I go this message online from the Labour party’s Yvette Cooper. I’ve posted any number of articles criticising – rightly – the Labour party and Keir Starmer’s Toryism and destructive and vindictive factionalism. But this time I think the party is doing the right thing in its plan to cut knife crime. That is, if they go along with it and Starmer doesn’t think it’s another policy that’ll get him criticised and which Tory voters won’t like.
‘David, yesterday, the government let young people down again.
Knife crime has gone up by a shocking 77% since 2015, and the number of fatal stabbings has hit a record high, with the steepest increases in our towns and suburbs.
Too many young lives are being lost, too many families and communities left distraught.
Yet the Conservatives have repeatedly and shamefully failed to act.
Ministers have said 16 times that they will ban the online sale of dangerous knives. Yet even with the changes they belatedly announced yesterday, it will still be easier to buy dangerous machetes and ninja swords online than it is to buy a kitchen knife on the high street.
Enough is enough. We need urgent action to save lives. Only Labour is determined to do that.
Keir Starmer has made it part of our mission for the next Labour government to halve knife crime. That is why we have set out an urgent plan:
Get knives off our streets with an urgent crackdown on the possession and sale of lethal knives, and bring in new and stronger laws to crack down on dangerous knife sales
Crackdown on criminal gangs who are luring teenagers into violence, by making child criminal exploitation an offence and strengthening the serious and organised crime strategy
Community prevention work and early intervention to stop young people being drawn into crime through a major new Young Futures Programme including new youth hubs and mental health support
Immediate interventions and serious consequences for young people caught carrying a knife with referrals to Youth Offending Teams, sanctions and bespoke intervention plans
Create a new cross-government coalition to end knife crime, bringing together political and community leaders to help tackle the issue and keep young people safe
With the Tories, dangerous knives remain on our streets. It’s yet another crushing example of us all paying the price for Tory sticking plaster politics.
Only Labour will restore security to Britain’s streets with a mission to halve serious violence and rebuild confidence in policing and the criminal justice system.
Labour will make cutting knife crime a priority to make our streets safe – for you, your family, and your community.
Here’s another piece from Daily Dose of Democracy, reporting how Trump appears to have funnelled money from the sale of Venezuela’s oil to accounts in Qatar. Who’d have thought Trump would personally enrich himself from Maduro’s kidnapping and the seizure of control over the country’s oil. I’m sure that money’s only resting in his account for safety and he’ll pay it back later.
Over the other side of the world, the Iranian revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the theocratic dictatorship are calling on him to come to their aid. If he does, he will be doing the right thing. But they should just remember what happened in Iraq and hang on to their oil, because he’ll definitely want a slice of that. The last democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mossadeq, was overthrown in a CIA-backed royalist coup because he nationalised the country’s oil.
‘Trump is reportedly funneling money from Venezuelan oil sales to a bank account in Qatar In news surely no one could possibly have seen coming, Donald Trump is now funneling proceeds from the sale of seized Venezuelan oil to a bank account in — wouldn’t you know it — Qatar, according to Semafor. The Trump regime’s first sale of Venezuelan oil was valued at $500 million, and that money is reportedly being held in multiple bank accounts, the biggest of which is in Qatar. A Trump official laughably described Qatar as a neutral location where money can flow freely with US approval and without risk of seizure. Risk of seizure by whom, you might be wondering? Great question! “There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, told Semafor. “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.” Correct! Friendly reminder that Qatar “gifted” Donald a $400 MILLION luxury jet last year, right around the time Trump’s family business secured a deal to build a luxury golf resort in the petrol state. Any questions?’
A lot of people have been suggesting that the real reason the Orange Generalissimo wants to get his grubby hands on Greenland is because of its mineral wealth. The argument that he wants it for US national security simply don’t make sense. There’s a video on YouTube of an expert on a British TV interview knocking it down one point after another. First of all, there are already 18 US bases on Greenland. The US has never asked for more, even though the Greenlanders would be perfectly willing to let them. There also aren’t Chinese and Russian ships nosing around Greenland’s waters. There are, however, plenty of Chinese and Russian ships nosing around the American waters off Alaska.
