The case of the Whole Truth Five

'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.' Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi (not an actual quote, but wise nevertheless)

On 18th July 2024, at Southwark Crown Court, the harshest criminal sentence for peaceful protest in British history was handed down to five people. Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam received five years, whilst Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster, Daniel Shaw and Lucia Whittaker-De-Abreu each received four years. Their crime? Conspiracy to commit a public nuisance - i.e. speaking on a Zoom call recruiting activists to take part in direct action.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has been convicted of conspiracy to commit public nuisance, although do feel free to correct me if I've got this wrong. This exists as a result of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which gives far broader powers to the authorities to clamp down on peaceful and legitimate protest. To put their sentences into perspective, here is the average sentence for various kinds of offence based on the Ministry of Justice's own figures (courtesy of Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats on Twitter).

I've been very concerned by the number of comments I've seen on social media celebrating this outcome, suggesting that they should have got even longer, and so on. I can only conclude that these people fail to understand the full scale of the climate crisis. But even if someone does misunderstand the climate crisis (hell, even if 99% of the world's scientists and academics inexplicably turn out to have been completely wrong about global warming) that would still not be cause for celebration. The callous attitude of the judge Christopher Hehir (who earlier this year refused to jail a police officer found guilty of rape, citing prison overcrowding as a factor) and the fact that in spite of having taken an oath to tell 'the whole truth' the group were forbidden from giving the jury information as to the reasons behind their actions, is something that is deeply disturbing and should chill us all. This is why the group has been colloquially referred to as the 'Whole Truth Five'.

I wasn't in the courtroom, and therefore feel that my words would not be sufficient to summarise all the things that are wrong with this case. Therefore, I will give you the statement that Roger Hallam has posted on his Twitter account, which is as follows:

'I've just been sentenced to 5 years in prison.

