Creeping fascism

Only the Starmer leadership and their toadies in the BBC could turn the Glastonbury music festival into a massive rally in support of the Palestinians. But that’s what they did when forgot about the rap-punk Bob Vylan duo and tried to censor Kneecap. These artists are not afraid of police action. Nor are their fans or the millions upon millions who had never heard of them until last week but are now echoing their calls for “free Palestine” and “death to the IDF [the Israeli army]” all around the world.
Now Palestine Action faces is going to be outlawed as a terrorist organisation. It would be one of, if not the, most draconian attack on everyone’s freedom of speech and right to dissent.
The police have been given powers to arrest and charge with terrorism anyone declaring support for Palestine Action. It is a chilling attack on the right to non-violent protest.
Palestine Action has been proscribed as a terror organisation. Anyone supporting the non-violent activist group could face up to 14 years in prison.
Since the 1990s there has been a procession of Police and Crime Acts, Immigration and Asylum Acts and anti‑terror legislation. And since the 11th September 2001 attacks on the United States, there has been an avalanche of very repressive anti‑terror measures, including detaining suspects indefinitely without charge or trial along with the introduction of control orders that amount to house arrest. These anti‑terror laws have been used against people who are plainly not terrorists – usually peace protesters. Now they’re being used to suppress the direct action Palestine solidarity movement that campaigns to end British involvement in the genocidal war against the Palestinian Arabs. 
Shamefully only a handful of Labour MPs voted against the proscription of Palestine Action. Jeremy Corbyn’s Independent Alliance took the principled stand. So did the Greens and the SD&LP from northern Ireland.
Supporters of Palestine Action have voiced concern about the precedent this sets for protestors who are calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Critics decried the chilling effect of the ban, which puts Palestine Action on a par with the gunmen suicide bombers of the sectarian al-Qaeda and ISIS movements, making it a criminal offence to support or be part of the protest group.
“Let us be clear: to equate a spray can of paint with a suicide bomb isn’t just absurd, it is grotesque. It is a deliberate distortion of the law to chill dissent, criminalise solidarity, and suppress the truth” says Zarah Sultana, the maverick Labour MP suspended from the party for opposing Starmer’s plans to ends the two-child benefit cap. Or as the journalist and environmentalist campaigner George Monbiot put it “you can blow the limbs off a child...you can directly and deliberately target journalists, academics, you can blow up entire families, you can target people who are queuing for food aid. You can do what the hell you like and you will not be condemned by this government. But spray a bit of paint on some war planes, on some weapons of war, and that paint becomes the true weapon of war. That becomes the true aggression. That becomes in [Home Secretary] Yvette Cooper’s words a ‘disgraceful attack’”.

After the guns fall silent…

...real negotiations must begin – and not just on the thorny issue of Iran’s nuclear energy industry. The American-inspired truce that some say was brokered at Israel’s request may have put the Israeli-Iranian conflict on hold but it hasn’t stopped the fighting in Palestine. In occupied Palestine Zionist gangs spread terror in the West Bank while the Palestinian resistance fights on against a brutal foe who kills scores of civilians every day in what is clearly an attempt to drive the Palestinian Arabs out of their Mediterranean enclave to make room for more Zionist settlement.
Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader who signed the Camp David surrender treaty, with Israel once said that the United States held “99 per cent of the cards” in the Middle East and that he relied on the Americans to advance the peace process in the region by “bringing Israel to reason”. The Arab traitor, who was assassinated by Islamic militants in October 1981, was wrong.
Sure – recent events have shown that the United States can bring “Israel to reason” any time they like as the Zionist entity is a total dependency of the United States. But the Americans, who certainly hold 99 per cent of the cards in Tel Aviv, have little or no sway in the corridors of power in Tehran let alone the Palestinian resistance. 
Despite all the talk of “Zionist lobbies” and the “Jewish vote” only the Americans count in Tel Aviv. The Israelis are American puppets that, until recently, enabled the Americans to pose as friends of the feudal Arab kings who allow the Big Oil corporations to plunder their oil in return for a juicy cut and American protection.
Likewise the Zionist leaders who strut the world posing as independent politicians are just alibis for American aggression in the Middle East. US imperialism provides the military and economic support that keeps Israel going. The country is an American protectorate and their leaders will ultimately do whatever America wants.
Iran is perfectly entitled to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. While Trump and his Israeli and European followers bleat on about Iran’s supposed nuclear bomb project the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that the claim by Israel and the USA that the Islamic Republic is secretly building a nuclear weapon is false. Likewise the continuous monitoring of Iranian nuclear activities by the agency has not unearthed any evidence of departure from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) that Iran has signed. 
The war goes on in Gaza because that’s what American imperialism wants. They want the fighting to continue until Hamas is crushed – because Hamas stands in their way, because the Palestinian resistance sabotaged the American plan for NATO expansion in the Middle East when it launched its raid into Israel in October 2023.
But what the Americans want and what they get is another matter altogether. They failed in Iraq. They failed in Afghanistan. They will fail in Syria and they will fail in the rest of the Middle East.
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 led to the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians from their homes. The war continues to this day. The Palestinians fight on and they will continue the struggle until their legitimate rights are restored.
UN resolutions have provided the basis for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. First of all Israel must totally withdraw from all the occupied territories seized in 1967, including Arab East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights. The Palestinians must be allowed to establish a state of their own on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian refugees whose homes are now in Israel must be allowed to return or, if they so wish, be paid appropriate compensation in exchange. And all states in the region, including Israel, should have internationally agreed and recognised frontiers guaranteed by the Great Powers.

