https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEFhuxFiqFU

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Labour is set to win a general election landslide with a majority of 170, according to an exit poll for the BBC, ITV and Sky.

If the forecast is accurate, Sir Keir Starmer will become prime minister with 410 Labour MPs – just short of Tony Blair's 1997 total.

The Conservatives are predicted to slump to 131 MPs, their lowest number ever.

The Liberal Democrats are projected to come third with 61 MPs.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1xnzlzz99o

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY4bD6o4n5M

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Right-wing demonstrations have turned violent in the UK, as anti-immigration protesters clashed with police over the murder of three children by a teenager of African descent earlier this week.

More than 30 protests were held on Saturday in cities including Liverpool, Nottingham, Leeds, Belfast, Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool and Hull. The demonstrations came almost a week after riots broke out in the town of Southport following the alleged fatal stabbing of three children and wounding of ten others by Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old born in Britain to Rwandan parents.

The Southport riots spread across England, with more than 100 people arrested in London on Wednesday and a police station set on fire in Sunderland on Friday.

Protesters on Saturday shouted anti-immigration and anti-Islam slogans, despite the fact that Rudakubana is not a Muslim. However, tensions between Muslim immigrants and native British have simmered in northern England since it was revealed that police covered up the existence of multiple Muslim ‘grooming gangs’ in the region over the last two decades.

In Leeds, where seven Muslim men were given prison sentences in April for raping eight British girls, demonstrators chanted “pedo Muslims off our streets” and “save our kids.” Police officers kept the protesters separate from a group of pro-immigrant left-wingers who turned up to stage a counter-demonstration. 

In Manchester, fighting broke out between left- and right-wing protesters, with the right-wing side hurling fences and other debris at police officers attempting to separate the groups. 

Police and protesters also clashed in Liverpool, with two officers hospitalized after being pelted with bricks and other projectiles. 

Police officers in Bristol were unable to prevent sporadic clashes between left- and right-wing groups.

Video footage from the city of Stoke purportedly showed gangs of Muslim men marching with machetes and other weapons.

In one video, a police officer can be seen telling men to surrender their weapons at a nearby mosque, but no arrests have been reported. Footage from another unverified location showed another large group of Muslim men chanting “Allahu Akbar” as riot police watched from a distance. 

In a speech to the nation on Thursday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer focused almost entirely on the reaction to Monday’s stabbings, rather than the stabbings themselves. Starmer condemned the “far-right hatred” fueling the riots, and vowed to give police additional powers to tackle similar unrest in future. 

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper warned on Saturday that additional prosecutors and prison spaces had been prepared, and that anyone involved in “criminal violence and disorder” would “pay the price.”

https://www.rt.com/news/602098-anti-islam-protests-uk/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

‘Think before you post’: Britain’s slide into censorship
This authoritarian mess has been decades in the making.

BY Tom Slater — editor of spiked.

Britain has fallen. That’s been the take on the anti-woke chattersphere this past 24 hours, as prime minister Keir Starmer’s post-riots crackdown has taken an Orwellian turn. Alongside coming down hard on the violent racist thugs on our streets, a move no sane person has a problem with, Starmer has also trained his ire on the apparent cause of every societal ill, at least according to our ruling class: too much free speech on social media.

All week, the government has been calling on the Big Tech firms, particularly Elon Musk’s X, to do more to clamp down on misinformation and hate. Of course, we’ve seen plenty of both, online and off, recently. A lurid claim that the Southport child-killings, the spark for nearly two weeks of unrest, were committed by a Muslim asylum seeker swirled in the wake of that horror. But while you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who is passionately in favour of misinformation or hate, the past few days have reminded us of the sinister territory you enter into when the powers-that-be try to police them.

Since Musk has refused to play ball, even goading Starmer with accusations of ‘two-tier policing’ and feverish suggestions Britain is verging on ‘civil war’, the government has resorted to doing the silencing itself. Yesterday, we had director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson telling us that even a retweet could land you in an all-grey prison tracksuit. ‘You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred’, Parkinson told the PA news agency. ‘Think before you post’, screamed the Gov.UK X account last night, reminding Brits that ‘content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal’.

The latter post caught the attention of Musk, who retweeted it to his millions of followers. Now Gov.UK’s mentions are full of furious Very Online yanks, mourning our tumble into totalitarianism, sharing pics of Starmer done up like a well-coiffed North Korean dictator – Keir Jong-Un. I appreciate the concern, guys. But the more mundane truth is that the UK’s slide into woke authoritarianism has taken place over decades, not days – and Starmer’s crackdown on speech will be of zero surprise to those who have been paying attention.

