Labour Heartlands

01/08/2025

Here we go down the rabbit hole again... 🐇

Government says: Civil service interns must be working class...

The latest bright idea from the geniuses in government is to restrict civil service internships to students from “poorer families,” in what they claim is a push to make Whitehall more “working class.”

But how will they define who’s working class? Income? Education? Lived experience? Of course not. They’ll be basing it on what your parents did for a living when you were 14 years old.

Because nothing screams progress like judging your future prospects by your parents’ past.

And this from a political class that couldn’t define the working class if it slapped them round the face with a P45. My dad was a Toolmaker, Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s blue-tie Blairite, once declared the working class to be “someone who goes out and earns their living, usually paid in a sort of monthly cheque,” and who can’t “write a cheque to get out of difficulties.” By that logic, almost everyone from a nurse to a young lawyer qualifies, regardless of wealth, privilege, or connections.

What this really amounts to is more top-down tokenism. It doesn’t challenge the real problem: a system rigged in favour of those with the right schools, the right accents, and the right networks. Instead of tackling unpaid internships, Oxbridge pipelines, or the civil service’s old-boy culture, they’ve reached for the PR stunt drawer.

We don’t need a checklist approach to class. We need a level playing field, where jobs are awarded on merit, not on identity metrics or what your dad did back in 2005.

I want a civil service, and a Parliament for that matter, that picks the best person for the job. Not someone who ticks a box for diversity. Not someone fast-tracked to tick a class quota. Just the right person, regardless of race, gender, creed, or postcode.

Working-class people don’t need patronising schemes. We need a system that stops excluding us in the first place.

Paul Knaggs, Labour Heartlands

You can read the details here...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ez3v9v8jqo.amp

01/08/2025

“There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a su***de bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.” - Tony Benn, British politician & activist (2007)

31/07/2025

Keir Starmer's Dirty Secret Exposed...
Keir Starmer spent £75,000 of public money chartering a luxury Airbus A321 to fly with his wife between London and Zurich to watch the Lionesses win the Euros, despite previously pledging to crack down on unnecessary government jet use. Another broken promise. That's without the 8k worth of free tickets for Arsenal matches... Curtesy of Double Down News

31/07/2025

Starmer claimed his EU “reset” deal would bring tangible benefits—like cheaper food in our supermarkets.

The reality?

Food prices continue to rise, and industry leaders are now warning of 6% food inflation by the end of the year, posing a major blow to household budgets just in time for Christmas.

Despite intense competition between supermarket chains, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) has sounded the alarm. They’ve warned that any tax hikes in the upcoming budget could “fan the flames of inflation.”

As of July, food inflation hit 4% year-on-year—the highest since February 2024. Fresh food inflation held at 3.2%, but cupboard staples surged to 5.1%.

So much for cheaper food.

Just another lie in Starmer’s Britain....

31/07/2025

Keir Starmer is covering his own back. Trying to create the illusion of statesmanship and Peacemaker after being complacent in Israel's war crimes.

The domestic political calculations prove equally cynical. Starmer’s recognition promise allows Labour politicians to claim support for Palestinian rights while avoiding any concrete steps that might antagonise Israeli lobbying groups or arms industry interests. The impossible conditions provide perfect protection against accusations of abandoning Israel while creating rhetorical distance from the humanitarian catastrophe that British weapons help enable.

The conditional recognition of a state that is actively being dismantled before its even recognised serves only one purpose: to provide political alibis for those who stood by, hands clasped behind their backs, as Gaza is starved and suffocated.

This is not diplomacy. This is the calculated abdication of moral courage, disguised as prudent caution. The faint echoes of future apologies will ring hollow against the screams of the present, too late to mend what has been deliberately broken.

By September, the world will not celebrate the birth of a Palestinian state. Instead, we will be left to mourn the ghost of what might have been. A tragic epic for generations unborn, whispered with aching sorrow: of a nation promised, yet never allowed to draw breath.

By September, there will be nothing left to call Palestine as the Israeli flag flutters over a graveyard where people once lived.

But this has been the plan all along… hasn't it!

Paul Knaggs, Labour Heartlands

31/07/2025

"There's a real danger that the left will drag Britain back to the 1970s, with secure well-paid jobs, ample housing, properly-funded NHS and social care, free tuition, student grants, final salary pensions, affordable rail fares and fabulous films and music" -David Osland

31/07/2025

The False Flag of a Palestinian State: How Western Leaders Engineer Plausible Deniability

Do not be seduced by the siren song of diplomacy. Look closely, and you’ll see the false flags of deception. What is coming is a Greater Israel...

When politicians promise the impossible while the possible slips through their deliberately opened fingers, we witness not diplomacy but deception elevated to statecraft. Keir Starmer’s announcement that Britain will recognise Palestine as an independent state, hedged with conditions so elaborate they would embarrass a Jesuit theologian debating angels on pinheads, represents the latest masterpiece in the art of organised inaction disguised as principled leadership.

