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The British state rigged the trial of Tony Greenstein, a secular Jewish socialist and peace activist, to get him locked up for as much as 14 years – supposedly for “inviting support for Hamas”.

Fearful that the judge would punish his barrister for delivering a closing speech that properly defended him, Greenstein instead spoke directly to the jury.

For half an hour, he picked apart sham charges relating to three social media posts and a blog article he wrote against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In doing so, he exposed the proceedings as a political show trial – one of a growing number, designed to silence opposition both to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and to the British state’s complicity in it.

In summing up, Judge Sarah Plaschkes said she had considered referring Greenstein for contempt of court. But instead she dismissed his eloquent, damning address to the jury as a “rambling speech delivered by an old man”. At that point, presumably, she had no idea what impact Greenstein’s words would have on the jury.

In a stinging rebuke to the judge, the jury members unanimously acquitted him after just two hours of deliberation. As it turned out, it was not Greenstein on trial; it was British justice.

Once given a chance to hear all the facts, not just the ones curated by the Crown, the jury accepted Greenstein’s arguments, including his accusation that the judiciary were readily conniving in the growing authoritarianism unleashed by the UK state’s complicity in genocide.

Which may explain why Greenstein’s landmark victory in a case with huge implications for free speech – and the right to speak out on the British state’s partnership in Israel’s genocide – was almost entirely ignored by the establishment media.

Had the jury found against him, you can be sure that same media would have covered the matter extensively, playing its part in sending a message to audiences that they should keep their heads down and avoid showing any solidarity with the Palestinian people or risk sharing Greenstein’s fate.

His acquittal, and the British state’s humiliation, was not a message the state – or the billionaire-owned media – wanted publicised.

What Greenstein’s closing speech managed to do was introduce something the British state and its judiciary have been carefully trying to strip out of the current wave of show trials of anti-genocide activists: important context.

Greenstein had to dismiss his barrister for the closing speech because, had the barrister spoken to the jury as Greenstein himself did, he would have most likely shared the fate of another distinguished lawyer, Rajiv Menon KC.

Menon is facing contempt of court proceedings over his masterful closing speech in the trial of six Palestine Action defendants, who were charged with multiple and serious crimes over their efforts to destroy killer-drones produced at a factory in Bristol operated by Israel’s biggest arms maker, Elbit Systems.

As a result of Menon’s speech – you can read the most important passages here – the jury refused to convict any of the defendants of any of the offences for which the state had put them on trial.

The judge in that case, Jeremy Johnson, was so eager to make an example of Menon – and intimidate other lawyers so they would be dissuaded from giving other Palestine solidarity activists a proper defence – that he managed to abuse the established legal procedure specifically designed for contempt of court referrals.

The Court of Appeal had to overturn his decision, though it allowed him to reapply for contempt proceedings against Menon, this time using the proper channels. Johnson did so.

The point is that judges like Johnson and Plaschkes – faithful servants not of justice but of the British state – know that no jury will convict activists trying to to stop a genocide if it is framed in those terms. So these judges must rig these trials to keep the jury as ignorant as possible of the relevant context: that the British state is persecuting peace activists for embarrassing it over its collusion in genocide.

That fact was, once again, only too evident during Greenstein’s trial.

Plaschkes was angry throughout the proceedings at Greenstein’s efforts to introduce context to the case. For the prosecution to succeed, she needed the jury to ignore many relevant things about Greenstein’s supposedly “Hamas-supporting” comment about a “ghetto uprising” in Gaza:

• the context that the one-day breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023 was a direct response to Israel’s preceding 16-year blockade of Gaza, denying its 2.3 million-strong population the essentials of life and turning the enclave effectively into a concentration camp;

• the context that, following the October 2023 breakout, Israel immediately launched a genocidal campaign of destruction against the enclave’s infrastructure and its civilian population;

• the context that, as a secular socialist, Greenstein has been a long-time critic of Hamas, as proven by a stream of articles he has written over more than a decade and that he cited to the jury;

• the context that, as the son of Holocaust survivors, he is deeply opposed to one people systematically oppressing another – all the more so given that Jewish Zionists have exploited their people’s historic victimhood to justify Israel committing contemporary crimes against Palestinians;

• the context of international law, which states that a people under occupation, the Palestinians, have a right to resist their oppression by Israel, including through the use of violence;

• the context that Greenstein had not even mentioned Hamas in posts that were the focus of the trial, or indicated any support for it – only his support for the right in law for Palestinians to resist Israeli crimes;

• the context that the British government proscribed the political wing of Hamas under the UK’s terrorism laws only in 2021, not based any new “terror” behaviour – in fact, four years earlier Hamas had rewritten its charter, showing a strong willingness to make concessions to Israel. No, the purpose of proscription was specifically to advance Israel’s goal of intimidating popular, international solidarity with the people of Gaza;

• the context that, in prosecuting Greenstein, the British government is destroying the very basis of the right to free speech, all to advance the interests of the demonstrably genocidal state of Israel;

• the context that the British state is not some dispassionate arbiter of justice in these prosecutions: it is aggressively colluding in Israel’s crimes. Its huge conflict of interest in silencing critics is the elephant in the room.

Greenstein told the jury:

Your [verdict] will not stay in this room. If these three posts are terrorism, then the word has a new meaning for everyone in this country. Every student who shares an article. Every pensioner who retweets the wrong opinion. Every writer, every blogger, every one of your neighbours with a social media account and a view about a war.

Can it really be the law of England that any of them – that any of you – will be condemned to 14 years of prison for a tweet? You have the power, today, to answer that question. Whatever your answer is, it will be remembered long after this trial is forgotten.

The whole speech is a masterclass in how to speak over the head of a complicit judiciary and prick the conscience of people who still have a moral backbone. I recommend you read it in full here.

The British government desperately wanted the scalp of a Jewish activist to show that no one is safe from the state’s long arm of persecution. It failed, which should be cause for relief and celebration among every person who opposes authoritarianism.

The defeats being handed to the British state by juries who hear the actual evidence are adding to the pressures on officials to find new ways to bypass the ancient right of trial by jury.

The government of Keir Starmer was determined to establish the precedent of scrapping jury trials. Faced with the unpopularity of such a move, his successor Andy Burnham has sounded hesitant about advancing the measure. But pledges he made while seeking the Labour leadership – and prime ministership – are proving to be worth little now that he is in office.

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Meanwhile, courtier-judges like Johnson are finding ways to get around the reluctance of juries to convict anti-genocide activists of serious crimes.

Juries that convict activists of a relatively minor charge of criminal damage for smashing up killer-drones, assuming the defendants will get a few months in prison, are learning that they are thereby handing judges in these trials unlimited powers, in violation of the most basic principles of justice.

After the verdict, judges like Johnson are choosing to rewrite the charge sheet, adding retrospectively what they are bogusly calling a “terrorism connection”. That means they can sentence the defendants as “terrorists”, leading to far longer jail sentences and destroying the defendants’ lives in perpetuity.

This is the mark of a justice system that no longer cares about evidence, fairness or jury verdicts. It cares only about visible punishment, about spreading terror through the courtroom.

We can fight back. Juries appear to be growing increasingly wary of these highly politicised trials the British state is staging to exonerate itself of its criminal activities and lock up its critics. As judges increasingly abuse the justice system to get the jail sentences demanded by the state, juries are likely to become much less willing to serve as an alibi for state repression.

This is no longer a struggle simply for the Palestinian people’s survival. It is a struggle for ourselves, for our right to have a voice, to have some say in how our societies are run and for whose benefit. It is a struggle to keep the forces of darkness at bay a little while longer.

And it is a battle none of us can afford to lose.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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More than 150 years ago, scientists discovered what they termed a “greenhouse effect”, demonstrating for the first time that water vapour and carbon dioxide trapped heat. Theoretical concerns were soon raised that we might, through the practice of burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon, have inadvertently been altering our climate since the start of the industrial revolution.

In 1938 a British scientist published the first observational study suggesting that human carbon emissions were, indeed, heating the planet.

By the late 1950s, the science about global warming was so well established that legendary Hollywood film maker Frank Capra was hired to make a documentary, The Unchained Goddess, intended to educate the public about what then seemed a relatively far-off threat.

The film explained that the release by factories and vehicles of some six billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year – a paltry sum by today’s standards – was “unwittingly changing the world’s climate”.

In the 1970s scientists working for the oil companies privately confirmed to their employers that their research showed continued fossil fuel burning would dangerously raise global temperatures. The oil companies kept the information tightly under wraps for decades.

By 1982 an Exxon team had produced a chart predicting – though again confidentially – the increases in CO2 levels in the atmosphere over time. When the chart came to light in 2019, scientists realised that the team had, in fact, correctly plotted contemporary CO2 levels – at 415 parts per million – in what was then 37 years into the future. The Exxon team had also correctly predicted what effect this would have on global temperatures: a disastrous rise of just below 1ºC.

In 1988 Nasa scientist James Hansen testified to the US Senate that he was 99 per cent certain global warming was already under way. His sounding of the alarm sparked for the first time headlines in mainstream media.

In response, the fossil fuel industry began aggressively funding “independent” think-tanks to spread disinformation, and create doubt about the established science.

In 2026, after more than a century of evidence-based warnings, all those predictions have been fully and catastrophically borne out – with heat records being toppled almost daily across western Europe. Drought and wild fires are the result.

And this isn’t even the worst of it. Things are going to get a whole lot hotter, and lot scarier, in the years and decades ahead.

Yet here we are, a century on, still hearing variations of the same arguments of denial promoted in the mainstream from the terminally dim-witted and serially dishonest.

When I was in my early twenties, in the late 1980s, it was common to hear climate change being dismissed as a “theory” and a hoax, one supposedly cooked up by a mix of socialists hoping to bring down capitalism and a group of rapidly emerging new specialists – climate scientists – eager for funding and prestige.

We now know that the strongest evidence for climate change was actually proposed not by socialists, or even by the new breed of climate scientist, but by research conducted by the fossil fuel industries themselves. Industry executives accepted the evidence presented to them as scientifically sound decades ago, and they then worked night and day to keep the public ignorant of their findings.

The Global Climate Coalition was formed in 1989 – secretly backed by Exxon, Texaco, and BP – and served as a powerful “independent” lobby group. When its own technical advisers concluded in 1995 that the science of global warming could not be denied, the coalition aggressively suppressed the report.

Another group, Informed Citizens for the Environment, set up by coal and utility companies, used advertising blitzes targeted at economically precarious groups to persuade them climate action would be harmful to their household finances.

A leaked 1998 internal memo from the American Petroleum Institute mapped out another multi-million dollar strategy, funding independent-seeming scientists to inject skepticism into mainstream debate in the media.

The goal of promoting these scientists would be to make “average citizens” and the media “understand (recognise) uncertainties in climate science”. “Victory” would be achieved, according to the memo, when climate doubt became “the conventional wisdom”.

These fake think tanks helped organise letter-writing campaigns, inundating politicians, to make it appear that there was a groundswell of opposition to any action on the climate crisis.

Remember, the oil industry launched these campaigns to deceive the public and journalists even though its own scientists had demonstrated many years earlier that continued fossil fuel burning would have catastrophic consequences.

‘Maverick’ science

The promotion of climate change as a “hoax” is among the weirdest in history. Which is why only the most foolish deniers still cling to it. Nowadays most have switched scripts. Yes, climate change is happening, they agree, but the climate has always changed – and that change has nothing to do with human activity.

Except, mainstream science predicted decades ago precisely the outcomes we are experiencing now, and on exactly the timeline we see unfolding. That is one very astounding, and very improbable, coincidence.

Indeed, climate does change. But it does so on a planetary timescale across centuries and aeons, set by the ebbs and flows of natural phenomena, not a timescale of decades. Such rapid shifts alone are evidence of human meddling in the climate.

Scientist James Lovelock’s expertise was developed through his early work for Nasa, predicting the climate on Mars through relatively primitive telescopes to help in the development of the first probes to reach our neighbouring planet. Nasa’s first Mars missions were a success largely because his predictions were so accurate.

By the early 2000s, Lovelock had become a major pessimist on the consequences for life on Earth of our inaction to curb carbon emissions. In an interview with the Guardian 18 years ago, he warned that “in 20 years global warming will hit the fan”. In fact, like other climate scientists, Lovelock turned out to be a little too optimistic – the shit has hit the fan a couple of years earlier than he expected.

