Under Starmer, avenues of protest are becoming increasingly meaningless
JVL Introduction
Keir Starmer’s refusal to condemn Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela, described in the Guardian as driving “another truck through international law and global norms”, shreds any pretence the great human rights lawyer may have had of caring about legality on the world stage. But lest we forget, in the article below Tribune magazine reminds us that Starmer is currently busy reneging on any commitment he may once have had to civil liberties here in the UK.
Writer James Smith examines the many ways in which this government is following in the footsteps of earlier Labour administrations, like New Labour whose ‘ethical foreign policy’ touted during the 1997 election campaign “was eventually exposed as little more than paper-thin rhetoric.”
He is scathing about how increasing police powers leave us “narrower and increasingly meaningless avenues for opposition to injustice and state complicity in atrocity crimes … Take your concerns to the ballot box in five years, we are told, where we will have a choice between one atrocity-enabling government and another.”
NWI
This article was originally published by Tribune on Wed 31 Dec 2025. Read the original here.
Red Keir and the Right to Protest
Nearly thirty years ago, a young barrister called Keir Starmer defended a group of activists after they damaged armaments destined for a brutal war in Asia. Why is a Starmer-led government now cracking down on similar protests?
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Robin Cook resigned from the Cabinet in protest at the impending invasion of Iraq.
Would he have done so though if he had still been Foreign Secretary?
He was certainly opposed to the criminalisation of the use of nuclear weapons as an article on the Declassified UK website makes clear:
“A “minimum UK requirement” in the negotiations shaping the ICC was that the body must not “criminalise the use of nuclear weapons”, foreign secretary Robin Cook outlined in July 1998.”
I think it important that people do not get too despondent about things as that would be self-fulfilling. The government assumes that it will not pay too high a price for its actions. We must make clear that this is not the case.
A welcome addition but too cautiously phrased , despite saying ‘the urgency of the moment cannot be overstated’.
It’s not that ‘In Gaza, Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people will undoubtedly continue’, it’s that it IS continuing without a let-up and the Gazans are starving again now that so many aid agencies have been banned without any of the earlier publicity or outrage.
Nor is it the case that ‘…Keir Starmer now seeks to criminalise direct actionists as vandals’ . He HAS criminalised them as terrorists, denying them the right to jury trials and making it possible to imprison them indefinitely. Some of them too may now starve to death.
NB Indonesia is NOW engaged in a continuing genocide in West Papua agains the indigenous people and their independence movement. These atrocities have been well documented, and in fact Monbiot publicised them over a decade ago. Please join the campaign to Free West Papua and stop arming the Indonesian military.
Starmer is a total disgrace, an outrageous hypocrite, an establishment toady. Starmer is also incompetent, as has been observed. Starmer is a disaster.