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Yesterday elections were held in parts of England to elect local councillors, and in Scotland and Wales to elect their devolved parliaments.
Fearing a challenge from the left, Starmer’s ruling Labour party spent the campaigning period, in coordination with Britain’s legacy media, confecting antisemitism slurs about Green party candidates.
The final effort, on the morning of the elections, was to turn a comment by the Green leader, Zack Polanski, that Israel nor any other country has an inherent right to exist, into one final psychodrama about antisemitism.
It hasn’t worked.
According to early results, the Greens are on course to beat pre-election forecasts for how many seats they’d win. Labour has suffered a heavy defeat.
The (very) dark, although not unsurprising lining to the cloud, is that the far-right Reform party is on course to win a large number of seats. Unsurprising because neither Labour nor the UK’s state-corporate media went after Reform with the rabid, ferocious intensity they went after the Greens.
Why?
Because Reform’s imperialist, hyper-capitalist, bigoted policies aren’t a threat to the establishment.
Reform’s promises to mass deport brown people, build private prison camps, privatise what’s left to privatise of public services, plough money into the war machine, support Israel, and cut taxes for oligarchs, are supported by a right-wing establishment.
What the establishment fears are threats to their power and wealth. What they fear are those who will redistribute wealth, expand the social welfare state and tax millionaires to do it. And with Zionism so deeply ingrained within western institutions of power, they fear anti-Zionists.
As absurd and morally depraved as it is, the establishment fear those who oppose genocide.
Which is why the media and political establishment made ‘antisemitism’ (actually anti-Zionism of course) into a central election issue. But when it was becoming clear it wasn’t working, when it was obvious that genocide, not fake claims of antisemitism, was a more salient issue for people of conscience, Labour MPs took desperately to social media to tell people not to think about Gaza when voting.
Despite this, despite the full weight of the British establishment being arrayed against the Greens, they have fought back, and fought back successfully.
The full results won’t be known until tomorrow, but a significant win saw a Green mayor elected in the London borough of Hackney, the first time the Greens have won a mayoralty election, and the first time the area has had anything other than a Labour mayor since it was formed.
More significant was that two days before her victory, Zoe Garbett had refused to praise the police for the violent arrest of the mentally ill man whose attacks on three people were mischaracterised as antisemitism (and weaponised against the Greens).
The bottom line is that genocide for many people is still, rightly, one of the primary, if not the primary political test. A test of character, ethics, morality and judgement.
The argument that local elections have nothing to do with Gaza appears logical on one level, but is an evasion.
Politics is (or at least should be) about all these things. About values.
And if you can’t oppose genocide, if you can’t stand up to genociders, why should anyone trust you to stand up for justice, or for anything decently progressive?
But for so many in Britain’s Labour party, as for those in the Democratic party in the US, and most liberal parties across the west, it’s worse than that. It’s not just that they don’t oppose genocide, it’s that they provide active support for genocide and a genocidal state.
The Labour party has effectively criminalised support for Palestine. An anti-genocide and community activist in the UK is facing fourteen years in prison having been charged under terrorism laws for social media posts. For tweets! And an NHS GP, Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, has been arrested numerous times for tweets opposing Israel and genocide and is facing years in prison. Meanwhile, another NHS GP, a Jewish Zionist who served in the IDF and claimed he didn’t kill enough babies, has faced no consequences and is still a practicing doctor.
And of course the Labour government provided funding, support and arms to Israel during the genocide, which included daily spy flights feeding back info to the Israeli army, helping fuel their genocidal assault. An assault that continues to this day, with the majority of Gaza now living in tents among rats and disease atop the wasteland of their former homes.
It’s a disgrace. More than a disgrace. Gaza is a moral collapse, and should be at the centre of all of our politics.
Gaza and genocide should very obviously be the test.
If you provide material and rhetorical support for genocide and genociders, if you have revealed genocide and apartheid as one of your core values, you should have no place in decent society, let alone be anywhere close to political power.
Which is why earlier this week I revealed that a Labour councillor in the London borough of Waltham Forest is a genocide supporter who at the height of Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter visited the country on an atrocity propaganda tour.
The final count isn’t in, so whether Lewis has lost the seat, and whether Labour lost the council to the Greens, we don’t yet know.
But what we do know is that the pro-Israel, pro-genocide, Zionist ideology Lewis wears proudly is rife within Labour.
And while Labour’s moral collapse has spurred the rise of the Greens, the overall environment being created in the UK is aiding the rise of the far-right Reform party.
Because in a country where being anti-genocide is lampooned and criminalised, and where being pro-genocide is considered the sensible and protected position, the emergence of fascism is hardly surprising. The rise of fascism is downstream, as they say, of pro-genocide sentiment. Which makes perfect sense, given genocide is the peak expression of fascism.
The UK is the perfect incubator for the emergence of hyper reactionary politics.
But these elections at least show us that Zionism may, slowly but surely, be losing its grip on western politics.
They also demonstrate that the power of legacy media to kill popular leftist politics with lies and slurs is waning, if not yet dead.
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