Let us note, the Guardian – historically considered the corporate outlet most open to the climate “debate” – dismissed him then as a “maverick”, a polite way of calling him a “crank”.

Meanwhile, “respected” veteran pundits – like BBC favourite Andrew Neil – are still peddling threadbare climate-denial conspiracies from the 1980s. The current spate of heatwaves, Neil predicted back in May, were just normal variations in weather, even though neither he nor I have ever experienced a British summer like this one. (If you think 1976 was like this, you either weren’t there or your memory is faulty.)

Here’s another perennial from the denier community: more CO2 will apparently be beneficial to plants.

That particular prediction will prove equally short-lived. Wait for next year’s drought-fuelled food price hikes. Even the climate deniers’ climate denier, TV personality turned farmer Jeremy Clarkson, has been embittered by a record fifth UK heatwave finishing off his crops. (I’m doing my best to stifle a smirk.)

It doesn’t really matter what the content of the deniers’ claims is. Any old nonsense will do if it keeps their audiences’ heads buried deep in the sand.

Note that the very media pundits who for decades promoted disinformation cooked up by the fossil fuel-funded think tanks, deflating any political pressure for the radical policies needed to forestall climate chaos, are still in place. They are still being given prominent platforms to deny the climate emergency or throw up their hands as if nothing can be done.

The Telegraph newspaper recently opined that we would just have to adapt to a hotter climate – a climate for which, science has long understood, larger mammals are not suited. There is a reason the only mammals scurrying around at the time of the dinosaurs were small rodent-like creatures that spent much of the day underground, out of the heat. They are our very distant ancestors.

Amidst all of this, it is largely beside the point what our governments actually know or say. We must judge them strictly by the urgency of their actions. And on that score, it is business – Big Business – as usual.

Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, has been pressured by public concern into very belatedly holding an emergency COBRA meeting this week on the mounting climate crisis. His reticence till now is easily explained. Any meaningful attempt to address the climate emergency will bring him into a direct and damaging confrontation not only with the fossil fuel industries but almost the entire corporate sector.

After all, it is not just fossil fuel companies growing fat on our continuing burning of their products. Many other corporations profit from maintaining the status quo, including, among others, those engaged in transport, supply chains, the agri-businesses, pharmaceuticals and the war industries. All depend on the riches generated by the continued flow of petro-chemicals.

Yes, renewables are being promoted too, but only as an add-on – a new way to generate corporate profits – not as an alternative to the corporations’ main business: profiteering from fossil fuels.

Doing nothing

None of this is lost on the political class.

US President Lyndon Johnson was warned in 1965 about the dangers of global warming by an advisory panel who had researched the issue. He and all of his successors did nothing.

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the ultimate champion of “free markets” and slayer of socialists, spoke eloquently in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in 1989 about the threat of man-made climate change to humanity. She and all of her successors similarly did nothing.

The problem has never been that our leaders do not understand the terrible dangers posed by climate change, or that they do not believe the scientific evidence. Each government has been fully aware of what lies ahead. They did not act because the political costs of acting against the corporate sector were far too grave.

Those costs have only risen since, as giant corporations, the largest in human history, have grown so powerful they now effectively own our politicians – and our “democracies”.

The truth is that for decades the political and media class have sat on their hands rather than address the impending climate emergency. Few politicians have dared to take on the corporations for fear, rightly, that they would end up sharing the fate of former Labour leader and soft-focus democratic socialist Jeremy Corbyn.

Watch this space as Green party leader Zack Polanski – the only British political leader currently trying to shift the dial on the climate crisis – is progressively stitched up by the media.

That is why Burnham will likely bow to the pressure fomented by the media corporations – and their so-called “advertisers”, the other corporations dependent on fossil fuels – to open up drilling for more oil in the North Sea.

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Meanwhile, contrary to the claims of the deniers, the vast majority of climate scientists have been nowhere near as alarmist as they needed to be, given the stakes. As scientists, their natural inclination has been to be exceptionally cautious. That tendency was only reinforced by the pressure to appear credible faced with a political and media landscape that has consistently painted them as zealots and partisans.

The fact that most of these scientists now appear to vacillating between depression and pure fear is warning enough. They know it is now already too late to stop catastrophic warming.

But worse, most have now learnt that the system is so rigged in the interests of the super-rich that, like lemmings, we are going to continue charging towards the cliff edge, even as the climate data they have been researching and studying for decades plays out into ever-more dramatic changes in our everyday lives.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively by setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X, Facebook and Bluesky.

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively by setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X, Facebook and Bluesky.

We are on the brink of a series of catastrophes of our own making that humankind will be exceptionally lucky to survive. There is a path ahead, but being able to see it and where it leads will require – at least from most westerners – a difficult feat of imagination. It will need us to cast aside many of the things we have been taught to most closely identify with. It will demand of us a realisation that our most cherished values are actually harmful.

That is a tall order, indeed.

I am reminded of a question posed in 2014 to critics of the status quo by Sunny Hundal, once the poster-boy of centrist liberalism. Hundal asked readers of his then-influential Liberal Conspiracy blog:

If you want to replace the current system of capitalism with something else, who is going to make your jeans, iPhones and run Twitter?

Notably, Hundal soon mothballed his blog and became a spokesperson for the corporate energy sector.

Nonetheless, it is revealing in itself quite how quaint liberal arguments from only 12 years ago sound now. It’s like taking a peek back into the Victorian mindset.

Today, Twitter is called X and run not by some nice bloke named “Jack” but by a sometime trillionaire named Elon Musk. That is the man who expects one day to use his personal rocket programme to colonise space. In the meantime, he believes Muslims and their “liberal” allies need to be driven from the West to avoid a civil war he seems intent on inciting.

Similarly, liberals are no longer as excited by mobile phones as they were back in 2014, when the iPhone was widely viewed as the ultimate proof of humanity’s progress through technological innovation. Now liberals want young people protected from their screens – possibly because those screens often show all too graphically how our leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, have been actively assisting a genocide and are hellbent on destroying the planet.

Jeans … well, liberals presumably still find it impossible to imagine a good life without a pair of 501s.

The western liberal, of course, cannot grapple with the idea that jeans or iPhones could be made independently of capitalism, let alone the suggestion that owning six pairs of jeans and disposing of your iPhone every other year may not be the best use of the planet’s limited resources.

Crumbs from the table

The truth is that democracy – of the liberal variety – is not an inherent feature of political life in what we like to call “the West”. There is nothing inevitable, or irreversible, about liberal democracy.

Indeed, the West has only been superficially democratic – in the sense that everyone gets a vote – for the last century or so. Even then, democracy has been highly restricted and controlled: the public usually gets a choice between two capitalist parties, one more extreme than the other, following a lifetime of exposure to opinions crafted for them by the ultimate beneficiaries of capitalism – the billionaires who own the mass media.

And, of course, “democracy” on these terms has operated only at home. The West’s colonial “adventures” – subduing and asset-stripping the Global South – never really ceased.

For a few decades of the so-called “post-colonial” era, we installed compliant local dictators to do our dirty work. For the past quarter century, our default behaviours have returned: we openly threaten, invade and plunder states that do not submit quickly to our diktats.

In a world of rapidly decreasing resources, our rulers have decided that they need to tear up the very rules of war they themselves formulated after the Second World War. The law of the jungle is back.

In fact, western “democracy” is not an artefact of our culture. It is an artefact of time and circumstance. With kings and princes giving way to a new breed of merchant and entrepreneur, the early capitalists showed they were even more proficient at theft.

An enlarged middle class, feeding off crumbs from the table, were trained to espouse liberal values justifying large disparities of wealth as the corollary of a supposed meritocracy.

Inherent contradictions in the theory and practice of liberalism culminated in a brief experiment last century: the working class and women were given a symbolic vote – to elect one of the ruling class’ loyal representatives – in return for becoming devotees of free-market consumption.

But in an era of decline, those contradictions have become harder and harder to contain. As surpluses disappear, so have the liberal values to which our “democratic elites” once paid lip service.

Craving power

The ruling class understand the tide is turning. The world’s resources are finite and running out. Capitalism’s model of mass consumption can only hasten the end. Consumption pollutes the planet. It fuels climate chaos. It decimates other species that sustain a living planet.

But, like a crack addict, the billionaire class cannot renounce the very thing that gives them what they crave: wealth and power. Their excuse is that, were they ever to stop, others – led by China – would take their place. Their one consolation is that, cocooned by their wealth, they expect to survive a little longer than the rest of us.

Our consolation, on the other hand, is to imagine that we can win because we are the many.

History suggests it may not be that simple. Saddam Hussein, for example, enforced a brutal system of rule over Iraqis – propped up by the West – for many decades, until we changed our minds and toppled him. So did Muammar Gaddafi. So did innumerable despots.

Understanding you are being oppressed is not the same as liberation. That requires much more: leadership, organisation, collective will, a sense of a better alternative.

The billionaire class, therefore, make it as difficult as they can for leaders to emerge, for the public to imagine an alternative and to organise. Any Jeremy Corbyns will be vilified. Any student campus protests, Extinction Rebellions or Palestine Actions will be criminalised.

The role of the media, from the Guardian and BBC to the Mail and Telegraph, from the New York Times to Fox News, is to so clog up our minds with propaganda extolling jeans and iPhones that we choose to continue worshipping at the altar of capitalism, even as the walls of the temple visibly crack and crumble.

Victims of abuse

Nearly 20 years ago, eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen memorably explained how this sense of identification with our oppressors works. He compared us to victims of serial domestic abuse.

If your experience is that food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from a tap, you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on it.

If on the other hand, your experience is that the water comes from a stream … and that your food comes from a land base, you will defend to the death that stream and that land base because your life depends on it.

We’ve got messed up and mixed up in this system, where our lives actually depend on the system that is exploiting us.

And, we should add, a system that is evidently now killing us.

The danger for the billionaires, now that North America and Europe are burning both figuratively and literally, is that we – the many – are starting to wake up. We see the images of genocide and of forest fires on the very iPhones the billionaires made us so addicted to.

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Might we soon start to understand that our survival depends on identifying more with streams, trees and soil than with factories, superstores and Elon Musk?

Like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the billionaires have the means of coercion. They still have the media pumping out “entertainment” to make us identify with factories and superstores (even if Musk himself is now a harder sell).

And if that fails, they have the police and the army.

Technology – from weaponry to surveillance and AI – is being purposed further to the ruling class’ advantage. Those killer robot dogs of dystopian movies are already here. Hollywood isn’t just making up fanciful, entertaining stories; it is imagining imminent futures.

Time of monsters

If the ideology of greedy individualism is exposed as utterly hollow (and suicidal), where might disillusioned iPhone and Twitter/X fans choose to head next?

In the opposite direction.

If individualism is shown to bring only ruin, we are likely to prefer collective ideologies. If greed brings only death, we are likely to prefer cooperation and solidarity. Hope of salvation resides not in iPhones and jeans but in the resurrection of the commons – of public good, of shared wealth.

The Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci famously wrote in 1930 of the moment we are currently in: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek popularised these “morbid symptoms” as a “time of monsters”. But our monsters aren’t a Cyclops, a Hannibal Lecter or even an Adolf Hitler. Our morbid symptoms are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, the exemplars of a dying western capitalism, the men who can tap directly into our minds and those of our children.

The greatest danger is that, with climate chaos accelerating, Gramsci’s new world will not be born at all. It will be stillborn. It may turn out that the proof needed to incentivise change comes too late to affect the outcome.

But if some of us do make it through the next decades, if survival is possible, one thing is certain: the society that emerges will look nothing like the one that worshipped jeans and iPhones.

It will draw on other, older trends in our history. It will prioritise community over the individual, cooperation over competition, mutuality over ownership – the very principles capitalism seeks to eradicate.

Nation-states, the incubators of capitalism, will have to be dissolved. Organised religions, competing over whose God is supreme, will need to be replaced by more ancient, spiritual ideas rooted in living with nature, not seeking to conquer or subdue it.

If all that sounds implausible or impossible, remember this. Your disbelief may only be the noise of capitalism speaking through you. It may be that the problem is yours, for being unable to imagine more than a new iPhone or pair of jeans.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively by setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X, Facebook and Bluesky.

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively by setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X, Facebook and Bluesky.

The most important question we should be asking after Karim Khan’s dismissal last week as chief prosecutor of the ICC – the international war crimes court in The Hague – is not whether he is guilty of “sexual misconduct” against another staff member, identified as “Sarah”.

