"I'll call you once I get changed," I told my sister. "Got absolutely soaked." She said she was sorry I'd got cold and wet. "It was water, not bullets," I replied. She cried. That afternoon in Munich, I had joined over one million Iranians and their supporters worldwide to remember the tens of thousands massacred by the Islamic Republic on 8 and 9 January this year. Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi had called on all who stand with Iranians to come together on a Global Action Day for Iran on Valentine's Day, which also fell on the 40th day after the ...
The Independent reports on new forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility which show that up to a million more pensioners will be drawn into paying income tax as a direct consequence of frozen tax thresholds. The paper says that the Office for Budget Responsibility's (OBR) forecast, published for chancellor Rachel Reeves's spring statement on Tuesday, indicated that 600,000 more pensioners than previously estimated will face income tax by 2026-27. That figure is due to increase to 1 million by 2030-31: While the state pension is subject to income tax, individuals whose sole income derives from it have historically avoided ...
The government has today announced plans for a "patriotic renewal" of Britain's communities. Ministers say the policy is about strengthening social cohesion and promoting the "shared values" that unite us as a nation. Fine words, for sure. But what exactly does it mean in practice? Because when politicians start talking about patriotism in this context, it can sometimes feel worryingly close to the language of the populist Right. Too often "patriotic renewal" becomes shorthand for cultural suspicion – a politics that encourages people to look sideways at their neighbours and ask whether they quite belong. That isn't renewal. It's division. ...
The Secret Barrister argues that Keir Starmer and David Lammy are taking an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with our individual liberty: "Restricting trial by jury has been paraded by the government as the only way to tackle the record backlogs and delays in the Crown Courts - caused by years of chronic underfunding and political mismanagement - yet the government has produced not a shred of credible evidence to support this claim, nor is it interested in discovering any, forcing the legislation through Parliament at breakneck speed in the apparent hope of avoiding inconvenient scrutiny." "The electorate is fragmented, multi-issue, and ...
One by-election win does not a government make. As a queer millennial living in East London, I am surrounded by Green Party Members. To paraphrase Derry Girls, 'It's wall to wall Green Party Members, sure you cannot move for Green Party Members round here'. Never has this been more obvious than in the last few days; conversations with friends and my social media have been filled with, quite frankly, sickenly gleeful Green Party activists & supporters, saying things like, 'a left wing government is just around the corner!' and 'this is the chance we have to change our country! Now ...
The most obvious manifestation of the government austerity which has been imposed on us in the past quarter century is the potholes in the roads. However, an article in last Friday's (6th March) Guardian by Aditya Chakrabortty claims that a much more serious consequence, largely ignored by the media, is a fall in our life expectancy. and especially our expectations of a health life. He writes: Our healthy life expectancy has been dropping for years; it is now the lowest since 2011, when records began. For most of the past 100 years, the UK and other rich countries have made ...
And I'm one of them: sitting in a Band E 4-bed house worth £600k. Yet all we get at York this week is another "hand wringing" motion on local government finance (F19), same as we got two years ago. It's pathetic. It's not "making policy", which is what I always thought Conference was for. Sure enough what was then called a crisis in local government funding is now an emergency. We seem no closer to publicly declaring we have a solution. Yet the Party has a solution waiting in the wings. In 2013, our policy paper "Fairer Taxes" included a ...
Britain cannot rely solely on others for its defence. Recent events in the Middle East have shown how quickly the world can spiral into conflict. When powers such as the United States, Israel and Iran exchange military strikes and deploy significant force, it reminds us that global stability can never be taken for granted. If Britain wants security, resilience and prosperity, we must rebuild our industrial strength particularly in the North of England and Scotland while maintaining close cooperation with our European partners. Watching the escalation in the Middle East has been deeply unsettling. The region has seen missile strikes, ...
Thanks to Illuminations Media for pointing me to this Jonathan Meades video from 1989.
The Independent reports on comments by Tony Blair, criticising Keir Starmer's slow support for Donald Trump's war on Iran, reportedly telling an event: "We should have backed America from the very beginning". The paper says that the former prime minister told a private Jewish News event on Friday that Sir Keir should have let the Trump administration use British airbases to strike Iran: He reportedly added: "If they are your ally and they are an indispensable cornerstone for your security ... you had better show up". Sir Tony's comments were made in private on the understanding that he would not ...