Daily Express article celebrates Kneecap’s defiance. What’s going on?!
JVL Introduction
The appearance of this article in Wednesday’s Daily Express made us rub our eyes in disbelief. Why was a right-wing newspaper publishing an opinion piece by a leftie political commentator celebrating both a Communist singer and an Irish republican charged under British terrorism laws?
The writer Andy Twelves, who has appeared on GB News rubbishing the idea that Reform UK cares about the working class, pulls no punches: “While Mo Chara stands in the dock for allegedly waving a flag, those complicit in a genocide walk the streets untouched.”
Words like these appearing in the Express suggest that establishment consensus on Britain’s role as a friend and ally of Israel and the US is taking a battering.
As Twelves says:
[Mo Chara] didn’t commit violence. He performed. He made art. Art that embarrassed the British state. And here, as ever, that’s a bigger crime than the one he’s plead not guilty to.
NWI
y Andy Twelves – Political Commentator
15:38, Wed, Jun 18, 2025 | UPDATED: 15:38, Wed, Jun 18, 2025
This article was originally published by Daily Express on Wed 18 Jun 2025. Read the original here.
Kneecap Mo Chara court appearance makes British state look panicked
For those with eyes to see, the case surrounding Mo Chara only makes one side look unreasonable.
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I am almost too shy to praise this piece because I imagine that the last thing the writer cares about is an alleluia from an elderly Leftie in a respectable organ like the JVL newsletter – far too prim and proper to garner any street-cred. (That term probably does for me, anyway.)
Thankfully, this is beyond Starmer, Cooper and the BBC who haven’t cottoned on yet that their absurd biases and contradictions – a bomb attack as a right of self-defence, a pre-emptive strike that anticipated only the manufactured fiction in one’s own fevered brain – merely serve to make clear what a set of charlatans and hypocrites are running the country; red paint is a terrorist weapon but “bunker bombs” are not; when even the civil servants can’t stomach the lies and distortions.
In our local Palestine Solidarity events we find not just more young people, probably more female than male, but more family groups, many pushing buggies along while the toddlers wave small Palestinian flags.
Older children have written poems and want to read them in front of crowds of strangers. We may feel we have no power to change the horror, but things are changing and the mass movement we need to build stands more of a chance than many have seen in a lifetime.