It's not just that we had two wasted years under Keir Starmer - years in which, with a vast majority and quite a lot of goodwill - he could have turned this country around. On crucial issues, we had two years of spiralling backwards, towards a very dark place. 🧵 theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com
It's not as if Burnham and Miliband are radicals. It's not as if the UK has stopped providing weapons, surveillance and logistical support to a government pursuing genocide. But at least we begin to see some acknowledgement that it's not mad and bad to care about the lives of Palestinians. Maybe we'll now discover that it is not mad and bad to want to stop weapons being shipped to Israel, which will be used to assist mass murder. Maybe we'll now hear that it's not mad and bad to hold a placard saying "I support Palestine Action". Maybe we'll discover we are not terrorists after all. I'm not holding my breath, not least because the author of the worst of these polices, Yvette Cooper, is still in government, and her successor in the Home Office, Shabana Mahmood, has defended and extended her draconian anti-protest measures. And yes, these measures really are mad and bad. They treat those who seek peace as a threat to the public realm, while throwing a defensive cordon around those engaged in genocide. They treat environmental protesters as if they were antisocial thugs, while the antisocial thugs of the fossil fuel industry get a free pass to trash our lives. Maybe this will change. We should hope for it and press for it. But at least, or so I believe, we now have a Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary who don't seem to want the world to become an even crueller, harsher, more dangerous place than it is already. And that's a welcome shift. The thread on one page: skywriter.blue
skywriter.blue