That can only be decided through a legal process – one, let us note, that has already taken place. A fact-finding body carried out a lengthy investigation of Sarah’s allegations over more than a year; its thousands of pages of evidence were then evaluated in detail by three senior judges.

Though you would not know it from the media coverage, they concluded that there was no evidence to suggest any kind of misconduct by Khan, sexual or otherwise.

Strangely, that determination was largely confirmed by an extraordinarily deferential “exclusive” CNN interview with Sarah, aired earlier this month.

She declined to give any meaningful details of what Khan had allegedly subjected her to, and celebrity interviewer Christiane Amanpour delicately avoided pressing her for any clarification.

No matter. The purpose of the CNN interview was never about excavating facts. It was designed to offer face-saving cover as an entirely political body called the Assembly of States Parties, comprising diplomatic representatives of the 125 states signed up to the ICC, entirely ignored the legal findings and dismissed Khan.

Paradoxically, it was the Assembly of States Parties that appointed the judges who had concluded that there was no evidence of misconduct or breach of duty by Khan. That inconvenient judgment was simply reversed, despite the Assembly members being in no position to weigh the evidence themselves.

We should not forget that many of these states have an investment in weakening the only international court that can bring their own senior officials to trial for war crimes.

In May 2024 – shortly before Sarah made her allegations – the ICC demonstrated that it was finally ready to prosecute western leaders for war crimes, not just those from the Global South or from the West’s official enemies, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Khan issued an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Both are accused of crimes against humanity for starving the people of Gaza through a prolonged blockade of food, water and power.

Were Netanyahu ever to face trial – and found guilty, as he almost certainly would be – a lot of other leaders would have good reason to fear they might be found culpable next, not least for their complicity in Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

The question that needs answering now is not whether Khan is guilty of misconduct – that has been decided at a political level, not a legal one. No, we need an answer to an equally political, and far more troubling, question.

“Cui bono?” Or “Who benefits?”

The evidence is hiding in plain sight. The evidence is revealed both in the deeply politicised process that led to Khan’s downfall, and in what that process means for the future of the court.

Covert war

Khan is not the first ICC chief prosecutor to face extreme pressures – and, as with Khan, those pressures surfaced at the very moment Khan’s predecessor tried to take on Israel over its war crimes.

Fatou Bensouda faced a “covert war” waged against her by Israel for the best part of a decade, according to an investigation by the Guardian in May 2024, just as Khan issued his arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

The Guardian’s report, published nearly three years after Bensouda had completed her nine-year term at the ICC, revealed that, during that time, she had faced threats to herself and her family, the monitoring of her communications, and an intimidating visit to her home.

More recently, Bensouda has confirmed these accounts in an interview with Al Jazeera. Bensouda notes that she repeatedly reported Israel’s campaign of intimidation to the Dutch authorities, but they did nothing to investigate the threats or protect her.

She also says certain “authorities” – she does not name them – warned her that she was going too far in investigating Israeli crimes and that “you could be harmed or you could be killed, or family members could be harmed in some way.”

The campaign of threats – instigated by Yossi Cohen, then the director of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad – intensified as Bensouda considered whether to open a formal investigation into Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, we should remember, predate – by decades – Hamas’ attack on 7 October 2023. In fact, though no one is supposed to mention it, Israel’s sustained crimes of occupation are the self-evident cause of that Hamas attack.

An Israeli source told the Guardian that “the Mossad’s objective was to compromise the prosecutor or enlist her as someone who would cooperate with Israel’s demands”– that is, scrap the ICC’s investigation into Israeli crimes. Another source admitted that Cohen was acting on Netanyahu’s instructions.

During one contact, Cohen reportedly issued a Mafia-style threat to Bensouda: “You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”

The Guardian reported that the Mossad “took a keen interest in Bensouda’s family members and obtained transcripts of secret recordings of her husband, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Israeli officials then attempted to use the material to discredit the prosecutor”.

The paper also noted that there were fears among senior ICC officials that “Israel had cultivated sources within the court’s prosecution division” – the division Khan would inherit from Bensouda.

Cohen was described as “stalking” Bensouda, and personally “ambushed” her in a hotel room in New York in 2018. Afterwards he repeatedly phoned her, in a threatening manner that was said to have escalated over time. When Bensouda asked Cohen how he had obtained her phone number, he reportedly replied: “Did you forget what I do for a living?”

According to the Guardian:

On one occasion, Cohen is said to have shown Bensouda copies of photographs of her husband, which were taken covertly when the couple were visiting London. On another, according to sources, Cohen suggested to the prosecutor that a decision to open a full investigation would be detrimental to her career.

Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members.

The spy agency obtained a cache of material, including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against her husband.

Israel used the materials to mount a “smear campaign” against her, but one that ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Concerted backlash

When Khan took up the role of ICC chief prosecutor in June 2021, he proved reluctant to pick up where Bensouda had left off on the Palestine case. Presumably, he was only too aware of the retaliation from Israel against her.

Bensouda had announced in December 2019 that she had grounds to open a full criminal investigation into allegations of war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

However, in the face of a concerted backlash from western states, she delayed opening the investigation. She first sought a ruling from a pre-trial chamber of ICC judges – presumably in the hope it would serve as some kind of insurance policy – on whether the court had jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories.

By February 2021 the judges confirmed what was already self-evident. The court did have such jurisdiction because Palestine had been signed up to the court since 2015.

Bensouda stepped down a few months later.

The door was now open for Khan to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes. However, the new chief prosecutor gave every appearance – perhaps understandably – of preferring to sit on his hands.

It was not just Israel that had been fearsomely opposed to its officials being tried for war crimes. Washington was equally incensed at the prospect – sometimes, it seemed, more so than over the possibility that US officials might also face arrest warrants for crimes committed by the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Between 2019 and 2020, during Trump’s first presidency, the US imposed severe visa restrictions and financial sanctions on Bensouda. Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions to the Palestine case: “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes.”

Khan might well have avoided pursuing Israel indefinitely had it not been for the events that followed 7 October 2023.

Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, its devastation of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure, and its starvation of the entire population were actions so criminally abhorrent that UN agencies, major human rights groups and Holocaust scholars were soon all in agreement that they amounted to genocide.

In May 2024, Khan announced arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders subsequently killed by Israel.

Tsunami of threats

Shortly before Khan made that announcement, 12 senior US Senators had sent a threatening letter to the ICC: “Target Israel and we will target you.” The letter ended: “You have been warned.”

Describing Israeli and US sovereignty as inseparable, the senators reminded Khan that Washington had demonstrated “the lengths to which we will go to protect [our] sovereignty.”

A 2002 law, popularly known as “The Hague Invasion Act”, authorises the US president “to use all means necessary and appropriate” to bring about the release US persons and any allies imprisoned or detained by the ICC. Those allies, it goes without saying, include Israeli leaders.

Such threats, it should be noted, are a violation of Article 70 of the Rome Statute.

Following the issuing of the arrest warrants, there followed a tsunami of similar threats – and presumably more that have yet to become public – against Khan and the ICC.

A British-Israeli lawyer within the ICC – one known to have ties to Netanyahu’s legal adviser – warned Khan "they will destroy you and they will destroy the court" if the warrants were not rescinded. He urged Khan to “climb down the tree" and drop the case.

The UK’s foreign secretary of the time, David Cameron, phoned Khan to tell him Britain would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute that founded the ICC if Khan did not back down.

Cameron warned Khan that he was “on the brink of making a huge mistake” and urged him to “take a step back and consider things”. He added that applying for arrest warrants for Israeli officials was tantamount to “dropping a hydrogen bomb”.

Meanwhile, Trump issued an executive order imposing aggressive financial sanctions against Khan and other ICC officials, including several of its judges.

Khan himself received warnings that Israel’s Mossad was continuing its operations in The Hague, where the ICC is located, to monitor and compromise the court’s investigators as they compiled evidence on Israel – just as it had done earlier under Bensouda.

Khan publicly stated that retaliatory threats and intimidation were explicitly targeting members of his own family.

Untouchable criminals

What conclusions should we draw from all of this?

Quite aside from the matter of whether Sarah’s allegations of “sexual misconduct” are true or not, it is clear that Israel and the US have been digging for dirt – and apparently ready to fabricate such dirt – on any chief prosecutor who tries to hold them to account for their crimes.

Both have indicated that they are ready to manipulate legal and political processes to ensure the outcome they desire: that they remain untouchable.

We have a template for how this plays out. Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, published details in 2010 of US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Almost immediately he found himself entangled in accusations of sexual misdemeanours – in his case in Sweden – that were similarly amplified by an uncritical western media.

Assange faced years in various forms of confinement while the US and UK pressured Sweden to keep alive an investigation against him Swedish prosecutors at least twice sought to drop for lack of credible evidence.

In fact, the US and UK never wanted the evidence tested – they were quite happy with a permanent, unresolved “investigation” – precisely because they knew it would have been unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny.

The point was simply to generate constant headlines about “rape”, turning Assange into a pariah, justifying his effective disappearance from public life, severely weakening Wikileaks as a whistleblowing platform, deflecting attention from the all-too-real crimes committed by the US and Britain, and paving the way to a political show trial to extradite him to the US on entirely confected “espionage” charges.

This has been repeated in the case of Khan and the ICC. In Khan’s case, the evidence was tested and found inadequate. So the legal process has been replaced by a flagrantly political one.

Khan has been turned into a legal pariah, even stripped of his right to work as a lawyer in the UK by the British Bar Association.

The ICC has been further weakened, just as Israel and the US have expressly stated they wanted it to be. Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, has recently launched an official campaign to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick”.

He says: “Now they [the ICC] are going to see the consequences”. Consequences of what? Of seeking to enforce international law against a key US client state.

Meanwhile, accountability for the all-too-real crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank – and actively supported by western states like the US, Germany and Britain – recedes yet further into the background.

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As each brick protecting the ICC is dismantled, a brick is added to the wall of protection around Netanyahu and Israel’s genocidal war machine.

Israel, meanwhile, is barely concealing that it has been masterminding the effort to destroy the ICC.

According to Guy Azriel, the diplomatic correspondent for i24 News, Israeli foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar “oversaw a dedicated task force and employed intensive diplomatic efforts aimed at securing Khan’s removal from office”.

Hillel Neuer, director of the Israel apologist group United Nations Watch, cheered what he called “our campaign to remove” Khan, and warned Francesca Albanese, the UN’s legal expert on the occupied Palestinian territories, “you’re next”.

Like Khan, Albanese has been searching for practical, legal ways – not just rhetoric – to hold Israel and its western allies to account for the crimes in Gaza.

Predatory states

The ICC claims its work will not be affected by Khan’s removal and that the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant will still be pursued under new stewardship. That seems doubtful.

Israel and the US are cranking up the intimidation of the ICC, which has no tools – beyond the support of members states – to enforce its rulings or protect itself from the hostility of a rogue superpower.

Currently the court appears paralysed, allowing Israel to muddy the waters with interminable, and vexatious, appeals against the arrest warrants.

Any lawyer who takes up the post of ICC chief prosecutor will be only too aware of the fate that befell Khan and the campaign of intimidation against Bensouda as soon as each tried to enforce accountability on Israel and its western patrons.

It will take a very brave individual indeed to renew that task. Khan’s successor will understand that, in any further confrontation with Israel and Washington, the US will not hesitate to crush the ICC and, with it, remove the only effective restraint on criminality by powerful states.

More likely, however, the Assembly of States Parties – the political body that ousted Khan – will privately require from his successor reassurances that the new chief prosecutor reliably defer to the principle of Israeli and western impunity. Only someone less willing to ruffle feathers stands any chance of being appointed.

That was the clearest of messages sent by the Assembly when a majority of member states voted to be rid of Khan. The short-lived experiment in creating a mechanism for enforcing international law is over. We are back to the law of the jungle.

Hundred of thousands of people around the world – more likely millions – will now find themselves even more exposed to the criminal actions of predatory states. Unlike Khan’s accuser, they are unlikely to ever get their day in court.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively by setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X, Facebook and Bluesky.

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When is it possible to declare that a society has moved from liberal democracy, however imperfectly realised, to authoritarian rule? Is there a moment when it is suddenly obvious the change has occurred? Does authoritarianism announce its arrival?

Or is it a process that gradually unfolds, where restraints on executive power are dismantled piece by piece until the tide cannot be reversed?

