the form of a massacre in Gaza courtesy of US arms supplies and diplomatic backing, escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and a nervous stand off in the North with Hezbollah. Any other “fronts”, like the Red Sea, Eastern Med or Persian Gulf are being covered by gigantic US aircraft carrier task forces; with a few Royal Navy frigates to show willing.

But clearly, for Sir Ephraim, the over 40,000 people killed by the IDF in the Gaza strip since October 7th and the further 502 in the West Bank are not enough. Many more have to die to ensure Israel’s survival as an apartheid state. For Mirvis, because Israel is a “strategic ally”, we should be prepared to turn a blind eye to what it is doing and keep passing it the ammunition so it can keep doing it. The UK complicity here is its usual auxiliary effort to the main supply from the United States, which is rushing just under two arms shipments a day; which it would not be doing if it didn’t think doing so was in its own interests.

And that means that all too often the game that is played in the media is to treat Israeli victims as rounded human beings deserving of sympathy and identification, while Palestinian victims are just statistics. Because large numbers tend to blur in the mind, it might bring the reality home more to condiers just the casualties of the Israeli assault in the last three days.

This is from the UN OCHA report.

  • On 1 September, 11 Palestinians were killed and tens of others injured when Safad school hosting Internally Displaced Persons was hit in Az Zaitoun neighbourhood, east of Gaza city.
  • On 29 August, nine Palestinians, including three children (of whom two were newborn), and two women (of whom one was pregnant), were killed when the upper floor of a residential tower was hit in western An Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in Deir al Balah.
  • On 29 August, five Palestinians were killed and at least 13 others injured in Deir al Balah.
  • On 29 August, five Palestinians were killed and others injured when internally displaced people’s (IDP) tents were hit in Wadi Saber area, east Khan Younis.
  • On 31 August, seven Palestinians from the same family were killed when a house was hit in As Sabra neighbourhood in Gaza city.
  • On 31 August, five Palestinians, including three females and a doctor, were killed when a house was hit in southern Khan Younis.
  • On 31 August, five Palestinians, including four females, were killed and 15 others injured when a house was hit in southern Khan Younis.

Mirvis goes on that such action has been forced upon it (Israel) on the 7th October, as if the genocidal scale of the reaction is not Israel’s responsibility and without reflecting that,

  • before Oct 7th, 20 Palestinians were being killed in the conflict for every Israeli
  • and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank was proceeding slowly but surely in the face of world indifference.

This is odd because he is very well aware of the latter, having taken part in National Day demonstrations in East Jerusalem in which settlers march through Palestinian Streets while chanting “death to Arabs” and “may your villages burn”.

He emphasises that this is “at the very moment when six hostages murdered in cold blood by cruel terrorists were being buried by their families” – without reflecting that had Netanyahu not sabotaged the recent ceasefire deal those hostages would probably still be alive. This has not gone unnoticed in Israel itself, leading to a General Strike and furious demonstrations last Monday.

He also does not mention the 184 Palestinians killed over the weekend by the IDF. Does he think those 184 people were not killed in cold blood? Or that their killers were kind? And consider the numbers. 184 to 6. Thirty one times as many people. Nearly three Grenfells. Half a primary school full.

That ratio of 31 deaths to 1 indicates how little these lives weigh in the balance. Their names will not be published. Nor will their pictures. Their relatives will not be interviewed. Their stories will barely be acknowledged. So, Sir Ephraim can look, and not see. Truly eyeless in Gaza.

On the same page, on the same day, as part of his pitch for the Conservative leadership, Tom Tugendhat called for the UK to be “willing to stand by our allies” (Israel) by continuing to supply it with arms as it, according to Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Joyce Msuya, creates a “situation in Gaza that is beyond desperate… Civilians are hungry. They are thirsty. They are sick. They are homeless. They have been pushed beyond the limits of endurance – beyond what any human being should bear,” including

  • Severe overcrowding, coupled with the lack of clean water, sanitation facilities and basic hygiene items like soap, which is taking a heavy toll on children, with skin infections continuing to increase among them. As of 30 June, WHO had already recorded 103,385 cases of scabies and lice, 65,368 cases of skin rashes and 11,214 cases of chickenpox in the Strip.
  • With MSF support, the Palestinian Agricultural Development Association (PARC) has been providing emergency latrines, solar water pumps and basic health care to some of the displaced people arriving in the Al Mawasi area of Khan Younis. “Every day, we see between 300 to 400 people at the medical clinic, of which 200 cases are related to skin conditions,” explained PARC pediatrician Dr. Youssef Salaf Al-Farra, underscoring that children are the most affected by highly contagious skin conditions.
  • MSF claims that, for three months, it has been trying to import 4,000 hygiene kits, comprising items such as soap, toothbrushes, shampoo and laundry power, to improve living conditions in Khan Younis, but the importation has not been allowed by Israeli authorities (my emphasis).

As Tugendhat puts it, if you can’t “stand by an ally” at times like this when it is busily reducing children to misery, “what is the point of an alliance?” So true. Because in an alliance, what “our” allies do gets brushed under the carpet, understated, justified, euphemised out of existence.

UK defence secretary, John Healey’s comment that that Britain remained “a staunch ally” of Israel and that the ban on just 30 liscences out of 350 would not “have a material impact on Israel’s security” shows that he hopes this level of gesture will be enough to defuse the pressure of the solidarity movement on the government, while it continues to “stand by an ally” no matter what it does. It won’t be. Israel reacts so aggresively to these gestures not because they undermine its practical capacity to keep killing on a mass scale, but because they undermine its perceived legitimacy in doing so. When even “unshakable” allies like the UK feel compelled to take even a symbolic distance, the ground is moving under its feet.