The longest ever for nonviolent action. The 'crime'? Giving a talk on civil disobedience as an effective, evidence-based method for stopping the elite from putting enough carbon in the atmosphere to send us to extinction. I have given hundreds of similar speeches encouraging nonviolent action and have never been arrested for it. This time I was an advisor to the M25 motorway disruption, recommending the action to go ahead to wake up the British public to societal collapse. I was not part of the planning or action itself. In the trial, I swore before God to tell the truth. The truth is the science. The science is clear. We're heading for billions of deaths and ecological collapse. To prove this, I presented the jury with a 250-page dossier of leading scientists' research as evidence in my defence. This was denied by the judge as an invalid - climate science is now illegal in the British courtroom. I then began to speak about the apocalyptic conditions humanity faces - floods, wildfires, mass heat deaths - and was silenced by the judge. He sent out the jury and threatened to arrest me if I didn't stop. Instead, I stayed in the dock and argued that until I was given the right to complete my defence – I would not move. Even the prosecution tried to argue in my defence and the judge let me continue. When the jury had shuffled in again, I spoke about the legal concept of “equality of arms” – that as the prosecution had had a right to lay facts over a whole week, I also wanted an equal opportunity. I spoke of various cases where juries had acquitted defendants when they had heard the facts, such as the Extinction Rebellion cracking of Shell's windows in 2018 as a reasonable action against criminal destruction. The Dutch Supreme Court has even said that all governments have a legal obligation to prevent the emission of greenhouse gases. Whilst the prosecution accepted that emissions pose an existential threat, for the first time in British history no less, they still tried to convict us for public nuisance rather than praise us for trying to stop those emissions. Given the objectivity of existential threat, there were overwhelming grounds to be involved in a plan to cause some disruption to the M25. In the British law on public nuisance, there is a ‘reasonable excuse’ clause. Science says there is an overwhelming threat to my life, my children, you and your children. To argue there is not a reasonable excuse directly defies the wish of this legislation. Things are happening that cause harm – people are engaged in physical acts to stop that harm – it doesn’t matter whether it’s a protest or not. As I began to offer up some case law, the judge kept intervening telling me I was “wasting my time” and ordering the jury to disregard me. To illustrate that I was not talking about my motivations but speaking about real necessity, I referred to a famous case over a decision to operate on conjoined twins with the likelihood that one would die. In this dilemma, I quoted the 19th Century principle that the action was necessary if the threat faced was inevitable and irrevocable, that no more should be done than essential, and that it must be proportionate. I argued that there was a “duress of circumstances” including the objective danger I’ve experienced as a farmer unable to grow food, and the global significance of “food insecurity” – a euphemism for famine and starvation. There has never been a moment in history where ‘necessity’ has been more supported by objective facts – more than 10,000 scientific and peer-reviewed papers, indicating an outcome of mass starvation and death from man-made climate collapse. In response, Judge Hehir called for an early lunch and dismissed the jury. He turned to me and warned that I wasn't a lawyer and that “this is not the Roger Hallam show”. He then gave me just 15 more minutes to put forward my “beliefs” - a totally fucking incoherent statement. This isn’t belief - it’s the objective threat of destruction of property and livelihoods of billions of people and the secondary effects of famine i.e. war, rape, and torture. I outlined four characteristics of the effects of emitting greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere, describing them as easy to understand, but unique to human experience and so horrific that they are impossible to assimilate. 1. They have universal effects – what’s emitted in India affects the USA, a melting Arctic affects Argentina and so on. 2. The ultimate consequence of GHGs in the atmosphere is that you destroy the basis of life – some experts say for 100,000 years, others 50 million, and some say the Earth will simply become like Venus. In other words, for the first time in human history, a group of people, namely a 1% of wealthy elites, are responsible for destroying everything forever. 3. The Earth has reached a 1.5˚C rise in temperature already and at some point in the next decade we’ll have triggered geological tipping points – regardless of any action, we’ll have started unstoppable change. In other words, we don’t have time to not pull that person from in front of the lorry, if we don’t act now it will be too late. Some scientists contend it’s already too late – the UN has said we have two years in which to make radical changes – so we’re not just trying to stop people from doing bad things, but to prevent them from doing bad things which will create badness forever. 4. There is not an insubstantial possibility of entire human extinction as a result of pumping GHGs into the atmosphere, we’re talking about a crime fundamentally different from any other in history. This, I said, is why I want to be able to show the jury expert evidence. The judge, showing obvious disinterest, told me to wrap up in a few minutes. Returning to the idea of ‘necessity’, I gave more examples. We agree that if a man pulls a dagger out in a pub and someone else pushes him and disarms him then there would be no question of prosecution. In Ireland, a cyclist who stopped and intervened when an immigrant was being attacked became a national hero. But what if someone plants a bomb under the table in a pub, set to explode in 30 minutes? If you push him over, grab the bomb and take it out to the police, you wouldn’t be prosecuted, even though the harm you’re trying to prevent is in the future. And what about those people pulling down houses in the Great Fire Of London? Their action was to try and prevent harm in other parts of London if the fire had spread. So just because something causes damage over a long time or space is irrelevant – it comes down to causality. The fact that emissions will cause damage across the planet for millions of years is not a reason to stop it from coming into court. In fact, the massive extent of the time and space is the very reason it should be in every court. At this point, the judge sent the jury home, and again scoffed at me for defending myself as an “amateur lawyer” getting “amateur results”. The next day reminded the courtroom that I was under oath to tell the whole truth and would continue with my evidence. The judge immediately ordered the jury out, and when I continued to declare I was under an obligation to continue, the public gallery was cleared and I was warned he would be arrested if he didn’t return to his seat. Then three police officers arrived. I said I would not resist, but also would not assist in my own arrest. As they forcibly dragged me towards the prisoner dock I announced to the observing journalists that this was “Democracy in Action” - Nonviolent resistance to a grossly unjust system. This