Is the turn to authoritarianism something that can only be understood after the event, when all opportunities to halt the slide have been missed?

And how do we admit to ourselves that we have been stripped of our most basic and cherished freedoms – of speech, assembly and protest – when we are no longer free to speak, meet or protest?

The unpalatable truth is that Britain is already far down this path. And if you are unaware of the earthquake that has been taking place, that may be because – just as you might expect when authoritarianism comes calling – the very first to be smothered are the voices sounding the alarm.

A media owned by billionaires and the state – the parties that, in an age of growing popular discontent, have most to gain from the accretion of executive power and the silencing of dissent – have no reason to illuminate the encroaching darkness.

An ostensible Labour government under the outgoing Keir Starmer has done much of the foot work to usher in the new, ominous political climate.

It was precisely Starmer’s credentials as a human rights lawyer that provided the British state with the cover story it needed for an unprecedented assault on the freedoms fought for by earlier generations.

There are few signs that his successors, whether it be a new figurehead in the genocide-supporting Labour Party or Nigel Farage’s immigrant-bashing Reform, will change direction.

The logic driving Britain’s slide towards authoritarianism is being set not just by politicians, but by a British establishment that needs to sell its collusion in genocide and illegal wars abroad and to find easy scapegoats – immigrants – to blame for its failures at home.

The job of the main political parties, reliant on billionaire donors who also own the corporate media, is to shore up these narratives.

Surveillance state

It was Starmer’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who incautiously gave the clearest expression to the British state’s vision of our future.

In a speech in January she laid out her ambition to harness new developments in AI to create an all-powerful, all-seeing “Big Brother” surveillance state of the kind foretold by George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984.

Mahmood even compared this future to the “panopticon” – a reference to 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s perfect prison: a central watchtower (the state) surrounded by a circle of windowed cells where the inmates (the public) would be visible at all times.

Bentham understood that this was not just about physical control. As he observed, the sense of being constantly observed would be a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind”. The inmates would police their own behaviour to avoid punishment.

Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, is reportedly keen to keep Mahmood a key figure in his government. But this isn’t about a single government minister.

Mahmood is the symptom of a deeper malaise, not its cause. The architecture of the new systems of control, as well as the erosion of freedoms and the cultural traditions that supported them, were already well advanced when she was appointed to the Home Office.

Whoever holds the reins of power in the months and years to come will be able to exploit these existing powers to the maximum, and then extend them further.

Once the spirit of authoritarianism takes hold, it becomes ever harder to stuff it back into the box. Only concerted mass protest can remind the state where ultimate power resides. And it is precisely this kind of protest that is being demonised and criminalised one step at a time.

Political trial

If it is possible to identify a single moment when the new authoritarianism moved out of the shadows, it was some 15 years ago. That was the moment the state launched its protracted campaign against Julian Assange to vilify and incarcerate him.

The founder of the whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks had incensed the United States and its loyal British sidekick by publishing details of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq both wanted to be kept secret.

It was probably no coincidence that, at the time, Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service and making repeated trips to meet Washington’s most senior law officers. Contrary to protocols, records of these discussions were destroyed by his officials.

We will never know what instructions Starmer was given by the US regarding Assange. But a possible clue survived the further, and highly irregular, destruction by Starmer’s department of related correspondence between UK and Swedish prosecutors from that time.

One of the few surviving emails is revealing. It shows that Sweden was considering dropping an investigation into Assange for lack of evidence, as he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London fearful of what lay in store.

Starmer’s staff, who were supposed to be neutral arbiters between Sweden and Assange’s legal team, angrily told the Swedes: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

In another email, the same CPS official told Swedish counterparts: “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.

Later, with the active connivance of the UK and its courts, the US showed its true hand. Washington began extradition proceedings on the preposterous grounds that Assange had committed “espionage” by publishing details of its war crimes.

Assange was caged in a high-security prison in London for years, often unable to meet his lawyers, his health failing, on a trumped-up, nakedly political charge.

This was a terrifying, unprecedented assault on the right of journalists to publish evidence of state wrongdoing in the public interest. And yet the billionaire-owned media could barely stifle their yawns.

Reality inverted

There was a two-fold gain from Assange’s decade-long abuse and the trampling of his legal rights.

First, it established a very visible precedent in which the rule of law was turned on its head. The roles of victim and victimiser were reversed.

Assange, who had published incontrovertible evidence of US and British war crimes, was the one behind bars. British officials who approved and hid those crimes not only evaded justice but were free to hound and smear Assange.

This has been the theme ever since, as the British state has intensified its curbs on speech and protest, with Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians often serving as the testing ground for authorising this new crackdown.

In the second half of the 2010s, Jeremy Corbyn – Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader – found himself and his supporters roundly vilified as “antisemites”.

Why? Because they tried to bring attention to Israel’s criminal actions – a forewarning of what was to come, as Israel unleashed what legal experts, Holocaust scholars, human rights groups and United Nations investigators have all concluded is a genocide in Gaza.

In a properly functioning democracy, those who smeared Corbyn and other critics of Israel would have been permanently discredited.

Instead, UK officials – the same officials colluding in Israel’s current crimes by shipping arms to Israel, by carrying out surveillance flights to guide Israel’s bombing campaigns against Gaza’s civilians, and by offering diplomatic cover – simply stepped up the demonisation campaign.

As millions of Britons took to the streets, the Starmer government – and the British state behind it – not only labelled them as antisemites but radically rewrote the statute books to criminalise opposition to Israel’s genocide.

Direct action group Palestine Action, which had been targeting Israeli arms factories operating on UK soil, was proscribed as a “terrorist” group equivalent to al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

Holding placards protesting the genocide, as thousands of respectable British citizens did, became “support for terrorism”, risking a jail term of up to 14 years.

Reality was once again inverted.

Britain continues to actively support Israeli state terrorism.

But it was those ringing the alarm – those trying to stop these shipments, those opposed to British collusion in Israeli state terrorism, or those simply appalled by the undermining of basic rights to protest – who were arrested and charged as terrorists.

Meanwhile, documents show Elbit Systems continues to enjoy unrestricted access to British government officials.

‘Fake news’

Second, in stigmatising and isolating Assange for publishing details of US and UK war crimes, the British state was able to draw its own fake distinction between “good” and “bad” journalism – a distinction the billionaire-owned media was only too happy to embrace.

Assange, whose independent platform WikiLeaks had held Washington and London’s feet to the fire for committing war crimes, had in the process shamed the establishment media for their unwillingness to do likewise.

He exposed the extent to which corporate journalists, dependent on access to the rich and powerful for stories, conspire in the covert, unaccountable ways power is exercised by the state.

The media are not watchdogs; they are lap dogs, representing the interests of the billionaire class.

The British state – and its security services – made clear they would not tolerate truly independent or critical media that could expose their hypocrisies or bring them to book.

In response, the billionaire-owned media not only hung Assange out to dry. It joined the government in a chorus of claims that independent outlets were either peddling “fake news” or serving as “Kremlin assets” spreading “disinformation“.

It amplified the pressure from politicians on social media platforms, the billionaires’ new plaything, to tighten their algorithms to hide independent journalists, and stymie these dangerous new competitors in the battle for truth.

Similarly, corporate media cheerled the government’s decision to ban Russia Today, the Russian state’s news channel. It quickly became all but impossible for UK audiences to hear Russia’s version of events in the mainstream media, as Britain and European states built the case for permanent confrontation with Moscow.

The European Union imposed an even more draconian ban – upheld this month by the EU’s Court of Justice – that makes it a criminal offence to repeat any information reported by RT, and other banned outlets, even if demonstrably true. The law’s purpose is to supposedly “protect public order and safety”.

In recent weeks, two prominent US commentators, Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker, have been denied entry to the UK over their criticisms of Israel. Uygur was due to speak at an Oxford University debate.

Enlightenment reversed

In this new authoritarian climate, truth is defined as whatever the state wants their citizens to know. Meanwhile, disinformation – “Russian propaganda” or “antisemitism” – is whatever those same states insist their citizenry must not hear.

This is a brazen reversal of 350 years of the western Enlightenment, with its professed belief both in the primacy of reason and that ideas must be tested through debate and critical scrutiny.

Now it matters not what is being said, but only who is saying it.

And unsurprisingly, the billionaire-owned, western media has endorsed this new regime. After all, its voice – representing the interests of the super-rich – is guaranteed a hearing.

No surprise, then, that this same privileged media corps has continued to meekly accept its exclusion from Gaza by Israel as the biggest crime in modern history unfolds – even now, in the midst of a supposed ceasefire that Israel keeps breaking.

Because what matters is who is allowed to speak: Israel, not Gaza’s Palestinians, whether what Israel says is true or, as invariably turns out to be the case, a lie.

In line with this precept, the billionaire-owned media has barely raised a murmur as Israel has slaughtered Gaza’s journalists in unprecedented numbers – killing more of them than in two world wars, Vietnam, the Yugoslav wars and Afghanistan combined.

The lives of Palestinian journalists – like the reporting they have had to do alone under Israeli bombardment – count for nothing in the western media because of who they are.

Genocide – the what – has been erased as a crime because it is we – the West – who are helping to carry it out.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, reportedly facing a political and donor backlash, scrapped last year its annual Global Impunity Index – which measured where journalists are murdered with impunity – after it became clear Israel would top the rankings.

Now the same committee is being accused of caving in to these pressures by raising doubts about who counts as a journalist in Gaza – doubts that will serve to embolden Israel, which claims that Palestinian journalists, indeed all Palestinians, are terrorists in disguise.

The who has to be rewritten because the what cannot be denied.

The same story is unfolding in the UK, where independent British journalists have been detained at the airport or had their homes raided at dawn by counterterrorism police for “wrong-think” about the Gaza genocide and British complicity in it. They too face up to 14 years in jail.

That has sent a chilling message to other journalists, those that lack the protection of a billionaire patron or the state, about what can be said.

Creeping authoritianism

None of this is, or will be, confined to Gaza. The upending of Enlightenment values, as should be clear by now, is part of a much bigger political project to normalise and entrench this creeping authoritarianism.

The proscription of Palestine Action and placard-holding has paved the way for the British state to designate any opponent – challenging its lawbreaking or contesting its right to dictate truth – as a criminal or a supporter of terrorism. A precedent has been set, and now approved by the UK courts, that will be hard to reverse.

The state has many tools at its disposal, some of which it is already wielding, again to no protest from billionaire-owned media “watchdogs”.

A particularly powerful one is “debanking”: forcing individuals or groups who disrupt the narrative of western state moral and legal authority out of the financial system, driving them into a kind of purdah that makes it near-impossible for them to function in the modern, western world.

Notably again, Assange and WikiLeaks were an early victim of the use of debanking as a political weapon. Washington imposed sanctions in late 2010, shortly after WikiLeaks exposed US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, cutting off almost all of its donor revenue.

Sanctions – what some describe as a “financial death penalty” – have already been imposed on several judges and staff of the International Criminal Court over the issuing of an arrest warrant against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza.

UN legal expert Francesca Albanese, at the forefront of highlighting western complicity in Israel’s genocide, has also been debanked.

In Britain, Palestinian and Islamic-run charities have long faced harsh restrictions on their ability to operate financially, usually on the basis of claims that they may be funnelling donations to proscribed groups.

But this has gradually expanded to mainstream Palestine solidarity organisations and to individuals caught up in the ban on Palestine Action.

In an even more disturbing, if predictable, development, Lloyds Bank has now debanked the Canary, a leftwing publication whose criticisms of Labour’s capture by Big Business have long proved a thorn in the party bureacracy’s side. The Canary can no longer pay staff, and its news operation is in jeopardy.

This is the same Canary that the Labour Together project led by Morgan McSweeney – who propelled Starmer to power on behalf of the billionaire-friendly, pro-genocide Labour right – identified early on as a threat. His mantra was reportedly: “Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us.”

As investigative journalist Paul Holden sets out in his book The Fraud, which documents Labour Together’s covert, law-breaking operations, McSweeney almost succeeded in destroying the Canary. He created an astroturf group, Stop Funding Fake News, that lobbied advertisers to boycott the publication.

Labour Together under McSweeney’s successor, Josh Simons, would then launch a smear campaign on Holden and refer him to British security services as a supposed Kremlin asset.

Like a bad penny, Simons has turned up again, this time giving up his Makerfield seat for Andy Burnham to return to Westminster. Simons is now one of Burnham’s political advisers.