I got this piece yesterday, reproduced from the American radical magazine Jacobin, from the Democrat newsletter Daily Dose of Democracy. It clearly demonstrates that behind Trump’s belligerent demands for Greenland to be handed over to America are the US big tech companies, who have their eyes very firmly set on the precious minerals locked beneath its icecap.
‘The tech billionaires behind Trump’s Greenland push Lois Parshley, Jacobin: “President Donald Trump started his second term with his sights set on Greenland. When Trump first proposed buying the arctic nation during his first administration, it was treated like a joke. But in a phone call last week with Denmark’s prime minister, who controls the autonomous territory’s foreign policy, the president doubled down on his efforts to seize power. In the ‘aggressive and confrontational’ conversation, Trump threatened tariffs if he didn’t get his way. In a news conference earlier this month, he also refused to rule out the use of military force. Now Denmark is taking him seriously: on Monday, it announced a $2 billion military expansion in the Arctic. Though the island is not for sale, the president emphasizedGreenland’s importance to US national security. Left unspoken: a US takeover could weaken the country’s mining laws and ban on private property, aiding Trump donors’ plans to profit from the island’s mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno-city. The president’s renewed intention to take over Greenland has reignited debates over its sovereignty, as the country grapples with the trade-offs between economic opportunity and independence from Denmark. As the country’s glaciers recede, it’s also facing sweeping climate-driven transformations, threatening traditional industries like fishing and hunting and exposing valuable mineral resources. These shifts have prompted interest from powerful players associated with Trump. Tech moguls in the front row of his inauguration, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, are also investors in a start-up aiming to mine western Greenland for materials crucial to the artificial intelligence boom. That company, KoBold Metals, uses artificial intelligence to locate and extract rare earth minerals. Their proprietary algorithm parses government-funded geological surveys and other data to locate significant deposits. The program pinpointed southwest Greenland’s rugged coastline, where the company now has a 51 percent stake in the Disko-Nuussuaq project, searching for minerals like copper. Just two weeks before some of its investors were glad-handing at the Capitol celebrations, KoBold Metals raised $537 million in its latest funding round, bringing its valuation to almost $3 billion. Among the contributors was a leading venture capital firm founded by Marc Andreessen, an early Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has helped shape the administration’s technology policies, including consulting with Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency as a self-proclaimed ‘unpaid intern.’ In addition to KoBold, Andreessen has also backed other ventures eyeing the arctic nation: he is a significant investor in Praxis Nation, a project aiming to use Greenland to establish a “crypto state,” a self-governing, experimental community built around libertarian ideals and technology like cryptocurrency. The venture is also funded in part by Pronomos Capital, a venture capital group founded by the grandson of economist Milton Friedman and bankrolled by libertarian figures such as Peter Thiel, whose own family reportedly managed a uranium mine in Namibia. Pronomos aims to create private, business-friendly charter cities like Praxis, often in developing countries where investors could write their own laws and regulations. These ‘broligarchs’” now have the ear of the president. Thiel has been a significant supporter of Trump, throwing millions of dollars behind him throughout his political career and introducing him to current Vice President J. D. Vance.”‘
I got this message from the pro-democracy organisation a few days ago. It’s a response to the assertions of Elon Musk, Reform and their allies that London is dangerous. It’s a good argument, but unfortunately the right have been able to use self-contradictory articles from the Guardian to disprove this. One of these had a headline stating that the writer still felt safe in London despite having been mugged three times. The article also requests donations, like many other messages from activist organisations. I really can’t afford to give anything, but I’m putting it up in case you fee like doing so. Unfortunately, the button for a one-off donation doesn’t seem to be working. I hope the button for ‘Support Our Work’ does include this option, but don’t feel pressurised into giving money to them.