All the more reason to keep up the pressure. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign petition for a complete end to the arms trade with Israel is here.

The scale of desperation to keep the narrative under control in the UK is shown by the deeply repressive arrests of journalists like Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson under “terrorism” legislation. This follows the Israeli style of narrative control, in which they have put 52 Palestinian journalists in prison and have killed 116 in Gaza.

The arrest of Medhurst – who was held for 24 hours – was under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which makes expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation an offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. This means that it doesn’t matter what is true. In a conflict in which

  • our government defines one side as “terrorist” and the other side as a “democracy with a right to defend itself”
  • and a context in which it is increasingly normative to describe inconvenient facts as ideologically driven opinions

reporting on facts that put that ally in a bad light can be framed as being supportive of a proscribed organisation especially if they are true. I must admit a certain trepidation in writing this, in case 16 counter-terrorism officers in balaclavas descend my home at 7.30 in the morning, and sieze this laptop and my phone for “content posted online” like they did to Helen Wilkinson.

At the same time, the police look as though they are angling for a confrontation at Saturday’s first mass solidarity demonstration of the Autumn by putting such restrictions on its assembly point and timing that will give them many excuses to make arrests, no matter how peaceful the demonstrators are.

The statement condemning this has so far been signed by

  • Palestine Solidarity Campaign
  • Palestinian Forum in Britain
  • Friends of Al-Aqsa
  • Stop the War Coalition
  • Muslim Association of Britain
  • Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Signatories

  • Apsana Begum MP
  • Baroness Christine Blower
  • Richard Burgon MP
  • Ian Byrne MP
  • Jeremy Corbyn MP
  • Lord Bryn Davies
  • Maryam Eslamdoust, General Secretary TSSA
  • Alex Gordon, President RMT
  • Fran Heathcote, General Secretary, PCS
  • Lord John Hendy
  • Imran Hussain MP
  • Daniel Kebede, General Secretary NEU
  • Ayoub Khan MP
  • Ian Lavery MP
  • John Leach, Assistant General Secretary RMT
  • Clive Lewis MP
  • Mick Lynch, General Secretary RMT
  • Andy McDonald MP
  • John McDonnell MP
  • Iqbal Mohammed MP
  • Grahame Morris MP
  • Zarah Sultana MP
  • Jon Trickett MP
  • Mick Whelan, General Secretary ASLEF
  • Sarah Woolley, General Secretary BFAWU

Energy. Go Green. End the Wars. Cut the Prices.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In response to the 10% hike in energy prices this winter, the media last Friday was graced by two stunningly misleading statements, by Claire Coutinho and Ed Miliband, one after the other.

Claire Coutinho, said that cheap, non-renewable energy should be prioritised over carbon reduction targets to help struggling families this winter. This is the truth turned upside down and inside out.

To start with, perhaps Coutinho hasn’t noticed that the increase in energy prices this winter is being caused by increases in the prices of oil and gas. These are “non renewable” not cheap, and getting more expensive. Ceratinly more expensive than renewable sources.

Renewable energy became cheaper than fossil fuels as long ago as 2020.

Moreover, Eco experts reports that the IEA reported that in 2023, an estimated 96% of newly installed, utility-scale solar PV and onshore wind capacity had lower generation costs than new coal and natural gas and three-quarters of these new wind and solar PV plants offered cheaper power than existing fossil fuel facilities.

And renewables are becoming cheaper, while fossil fuels are becoming more expensive. Very profitable for that reason, however. Which is why Coutinho – formerly a senior fellow at fossil fuel funded right wing think tank Policy Exchange – wants to promote them.

So, doing what Countinho wants would increase bills, not reduce them and force struggling families to struggle even more. She either doesn’t know this, and is just a fool, or she does, and is cynically carrying on the Great Conservative Johnsonian tradition of bare faced lying, in the hope that if she brasses it out with enough self confidence no one will point out that she is speaking gibberish.

In an attempt not to be outdone, after rightly saying that this increase is partly a result of the Tory failure to invest sufficiently in renewables – assessed by Carbon Brief as now costing the average household around £40 to £60 a year – Ed Miliband went on to say that the prices are also going up because the UK is at the mercy of international markets controlled by dictators.

This trips off the tongue as one of those off the peg soundbites that requires no thought at all, and slides effortlessly along the the simplistic Foreign Policy groove shared by both front benches, and in so doing hides the fact that the increase in both oil and gas prices is caused by wars driven by Western allies; as it is designed to do.

  • the increase in oil prices is caused by fears of wider war in West Asia caused by Israel’s assassination of the top Hamas negotiator in Iran and several Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon; which at the very least sabotages ceasefire negotiations for Gaza, and at the most, could lead to a war across West Asian as the “democratic” far right government in Israel seeks to carry out the Samson doctrine on an apocalyptic scale. It pretty much an iron law that when US aircraft carrier task forces mass in the Eastern Med’ and Persian Gulf, oil prices go up in case there’s trouble ahead.
  • the price of gas started rising again this year because NATO is sustaining the Ukraine war instead of looking for a negotiated peace, and given an extra boost when the Ukrainian armed forces launched their reckless and doomed offensive into the Kursk region of Russia, further threatening gas supply. As the Financial Times put it The latest increase in the price cap is also connected to the war in Ukraine, with wholesale prices climbing over the past few months because of uncertainty over Russia’s remaining gas supplies to Europe. My emphasis.

The top suppliers of imported gas to the UK are Norway (by pipeline) and the USA (very expensive LNG, much of it fracked which has a carbon footprint as bad as coal).

Go green. End the wars. Cut the prices.