Political retaliation

This systematic assault on the right to scrutinise the British state’s actions has been extended to the legal profession too.

Last month, Dan Kovalik, a respected US human rights lawyer and professor, was detained at Liverpool airport by counterterrorism police and questioned over his criticisms of western foreign policy in Gaza and Iran.

Fahad Ansari, a British human rights lawyer, was detained by police last year on return to the UK from a family holiday in Ireland under Schedule 7 of the draconian Terrorism Act of 2000.

Both men had their electronic devices seized, despite protests that this was unlawful and violated their privileged lawyer-client communications.

Ansari’s detention appears to be a blatant act of political retaliation and intimidation. He had made legal representations challenging a Home Office decision in 2021 to expand the proscription of Hamas to its political wing. Hamas has never launched a military operation in Britain.

For the submission, Ansari had assembled a group of experts to argue that the expanded proscription – long desired by Israel – was having a profoundly chilling effect on the work of lawyers, scholars, human rights groups and journalists in documenting and discussing Israeli crimes in Gaza.

Five UN legal experts wrote protesting the abuse of Ansari’s rights as a lawyer, warning that “such measures threaten to criminalize, stigmatize and have chilling effects against lawyers and legal associations carrying out lawful work in national security and counter-terrorism matters”.

That seems to be precisely the point. Harassing lawyers is a feature, not a bug, of Britain’s new authoritarianism.

An even more visible victim of this new assault on the legal profession is the highly respected barrister Rajiv Menon.

He has worked on some of the most important human rights cases of modern times, challenging failures and abuses of power by the state in relation to the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, the deaths of nearly 100 Liverpool football fans at Hillsborough, and the 72 victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.

He is currently facing contempt of court proceedings after making a closing speech in January that persuaded a jury not to convict six Palestine Action defendants of any of the charges brought by the British state against them. In 2024, the six had targeted an Elbit factory.

It is believed to be the first time that a lawyer has been prosecuted for contempt of court over a closing speech. Garden Court Chambers, where Menon has practised for three decades, said the proceedings had sent “shock waves through the legal profession”.

It warned of a severe chilling effect on barristers, who might be more reluctant to mount a strong defence, especially in politically charged trials, for fear of reprisals.

All of this should be seen in the context of the government’s equally unprecedented moves to erode the cornerstone legal principle of the right to trial by jury.

Authoritarian states permit no meaningful restraints on their ability to impose their will. Independent-minded lawyers and juries are just such a brake.

Protest criminalised

But perhaps the most sustained assault by the British state has been on the rights to protest and assembly, making it increasingly dangerous to express a view in the public space.

Since some two million people took to the streets to oppose Britain’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, new ways have been sought to restrict the ability of ordinary citizens to raise their voice against the abuse of governmental and state power.

Recent legislation allows police to ban protests because they are “too noisy” or cause “serious unease”. Disruption has been redefined to now include hindrance to any daily activity. Protests can be barred if they have a “cumulative” impact.

These are all inherent features of protest. The mass demonstrations against Britain’s illegal attack on Iraq were noisy, disruptive and repeated – as have been the marches against Britain’s collusion in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

By judging the legality of protest according to these selective and largely subjective criteria, the state has given the police huge latitude to decide which protests should be criminalised and which allowed. It is hardly surprising then that the police are currently concentrating their efforts on the anti-genocide marches, which highlight British collusion in Israel’s crimes.

Facial recogition technology – pioneered by Israel against Palestinians – is being rolled out too, normalising the Panopticon state so beloved by Mahmood.

Where is all of this leading? The answer is to a new piece of legislation that was hurried through parliament by the home secretary.

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The National Security (State Threats) Act gives the state unprecedented powers to proscribe groups, as it did with Palestine Action, but now without having to claim to have evidence of a terrorist threat.

The home secretary can make such a designation unilaterally, without any parliamentary oversight, simply because he or she claims the group is a “hostile” foreign state actor that poses a threat to national security or public safety.

Mahmood has already done so with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), effectively Iran’s military.

Further, anyone who works with or receives a “material benefit” – defined to include “information” – from a proscribed group can be jailed for up to 14 years. That includes expressing support for the group or sharing information it has provided.

Simply hosting an event where someone expresses support for the group could open one to prosecution, as could posting something on social media that the British state claims is a hostile foreign state “talking point” – whether or not the information is true.

Ban on search for truth

Once again, this is an assault on the most fundamental of Enlightenment values.

In the National Security Act, it matters only who is passing on the information, not what the information is, or whether it is truthful. There is no public-interest defence, such as exposure of criminality by the British state or its allies.

There is no exemption for journalists, lawyers, scholars or human rights groups. It will be impossible for them to do the most essential part of their job: digging out information, testing claims from one side against the other’s, and allowing audiences to determine the truth.

Assuming Hamas is declared a hostile foreign actor, as seems all but certain, journalists will be barred from collecting details of Palestinian casualties from Gaza’s health ministry or speak to doctors there. Why? Because the Hamas government runs the health ministry and hospitals.

Worse, it would be impossible for journalists to visit Gaza to investigate Israeli crimes – something that will delight Israel – because such a visit would need to be organised through the Hamas government. To do so would risk 14 years in jail.

The same will be true for reporting from Iran or Russia, if the home secretary so decides.

The only apparent carve-out will be for journalists who get approval from the British government beforehand.

That should ensure that only the most compliant, access-driven journalists, belonging to state and billionaire-owned media, will be able to engage with “hostile” foreign actors – in ways the British state can be sure will best represent its interests.

Under this new law, the search for truth, and potentially the truth itself, will be criminalised.

Inside the Panopticon

The National Security Act systematises all the other developments we noted earlier. It gives the state carte blanche to criminalise anyone who scrutinises or challenges its moral or legal authority.

Who should be in uproar over this monstrous legislative assault on the right to search for truth, to hold the state accountable, to act as a watchdog on the abuse of power?

If the billionaire-owned media did any of the above, news outlets would be leading the pushback. As it is, they are mostly silent – because they do none of these things.

It will be independent journalists, commentators, lawyers and human rights activists who will be picked off one by one, sending a message to everyone else to keep their heads down.

Starved of real information and critical scrutiny of the British state’s actions, the public, so it is hoped, will become more ignorant, more docile, more passive as their rights are steadily stripped away.

As the climate crisis intensifies, as resource wars accelerate, as austerity at home bites deeper, the finger will be pointed not at the real culprits – the super-rich, their media and the captured state – but at earlier victims of the West: those fleeing from the wars we initiated, from an increasingly unstable climate our inflated consumption provoked, and from a paucity of resources following centuries of colonial theft.

While we are encouraged to blame “the immigrants”, or “the Muslims”, or “the left”, or “the Israel haters”, the state is in a race to erect a scaffolding of control to protect itself before we wake up to the deception.

Time is running out on all fronts. The lack of urgency to address these crises is not because the crises don’t exist, but because our passivity has been engineered. The truth is we are already in the Panopticon, and our minds are already deeply fashioned for obedience.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X and Facebook.

If I asked you to cut off your arm, would you do it?

What if I pointed out that that your arm regularly punched a neighbour in the face so violently that it broke their nose and teeth, and left them unconscious? Would you cut your arm off then?

I’m guessing the answer to both questions is a firm, “No.”

Which is exactly why the European Union, Britain and the United States have precisely no intention of severing their support for Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, however violent the Jewish colonisers who live on stolen Palestinian land prove to be.

For decades, settler militias – backed by Israeli soldiers – have beaten up Palestinians, shot them, poisoned their wells, chopped down their olive groves, torched their homes, all in an attempt to ethnically cleanse them from their historic homeland.

The relentless expansion of these illegal settlements has left any hope of a two-state solution in tatters. The West Bank is now an archipelago of Palestinian villages and towns isolated from one another by marauding violent settlers, apartheid roads only for Jews, steel and concrete barriers, and army checkpoints.

All of this has happened in full view of western states over many decades. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, ruled back in 2004 – nearly a quarter of a century ago – that these Jewish settlements violated international law and needed to be dismantled.

It reiterated that demand in a decision two years ago in which it identified Israel as an apartheid state ruling over Palestinians. It warned states to “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assists in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory”.

And yet the West has done nothing meaningful year after year as the settlements have stolen more land from Palestinians, made their lives there ever more miserable, and trashed any chance of the West’s supposed ambition of two states living alongside each other.

Remember this when Israel’s apologists tell you to wait for the same court’s definitive ruling – in a year or two, or maybe three – on what it deemed in early 2024 to be a “plausible” genocide in Gaza, just three months into Israel’s mass slaughter there.

Not only will any such ruling be far too late to make any difference to the victims of the genocide, but the US, Britain and Europe will do precisely no more to punish Israel for this crime of crimes – one we can see for ourselves without an ICJ ruling – than they have done in punishing Israel for the settlements.

Punching fist

Why? Because most western states no more wish to impose a penalty on Israel for its crimes than you would want to amputate a healthy arm.

If they refuse to lift a finger to stop a live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, why on earth would anyone imagine they are ready to do anything to stop Israel’s violent settlers ethnically cleansing the West Bank?

The settlements are as deeply integrated into Israel as your arm is attached to your shoulder. And in turn, Israel is as much the punching fist of the imperial West’s war machine as the City of London – and its former tax-haven colonies – are the beating heart of the imperial West’s financial machine.

Western elites cannot imagine a world without Israel as their military thug in the oil-rich Middle East any more than you can imagine life without your arm.

That explains why no one really believed that EU foreign ministers, meeting once again this week to discuss banning settlement products – the bare minimum they have long been obligated to do under international law – would reach an agreement.

More than 100 legal scholars had earlier written to the European Commission’s top trade and foreign policy officials stressing the EU’s “international legal obligation”.

But as everyone predicted, EU ministers kicked the can down the road – until at least October, when they agreed to more talks about talks.

The EU has been delaying meaningful action on dealing with the settlements since at least 2004, when the ICJ ruled them illegal.

A year after that ruling, the EU issued a Technical Agreement that removed preferential trade tariffs of the kind Israeli goods enjoy from any items produced in the illegal settlements. Israel agreed only because there were so many loopholes and workarounds it had no practical effect whatsoever.

It was another seven years – in 2012 – before the EU started to express concern about these loopholes, including the fact that Israel was routinely mislabelling settlement products as “Made in Israel”.

Fast forward another three years and the EU finally got around to pretending to be closing the loopholes. In November 2015, 11 years after the ICJ ruling, the EU issued an “interpretative notice” requiring labels on settlement goods to state: "Product from the West Bank (Israeli settlement)."

Again, Israel simply ignored the notice and continued mislabelling products, or blended them with products made in Israel, making it hard to determine the provenance.

Pure pantomime

Remember, these lengthy, meaningless battles were not about banning settlement products or even imposing punitive tariffs. They were simply about labelling them correctly.

To this day, the overwhelming majority of consumers across the EU have no idea, even if items are correctly labelled, which they almost never are, that they are buying products supporting Israel’s violent campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland.

It was because of this utter farce that civil society organisations started to noisily accuse the EU of complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and demand instead the outright banning of all settlement products.

These critics have now been banging their heads against a brick wall for over a decade. They have still achieved nothing, as this week’s EU meeting once again confirms.

Even were they to win a victory a year or two hence on banning settlement products, Israel would still be able to use the same workarounds it has been for the past 22 years to avoid any meaningful impact. European consumers would still be directly subsidising the violence of Jewish settler militias and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes.

All of this has been pure theatre – or more accurately, pantomime – to suggest that some kind of administrative process is in hand, that legal avenues are being pursued, that Israel will one day pay a price for its decades-old programme of ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

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And yet nothing ever actually happens. The most the EU is prepared to do is throw a sop to its critics by imposing symbolic sanctions on a couple of dozen of the most violent settlers – out of a total settler population of nearly 700,000.

Those settlers did not end up in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by accident. Most were encouraged there by the Israeli state with offers of cheap housing, lower mortgage rates and higher funding of educational and other municipal services.

Note too that this abject failure relates to Israel’s explicit goal in expanding its settlements: to eviscerate the two-state solution the West says it craves as the only way to bring peace to the region.

The fact is Europe, Britain and the US have no interest in the two-state solution. If they did, they would have used the ICJ ruling in 2004 as grounds to ban settlement products, give that ban real teeth, and threaten Israel with a loss of all preferential trade with the West until it abided by international law and removed all obstacles to Palestinian statehood, including the settlements.