‘Dear David,
Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, even Donald Trump. They all want you to be afraid of London.
They don’t care about our capital city or our country. They’re painting it as a crime cesspit full of “no-go zones” because it suits their personal agendas.
They’re spreading fear and panic because it fuels the far-right’s story that Britain is broken, that decline is inevitable, and only they can save it.
It’s not patriotism. It’s grifting, plain and simple.
London is the perfect target because it’s the antithesis of their politics. Diverse, open, successful, globally influential. Living proof that the far-right’s worldview is a lie.
Last year, London recorded just 97 homicides, a record-low rate of 1.1 per 100,000 people. Lower than Paris, New York and Berlin.
So why do they keep pushing this lie? Because it scares us, and that fear is useful.
If we’re busy blaming each other, we stop looking up at who’s really benefiting. We stop noticing what’s happened to this country in plain sight.
While people fought for their lives, lost loved ones, and made enormous sacrifices during the Covid pandemic, wealth at the very top surged. Since 2020, the richest 1% have taken nearly twice as much new wealth as the other 99% combined. In the UK, the richest 1% hold more wealth than 70% of the population put together.
We’re too busy living in fear of foreign criminals and a crimewave that doesn’t exist to ask why the super-rich are funding Farage’s efforts to game a broken electoral system to secure power
This week, London’s police chief described the city as “extraordinarily safe”, after murder fell to its lowest level on record. At the very same time, Nigel Farage claimed London is being “gripped by a foreign gang crimewave”.
Fear is a distraction and immigration is a scapegoat, but while people are pushed to look at each other, those at the top keep winning.
The tactic is to keep people angry, scared, and fighting each other. Our failing democracy rewards it.
Farage, the far-right, and their wealthy backers thrive when the country is divided, while the rest of us pay the price.
If we don’t fix our politics, we will lose. And the consequences will be dire and lasting.
That’s why Open Britain is fighting for:
An end to the pollution of dark money and vested interests in our politics.
A proportional voting system that translates the will of the people into real power in the Commons.
Action to stop disinformation poisoning our democracy, and having people cast votes based on lies.
If you recognise the threat, please support our work today.
A monthly donation is the single most powerful thing you can do. It funds year-round campaigning and gives us the stability to take on this machine properly.
Short video on the history of Mound Bayou, a town founded by freed Black slaves exclusively for Blacks. The former slaves came from a plantation, whose owner believed he could get more work from his slaves if they practised a variety of skills and occupations. When freedom came, the liberated slaves had all the skills necessary to support themselves as a viable community.
Their leader established Mound Bayou on former marshland, and used the South’s racial segregation laws against White domination. The town was to be solely for Blacks. Whites were legally forbidden from owning property there. The city government was all Black, the sheriff and law enforcement were all Black, the banks and businesses were similarly totally Black. When a middle class White business organisation tried to force free Blacks into subservience by withdrawing credit for Black businesses through the banks, the Black bank in Mound Bayou kept these businesses afloat by supplying them instead.
The town still survives, but has declined since its 19th century heyday. One reason for this is that the trains no longer stop there.
This is a fascinating look at a successful free Black American town, in contrast to others that were burned down by White Supremacist. It’s existence challenges the notion that Blacks are unable to successfully run communities. It also partly supports the argument of the Black American conservative, Shelby Steele, in his book False Black Power that Black Americans would have been concentrating on developing themselves economically through establishing and building up businesses rather than going for political power. As a result, so he contends, Black America has produced a vast number of local and national politicians but seriously declined materially. However, Bayou prospered and defied White domination as it had both: a Black government and solid Black businesses and professions.
The Elgin Marbles have been a source of contention and controversy almost from the moment Elgin took them in the first years of the 19th century. He was Envoy Extraordinaire to the Turkish empire between 1799 and 1802, and had the permission of the Turkish authorities to study and remove pieces of classical art from Athens. The purpose of his expedition was to record these monuments as carefully possible so that examples of classical art could be studied by architects and draftsmen back in Britain. The expedition therefore included six artists to make these drawings. At the same time, Harrison, a neo-classical architect, advised Elgin to make casts of these sculptures and reliefs as without having a solid representation of these piece of art in front of them, artists would be unable to reproduce them properly. The expedition duly made moulds of them, and sent them to London.
