London’s Metropolitan Police arrested another 492 people over the weekend after a protest Saturday in Trafalgar Square, as the Starmer government accelerated its crackdown on opposition to the Gaza genocide.
The entirely peaceful protest was held to oppose the proscription of Palestine Action. It was organised by Defend Our Juries and attended by over 1,000 people. Of the arrests, 488 were for holding up signs declaring, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.
Of the arrests, 488 were for holding up signs declaring, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.
what the fuck?
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Humanist Capitalism has to come out of the ashes
Unions, cooperatives, and unionized cooperatives no matter what
Yes, I’m sure that when the Oil Manufacturers Cooperative murders climate activists and spreads propaganda to prevent the adoption of sustainable alternatives, humanity will be much better off…
Capitalism in any form is unsustainable, any system that treats the world as fungible is. What we need is fundamental, structural change.
We need a system that naturally incentivizes degrowth and makes the filling of power vacuums by corrupt, greedy, or opportunistic people or systems impossible.
That’s not capitalism, it’s not syndicalism, it’s not state communism. It’s something in the realm of anarchocommunism. Societies that are prosperous because nobody in them is trying to screw people over: ones without capital accumulation or exertion of power, that are nevertheless resistant to power over them.
That makes a lot of sense, have anything similar enough to that I can read up on?
Just read Marx and Lenin. They talk about all of this in depth.
Nah, Capitalism had its moment. It’s time for socialism now.
It’s not black and white. You can have parts of the industry capitalist and part of it socialist. I am all for housing reform, I wouldn’t mind paying more taxes if it meant that we are all gonna live a happier life. I probably wouldn’t want state owned means of production as we all know you can’t trust em that much.
I don’t think you know what socialism or capitalism are.
Capitalist and commerce are not synonyms.
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Isn’t this fucking idiot a human rights lawyer? People have a right to protest
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This is why I fucking left. Oh yeah, the tories are a shitshow. Oh look, their replacements are barely better.
Where’s safe?
Nowhere. I’m somewhere better at least. We went from a good left wing government to an acceptable center right one and back again.
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As an American, it’s super disheartening to read stories about European governments being fascist assholes as well. It’s nice to imagine there’s somewhere to go to escape it.
“I’m escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism…SPAAAAAYCE!”
I mean Europe is the home of facism and literally spread it throughout the world
Yeah, which means they should know better more than anyone else. There’s also the fact that the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow, so Europe alone doesn’t get the blame.
I honestly believe the anti American sentiment from Europeans on the internet comes from them hoping the origin of racism and facism is connected more to America than Europe. European facism, racism, and sexism has done more damage than any other group on the face of the earth
Considering everything about America originated from England, it’s a real ouroboros type of situation.
There you go, Trump. There’s your 51st state.
It would be poetic, the former colonies coming back to annex the fatherland. Too bad it’s because they’re all Nazis now.
At what point are people going to riot?
That’s a funny looking labour government you got there UK.
How did you guys go from Corbyn to this? Is it so hard to have a labour party leader that doesn’t back Israel or Russia?
Starmer is terrified of Reform. So he’s taken the really smart stance of pulling Labour to the right to court a demographic that would never vote Labour anyway, and in the meantime utterly piss off his core base.
This almost always fails and only ends up moving the country average to right and make extreme right seem more mild.
Also I don’t think right wing voters have that strong an opinion on Israel. This is more likely zionist lobbies pulling some of Starmer’s strings.
Controlled opposition, doing what the fascist sociopath pedophile oligarchs paid them to do.
It’s so depressing. I remember the election that Ed Miliband lost, and how many of us were unsurprised that people found no appeal in Tory-lite as opposed to the regular Tories; Labour implicitly conceded to the Tories by affirming the idea that austerity was the only way to go. Now the same is happening with Reform.
If Labour really wanted to challenge Reform, they’d challenge Reform’s base assumptions. They’d argue, for example, that reducing immigration won’t solve the housing crisis or NHS wait times, because those essential services are suffering from over a decade of chronic underinvestment. They don’t need to fight on Reform’s terms, because if they do, Labour will lose — again.
Yeah, it’s very sad since I think people are more willing to vote Labour if they were just better. Now their voter base is more likely to stay at home instead of going to the voting booth. Weird move by Starmer since he was in the march against the Iraq war himself.