They did none of this because that was never their intention.

Their only concern is keeping Israel – their pit bull in the Middle East – fed and watered.

If Israel wants the settlements to continue expelling Palestinians off their lands until there are no Palestinians left on those lands, then the West is not going to naysay it.

Just as if Israel wants to continue deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza for death, as a United Nations inquiry recently determined, then the West will turn a blind eye to that too.

If Israel’s soldiers and Jewish settler militias want to take a US Congressperson hostage in the West Bank, as they briefly did to Democrat politician Ro Khanna last week, no western leader is going to make a fuss about it.

Israel may be a rogue state but it is a rogue state made entirely in the western elite’s image. The West’s only real concern is in ensuring its own publics don’t realise, as they watch a genocidal state disappear the Palestinians, that they are looking into the mirror.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X and Facebook.

Till now, I have maintained a very light touch in monitoring the comments and discussions below each article. Policing discourse isn’t something I like doing, not least because, as a journalist, I have myself faced more than a quarter of a century of discourse policing – first by editors in the corporate media and then by the algorithmic constrictions of social media.

However, I am aware there are downsides to a hands-off approach. It attracts trolls. Indulging bad behaviour encourages a small number into ever greater abuses. That can make the site uncomfortable for those who don’t like being verbally abused, which is most of us. And finally, and selfishly as the “owner” of this page, it can prove a time drain responding to the same kind of criticisms and misrepresentations, often from the same people, each time I post. It’s not a good use of my time.

So, I am setting out here a few guiding principles – and a few expectations of commenters – in the hope of encouraging a more focused discussion section and serving as a warning to the worst and most persistent offenders of potential repercussions.

This article may evolve, depending on the feedback. If appropriate, I will add updates. Also, if you want to vent against me, this is your safe space to do it.

So here goes:

1. No one should arrive here assuming they have a god-given right to have their voice heard. That includes me, though inevitably I have more of a say here than you do, given that it’s my Substack page. Yeah, I know: life ain’t fair.

We don’t have to agree but we should all expect a bare minimum of good-faith engagement and reasonable manners.

If anyone needs help understanding what this means in practice, think of it this way. You are a guest in my home – and a very welcome one at that, as long as you don’t put your feet on the table, start cursing me or the other guests, or throw your weight around.

If your friends allow you to behave that way in their homes, then I suggest you find an online equivalent. My Substack page isn’t that place.

2. Please stay on topic. If I want to host a discussion on the standardisation of measurements in Anglo-Saxon Britain, I will alert you to the fact – by writing about it.

3. Please do not generalise about groups based on their physical or ethnic characteristics. If you think you have spotted some generalising quality about Muslims, or Jews, or any other ethnic group, seek out a different Substack. I’m sure they exist.

That restriction does not apply to ideologies, such as conservatism, socialism, Zionism, Islamism etc. It is reasonable, even warranted, to have opinions on general features or beliefs in these ideological movements.

4. I am happy to be criticised but please, for the sake of my blood pressure, don’t tell me what to write, or gripe that I write about things you don’t think are important. Go write it yourself or find a different writer who shares your interests. (Alerting me to topics or events I may not be aware of is something else entirely.)

5. Please don’t comment: “Everybody already knows this.” Why state something that’s not only tiresome but so obviously untrue? Or insist that I offer solutions to the problems I highlight in my articles. I’m a writer and analyst, not a politician, scholar, inventor, think-tank or guru.

6. I have a particular beef with those who misrepresent my beliefs, views or opinions, whether intentionally or not. If you want to level an accusation against me, please back it up with evidence. Cite the article or interview where I supposedly said the thing you claim I said.

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7. Please don’t tell me my articles are too long. I don’t write long articles for the sake of it. They are time-consuming and difficult to produce. I write as much as I believe the subject matter deserves for it to be properly understood.

The billionaire-owned media intentionally manufacture a thick fog around issues that are most likely to damage their class interests. Dispersing that fog is no simple matter. It cannot be done in soundbites. It requires sustained deconstruction, stripping away the layers of misinformation and disinformation, and adding the context and background that have been omitted from “mainstream” discussions.

I also understand that not everyone has the interest or attention span for my longer posts. Which is why I invariably post short extracts from these long articles that should be more digestible and can be more easily shared. Their purpose is to tempt people into reading the full articles. I publish extracts on Notes, X and Facebook.

8. Finally, remember that not everyone is in the same place of understanding you are. I write not just for committed revolutionaries, who already know that power structures are rigged to make the rich even richer and to keep the rest of us poor and docile. I also write for people who are on the long and often painful journey unlearning everything they were raised to believe.

I am still on that journey myself – and grateful to those ahead of me who guided me to my own deeper understanding of the world. In writing, I’m trying to pay it forward.

You may feel you are no longer in need of such assistance, but please don’t forget that there are likely to be friends and family only just beginning their own journeys, as the world grows ever darker from resource wars, economic collapse, authoritarianism and climate chaos. More and more people see the encroaching darkness and crave illumination. Our job is to pass them a torch.

Repeat breaches of some of these principles risk a short suspension or, in the case of the grossest violations, a permanent ban on commenting privileges. Rail against the “censorship” if you must, then either come back a less angry, more focused commenter or leave and find one of the many other places where you can express your opinions in the digital public square.

Now, it’s your turn…

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X and Facebook.

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X and Facebook.

Actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes. So far, all we have from Andy Burnham – expected to become Britain’s new prime minister in little more than a week – are words.

His three-minute monologue to camera on Gaza, communicated via social media, was carefully, and cynically, calibrated.

The first minute was dedicated to condemnations of Hamas and concerns about antisemitism – designed to insure against the kind of pile-on endured by Jeremy Corbyn from the political and media class every time he spoke out against Israel.

The rest of Burnham’s piece to camera was no less judiciously weighed.

Vague contrition over the fact that Keir Starmer backed from the outset a supposed “right” by Israel to starve the people of Gaza of food and water – a crime against humanity, for which the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Worries about the resulting “humanitarian” suffering of the enclave’s Palestinian population – suffering entirely engineered by Israel.

The need for the return to a two-state solution – the very “solution” that has allowed Israel over the past three decades to devour the Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation with illegal Jewish settlements.

Oh, and criticism of Israel for “appearing” to have committed war crimes.

These words were directed at a very specific audience: the millions of progressive voters who would once have seen Labour as their natural home but have been appalled by the party, in both opposition and government, throwing its weight behind Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Burnham was keen to tell these people that they should return to the fold under his leadership.

Why? Because, without them, Labour has almost no chance of winning the next general election. Unless he persuades them he will be different, they will either stay home or vote Green.

His fear is a consolation, if a small one. Even in these increasingly authoritarian times, there is a residual power in the exercise of our vote. Politicians cannot ignore us entirely.

But all we have seen so far is that we can influence Burnham’s words. We can force Labour to do better image management. That will not save a single Palestinian, or Lebanese, life. Deeds are needed, not simply words.

So watch Burnham’s actions as prime minister.

Here are some of the minimum things he would do if he was actually serious about ending British complicity in Israel’s genocide. Remember, he is legally obligated to do all the things listed below, according to an International Court of Justice ruling that countries must honour the Geneva Convention and take whatever concrete steps they can to prevent a genocide.

He must de-proscribe Palestine Action, and the chilling impact it was intended to have on those protesting British complicity in what UN inquiries, legal experts, human rights groups and Holocaust scholars all believe to be a genocide in Gaza.

He must advise the Crown Prosecution Service to drop the impending charges against, and prosecutions of, thousands of ordinary people as “supporters of terrorism” for holding placards opposing genocide.

He must insist, more generally, that the UK police stop hounding anti-genocide activists, journalists and lawyers through an expanded and exaggerated interpretation of already-draconian counter-terrorism laws, and also scrap a new National Security Bill being hurried through parliament that will criminalise those trying to scrutinise British collusion in crimes like the Gaza genocide.

He must announce that any Briton who has served in the Israeli military – there are at least 2,000 of them – risks being prosecuted for war crimes on their return to the UK, including the son of Britain’s Orthodox chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. Equally, he must remind the police of their duty to investigate prominent figures in Britain using their platforms to incite genocide.

He must commit to ending all arms sales to Israel, not just the measly suspension of 30 out of 350 export licences that was conceded by Starmer. He must also end the carve-out on Britain’s supply of components for the F-35 jets being used to bomb Gaza.

He must insist Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, stop production of its killer drones at its UK factories and their shipment to Israel for use in Gaza – drones that a recent United Nations inquiry found were being used to deliberately target Palestinian children.

He must refuse to meet Israeli government ministers and generals, as Starmer’s government has repeatedly done in flagrant violation of its legal obligations, and promise to enforce the arrest warrant against Netanyahu, and any other Israeli officials the ICC may have indicted in secret, should they set foot in the UK.

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He must stop British RAF base Akrotiri, on Cyprus, from being used for spy flights over Gaza, gathering intelligence that is being handed over to Israel and almost certainly directing its attacks on Gaza.

He must also block Britain’s role in the weapons supply chain to Israel, with Akrotiri being used to transfer US and German arms that have killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians in the enclave.

And he must impose economic sanctions and asset freezes on Israel, equivalent to those on Russia.

Will Burnham do all of this? Will he do any of it? Will he even try to do any of it?

You know the answer as well as I do.

Talk is cheap. Judge Burnham by his actions.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X and Facebook.

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X and Facebook.

Israel’s supporters have gone apoplectic over a short post on X from the journalist Mehdi Hasan, highlighting Israel’s peculiar marriage laws.

Hasan asks: “Did you know that you can’t have a civil or secular marriage in Israel?”

He’s not wrong. Israel has banned civil marriage. You can wed only in a ceremony strictly controlled by religious authorities. If you want a civil marriage, you have to travel to another country.

Why, you might reasonably wonder. Isn’t Israel a modern, secular, western-style liberal democracy? After all, that’s what our politicians and media keep telling us.

The most popular rejoinder to Hasan from Israel’s apologists – that the situation is no better in Saudi Arabia – is not quite the flex they seem to imagine. So Israel offers the same human rights protections as Saudi Arabia? Impressive.

Others have pointed out that Israel inherited the so-called “millet” system from the Ottoman empire, which gave the leaders of each confessional group across the Middle East autonomous control over their community’s religious affairs.

Doubtless, 150 years ago the system worked relatively well in reducing communal tensions in religiously diverse parts of a large empire. It prevented officials in Constantinople – modern-day Istanbul – from getting dragged deeply into the day-to-day affairs of its often distant subjects.

But 150 years ago, Britain sent children up chimneys to sweep them. The law was changed around that time to stop this abusive and dangerous practice.

Israel was established nearly eight decades ago, supposedly as a secular, western-style liberal democracy. It has had 78 years to change those archaic Ottoman marriage laws.

Why hasn’t it done so?

All the bluster decrying Hasan’s post is a desperate attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that Israel’s antiquated marriage laws survive because they are useful to Israel.

In fact, they are more than that. They are a core component of Israel’s version of apartheid – a racist system of segregation Israel has successfully shielded from the view of western publics with the help of western politicians and media.

‘Demographic threat’

Israel’s ban on civil marriage is central to its efforts to prevent what past racist societies, such as apartheid South Africa and the American Deep South, termed “miscegenation” – that is, sexual relations between different ethnic groups. You might remember that the Nazis had unpleasant views on this subject too.

Here is the current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, opposing miscegenation in 2016:

Preventing assimilation in the Jewish state is completely legitimate and not at all racist. You are assuming as a basis for the discussion that preventing intermarriage is wrong, while ignoring the fact that most [Jewish] girls who go with Arabs are poor girls who are being used.

Former education minister Rafi Peretz called mixed marriages involving Jews a “second Holocaust”.

In Israel, such views are entirely mainstream. In 2018, Yitzhak Herzog, Israel’s current president and the former leader of an ostensible leftwing Israeli party, described mixed marriages among American Jews as a “plague” for which a “solution” had to be found – presumably by copying Israel’s approach.

In Israel, the chief concern is not about marriages between Jews and the Palestinians under occupation – which Israel and its supporters like to present, bogusly, as a straightforward “security” matter.

In the occupied territories, Israel uses far blunter methods than laws to prevent any kind of intimate relations developing between Jews and a captive Palestinian population. It prefers physical containment and violence.

