I start with Owen Jones. In ten minutes he moves from the disastrous findings for Keir Starmer and his Labour Government of last week’s Ipsos, YouGov and other pollsters, to the unnamed new party of Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana. Concluding halfway in that since Labour cannot possibly go into elections with a message of hope, Morgan McSweeney’s team will go with a campaign of fear – vote Corb-Ana, get Farage. 1
For the remaining five minutes Owen, who fifteen months ago quit Labour for reasons he gave here, sets out his own advice to the new party. Though I’m far from convinced – I’d love to be, but fear that Jeremy, Zara and Owen have grasped neither the severity of Britain’s predicament nor the extent to which the British State has been captured by rentiers and is administered by compradors who take their orders in Washington – the man has earned the right, if only for his splendid coverage of Palestine, to a hearing.
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Speaking of Labour and Palestine, my second video has Kernow Damo with an argument more specific than those offered in my previous post – Yvette Cooper takes to The Observer – as to why Britain’s home secretary took the extraordinary step of placing a non violent direct activist group, Palestine Action, on its proscribed list of terrorist organisations.
More specific too than those offered by Craig Murray in my August 13 post, Palestine Action: “Yvette is lying”.
Disclaimer: as ever with YouTube kickers, this one trades accuracy for clickbait. Palestine Action is far from ‘crushed’. On the legal side co-founder Huda Amorri won her July 30 bid to appeal the ban (but failed to have it suspended pending the outcome in November). Meanwhile on the civil disobedience side, 2,500 have pledged to repeat, on September 6, the mass defiance of August 9.
But the second part of that kicker gets it right. Starmer’s ministry of defence has indeed handed a $2bn contract to Elbit Systems – the Israeli owned arms and surveillance firm targeted more than any other, directly and through its secondary/tertiary supply chains, by Palestine Action – to train British soldiers. As Western states grow more darkly repressive – since rule by consent is incompatible with the needs of creditor oligarchies to subordinate the environment, peace, and an economics of prosperity to the dictates of profit – let no one say Elbit lacks expertise in insurrection control.
Over to Kernow.
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- One man keen to push this message is my former Workers Power comrade, Paul Mason. See this five minute takedown of his arguments here. (A brief exchange below the line bears out my point about YouTube’s misleading kickers.)
“Training 60,000 troops a year!”
Given the UK has a military of around 180,000…….
https://fullfact.org/news/size-of-armed-forces-pre-election-briefing/
……..with the army making up about 108,000 of that number, that would be a three-year deal unless the intention is to continue increasing the size of the military indefinitely?
The question arises as to what these troops will be trained in?
Meanwhile, we have this:
https://skwawkbox.org/2025/08/23/doctors-say-israel-testing-new-banned-micro-cube-shrapnel-and-heavy-metal-weapons-on-gaza-civilians/
“Volunteer doctors serving in Gaza say that they are finding tungsten micro-cubes of metal, designed to travel at high speeds across a wide area from a missile strike, in the wounds of bombing victims – and in others, no shrapnel is left behind but residues of highly toxic heavy metals remain in victims’ systems to poison them and cause organ failure.
Israeli arms manufacturers then market these weapons as ‘battle proven’:”
As regards:
“the extent to which the British State has been captured by rentiers and is administered by compradors who take their orders in Washington”
There does exist a contrary view that the location of that controlling elite of rentiers resides inside the City of London, with Washington as merely the muscle and convenient front maintaining the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon colonial empire.
Either way, the Western oligarchy moves from proscribing armed opposition to the illegal Israeli Apartheid State or any other Western controlled proxy as “terrorism” because they won’t go away and die to proscribing peaceful protestors in the same way.
Who would’ve thought?
It’s not that big a jump from this to moving from using ‘battle proven’ systems against civilian opposition in the “Jungle” to using the same systems against civilian opposition in the “Garden”.
As matters stand, it is now beyond time for the pitchforks and guillotines.
A point Kernow makes in the featured podcast is that Elbit Systems boasts at arms fairs and the like that its weaponry and surveillance kit is “field tested”.
We know precisely what that means.
Yes, Anthony Lowenstein has set out in his book, The Palestine Laboratory, how Israel develops and sells around the world its armaments and population control technologies as ‘battlefield tested’ on its captives in Gaza and the West Bank.
Thanks Nick. At the height of the “Troubles”, in the quarter century between Bloody Sunday and Good Friday Agreement, the Six Counties served too as a laboratory. That’s one reason Ireland has been so well represented in those standing up to be counted over Palestine. It too knows the meaning of Occupation.