obscene miscarriage of justice happened to me five times throughout the trial. What a fucking indignity. I received no good reason why I could not tell the jury what is blindingly obvious - that the elite putting carbon in the atmosphere will kill billions. Without the whole truth, it is not a fair trial. If thousands of people were going to die further up that motorway, we would have a reasonable excuse to disrupt it. Except it's not further up the motorway - it's everyone, all around us. Humanity, gone forever. The judge began the next morning by bizarrely reading out my Twitter feed, which alerted my followers to the fact I wasn’t allowed to give my whole defence and called for support for a presence outside the court. But then he moved on to gleefully recounting some of the various trolls – why this was any part of a serious trial, no one could fathom. I was ordered to take them down by lunchtime or I’d be in contempt of court. This is a British judge in 2024. Meanwhile, the UN special rapporteur for Environmental Defenders, Michel Forst sat in the gallery, watching. He had previously put out a statement on the injustice of our treatment. It states that the UK could be breaking international law on the rights of environmental protesters. A repressed, UN phrase for trying to stop the carbon elite from killing us all. I stood up and told the jury that after they’d been ejected yesterday, I had been arrested and removed, but that they had a right to hear my evidence. Once again, the judge ordered the jury and forcibly removed me. The UN guy watched as I was dragged away. I was sent to prison and couldn’t hear the rest of the day’s trial. Afterwards, the judge falsely claimed that I was behind the jury protection campaign, Defend Our Juries, and had ‘conned’ vulnerable people into coming to the court. No evidence was given. Fair, right? The next day I again explained that blocking motorways has direct effects on society e.g. the farmers’ protests quickly changed EU policy, and road protests held fuel prices down. The judge dismissed this by asking whether the action had any effect on global temperatures and told me to sit down. I stayed standing and the judge just left the courtroom. What the fuck? I even looked to the prosecution for help again against the judge’s incoherent madness. When he came back, he started quoting his favourite movie, Goodfellas, and asked me “What are you still doing here?”. Then he ordered me arrested and sent to prison, again. Whilst I was jailed, the judge gave my friends a pathetic 15 minutes each to defend themselves. When they also spoke of the necessity for action against mass death from carbon emissions, the judge ordered them all to be arrested. After this gagging, people began to call us the #WholeTruthFive. Finally, we came to the prosecution's closing statement, where, I kid you not, they argued that the jury must take direction from the judge, that the rule of law keeps our society free from collapse, and that climate change is irrelevant. I, of course, was dismissed as someone who “waffles about the cause”. Not a cofounder of the most influential climate movements in the world and academic on social change. Show trials are about lies, remember? In response I gave my final statement, from behind the glass panel of the dock, reminding jurors they must be sure, not almost sure or on the verge of being sure, and that they must consider ALL the evidence and make a decision that they have actually been given all the evidence. I reminded them of the placard in the Old Bailey that confirms they can acquit based on their conscience without having to give an explanation and without any legal repercussions. There are two elements to the indictment - conspiracy and disruption. The prosecution had presented what they say is ‘powerful evidence’ of involvement in the plan, but this is not the same as ‘conclusive evidence’. I was there to make arguments for action, and not directly involved in actual planning. What does it say about civil liberties if people are imprisoned for making speeches? I offered an alternative explanation for what happened – that a Murdoch-owned newspaper, the Sun, had a journalist who just wanted to make a film of my arrest and so recorded and leaked the public Zoom meeting to the police. Let me remind you that for this I have already been to prison for four months in 2022 without a trial and have been tagged with an 11pm curfew ever since. Even during my closing statement, the judge tried to shut me down but I went on. I argued that I just wanted the jury to hear the defendants for a few hours and to present them with three or four expert witnesses to give the whole evidence. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to mention the ‘C-word’ but the jury had heard the undisputed facts of existential threats – which between them describe an unimaginable harm lasting tens of thousands of years. I simply asked them to consider doing what many other juries have done, let good people go free when they are persecuted by the state. This was about facts, not beliefs. Without facts, this is not a ‘functioning democracy’ but a government that is facilitating the destruction and death of our population. That’s why UN people sat in on the trial – because we do NOT have a functioning democratic state. If you go and ask people in the street, many would laugh at the idea that they have a say in how this country is run. Plenty of expert witnesses would come and tell us we live in a capitalist democracy, a democracy for the rich. In other words no kind of democracy at all. In the end, I said to the jury that if I speak the truth to them I may end up in prison. If the lawyers speak the truth to them they may lose their jobs. If the jury speaks the truth, nothing will happen to them. I begged them to consult their conscience and ask themselves if they were really sure we didn’t have a reasonable excuse. The result of this kangaroo court? You have guessed it. The jury representative stood up the next day, and one by one gave guilty verdicts for all of us, all unanimous. After the verdict, the judge accused me of fraud and ‘grifting’ because my social media post asked for donations towards ‘court fees’. A slight miswording by my friend who writes the posts, as there were no such fees in this trial. But of course, there are massive costs around the whole legal team supporting us and the consequences of going to prison. Please donate towards them at https://chuffed.org/project/support-the-five-on-trial-for-conspiracy. The judge then slandered me by proposing to the jurors that if I was telling lies to obtain money, I might be telling people other lies, and maybe other protesters outside the court were being told lies. He said one of them had been an elderly man hard of hearing and was worried I was exploiting vulnerable people. The public gallery gasped. The man in question was a retired GP in full possession of his faculties with a keen knowledge of the issues – what an insult, and what baseless accusations. To top it off, he said I was 'incapable of introspection'. Guess I’ll have plenty of time for that now… The judge finished his attacks by then personally thanking the jury for not being ‘intimidated’ and said “Well done”. He said he didn’t care what we thought of him. He was just 'doing his job'. This is the banality of evil all over again. He claimed our conviction was just a result of our “single issue fanaticism”. Again, no bias there from a judge who is planning to fly off on holiday when
@JustStop_Oil are planning to disrupt airports… 