Britain’s almost 60-year experiment in hate-speech legislation is a warning to the world. We first introduced an offence of ‘inciting racial hatred’ in 1965, in the Race Relations Act. Fast forward to today and we now have laws against ‘incitement to religious hatred’, ‘grossly offensive’ online communications and a police force who routinely harass women for calling men men on the internet. Cops have also taken to quietly recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’ against citizens’ names, when the pesky law gets in the way of their authoritarianism.

The upshot of this is a scale of speech-policing that is surely unprecedented in our history. In 2017, an investigation by The Timesfound that nine people a day were being arrested for ‘posting allegedly offensive messages online’ – with 3,395 arrested in 2016 alone. Even then, that investigation was limited to one piece of legislation – the Communications Act – and the real number is almost certainly higher, not least because many police forces didn’t respond to the survey. Greg Lukianoff, president of America’s estimable Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, argues that, on the basis of those partial numbers alone, Britain is comfortably locking up more people today for speech crimes than America did during the first Red Scare.

When people think of hate-speech laws they probably imagine some vicious fascist, being dawn-raided for airing toxic, ancient hatreds. There’s still a bit of that. But as those racist rioters remind us, while they are mercifully small in number, censoring racists doesn’t make racists go away – it just forces them to spew their bile out of sight, at the fringes and in fetid echo chambers, where they can’t be clocked or challenged. What’s more, there are many supposed speech criminals who – while offensive to some – are hardly dangerous bigots. There’s Count Dankula, the YouTuber who was convicted in Scotland for making a ‘grossly offensive’ comedy video in which he taught his pug to do a Nazi salute. Feminist Kate Scottow was convicted of causing ‘needless anxiety’ via persistent ‘misgendering’ – thankfully, that one was overturned. Christian street preachers are often arrested by the police for airing their predictably less-than-liberal views on homosexuality and transgenderism. This has been going on for decades now. Indeed, it’s been almost 20 years since Sam Brown, a student at Oxford University, was famously arrested for calling a police horse gay.

More alarmingly, the British state is increasingly taking an interest in things people say in private. There have been a few cases now in which people in England have been convicted for racist posts made in private WhatsApp groups. In Scotland, the great, sinister innovation of Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act is that it forgoes the usual dwelling defence – a feature of existing hate-speech legislation that prohibits arrest over speech uttered in your own home. Now, any Scottish dinner-table chat could be a crime scene.

Certainly, incitement to violence, true threats and so on are crimes in every civilised society – even in America, where the First Amendment renders any censorship of speech and the press unconstitutional. But ‘incitement to hatred’ and ‘grossly offensive’ speech are different things entirely. One man’s hatred is another man’s passionately held moral conviction. Offence is always in the eye of the beholder. We all think we know hate or offence when we see it, but at the end of the day everyone will draw the line slightly differently. You’re then left with someone having to decide, and nowadays that means someone like Keir Starmer – a man who until about five minutes ago thought it is ‘not right’ to say that only women can have a cervix.

The same goes for policing misinformation. Of course misinformation exists. The question is, who do you want to act as your Ministry of Truth? Big Tech? The state? Neither has a particularly encouraging track record. In 2020, Silicon Valley brutally suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, labelling it Russian disinformation, even though it later transpired to be legit. And if you’re comfortable with the state deciding what is and isn’t true then, let’s just say, you’re a much more trusting soul than most. Grimly, this seems to be another new frontier in British state-led censorship. The new Online Safety Act contains a ‘false communications offence’. A 55-year-old woman has just been arrested in Cheshire on suspicion of committing this offence and another, for her alleged role in spreading the rumour about the Southport killer being a Muslim asylum seeker. As much as I loathe those cranks who spread that bogus, inflammatory claim, cases like this will open Pandora’s Box where censorship is concerned.

The Very Online Right’s telling of recent days, that Keir Starmer has all but taken power in a post-riots coup, is obviously a fantasy. For one thing, his crackdown is being prosecuted using existing laws, passed by Labour and Conservative governments over decades. The Online Safety Act passed last year, another signal achievement of those freedom-loving Tories. But that doesn’t mean our fight for free speech is any less important, or that the task ahead of us is at all simple or straightforward. At least a despot could potentially be toppled. Normality could then quickly resume. In the UK in 2024, being locked up for saying things is kind of normal. And it has been for a very, very long time.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/09/think-before-you-post-britains-slide-into-censorship/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

The Guardian reported this week a source from within the Foreign Office confirming what anyone paying close attention already knew.