Palestinians under occupation are forcibly separated from Israeli Jews. They are hemmed into their own tightly confined ghettoes by Israel’s network of steel and concrete barriers; by the Israeli army; by checkpoints; by separate, apartheid roads in the West Bank; and by Jewish militias living on stolen lands in so-called “settlements”.

There is little chance of interaction, let alone intermarriage, in such circumstances – except when Israeli soldiers or armed Jewish settlers come rampaging into Palestinian communities to destroy crops, kill livestock, poison wells, torch homes and cars, and beat up – and sometimes kill – the inhabitants.

Nonetheless, there is still a potential vulnerability in Israel’s system of segregation.

In 1948, Israel expelled 80 per cent of the Palestinian population from their homes and lands in an area that was henceforth to be called, not Palestine, but the “Jewish” state of Israel.

A few Palestinians remained, however, inside those borders – mostly from oversight or error. Despite covert efforts by Israel for several years after the 1948 war to force them out of the state, its officials soon came under international pressure to give these stranded Palestinians citizenship – even if in practice, as we shall see, this conferred on them very inferior rights.

Even today, Israel is extremely worried about a supposed threat from its third-class Palestinian “citizens” – officially termed “Israel’s Arabs”. Given a higher birth rate, their numbers have grown exponentially over eight decades. They now comprise a fifth of Israel’s population.

Israeli journalists, academics and politicians, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, regularly call the country’s Palestinian citizens a “demographic threat”, and endlessly worry about the “Palestinian womb”.

No state of all its citizens

But Israel faces a countervailing pressure. If it makes its treatment of Palestinian citizens too obviously racist and oppressive, some outsiders might start to realise it is not the secular western-style liberal democracy it claims to be.

You will hear the pro-Israel lobby in the West tell you that so-called “Israeli Arabs” have exactly the same rights as Israel’s Jewish population, guaranteed by Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That is not even remotely true.

Adalah, a leading legal rights group in Israel, has a database showing more than 70 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jewish citizens and Palestinian citizens. These laws form the core of Israel’s apartheid system.

Israel’s Basic Laws, a sort of constitution, explicitly exclude any principle of civic equality. Every attempt by a Palestinian party in Israel to get a debate in the parliament on Israel becoming a “state of all its citizens” – that is, a liberal democracy – is barred from discussion. And in 2018 the Israeli government passed a Nation-State Law declaring that Israel belongs exclusively to the Jewish people, not to all citizens who live there.

As with Palestinians under occupation, Israel has almost entirely confined its Palestinian citizens to their own segregated, underfunded, under-resourced communities (townships) on less then 3 per cent of the country’s territory.

A small minority of Palestinian citizens inside Israel live in segregated, deprived neighbourhoods of what are misleadingly termed “mixed” cities. Other Palestinian citizens, the most oppressed of all, live in communities inhabited by their families for centuries but which have been criminalised by an Israeli state that refuses to recognise them.

Many hundreds of Jewish rural communities, by contrast, operate effectively as exclusive membership clubs. They have the power to exclude Palestinian citizens – a right they take full advantage of.

Separate planning structures ensure massively overcrowded Palestinian communities inside Israel are unable to build new homes and expand. Palestinian children are schooled in a separate and much inferior education system.

For the who wish to dig deeper, I have written a lengthy essay setting out the details of Israel’s apartheid system here.

The ban on civil marriage inside Israel’s borders is not usually cited, even by critics, as an example of its apartheid system of rule. But the ban persists because it is the ideal way to conceal segregation under the veneer of equal treatment.

Israel’s Palestinian citizens must marry in ceremonies conducted by their religious community’s leaders: by Muslim clerics, or by various Christian churches, or by the Druze clergy.

It is the same for Jews in israel. They must be married by an Orthodox rabbi.

So everyone faces the same restrictions. But the point is this: the equality of treatment ensures very unequal outcomes. It is designed that way.

Fascist thugs

Inside Israel, intermarriage is only possible if one party can convert to their partner’s religion.

Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate makes it impossible for Palestinians under occupation to convert to Judaism in Israel, with the head of its conversion authority stating in 2016 that any such applicants are rejected “without review because of their ethnic origin”.

Meanwhile, Israel makes it almost as difficult for anyone else considered a non-Jew to convert to Judaism, most especially Palestinian citizens. Over decades, there have been only a handful of such cases.

In practice, this means that in any relationship between a Palestinian citizen of Israel and an Israeli Jew, it almost always falls to the Israeli Jew to convert to the religion of the Palestinian citizen, whether a Muslim, Christian or Druze. That entails the Jewish partner losing their Jewish status and the many consequential privileges inside Israel that derive from that status.

Israel has found this is a much better solution than apartheid South Africa’s, where blacks and whites were explicitly barred by law from marrying. Israel can achieve the same result more quietly.

Given the entirely segregated structure of Israeli society, and the strong social taboos among Israeli Jews on “miscegenation”, the number of intermarriages in Israel between Jews and Palestinian citizens barely reaches double digits each year.

There are even groups like Lehava – Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan – that go around beating up Palestinians caught anywhere near the Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem and terrorising any young Jewish women suspected of being romantically involved with a Palestinian. Lehava hold noisy and disruptive protests to shame the odd Jewish woman who converts and marries a Palestinian citizen.

All of this happens with a quiet wink from the authorities. The current police minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, has long been a patron of the fascist, Jewish supremacist thugs of Lehava.

In the rare cases of a Jew converting and marrying a Palestinian citizen, the Palestinian partner faces innumerable legal and social obstacles to integrating into a Jewish community to which they do not belong.

Instead, the Jewish partner moves to a Palestinian community – an Israeli version of a township like Soweto – and educates their children inside the vastly inferior “Arab” school system. The former Jew loses most of the ethnic privileges they previously enjoyed inside the world’s only “Jewish” state.

Faced with this as their future, such couples often seize the opportunity for neither to convert and instead marry and live abroad.

Unwelcome guests

None of these difficulties are accidental. It is exactly how you would expect an apartheid system that prefers to obscure its apartheid character to structure its laws – and thereby help its lobby in the West, including the western political and media class, to claim that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

Israel learnt from the mistakes of the old South Africa. It mastered the modern arts of public relations – or at least it did until Benjamin Netanyahu tore up the script by erasing Gaza.

Inside Israel, the apartheid system extends far beyond marriage laws to touch all areas of life.

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Here is another way Israel has obscured its apartheid system – again not in the occupied territories, but inside Israel itself.

The same system that denies Israelis the possibility of a civil or secular marriage also refuses to recognise that they have any kind of civil or secular identity, simply as Israelis. By law, everyone in Israel must belong to a confessional group, identified as a Jew, Muslim, Christian or Druze.

Which makes sense of another little-known fact about Israel: Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own – in this case, Israeli – nationality. Why? For the simple reason that, were Israelis to share a common national identity, it would be much harder for the Israeli state to operate its apartheid system.

Israeli nationality exists only as a fiction on Israeli passports to allow the population to travel internationally. Inside Israel, everyone is identified by their confessional group.

In Israel, “Jewish” is treated as a nationality. Remember the 2018 Nation State Law. What it declared is that the state of Israel belongs exclusively to the “nation” of Jews – that is, to every Jew around the globe, not just those living in Israel.

Muslims and Christians are lumped together into a similarly artificial “Arab” nationality, while the Druze have their own, different nationality. The same Nation State Law makes clear that the state of Israel does not belong to these other, non-Jewish “nations”, despite their families having lived on the same lands for centuries. Palestinian citizens are nothing more than guests – and unwelcome ones at that.

This segregation carries through to Israel’s ID cards. These cards, which must be carried at all times, used to include a section that expressly showed the “nationality” of each Israeli. But this section attracted uncomfortable scrutiny during a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by a group of dissident Israelis seeking recognition of an Israeli nationality. Officials removed the category from the card. However, Israel’s population register still includes a nationality classification.

In addition to Jew, Arab and Druze, there are more than 120 other categories to deal with all the anomalies. I was just one such anomaly after I married a Palestinian Christian and entered a lengthy and difficult naturalisation process. My nationality was classed as “British”.

Why all this complexity? Why all this unique weirdness?

Because Israel needs to conceal its system of apartheid. The old South Africa simply said: one law for whites and another for blacks.

Israel knows this no longer plays well. So it has devised a convoluted, baffling system that few understand as a way to avoid attracting attention and criticism.

Special Jewish rights

So let’s end with just one example of how Israel’s apartheid system works in practice.

Notionally, Israel confers on all its citizens – Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze – equal rights as citizens. But with a sleight of hand, it then undermines those equal rights by conferring superior “national” rights on one group only, Jews. If there is a conflict between a citizenship right and a Jewish “national” right, you’ve probably already guessed that the Jewish national right takes precedence.

Education is a good illustration. All Israeli citizens enjoy a right to have their children educated, because education is a citizenship right. But lots of veiled manoeuvres – like extra budgets for National Priority Areas, special subsidies for Jewish religious schools, funding from the diaspora, and bigger tax disbursements from central government for Jewish local authorities – mean Jewish schools are far better funded than “Arab” schools.

Education for Israel’s Palestinian citizens has been underfunded for eight decades. So even though Israel’s apologists will claim the funding gaps are slowly narrowing, the continuing shortfall simply compounds a decades-long historical injustice. Arab schools are so far behind they can never catch up without aggressive additional funding Israel clearly has no intention of ever providing them with.

There are massive shortages of classrooms and staff in dilapidated school buildings. Old books are often grossly outdated and poorly translated into Arabic by the state. Palestinian educational leaders have no input into the curriculum the community’s children are taught. There are strict controls by Jewish (usually racist) officials over what can be taught and who can teach. And on top of all this, huge cultural biases in qualifying tests make it far harder for Palestinian citizens to gain entry to universities in Israel.

There are many other problems in education. For example, nearly one in 10 Palestinian children in Israel live in historic communities built on lands that the Israeli state now wishes to “Judaise” – reserve for the Jewish population – and are therefore denied all recognition.

Treated like criminals, these children rarely have schools in their communities because no permanent buildings are allowed. What buildings there are cannot be connected to the electricity or water grids. Even children of kindergarten age must typically travel long distances – sometimes close to 60 km a day – to get to a licensed school.

The forms of discrimination in education alone are endless. But they do not stop there. The discrimination is replicated in all major facets of life for Israel’s more than 2 million Palestinian citizens through these conceptual and legal contortions over religion, citizenship and nationality.

None of this should be a surprise. It is exactly what you would expect in an apartheid state like Israel.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X and Facebook.

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[First published by Middle East Eye]

Keir Starmer’s announcement on Monday that he was stepping down as Labour leader – and therefore as Britain’s prime minister – is a remarkable turnaround for the man whose election victory less than two years ago was uniformly heralded as a triumph.

In fact, Starmer rode into 10 Downing Street on a grand deception, propped up by the UK’s establishment media, that has proven the key to his undoing.

This was a disaster foretold. And Andy Burnham, his likely successor, could well find himself in the same boat a year or two hence – unless he radically rethinks his party’s strategy on a range of domestic and foreign-policy issues.

Labour won by a landslide in 2024, gaining around two-thirds of the parliamentary seats on a third of the national turnout, thanks to the UK’s dysfunctional first-past-the-post electoral system. Starmer enjoyed the backing of scarcely a fifth of eligible voters, in what was the second-lowest turnout since 1885.

By contrast, Starmer’s much more leftwing predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn – roundly dismissed by mainstream media as “unelectable” – secured 40 percent of the vote in 2017. It was the party’s biggest surge in votes since 1945.

Labour’s huge haul of seats in 2024 did not indicate widespread approval of the party’s uninspiring programme, nor was it a broad endorsement of Starmer as leader. It chiefly reflected disunity on the right.

The outgoing Conservative government had lost much of its appeal after 14 years of misrule and an austerity politics that, as became ever clearer, was siphoning money from the public coffers into the pockets of the party’s donors.

As a result, the right split, with many traditional Tory voters either staying home or straying to the insurgent far-right Reform party, whose core policy is to blame immigrants for the dismal state of the nation.

Passionless politics

Long before the election campaign, Starmer had ditched the 10 pledges he made to secure the party leadership – promises that echoed the leftwing policies that had brought Corbyn within a whisker of winning the 2017 election.

Instead, Starmer presented Labour, and himself, as a safe pair of hands to steer Britain on a not-dissimilar course from the Conservatives, but without the corruption and “nastiness”. It was a passionless, visionless approach to politics that – along with dishonesty – would serve as his trademark.