Same story, different country
Same shit, different assholes.
A campaign by Israeli-backed British Jewish groups of anti-semitism slanders against Corbyn (so extreme that at one point a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was deemed an anti-semite to get at Corbyn by association) toppled him down from Labour Party leadership, to be replaced by these types, who as soon as they got control of the Labour Party started purging it of people who had voiced Leftwing ideas and support for Corbyn.
Essentially Labour was emptied from the inside and its shell was filled with supporters of a foreign ethno-Fascist regime.
This is a big part one party system of governments tend to fail.
Also indicative of how multi party systems Can fail apparently.
Power Duopolies, such as those found in countries with First Past The Post systems, suffer from similar problems as the Power Monopolies in one party systems, such as how there is a path to power which is entirelly unaccountable to voters, of just taking over one of the Power Duopoly parties from the inside and then let the normal back-and-forth of the duopoly system - since people only ever have 2 options, naturaly the power goes back an forth as people vote for the “lesser” evil that then turns into the “greater” evil so they vote for the other “lesser” evil - bring that party back to power.
Funilly enough, in the UK that seems to have been done to both of the Power Duopoly parties, first to the Tories during the Leave Referendum and after that to the Labour Party when Israel joined with the Liberals (and I don’t mean the LibDem Party, I mean Blairites) and even the Tories to overthrow Corbyn (who was openly a defender of the rights of Palestinians) and replaced him with the Liberals who then proceeded to make sure there was nobody left-of-center in that party.
If you look at the US, you see the very same phenomenon transforming the Republicans from a Conservative Party to a Fascist one, as well as how the Democrats have be thoroughly taken over by those serving the interests of Israel and of Billionaires.
I think that the less rigged a country’s voting system is for “stability” (read: for making sure only the same handful of big parties has power and they seldom have to do it as part of a cohalition) the more robust it is to this kind of taking over of a large party as an unaccountable way to get power, mainly because more parties have to be taken over and people will migrate more easilly way from a party when it stops representing them (there is no such thing as tactically voting for the “lesser” evil in a Proportional Vote system).
Great points.
My comment wasn’t in reference to FTPT specifically, though I suppose the UK uses FPTP in voting for party leadership?
And im guessing this doesn’t happen so much in other countries that don’t use FPTP?
Every party HS a different system. The conservatives have their MPs select two candidates in multiple rounds of voting to put in front of all their members.
Labour has a system where a candidate needs to have a minimum support from their MPs too but it’s still an election from labour members and supporters. They rank their candidates I believe
In my own experience, if all the voting systems rigged to benefit size, there is a broader phenomenon of larger parties existing which which are usually in power (though often in cohalitions) and which attract the kind of people with no scruples who go into politics to become wealthy from selling access to power (i.e. the corrupt).
However in the two other countries I lived in beyond the UK, one of which had Proportional Vote and the other Multi-representative Electoral Circles (so, not as bad as FPTP, but still Mathematically rigged), I have not seen a case of the larger parties being obviously taken over as means to get to power like I saw in the UK, though I’ve seen smaller parties being created and/or supported by foreign money and then eating up some of the vote of the large parties.
Certainly were I am now - Portugal, which has Multi-representative Electoral Circles - of the two new Far-Right parties which were created not that long ago, one of which for sure got money from the Fascists in Brasil and the other also likely had funding from abroad (the campaign phamplets and other materials in their very first elections were both far too expensive for a small party and using the kind of design and slogan style one finds in International Marketing campaigns in huge contrast with other small parties), probably American (they’re an ultra-neoliberal party created a couple of years after Steven Bannon came to Europe with money he openly said was to fund far-right parties), though there I don’t know for certain. Both of those parties are taking votes away from the large rightwing party but also partialy from all the way into the leftwing (the more Fascist of the two is even picking traditional working class votes that used to go into a Communist Party)
UK is a fascist regime. Well done!
Folks who get really up in their feelings about the Trump/Harris election seem to forget that Harris was taking campaign advice from this guy. It’s so easy to forget how absolutely poisoned so-called “Liberal Democracy” has become with a broad strain of fascist tendency.