By last February, according to the source, Britain’s then foreign secretary, David Cameron, had received official advice that Israel was using British arms components to commit war crimes in Gaza. 

Cameron sat on that information for many months, concealing it from the House of Commons and the British public, while Israel continued to butcher tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Several points need making about the information provided to The Guardian:

No. 1: The source says that the advice to Cameron on Israeli war crimes was “so obvious” it could not have been misunderstood by him or anyone else in the previous government. Given that the new Labour government has been similarly advised, forcing it to partially suspend arms sales, one conclusion only is possible: Cameron is complicit in Israel’s war crimes. 

The International Criminal Court must immediately investigate him. Its British chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, needs to issue an arrest warrant for Cameron as soon as possible. No ifs or buts.

No. 2: Now that it’s in government, Labour has a legal duty to make clear the timeline of the advice Cameron received — and who else received it — to help the ICC in its prosecution of the former foreign secretary and other British officials for complicity in Israel’s atrocities.

No. 3: The current furore being kicked up over Labour’s suspension of a tiny fraction of arm sales to Israel needs to be put firmly in context. David Lammy, Cameron’s successor, is keen to evade any risk of complicity charges himself. Leaders of the previous government are denouncing his decision on arms sales only because it exposes their own complicity in war crimes. Their outrage is desperate arse-covering — something the media ought to be highlighting but isn’t.

No. 4: Labour needs to explain why, according to the source, the advice it has published has apparently been watered down from the advice Cameron received. As a result, Lammy has suspended 30 of 350 arms contracts with Israel — or 8 percent of the total. He has avoided suspending the British components most likely to be assisting Israel in its war crimes: those used in Israel’s F-35 jets, made in the U.S.

Why? Because that would incur the full wrath of the Biden administration. He and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, dare not take on Washington.

In other words, Lammy’s decision has not only exposed the complicity of Cameron and the previous Tory leadership in Israeli war crimes. It also exposes Lammy and Starmer’s complicity. Put bluntly, following this week’s announcement, they are now 8 percent less complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity than Cameron and the Tories were.

There has been lots of fake indignation from Israel and its lobbyists, especially in Britain’s Jewish community, about how offensive it is that the government should announce its suspension of a small fraction of arms sales to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza the day six Israeli hostages were buried.

The chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, for example, is incensed that the U.K. is limiting its arming of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, saying it “beggars belief.” He is thereby calling for the U.K. to trash international law, and ignore its own officials’ advice that Israel risks using British weapons to commit war crimes. He is demanding that the U.K. facilitate genocide.

The British Board of Deputies, which claims to represent British Jews, has retweeted Mirvis’ comment. The board’s president has been all over the airwaves similarly decrying Lammy’s decision.

Israel would, of course, have always found some reason to be appalled at the timing. There is an obviously far more important consideration than the bogus “sensitivities” of Israel and genocide apologists like Rabbi Mirvis. Each day the U.K. government delays banning all arms to Israel – not just a small percentage – more Palestinians in Gaza die and the more Britain contributes to Israel’s crimes against humanity.

But equally to the point: according to the rules Prime Minister Keir Starmer imposed on the Labour Party — that Britain’s Jewish leaders get to define what offends Jews and what amounts to anti-Semitism, especially on issues concerning Israel — the Labour government is now, judged by those standards, anti-Semitic. You can’t have one set of rules for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left, and another for Starmer and the Labour right.

Or rather you can. That is precisely the game the entire British establishment has been playing for the past seven years. A game that has facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza even more than the sales of British weapons to Israel.

Many have dismissed the significance of recent rulings against Israel from the International Court of Justice — that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza and that its decades of occupation are illegal and a form of apartheid — as well as moves from the International Criminal Court to arrest Netanyahu as a war criminal.

Here we see how mistaken that approach is. Those legal decisions have set the two wings of the British establishment — the Tories and the Starmerite Labour right — at loggerheads. Both are now desperate in their different ways to distance themselves from charges of complicity.

The rulings have also opened up a potential rift with Washington. The State Department spokesman has been shown having to frantically justify why the U.S. is not banning its own arms sales.

Admittedly, these are only small fissures in the Western system of oligarchy. But those fissures are weaknesses — weaknesses that those who care about human rights, care about international law, care about stopping a genocide, and care about saving their own humanity can exploit. 

We have few opportunities. We need to grasp every single one of them.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East(2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support. 

This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/09/06/why-limiting-israel-arms-sales-doesnt-absolve-uk/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.