Repression is increasing around the world. Amnesty just put out a report on the systematic state attacks on peaceful protest. Look it up. Either we resist the the carbon elites' repression and build a true democracy, led by ordinary people in Citizen’s Assemblies, or Covid-like, ecological and economic shocks spark chaos and fascism. We've seen it over and over again. It's time to say never again. Never again will we let fascism produce a holocaust. Never again we will fail to tell the whole truth: that we face the greatest holocaust ever known, a worldwide gas chamber of carbon that could kill us all. 

Today it was me imprisoned for telling the truth. Next, it could be you.

Join the resistance at http://juststopoil.org before it’s too late.'

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Since I've become politically active, there have been many court cases and sentences that I have disagreed with. I actually think that is to a certain extent inevitable, because rules have to be followed, none of us are infallible and in any justice situation there will be instances in which we'll think that the wrong decision was made. There is no getting away from that. But truthfully, I have never in my life come across any judge who is as partisan as Christopher Hehir seems to be here.

When someone is in a criminal court, they have to swear to tell 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth'. The whole truth, without a doubt, includes the motives that prompted someone to commit the actions they did. Whether those motives made the course of action justified is a separate matter (in this case, given the severity of the climate emergency, I'd argue that they were, but that's open to discussion). But in preventing the jury from hearing the motives at all, Judge Hehir was intentionally prejudicing the outcome of the trial. The right to a fair trial is protected by Article 6 of the Human Rights Act, and on this occasion this was breached. I hope that everyone can agree to that irrespective of whether they have faith in the actions of groups like Just Stop Oil. Not only that, but Hehir showed absolute contempt for the UK's obligations under international law, in spite of having been shown the relevant information beforehand.

In the interests of addressing one of the most commonly cited concerns about Just Stop Oil's tactics, I feel I must answer the frequently-raised question of, 'What about people's daily lives? What if it disrupts someone who needs to be somewhere in an emergency?' This question is normally posed by media sources, but there are regular folk who ask it, some of whose lives have been severely impeded by climate protests, so I think it's only fair to answer. The first answer is that these environmental groups generally make sure the relevant information regarding the road blocks is communicated out beforehand so that people can make their travel arrangements accordingly. There are also blue light policies, which means that emergency vehicles are allowed through.

