Iran has struck Israel.
previous preamble
The continuing fall of the remains of the British Empire is pretty entertaining from the outside: an archaic royal family that is seemingly being smote with disease by God itself for their past crimes; a navy that virtually no longer functions, ramming into foreign ports and under constant repair; and an economy that cannot seem to stop sputtering, fucked whether they're in the EU or outside it. Watching the impacts on people from the inside is a little more worrying, though.
A fifth of the population is in poverty, including nearly a third of all children. These figures have barely shifted since the Labour government in the early 2000s, aside from a decreasing poverty rate for pensioners. Actually, poverty hasn't substantially shifted since Margaret Thatcher. Before her, the poverty rate was around 14%, but her catastrophic policies caused a major increase, and poverty levels since then are still 50% higher than over 50 years ago, because neoliberal economic policy since then has not fundamentally changed. Parties and corporations have impoverished the usual vulnerable groups, such as large families, minority ethnic groups (including half of Pakistani and Bangladeshi households!) and disabled people. These differences are also regional, with the North more impoverished than the richer Southeast (but some of the poorest boroughs are in London, so it's a complex pattern).
With Corbyn's defeat in 2019 mere months before the pandemic began, the Labour Party shifted back towards the right, with left-wingers purged from the party if they did not kowtow to Keir Starmer. This leaves us with a situation where the only substantial difference between the two parties would be on social policy, but it goes without saying that economic policy is the overwhelming factor that determines if minorities can have a decent life. Worker-oriented movements since then have been largely not under the umbrella of major party leaderships, such as the Don't Pay movement in late 2022 that arose in the wake of dramatically rising energy prices where 3 million people vowed to not pay them (which did lead to results).
Most notably recently is the major upset in the constituency of Rochdale - the victory of George Galloway - who is the leader of the Workers Party of Britain, which describes itself as both socialist and socially conservative. This took place both in the context of aforementioned economic troubles, as well as anger over Israel's genocide of Gaza in the British population, especially in British Muslims. It remains to be seen how much of this is an isolated event, especially as Corbyn has, understandably, refused to collaborate with Galloway due to his socially conservative stances. The UK general election will be held at some point within the next 9 months or so, and might well be a shitshow depending on what happens domestically and geopolitically before then; parallels to the current American electoral shitshow with increasing anger over Biden are pretty apparent. The Conservatives are quite likely to lose given 14 years of uninspired rule if current polling is correct, but it truly is a race to the bottom.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is the United Kingdom! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I’ve been thinking, does a leader come before a movement, or do you need to develop a movement first and a leader will naturally appear out of the movement?
Like, if you were to establish a vanguard party in the UK, how would that work? If you have a small group of revolutionaries fomenting a movement, will a leader emerge out of the movement as it grows larger? Or you need a strong charismatic leader to propel the movement in the first place?
It’s kind of a chicken and egg question and I can’t seem to figure out how does one begin. In Russia and China, those were chaotic times and there were already a bunch of politically aware people involved in all kinds of movements interweaving with all kinds of historic events, and it’s hard to identify the origin of such vanguard revolutionary movement.
It's both. We are in a perpetual state of struggle where everything is in motion. The struggle itself creates the movement and the struggle itself creates the leader of the movement.
What is taking place is a consistent rolling through of different ideas and tactics that fail and become checked off in the "this tactic has failed" list of people's minds. Once that has occurred they move onto the next. "Why did that idea fail? Because we had a weak leader? Ok lets get a strong leader."
The next stage is determining why the strong leader fails. And what needs to be different in order for it to succeed. I can already pre-empt that: The strong leader fails because the left is divided. The general left will not collaborate with Galloway and his ilk because of his social conservatism. Corbyn has outright refused to work with him. The failure here is the division of the left, this has to be resolved but through what means? Through the collapse of the socially progressive left or the collapse of the socially conservative left. What answer people come to when asking themselves these questions will determine what tactic they pursue after him.
Yeah I was just meeting some of the more known members of the British communist movement that had ties with Galloway's group and I'm surprised by how much ideologically alike we are and get along famously while discussing shit like stalin-era green policies to offset their rapid industrialization, dunking on the French, and even talking about the urgent need to reform the agricultural industry to end animal cruelty while ensuring the people have a quality balanced and healthy diet, etc.
But when it comes to discussing Trans issues it's like a damn line in the sand where they become indistinguishable from the hogs. Like thankfully they had tact to stay silent on it when my Trans comrades were around and talk about things we all hold in common but whenever a conversation would lead to lgbtq+ issues the switch would flip and I'd have to spend a decent chunk of time trying to get the conversation away from the topic.
It was pretty frustrating having folks you agree with on an overwhelming number of topics but have one of them where there's a clear break of differences that you'd know would be irreconcilable if pressed.
I don't really envy you folks over the pond with your divided communist movement. But I'd honestly say the same thing about us Yankees if I was in your shoes lmao.
It's so incredibly divisive it's ridiculous. They call trans people and capitalist pushing the trans on people the "divisive" ones but the reality is that these people are drawing this line, not the rest of the left.
It's fucking ridiculous. If we can blast through this issue somehow we will have something incredibly powerful going but I don't know how. It's so hard headed. These are intelligent fucking people on every single other fucking thing but they are letting prejudices and heebie jeebies get the better of them on this one.
One thing I do have to say about it is that all the men that I meet that have this problem all feel like they're men that have something to prove about masculinity, they are men that want to be MEN, the women on the other hand barely exist. There is a serious sexism issue going on.
It's wild that one of the women I met had the same thing to say as you about the English side of the movement, we even shared a good laugh over calling it a bit too much of a hooliganish boys club at times. Said that the gap between gender representation heavily unbalances the movement and isolates the movement from a whole wide swath of the working class.
I was screaming internally when she said that.
It's a very real problem. Hooliganish is one way to put it, what I tend to describe it as however is less football and more pub-reactionary. I feel it is connected to british drinking culture, which is unique among all the cultures of europe as we have huge binge drinking issues here. The problem is that these people imagine a specific kind of person as "working class", they are a caricature though, created from the experiences of what a "hard" bloke seems like after a long night of binge drinking and getting turfed out into the streets, where shit always hits the fan between the drinking, those looking for fights, and the cops that always make things worse.
This experience shapes what these men imagine as the working class man of britain. But it's just a caricature, a minority of dickheadish after pub/nightclub behaviour. This caricature though is something a lot of these boys and man-boys want to be though, they see it as "hard", they like it.
It has its uses I will say. This type of person is significantly more likely to be up for a scrap, or up to doing a bit of crime. But it comes with the baggage of social/cultural behaviours perceived to be attached to being this "hard" man.
If this image were to change, if being pro-lgbt were to become attached to this image of the drunk man after pubs/nightclubs, then their caricature would change with it. They are pandering to this image and they would continue to pander to this image if it were to shift form a bit.
I believe I do agree. A more balanced and all-encompassing perception of the working class is needed. It would be one thing if you had a balanced perception and decided to focus on sections for tactical reasons as a part of some plan or another. But it feels like folks are eagerly wearing horse blinders and outright proud to miss the forest for a few trees.
I can only hope recruiting and retaining more diversity can help balance out the internal culture of the movement among the brits