In opposition, Starmer promoted an image of himself as Mr Rules, drawing on his previous role as head of Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service.

His campaign slogans, contrasting himself to the Tories, included: “Root out 14 years of rot” and “no more revolving doors”, along with commitments to “crack down on cronyism” and “restore standards in public life”.

Once in power, and under greater scrutiny, Starmer was quickly outed as a hypocrite of the first order. Revelations showed he had been showered with more than £100,000 ($132,000) in gifts and freebies, including clothes and designer spectacles, a personal shopper for his wife, and lavish corporate hospitality, with tickets to Arsenal matches and Taylor Swift concerts. One top donor also loaned him an £18 million central London penthouse so that, Starmer claimed, his son could study for exams in peace.

Starmer promoted his version of Labour as the “party of change”. But this looked all too similar to the kind of sleaze familiar from years of Conservative rule.

There was a reason for that. After Starmer unceremoniously booted Corbyn out of the party in late 2020, he began driving out the record numbers of members who had joined during his predecessor’s tenure. They had been attracted to Labour by Corbyn’s promises of a democratic socialism that would reverse austerity, and of a foreign policy that would place ethical considerations above war profits.

As the new leader, Starmer launched a large-scale purge, using the same weaponised antisemitism claims that had brought down Corbyn. The Labour bureaucracy suspended and expelled party members, including a disproportionate number of Jews, who were critical of Israeli abuses of the Palestinian people.

By early 2023, Starmer was telling the party’s leftwing members to go. “If you don’t like the changes we have made, I say the door is open and you can leave,” he declared.

They took him at his word and departed.

Narrow interests

Later, when the Green Party elected a new progressive leader in Zack Polanski, former Labour members hurried to swell its ranks. No one in the media cared to note that these political refugees, smeared as “antisemites” while in Labour, were enthusiastically signing up to the only major British party with a Jewish leader.

A reinvigorated Green Party would go on to deliver knockout electoral blows to Starmer this year, further battering his already-diminished authority. Polanski’s party trounced Labour in the Gorton and Denton by-election in late February, and then seized many supposedly safe Labour seats in the local elections that followed in May.

In the 2023 speech in which he told leftwing members to leave the party, Starmer also engaged in characteristic deceit: “The Labour Party is unrecognisable from 2019 [under Corbyn],” he averred, “and it will never go back. It will never again be a party captured by narrow interests.”

The supposed “narrow interests” he was referring to were the popular, democratic socialist policies that Corbyn had campaigned for in 2017, which nearly won him that election.

In fact, it was Starmer, not Corbyn, who ensured Labour was “captured by narrow interests”. The loss of leftwing members shrunk Labour’s income precipitously. No matter; Starmer’s aim was to rely instead on the same corporate donors that funded the Conservative Party.

Big Business was wined and dined, as were donors who barely hid the fact that Israel was their main political priority. As a result, Starmer’s Labour government looked and acted little differently than its Tory predecessor.

Starmer lost no time in deflating expectations after winning his landslide victory in summer 2024. He issued dire warnings that state coffers were bare after years of Tory misrule. He was soon imposing swingeing austerity cuts that even the Conservatives had not dared to introduce. At the same time, he made sure to keep Big Business happy.

Particularly unpopular were his abolition of the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, and cuts to welfare and disability benefits.

Amid a cost-of-living crisis, Starmer’s decision to penalise the most vulnerable – a key traditional Labour constituency – provoked repeated rebellions on his backbenches.

Collusion in genocide

From the outset of his leadership of Labour in 2020, Starmer had worked assiduously to purge the party of its left wing over criticisms of Israel – under the guise of addressing a supposed “antisemitism crisis”.

It hardly came as a surprise, then, that he alienated swaths of the British public with his first foreign-policy test – in Gaza.

In late 2023, as opposition leader, when he had a chance to distance himself from the Tory government’s illegal collusion with Israel, Starmer shocked even sections of his party’s right wing by declaring that Israel’s denial of water, food and power to millions of Palestinians was an act of “self-defence”.

A former human rights lawyer, Starmer was excusing an unquestionable war crime. He later backtracked, unconvincingly, on the comments.

The International Criminal Court would later issue an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing him of crimes against humanity over the starvation blockade of Gaza endorsed by Starmer.

Once in office, Starmer proved no better. He repeatedly denied that the situation in Gaza was a genocide, even though he himself had argued before the International Court of Justice in 2014 that a Serbian attack on the Croatian city of Vukovar 23 years earlier was a genocide. That attack was many orders of magnitude less destructive than Israel’s erasure of Gaza.

Starmer refused even to admit that Israel was committing war crimes in the enclave – not least, because to do so would have required him to stop colluding in those atrocities.

His government continued to sell arms to Israel, and allowed Israeli arms manufacturers such as Elbit Systems to operate factories in the UK to build killer drones for use in Gaza.

British planes transported large shipments of weapons to Israel that helped level the tiny territory, while also carrying out endless surveillance flights over Gaza to supply Israel with intelligence used to obliterate the enclave.

At the same time, Britain provided diplomatic cover for Israeli crimes, including at the UN Security Council, and welcomed Israeli generals and politicians suspected of war crimes.

Authoritarian instincts

But most significantly of all, the Starmer government went further than the Conservatives in cracking down on basic and long-cherished rights to speech and assembly to stifle protests against what a consensus of experts concluded early on was a genocide by Israel.

In this regard, Starmer appeared to be extending to the wider public the dirty-tricks, antisemitism smears he had used against Corbyn and his supporters.

In the previous Conservative government, home secretary Suella Braverman had branded anti-genocide demonstrations in London that attracted hundreds of thousands of Britons as “hate marches“.

Starmer’s first home secretary, Yvette Cooper, not only continued the theme but recruited Britain’s draconian terrorism laws to further chill the protests.

Journalists and political activists who criticised the government’s complicity in genocide had their homes raided by police at dawn, and faced the threat of up to 14 years in jail for “supporting terrorism”.

Next, Cooper proscribed as a terrorist organisation the direct action group Palestine Action, which targeted Israeli factories hosted on British soil that make killer drones to be used in Gaza.

It was not just the first time in British history that a direct action group had been proscribed. In a related legal first, the judge in the trial of four Palestine Action activists sentenced them this month as terrorists, even though none had been convicted of a terrorism offence or of causing intentional violence.

A popular backlash was inevitable. Thousands of elderly Britons – from vicars and lawyers to doctors and army veterans – took to the streets in protest at an unprecedented assault on civil liberties.

In a clear indication of the deeply authoritarian instincts of Starmer and his government, the police were sent in to arrest the protesters en masse. They now face charges of “supporting terrorism”.

Meanwhile, the government announced it was preparing to scrap the right of many defendants to trial by jury – one of the most important safeguards against the dangers of state overreach.

It was hard not to conclude that the government’s urge to dispense with juries followed from the fact that juries had shown themselves far less ready than judges to convict those caught up in Starmer’s wholesale assault on rights of speech and protest.

Hologram leader

Why has Starmer been so actively complicit in Israel’s genocide? In large part, because it would have required of him moral fibre, and an independence of spirit, to break free of US-dictated policy in the Middle East.

Recent investigations by journalists show he was never going to be that kind of prime minister. In fact, they reveal that, in a real sense, Starmer was never in charge of his own party or government.

According to his closest advisors, he has largely been a hologram leader.

In a memorable quote, one described Starmer to journalists in withering terms: “He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR” – a reference to the driverless Docklands Light Railway in London.

So if Starmer was never running the show, who was?

Investigative journalist Paul Holden’s recent book The Fraud disclosed that Starmer was the creature of a shadowy think tank called Labour Together, set up during Corbyn’s tenure as leader.

In secret, and in breach of electoral laws, it amassed a giant slush fund – some £800,000 – from wealthy benefactors, including more than half of the money from a prominent pro-Israel lobbyist, Sir Trevor Chinn.

Their campaign included feeding the media endless smears associating Corbyn’s Labour party with antisemitism.

The aim was to replace him with a pliant novice who could be coached into telling party members what they wanted to hear but ignore their wishes once elected leader.

Starmer was Labour Together’s choice. He was an empty vessel through which hidden actors could exert their control over the party in the interests of wealthy donors.

Before the 2024 election, Labour Together would handpick and fund more than 100 candidates it parachuted into seats to bolster its grip on the party.

For much of this time, the think tank was led by Morgan McSweeney, who would go on to become Starmer’s chief of staff. McSweeney was himself a protege of Peter Mandelson, the key architect of Tony Blair’s Big Business-friendly New Labour.

McSweeney insisted, apparently against the advice of the security services, that Mandelson should be Starmer’s ambassador to the US.

That decision would seal first McSweeney’s fate and then Starmer’s as it emerged that both knew at the time of his appointment that Mandelson was a close friend of the serial sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

It was yet another sleazy episode in Starmer’s short political career – and one, along with his complicity in the Gaza genocide, that pundits mostly preferred to gloss over this week in their assessments of his two-year tenure as prime minister.

Why? Because were the threads of the Labour Together scandal to unravel further, they would lead beyond the tawdry, crooked Starmer project to the role the establishment media played in destroying Corbyn and puffing up Starmer, all to eradicate the threat of a mildly socialist programme curtailing the privileges of the Epstein class.

Easy scapegoats

The question now, as Burnham prepares to take Starmer’s place, is will anything change – beyond spin – under a new leader?

Britain is about to get its fifth prime minister in four years. The country is looking ungovernable.

That, in large part, is because the public – tired and cynical after years of an austerity politics that visibly serves not their interests but those of the billionaire class – now demands radical change. It wants a politics of insurgency.

But the so-called “financial markets” – that is, the super-rich – insist on more of the same: the continuation of a business environment in which they grow fat on profits and can hoard their wealth.

The globalised economy is a hidden constraint, designed to tie the hands of national politicians. It forces them to deceive the electorate about what they are willing and able to do.

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Some, like Starmer and Labour Together, promise change but deliver yet more austerity. Others, like Reform’s Nigel Farage, find an easy scapegoat – immigrants – to blame for the malaise.

Can Burnham break this cycle? The indicators are not hopeful.

One of the main images following Burnham’s victory in Makerfield last week was of Josh Simons, who quit as the constituency’s MP to trigger the by-election, warmly embracing Burnham the morning after the vote.

Simons resigned as a government minister in February after it emerged that, in emails to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spy agency, he falsely linked reporters investigating Labour Together to a supposed “pro-Kremlin” network. Simons succeeded McSweeney as the director of Labour Together.

Simons is reported to be advising Burnham on policy, and is being tipped for a place in his future cabinet.

Wriggle room

Unlike Starmer, Burnham may be by nature a politician but, like Starmer, he shows few signs of having strong convictions or a moral core.

He has already followed Starmer in moving on to Farage’s terrain on immigration controls and detention centres. He is reported to favour keeping Shabana Mahmood, another Labour Together alumna, as home secretary.

Mahmood has led Starmer’s authoritarian crackdown on speech and protest and has promoted the idea of the state running AI-powered, Big Brother-style surveillance – what she called a “panopticon“ – of the British public.

A long-time Labour Friend of Israel, Burnham refuses to call what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. He has not responded to a letter from Corbyn last month calling on him to hold a public inquiry into British complicity in Israel’s genocide.

Burnham has referred to the peaceful boycott campaign against Israel as “spiteful“.

This week it emerged that he had tapped James Purnell, a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel, as his chief of staff – his version of Morgan McSweeney.

Burnham backed the illegal Iraq war in 2003 and voted twice against an inquiry. Defending his record during the 2015 leadership contest won by Corbyn, he observed that “there wasn’t an easy answer” on the issue of illegally invading a sovereign country.

His vague formulations about “public control” over national utilities like water and energy give him plenty of wriggle room to avoid actual public ownership. One of his first acts after winning Makerfield was to “reassure the financial markets” by meeting a trio of leading economists, including a former chair of Goldman Sachs.

Polanski, leader of the Greens and the left’s new insurgency candidate, threw down the gauntlet to Burnham: “The time for half measures and sticking plasters is long gone – if he becomes the next PM, Burnham must be bold or he will be bust.”

Even if Burnham wishes to rise to the challenge, all evidence suggests he will face not only formidable external controls from “the financial markets” but insuperable internal constraints from Labour’s party machine.

Starmer leaves office with the country more divided than ever. His successor is unlikely to heal those wounds.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X and Facebook.

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Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X and Facebook.