I'm certain that they haven't been effective in every single case - volunteers are only human, and occasionally there'll be someone who didn't get the memo or an incident that could have been handled more appropriately. There is no way to avoid that. However, I would also raise two points. The first point that roadworks cause major inconveniences to people's lives all the time, and no one is constantly expecting them to account for the inconvenience they cause. It is recognised that in order for our roads to function, the wear and tear from regular use will routinely have to be repaired, even if it does cause a bit of inconvenience now and again. And the second and more important point is: with runaway climate change, our infrastructure will just stop working. In New York earlier this week, the Third Avenue Bridge in Manhattan had to be shut down because the heat had caused the metal pivots inside the bridge to expand, meaning it couldn't close correctly. Hurricanes, wildfires, floods and heatwaves will continue to cause major inconveniences, and increasingly so with time. If you're so concerned about these inconveniences preventing you from getting quickly from place to place, why aren't you worried about how difficult that might be in the future? Environmental groups are trying to stop that from happening. It's not fun. No one likes sitting in a dirty road all day, being shouted at by frustrated drivers, and putting their freedoms on the line. No one likes feeling as though they're ruining someone's day. But they do it because they are genuinely frightened by the speed of environmental progress in the world. They do it for me, for you, for all of us, and are prepared to spend years in jail in the interests of stopping the future from being that bit worse. I think that's worthy of respect.

If there's one positive to be found in the situation with the Whole Truth Five, it's the fact that this jail sentence is so disproportionate that I don't think this story is going to go away. In the long run, I think instances like this are beneficial for the cause of environmentalism, in much the same way as how Emily Davison jumping in front of a moving horse was beneficial for the Suffragettes' movement. It's just a shame how traumatic this will be for the individuals concerned - but there are ways in which we can help them. The first thing you can do is to sign the petition to the Attorney General Richard Hermer KC calling for the Whole Truth Five's release and for cases like this not to involve severe jail sentences. The second thing you can do is to contact your local representatives. Since the passing of the relevant Act, we have a new Government. It will be very interesting to see if Labour is committed to justice and the rule of law. I hope they are - but even if not, we will not let this matter pass.

I'd just like to finish by saying that I know how anxiety-inducing the matter of climate change can be. I myself often get panic attacks when I read too much about it; I have to be quite selective about my sources, and only go for the things that make me feel compelled to take action, rather than those which make me paralysed with fear (there are a lot of those). So I want to share this article by one of the world's most accomplished climatologists, Michael Mann, which emphasises that we aren't doomed and we are making progress. We're not making enough progress - there's still far more that needs to be done, and currently is not being - but I think sometimes the language we use to describe these things is quite a barrier to making further progress. There are more people than ever before who care about these matters. This is emphasised by the fact that at the recent UK General Election the Green Party quadrupled their representation in Parliament, and the reason that harsh sentences like that of the Whole Truth Five are happening now, rather than a few decades back, is because we are winning, and the establishment is scared of us. We must not allow ourselves to be cowed.

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Reform UK voters are victims of grooming

 When I was on doorsteps campaigning for my partner Owen Lewis in Monmouthshire, one of the things that surprised me most was how much better I got on with people who were planning on voting Reform UK than I thought I would.

I wrote a bit about my views on Reform UK on a previous blog, and how I feel that a major part of their appeal is not based especially concretely on their policies. Nevertheless, I had presumed (perhaps unfairly so) that people with those kinds of views would be types that I would really struggle to talk to, people I'd feel were a bit racist, people whose approach to life would be the complete antithesis of mine. What I found was the opposite - although many of these people did express opinions that I felt a little dodgy, I often found them to be quite interesting people, and their views to be ones that I respected.

My partner's campaign was fundamentally about the rights of the most vulnerable people, and for that reason I felt quite reticent about getting too deep into conversations about immigration or about refugees or asylum seekers with people sympathetic to Reform's message. If these topics did come up, I would normally either divert the subject to people drowning in the channel, the reasons why people make these crossings in the first place, or agreeing that there needs to be a better and more fair system (which is what I believe, even if my idea of what is a fair system might differ quite strongly from theirs). This was not in the interests of trying to avoid the subject, far from it; more that I felt that it would be more conducive to finding something in common with the people I was talking to, and a lot of the time this was a lot more easy than I'd expected.