On the one hand, you’ve got a guy who is looking to literally lay siege to cities in the US that didn’t vote for him. On the opposite side of the pond, they’re doing mass-arrests of anyone with a “Please Stop Killing Brown People” bumper sticker. And in the middle, a sea of smug dipshits posting “You got what you voted for”.
Liberals will ALWAYS end up siding with the Fascists to try to suppress the Left. Happened in Germany in the 1930s, and the dumbass liberals eventually ended up lined up against the same walls the communists and socialists were lined up against. If you’re a liberal today and defending this fascist suppression against Palestine Action: you’re next.
Happened in Germany in the 1930s
Happened in the 1910s, even. Hence the old quip about Bernie Sanders killing Rosa Luxemburg.
dumbass liberals eventually ended up lined up against the same walls the communists and socialists were lined up against
Or marched out into the snows of Russia to seize more Lebensraum for the imperial core. Or just bombed to death in Dresden or Berlin when the front lines collapsed.
If you’re a liberal today and defending this fascist suppression against Palestine Action: you’re next.
The hard math of living in a fascist state is standing up and getting shot today or ducking and hiding in hopes you won’t get shot tomorrow.
Liberals made their bed back in 2009. We’re all just living in the aftermath.
I’d argue that the Liberals are a little farther down the line. This administration isn’t finished bullying women, intellectuals, non-Caucasians and the queer community to death, they’re just getting started.
And then there’s the Americans, for whom literally everything has to be about America in some way or another.
Have you seen their fiction? Even in sci-fi, they’re the center of the fucking universe. Galactic Space Empire HQ, located in NYC/LA/San Francisco of course.
Americans own the world. Everyone else just lives in it.
That might have been true 40 years ago but those times are gone, you just haven’t realised it yet
What about the other 160 or so democracies? How they doin?
Especially the proportional representation ones. FPTP is just a hint of democracy.
What about the other 160 or so democracies?
I’m not sure where you’re getting your numbers, but…
In 2024, just 6.6% of the world population lived in “full democracies”, falling from 12.5% a decade ago. Overall, the vast majority of these countries are in Europe, with notable exceptions—such as Japan, Mauritius, and Costa Rica—across other global regions.
I’m counting far less than 160.
FPTP is just a hint of democracy.
Sure. But then IRV still gave us NYC Eric Adams as mayor of New York. There’s more to democracy than the shape of your ballot.
Calling Japan a full democracy is a stretch. They’ve been ruled by one party for over half a century, and definitely not b/c they’re good at their jobs.
In 2024, just 6.6% of the world population lived in “full democracies”,
I’m counting far less than 160.
Sorry I didn’t make any claims as to what constitutes a “full” democracy, I was going with these guys who put it at about 167 “democracies”.
Sure. But then IRV still gave us
IRV is just FPTP+. Like you say, it isn’t an electoral system so much as a ballot system.
We studied it, in Canada, under the name “Alternative Vote”. It was the only one we could find that was worse than FPTP:
There’s a reason why politicians keep suggesting it, and it’s not for our benefit.
Sorry I didn’t make any claims as to what constitutes a “full” democracy
I’d settle for what defines “democracy” at all. I’ve seen folks claim El Salvador is a democracy while Nicaragua isn’t, entirely because the government of El Salvador is politically aligned with the US and the Nicaraguans are not.
IRV is just FPTP+
I don’t really care what flavor of election system you think is the right one. However you square it, you can have shit candidates win popular mandates. There is no system that’ll keep people you don’t like out of office, shy of a dictatorship that puts you in charge.
There’s a reason why politicians keep suggesting it
Suggesting it? Thirteen states have now banned ranked-choice voting as municipalities decide on whether to adopt it
I met an Aussie in Thailand who claimed that ranked ballot elections are undemocratic, that recent Australian protests were not racist, that immigration was a huge problem in Australia, that Australians are not actually racist at all, and that recent Australian protests were about protesting Palestine, and not racist at all.
I don’t really care what flavor of election system you think is the right one.
You’re against logic and reason?
However you square it, you can have shit candidates win popular mandates. There is no system that’ll keep people you don’t like out of office, shy of a dictatorship that puts you in charge.
I’m not interested in a system that will keep people I don’t like out of office. I’m interested in a system that represents the will of the people, rather than the will of a select rich and powerful few.