This bamboozle serves a darker purpose: creating plausible distance between Starmer’s government and the genocide they have not merely enabled but actively cheered. When the reckoning comes, when history demands answers for the complicity in mass starvation and systematic destruction, these impossible conditions will serve as political alibi, proof that Britain “tried” for peace while providing the weapons that made peace impossible.

The Prime Minister’s formula deserves admiration for its cynical sophistication. Britain will recognise Palestinian statehood, he declares, provided Israel agrees to a full ceasefire, allows aid into Gaza, commits against West Bank annexation, and embraces the two-state solution. Oh, and Hamas must simultaneously agree to ceasefire terms, release all hostages, completely disarm, and abandon any role in Gaza’s governance. Simple, really, like promising to climb Everest once gravity agrees to suspend itself.

This is not naivety but calculated theatre. Starmer understands perfectly that these conditions cannot and will not be met. Israeli parliament has already voted 71-13 in favour of West Bank annexation, revealing the contempt with which Tel Aviv regards international opinion. Hamas, facing existential destruction, possesses neither the capacity nor incentive to disarm while under bombardment. The conditions are designed not to be fulfilled but to provide retrospective justification for inaction when the moment for meaningful intervention has passed.

Do not be seduced by the siren song of diplomatic process. What we witness is not peace brokerage but strategic delay, orchestrated with surgical precision. Western leaders, from Starmer’s measured calculations to Macron’s theatrical pronouncements, are not working toward Palestinian recognition but engineering plausible deniability for Palestinian destruction. They are crafting political alibis while genocide unfolds, constructing elaborate justifications for their own complicity in what international law scholars increasingly recognise as systematic ethnic cleansing... genocide.

The timing reveals everything. The 80th Session of the UN General Assembly opens on Tuesday, September 9th, just five weeks away. By then, these same leaders will stand before the world community, hands rhetorically wringing over their inability to recognise Palestine due to “unfortunate” failures to meet their impossible conditions. They will express deep regret that circumstances prevented the peace they supposedly championed, their sorrow as performative as their previous action was strategic. In five weeks, the children of Gaza will have starved…

The cruel irony is that these leaders have spent months actively enabling the destruction they now claim to oppose. Starmer himself endorsed Israel’s right to cut off food and water to Gaza’s civilian population, actions that constitute war crimes under any honest reading of international law. His government continues providing arms and diplomatic cover for operations that have reduced Palestinian territories to uninhabitable moonscapes. Yet he positions himself as Palestine’s potential benefactor, offering recognition contingent on conditions he knows cannot be met.

Read more...

https://labourheartlands.com/the-false-flag-of-a-palestinian-state/

The Prime Minister's formula deserves admiration for its cynical sophistication. Britain will recognise Palestinian statehood, he declares, provided Israel

31/07/2025

In his Sydney Peace Prize lecture, Pilger said: “What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness; the revelation of a seed beneath the snow,” and he quoted what he called one of the greatest poems of the English language by Percy Shelley:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew.
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few.

30/07/2025

Starmer waves goodbye...

30/07/2025

A C***k of Light: High Court Gives Green Light to Challenge Labour’s Draconian Palestine Action Ban

Palestine Action has won permission to challenge its controversial ban by the UK government under terrorism legislation.
In a rare glimmer of judicial sanity, the High Court has granted Palestine Action permission to challenge the Labour government’s authoritarian decision to proscribe it as a terrorist organisation. This isn’t just a procedural victory; it’s a vital pushback against an authoritarian government that is wielding the bludgeon of the state against legitimate protest.

The ruling from Mr Justice Chamberlain is a direct rebuke to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s move to ban the direct-action group. The ban, rushed through after activists caused damage at RAF Brize Norton, effectively criminalises support for Palestine Action, carrying a potential 14-year prison sentence. It’s a sledgehammer designed to smash not just a single organisation, but the very principle of dissent.

The judge’s reasoning should send a chill down the spine of every minister in Whitehall. He warned of a “recipe for chaos” if the ban wasn’t reviewed, with courts across the country potentially reaching different conclusions about its legality. Mr Justice Chamberlain pointed out the sheer absurdity of the government’s position: the semi-secret official appeal process is so slow that hundreds of the 200 people already arrested for supporting the group could face prosecution before the ban itself is properly scrutinised.

In short, the High Court has been forced to step in to prevent the government’s overreach from collapsing the justice system into authoritarian and judicial chaos.

Read more...

https://labourheartlands.com/a-chink-of-light/

In a rare glimmer of judicial sanity, the High Court has granted Palestine Action permission to challenge the Labour government's authoritarian decision to

30/07/2025

🚨REVEALED: Birmingham City Council has spent nearly £8m on agency labour to break the bins strike. Let that sink in: A Labour council has spent £8m of your money to break a strike by its workers who face losing £8,000 a year!

👮‍♂️ It is unlawful for an employer to use agency/other staff to cover the work of strikers

💰 The council could fix this strike for much less than it is spending on busting it.

30/07/2025

For all you rabid right wingers....tell me I'm wrong?