However, it was claimed that Elgin took the marbles because he and his artists were appalled and the neglect and casual destruction they had suffered under the Turks, and wanted to save them from further destruction. The government Memorandum on the Subject of the Earl of Elgin’s Pursuits in Greece, 1811 states
‘In the prosecution of this undertaking, the artists had the mortification of witnessing the very wilful devastation, to which all the sculpture, and even the architecture , were daily exposed, on the part of the Turks and travellers. …. The Temple of Minerva had been converted into a powder magazine, and been completely destroyed, from a shell falling upon it, during the bombardment of Athens by the Venetians towards the end of the seventeenth century; and even this accident had not deterred the Turks from applying the beautiful Temple of Neptune and Erectheus to the same use, whereby it is constantly exposed to a similar fate. Many of the statues on the posticum of the Temple of Minerva (Parthenon) which had been thrown down by the explosion, had been absolutely pounded for mortar, because they furnished the whitest marble within reach; and the parts of the modern fortification, and the miserable houses where this mortar was so applied, were discovered. Besides , it is well known that the Turks will frequently climb up the ruined walls, and amuse themselves in defacing any sculpture they can reach; or in breaking columns, statues or other remains of antiquity, in the fond expectation of finding within them some hidden treasures.
Under these circumstances, Lord Elgin felt himself impelled, by a stronger motive than personal gratification, to endeavour to preserve any specimens of sculpture he could, without injury, rescue from such impending ruin….. Actuated by these inducements, Lord Elgin made use of all his means, and ultimately with such success, that he has brought to England, from the ruined temples at Athens, from the modern walls and fortifications, in which many fragments had been used as so many blocks of stone, and from excavations made on purpose, a greater quantity of original Athenian sculpture, in statues, alti and bassi relievi, capitals, cornices, frizes, and columns, then exists in any other part of Europe…..
The Parthenon itself, independently of its decorative architecture, is so chaste and perfect a model of Doric architecture that Lord Elgin conceived it to be of the highest importance to the arts, to secure original specimens of each member of that edifice…..’
From: ‘The Controversial Bequest of Lord Elgin’ in C.W. Ceram, The World of Archaeology (London: Thames and Hudson 1966), 49-54 (52-3).
I don’t really know what the solution is to this extremely long-standing artistic and diplomatic controversy, and clearly there are arguments for returning the marbles to Greece as they have called for. But I thought this extract was important as it shows how Elgin and the British government viewed it and the acquisition – or theft – of the marbles at the time.
I’m annoyed at the way the British role as the world’s policeman in stamping out slavery is undervalued and ignored in the contemporary debate about historic slavery while Britain’s guilt for our involvement in the slave trade is stressed and continually reiterated.
Britain outlawed slavery in our empire in 1833, and from the early 19th century royal naval ships were patrolling the seas off west Africa to seizing slaving vessels. As the century progressed, Britain made successive treaties with the Imaum of Muscat, now Oman, and the suzerain of Zanzibar, to ban the transport of slaves from east Africa across the Indian ocean to India. This was after Indian merchants were caught illegally importing them into British India, which officially banned slavery in 1848. The British navy extended its operations into the Pacific as Britain colonised Australia and New Zealand. Despite this, slavery has persisted into the modern world. There were 20 million enslaved people globally in 1990 and this has increased to 37 million today.
Very interesting video from the Kha-Nu National channel on YouTube. It’s of a ceremony at the Gate of No Return at the former slave fort at Elmina where a Ghanaian leader formally apologises on behalf of the chiefs and people of Ghana for selling Blacks into slavery. He states that not all of them did, and many resisted, but they had no guns in contrast with the slavers who did, and they were deceived with alcohol. He’s a Christian, and so he prays through the blood of Jesus that such evil will never happen again.