If you’re willing to care, you might find one.
Suggesting it? Thirteen states have now banned ranked-choice voting as municipalities decide on whether to adopt it
I don’t see the problem here, like I said, it’s worse than FPTP.
UK is a fascist regime
It’s really not.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-world/2025
https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-states/freedom-world/2025
A country actively kidnapping people off the streets, removing due process and habeus corpus, deporting prisoners to random countries, building concentration camps, and deploying troops on the streets has a score of 84/100. Forgive me for not feeling particularly free with my score of 91.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House#Criticism
Having a read of this I think it’s fair to say boiling down a nation’s “freedom” to a single number is a silly unacademic metric, before even getting into the likelihood of bias and manipulation.
If it looks like a
duckfascist, swims like aduckfascist, and quacks like aduckfascist, then it probably is aduckfascist. Regardless of what a likely bias think tank’s research may say.Wow, what a clown propaganda machine.
They need to update it apparently, because I can’t see those rights.
Real question:
Im going tongo tin foil haters a bit with the implication:
If you have a faist government why not just bring back the royal family as the leaders?
I get that facism is different than monarchism but many of the key distinctions aren’t that significant imo, in that they both lean heavily towards autocracy and both Aggressively punish dissent.
This is so self defeating… Palestine Action should have never been declared a “terrorist organization” in the same category as Al Qaeda and Daesh. People see right through that and it causes a backlash. Nd the UK government doubling down on the backlash creates even more backlash. I mean anyone can see that at this point that the government has lost the political battle on this one and is just chugging through due to the sunk cost fallacy. This is only paving the way for the Right to do a comeback. Fucking centrist liberals man, god damn.
No of course not, Al Qaeda is our great ally in Syria now, or some completely legit and organic offshoot of said group.
The sunsetting of a once great empire.
I’m sure the people of India who starved think the British Empire was great.
I’m sure the Irish really think the British Empire was great.
I’m sure most of Asia and Africa think the British Empire was great.
I’m sure the indigenous people of any land the British Empire conquered think the British Empire was great.
I mean, it was never great in a good sense
It’s been twilight for quite some time now.
United Kingdom - The only democracy in the Middle East
Fuck Tory Lite
I can’t decide what’s more depressing.
A) The subject of the linked article, or
B) The fact that an article on World Socialist Web Site is linking to posts by Amnesty UK and Defend our Juries (three organizations that should all know better by now) on Xitter.
Jesus
At an absolute bare minimum, the last two should be cross posting everything to Mastodon, and the first should be linking to the Mastodon accounts whenever available.
Oh, look! Amnesty UK has a Mastodon account that they’re not fucking using, apparently never have.
[Edit: spelling]
Keir Starmer is a cunt
nah. he lacks the warmth of a cunt.
And depth
and he doesn’t seem as fun as a cunt.
Or as useful.
90% chance the mossad has a bunch of videos of Starmer and his cabinet diddling kids, or engaging in animality with pigs, whatever is the depravity du jour was in his heyday.
Meanwhile the nazis march against london with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon at the helm. 0 actual enforcement. The funniest part is Yaxley-Lennon was invited by an israeli minister to visit Israel…
Can you imagine travelling back to 1943 and telling people in the camps that their sacrifice would be the fertilizer of a new wave of the same ideological poison that deprived them of dignity and life. This is just heartbreaking… What’s even the point of resisting anymore?
Resisting tyranny is how everything good in the world is possible. The way to have lives worth living is to defeat tyrants and their ideologies. We defeated the Nazis but not fascism. Now we have to defeat the ideological descendants of the Nazis.
If we don’t defeat fascism, neoliberalism, and capitalism now the turn around time for the next fascist movement will be measured in years not decades. We have seen as much with the Biden administration. They failed to meaningfully hold Trump and MAGA to account for the insurrection or fundamentally fix the underling systemic issues that they are symptoms of and now we are living under fascist rule.
We don’t have dignified lives or liberal democracies to go back to. The way to get something better is with socialist democracies where workers own corporations and the political process. Until then it’s liberty or death. We benefited from a free democracy. If anyone is to enjoy that again we must resist now and until we are all free.
because…what other choice is there, let them win?
This will backfire.
We hope.