Stop the drive to war

Trump walks out of the G7 conference in Canada. He threatens to kill the Iranian leader and join Israel in its offensive against the Islamic Republic of Iran. All in all it seems that the American establishment, the “deep state” or war lobby that cuts across the bogus political spectrum in the United States, that represents the most venal and aggressive sections of the American ruling class is back in charge if the mercurial acts of the man in the White House is anything to go by these days. That, of course, we won’t know for sure as Trump’s bargaining style is a heady mixture of lies, bluff and threats What we do know is that the entire Middle East will be set ablaze if US imperialism does openly join in the war to save the skin of its Israeli puppet.
That’s why the Stop the War movement and the rest of the Palestine solidarity coalition has added the slogan No War on Iran as part of its mobilisation for the big national demonstration in London this weekend. That’s why we, as communists, must also help in the effort to stop British involvement in any future American aggression in the region.
The Americans will almost certainly want to use Diego Garcia, the Anglo-American military base in the Indian Ocean, as a staging post to conduct strikes on Iran. They may also want the RAF squadron in Cyprus to join them in what the Israelis are openly calling “regime change” in Iran. 
Crawling to the Americans is second nature to Labour and Tory politicians who still drone on and on about trans-Atlantic “partnership” and the “special relationship” to justify British imperialism’s slavish support of American power throughout the world. So we shouldn’t expect much from the Starmer government that bleats on about “de-escalation”, says Iran must never have a nuclear bomb while supporting Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” whenever anyone demands a serious response to Zionist war-crimes from the British government. 
Stop The War convener Lindsey German says Trump has “absolutely no business bombing or attacking the country in any way. To do so would be a completely illegal war crime which will cause misery to millions and drive the world into the worst Middle East war ever.
“The claims that Israel is simply defending itself against the attacks by Iran over the last week are completely false. 
“We know from the past 20 months of Israel’s assault on Gaza they’re not defending themselves, they’re engaged in an aggressive and genocidal war, and they intend the same for Iran”.
 In Britain the ruling class would have us believe that we live in what the Americans call the “free world”; that the USA is some sort of democratic utopia and that anyone who opposes imperialism is evil, mad or both. Backed by bought and paid-for Labour leaders and a daily dose of lies from the bourgeois media they think they can play this cynical game for ever and ever. We must prove them wrong and stop this war.

The Gordon riots

by Ray Jones

In June 1780 thousands of people marched through London and started what is said by some to be the greatest riot Britain has ever seen. Led by Lord George Gordon, after whom it became known – an MP for a pocket borough in Wiltshire – the initial cause was a bill set to give very limited rights to Catholics. In the forefront were the middle classes organised in the powerful Protestant Association. Peacefully they marched through London to present a petition against the bill to Parliament.
But Parliament quickly rejected it and the situation swiftly changed. What started off peacefully enough became violent and destructive; the middle classes stepped back (although some liberal Whigs continued to pay lip service to the cause) and the initiative was taken up by the poor. For a week London was held by the ‘mob’. All except one of the prisons were wrecked and the inmates released, Parliament was blockaded. The houses of wealthy Catholics were burnt and looted as were Catholic chapels (most of which were attached to the houses) but poorer Catholics were mostly left alone. The Bank of England was attacked and perhaps this was some kind of turning point.
For a week the magistrates and the authorities were remarkably inactive and for the most part the troops obeyed the law which restrained their actions, not having a magistrate willing to read the Riot Act. The King, George III, stepped in and demanded that the law be reinterpreted to allow the troops to ignore the magistrates and fire at will (that is as they were ordered, because there is a suggestion that before this a lot of fraternisation was going on). Fifteen thousand soldiers had been brought into the city and they opened fire killing between 400 and 700 people and wounding many more.
The riot was effectively crushed. Twenty five rioters were tried and hanged and Lord George Gordon was tried for treason but acquitted (possibly because he had turned against the rioters before the end – and no doubt being a Lord and MP helped).
Although the Gordon Riots are sometimes categorised as purely anti Catholic riots there is much to indicate that they were more complex than that. It’s true that “No Popery” was a common battle cry of the rioters and that anti-Catholicism had deep roots going back before the English Revolution but poor Catholics were not targeted. It was the wealthy and powerful that were mainly attacked and institutions that represented authority.
The change in the law was seen as a means of allowing more men into the army to be used against the Americans in their struggle for independence which many supported. But it was also used to bolster the King’s push for absolutism in Britain – hence the other battle cry of “Liberty!”. The very limited freedoms that people had were cherished and people looked nervously at the rest of Europe and linked Catholicism with the absolutist regimes on the Continent and the even greater poverty they saw there.
The conditions for working people were hard. London was over-crowded, dirty, stinking, poverty-stricken and disease ridden but with tiny islands of immense wealth and enormous class differences. Working class political organisation was in its infancy. It’s not surprising that people struck out in revolt sometimes.
If readers fancy a fictional account of the riot they might try Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge. He is hardly pro-riot and the novel was written years after the event but his liberal attitude (for the time) is clear and being a journalist he did some research.
As for Gordon he later converted to Judaism and died in prison after being jailed for libelling the queen of France, the French ambassador and the administration of justice in England.