His apology is accepted by a uniformed Black American, who represents the Black man and the Black woman enslaved and sent to the New World. As a Christian,, he believes that despite this evil, God has a plan to bring all Black people together.
From the remarks on the channel itself and in the comments section that the Kha-Nu nation appear to want land for themselves in Africa. If this is so, it would mark them out as a surviving piece of the ‘Back to Africa’ movement that included the Black Panthers and Rastafarians at one time.
Understandably there’s great concern about the reliability of the facial recognition system the police and others intend to roll out in security cameras in order to catch villains. These systems aren’t 100 per cent reliable by a considerable margin. There’s thus a real possibility of wrongful arrest. A few years ago one of the tech companies in America because infamous with people calling for the scientists working in the area to be more diverse after its pattern recognition system identified Black people as gorillas. People are also worried about the effect AI is having on journalism and literature now that it is increasingly being used in these areas. Most of this concern centres around them replacing real, human journos and writers. But, as this report from Daily Dose of Democracy shows, they may also include sheer nonsense in very serious reports.
This story is funny, but it’s implications aren’t.
‘An AI-generated police report claimed a cop transformed into a frog during a routine traffic stop in Utah Look, let’s not, uh, jump to conclusions here. Sure, the Herber Police Department’s explanation — that their AI system mistakenly folded in dialogue from the Disney movie “The Princess and the Frog” into a police report because the movie was playing in the background as an officer’s body camera was recording — certainly sounds plausible, but everyone knows there’s no substitute for good, old-fashioned police work. A full investigation is clearly merited here. Who’s to say the officer in question isn’t a shape-shifter, of royal bloodlines, and/or under the curse of a villainous doctor? Anyway, speaking of artificial intelligence…’
I’ve been going through YouTube finding more information about Trump’s threat to invade the Danish autonomous province of Greenland. There have been interviews online with the Generalissimo who’ve pointed out that America already has military bases on Greenland and that there has never been any problem with siting such bases there. So Trump’s argument that America needs it for national security is total bollox. After he made the threat the first time the Danes said that they were willing to cooperate peacefully with him on this issue. They’ve never blocked America from building army bases, and were willing to let them build more, as a free nation.
Now I find the Torygraph has published an article stating that the Danish army has been given orders that if Trump invades they are to shoot first and ask questions afterwards.
Trump’s threats are breaking two of the rules of modern international diplomacy. One is the old saying you hear from the defenders of democracy. It’s the hope that if the world becomes more democratic, wars will cease. ‘Democracies do not make war on democracies’. Well, Tumpelstitskin is about to throw that one out the window.
The other unspoken view is that allies don’t make war on each other. That hasn’t always been the case, but it’s been more or less true following the Second World War. Both Denmark and America are members of NATO, but the Adolf’s Orange Spawn is throwing this under the bus as well.
Trump’s sneered at the Greenlanders’ ability to protect themselves, saying that when they wanted to beef up their defence force they added another dogsled. Well don’t underestimate the determination of small or weaker states to resist a much more powerful invader.
I gave the example of Libya yesterday, and how, although it also had a population of thousands at the time, it’s resistance fought like tigers for two decades against the Italian Fascist occupation. I’ve no doubt this is why they threw out the Italians in the 1950s, despite Tory party whining the other year that it was all anti-Semitism. I don’t doubt this was a factor in the expulsion of the country’s Jewish population, as many Arab countries did after the foundation of Israel. But if America does invade Greenland, it may find itself under very sustained resistance and its people bitterly resented as colonialists.
There are also two more examples: Poland and Denmark during the Second World War. Yes, the Poles were effectively steamrollered by the German army and the country conquered in a matter of weeks. But they knew perfectly well what was coming and how they wouldn’t be able to resist the Nazis.
They fought on regardless.
Bravo, the heroic Poles.
