By *Jomo Sanga Thomas
(“Plain Talk” July 12, 2024)
Labour victory wide but thin
The British Labour Party won a landslide 412 seats in the July 4th elections, ending 14 years of Conservative rule. The Conservatives were reduced to a paltry 121 seats in the 650-member parliament.
The margin of victory covers an underlying worry for new prime minister Keir Starmer and his punch-drunk Labour MPs. Whilst Labour has this vast parliamentary majority, their national share of the vote was only around a third of all votes cast. It’s a very low mandate.
Journalist Nesrine Malik calls it right: “It was a striking landslide victory. That is nothing to be disputed. It’s a 170-seat majority and one of the biggest landslides in British political history. But there is an interesting story underneath that landslide narrative. There’s reduced turnout. Seats previously held by the Tories were then won by Labour, but not necessarily by a huge number of votes. So, the story of the election is Tory collapse, a Labour landslide, but a sort of wide but thin mandate that Labour really needs to solidify over the next five years if this is not going to be a temporary win for the party.”
Sir Keir Starmer, a right-of-centre politician, vowed to lead a government of “stability and moderation” in his first official address at 10 Downing Street. A former Human rights lawyer, Starmer will long be remembered for supporting the Israeli government’s decision to cut off food, water, and electricity as it wages its genocidal war against Palestinians.
Among the other notable results in the election, Conservative Liz Truss, the shortest-serving British prime minister at just 49 days, lost her seat in Parliament. Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader expelled from his party on the spurious grounds of anti-Semitism, won his seat. The Far-right political swamp monster Nigel Farage, best known for pushing Brexit, was elected in his eighth attempt to gain a seat. Irish nationalist Sinn Féin party became Northern Ireland’s largest party in the British Parliament for the first time.
It will be interesting to see how labour under Starmer governs. On the economy, he has embraced growth as the lever of prosperity, embracing the disastrous neoliberal concept of trickle down, or, as they would call it, float up — so, the tide will rise, and all the boats will float up with it. He articulates a sort of austerity that implies that there will be either cuts or maintained reductions to investment in public services.
How that works in a country suffering the consequences of 14 years of Conservative austerity remains to be seen. It is well documented that the public infrastructure is falling apart; funding for public education, housing, the National Health Service, and public services for youth and families has all been decimated.
Counter-revolution in America
The US Supreme Court ended its 2024 term with a raft of decisions that historians will mark as another counter-revolutionary moment in America’s history.
Many constitutional scholars have argued that the paramount goal of the American Revolution, beginning with the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, was to end King George III’s iron rule over the American colonies and protect the country against the re-emergence of a leader with absolute power.
The US Supreme Court dropped a bomb. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in Trump v. United States (a 6 to 3 decision) seems to have other ideas. Justice Roberts ruled that presidents are absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for their core official acts, including starting wars of aggression or defying scores of Congressional subpoenas. He said presidents are ‘presumptively immune’ for all other acts to be defeated by the legal standard of ‘we’ll know it when we see it.’
We know it when we see it has its history in a 1964 Supreme Court decision on obscenity. Justice Potter Stewart, in a concurring opinion reasoned, ‘I will know it when I see it.’ Roberts refrained from providing a single hypothetical to illustrate his categories, except to say all exchanges with and orders to the Justice Department are immune.
In a blistering dissenting opinion, an incensed Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the Roberts majority had invented a ‘law-free zone’ entrusting the president with a ‘loaded weapon’ for future occupants of the White House to brandish. Specifically, she noted, ‘Orders the Navy’s Seal Team to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organises a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune, immune, immune.’ She concluded that “moving forward, all former presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide by will not provide a backstop … never in U.S. history have presidents had more confidence that they would be immune from prosecution for crimes of any sort.”
Gaza is much worse than Imagined
Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians has entered its 10th month as the official Palestinian death toll has reached 38,200. But a new report in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet estimates the actual death toll could be 186,000 or even higher — that’s roughly 8% of Gaza’s population. The report looks at how war leads to indirect deaths due to shortages of medical care, food, shelter and water.
The study points out that the death toll is higher because the official toll does not take into account thousands of dead buried under the rubble and indirect deaths due to the destruction of health facilities, food distribution systems and other public infrastructure.
Conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, the study said, and even if the Gaza war ends immediately, it will continue to cause many indirect deaths in the coming months and years through things like diseases.
And to think that many in high places refuse to call Israel’s war a genocidal act of aggression necessitating a war crimes tribunal.
*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former senator and Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
The opinions presented in this content belong to the author and may not necessarily reflect the perspectives or editorial stance of iWitness News. Opinion pieces can be submitted to [email protected].
The Palestinians kidnapped about 1200 Israelis last October. Israel then when on a rampage and killed of upwards of 50,000 Palestinians including women and children and destroyed almost all of their infrastructure. The WEST is saying: “Israel has the right to defend itself”. What they are not saying is the west went to America, killed off most of the population. They went to South America and killed almost all of the population. They went to Australia and killed most of the population, then they occupied the land. Do you see any parallels here?