Also, Denmark. Yes, the German army did practically walk in there, but there was a small Danish resistance movement which did blow stuff up and provide aid and intelligence to Britain and the allies. I also heard that one German air force base commander in occupied Denmark also provided Britain with intelligence of Luftwaffe operations. Why? Like many other Germans he hated the flatulent Fascist.
So if Trump goes in, even if the country offers only token official resistance, he may still find ordinary people fighting back underground. At worst he could find himself facing a civil war as we faced with the Nationalist paramilitaries in Ulster.
How prepared are Americans for more of their bravest young men and women coming back in coffins in a war that Trump would unilaterally declare and which could not be defended with the pretext that he was liberating them for democracy. They’ve already got it. 87 per cent of the population either want to be independent from Denmark or still part of it. They don’t want to become another American state.
And then there’s Gandhian way occupied people’s fight for their independence through strikes, mass marches and boycotts. And if Trump invades, that will almost certainly come. And it may possibly be taken up by the rest of Europe.
Trump seems to think the annexation of Greenland would be a pushover, but it looks like it’s going to be far more difficult than he thinks.
The Renaissance is rightly celebrated as the age when western society moved out of the Middle Ages to form the basis of the modern world. It was an age when art, music, literature, philosophy and science innovated and developed. Philosophers began to debate and question the nature of political authority, with the Spanish Jesuit Suarez outrageously declaring that as sovereignty lay with the people, they had the right to overthrow an unjust monarch. Later in the 17th century John Locke would attack the patriarchal theory of government, and argue that the people had the right not only to elect their own representatives and formulate governmental policy, thus laying the foundations for modern political liberalism.
The invasion of the Americas spurred a debate on the nature of international law, as jurists and philosophers questioned the morality and legality of the Spanish conquest of the indigenous nations. These were based on Christian Just War theory and the old Roman idea of the Lex Gentium, the Law of Nations. This held that there were common ideas of justice held by all nations governing international affairs, ideas further developed in the 17th century by the Dutch writer Hugo Grotius. One of the writers to examine this question after the conquest of the Americas was the Spanish writer Francisco De Vitoria. In his De jure belli and De potestate civili De Vitoria firmly stated that Christian states should only wage defensive wars. Wars should not be waged because of difference of religion, neither the extension of empire or the glorification of the prince. All of which means that Trump’s desire to annexe Greenland and Canada, through military force if necessary, are morally unjust. De Vitoria’s views on international law and the just war are laid out in an extract ‘War and the Law of Nations’ in James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, eds. The Portable Renaissance Reader (Viking Penguin, Revised Edition 1968).
At the end of the extract De Vitoria places the nature of war with the context of the international community and argues for the pre-eminence of the Law of Nations. He writes
‘From all that has been said, a corollary may be inferred, namely: that international law has not only the force of a pact and agreement among me, but also the force of a law; for the world as a whole, being iin a way one single state, has the power to create law that are just and fitting for all persons, as are the rules of international law. Consequently, it is clear that they who violate these international rules, whether in peace or in war, commit a mortal sin; moreover, in the gravest matters, such as the inviolability of ambassadors, it is not permissible for one country to refuse to be bound by international law, the latter having been established by the whole world.’
This was written in 1532, centuries before the foundation of that bugbear of the American right, the United Nations. The modern neo-Con view of international relations firmly rejects the idea of international law, seeing international affairs as a Hobbesian war of each nation against all for dominance. Hence Trump’s flouting of it in his kidnapping of Maduro, demands for the annexation of Greenland, Canada, and the possibility of further action against Cuba and Colombia.
Some National Conservative thinkers have argued that we should no longer judge the past by our modern viewpoint and condemn it for its immorality compared to our modern standards. Rather we should reverse this, and see how immoral our modern world is when judged by their standards.
Well,, if we judge Trump’s neo-Con imperialism by the standards argued by De Vitoria, he stands utterly condemned. Sometimes our ancestors really are wiser than our modern leaders, and speak their wisdom across the ages.
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