One man in particular, who'd been planning on voting Reform as a protest vote, stuck in my mind. He told me quite a bit about his life and his frustrations, very much of which I was very sympathetic to. I didn't have the impression that he was especially right-wing or especially anti-woke - more that, just like me, he was absolutely fed up with the Tories and didn't have the slightest bit of faith in the Labour Party to deal with the myriad of problems they'd caused, and that he therefore wanted to send a message. 

The conversation reaffirmed to me something that I've felt for a while - which is that irrespective of the political choices we might make, most of the time the problems we face in the world are exactly the same as everyone else's. It's also true that politicians manipulate this for their own ends. I think a good example of this is to look at how much the matter of the NHS was used by both the Leave and Remain campaigns around the 2016 EU referendum. Some people were led to believe that leaving the EU would benefit the NHS, some were led to believe that remaining in the EU would. The common factor was that pretty much everyone wanted to help the NHS; this ought to have been something the UK public could agree and unite on, but politicians cynically used it to make people fight amongst themselves. The outcome was that we were stuck with a Government that was intent on destroying the NHS, and more importantly this would still have happened had Remain won the referendum. The whole NHS conversation was an absolute scam and was always going to be, right from the very beginning.

Scams are horrible things to experience, and most of us will fall victim to a scam at some point in our lifetime. There are certainly things we can do to protect ourselves from scams, just as there are things we can do to protect ourselves from being raped or from having burglars break into our homes. But the important thing to remember is that none of these protections are infallible, and that if you happen to fall victim to a crime it is absolutely not your fault. I feel this way about people who vote in ways that cause them additional harm. The common perception of people who vote for parties like this are that they're bigoted, racist or just stupid. I'll confess to having expressed myself views to this effect in the past; it's something that is quite a common belief here on the left.

I don't believe that these kinds of people are stupid, but I do think that a lot of the time they aren't as informed about politics as perhaps they should be. This raises the question as to whose responsibility it is to inform oneself about politics. I am fortunate enough to be someone who does have quite a lot of information about what's going on; I've been writing this blog since I was 17 and first got into going to social justice protests, and I've used it to network a lot online with people, educate myself and inform others. But this didn't just come out of nowhere. Even before I started writing about politics, I had lived with people from multiple different countries, been to school with people from all kinds of class backgrounds and had a fairly clear shape of how I viewed the world. My earliest blogs are quite embarrassing for me to look back on now - naturally as I've grown older and matured my perspective on these topics has become a bit less black-and-white - but on the whole my view of the world hasn't particularly shifted since the time I started doing this fourteen years ago. For my opinion to change, I need to see really good reasons that are in line with my understanding of morality.

If you're someone whose experience of the world is radically different to mine, someone who hasn't been as privileged as I have or met the sorts of people that I've met, it is natural that you may have come to different conclusions to mine - or, more likely, not to have come to very thought-out conclusions at all. The way that political discourse is presented in our media is exceptionally convoluted and difficult to follow. I believe that this is done on purpose so that Governments can get away with more things and it's harder to consistently hold them to account for it, but as years pass it makes the population increasingly susceptible to being groomed by the extreme right. This is what I think has happened with the rise of UKIP and now the rise of Reform - people are rightly, rationally and intelligently crying out for a change in the system, but their lack of reliable political information results in cynical politicians like Nigel Farage being able to take advantage of them. I would view anyone who becomes a target of this to be as vulnerable as anyone who is groomed in any other way.

To the man who was considering voting Reform, I told him that our local candidate had failed to turn up to all hustings bar one, so how could he be relied upon to care or know about local issues? I also made clear that these kinds of politicians are not actually anti-establishment - they're just very practiced in the art of appearing so, when in reality they are as wealthy and connected as the two main parties. The man grudgingly admitted that this was probably true, and I left thinking that he might vote for my partner - naturally I don't know if he did in the end. I've had other conversations like this, and some of them went better than others. But the whole experience did affirm to me that dismissing these kinds of voters as racist bigots causes more harm than good. Reform UK relies on the fact that the left is going to do that - we need to prove them wrong, be willing to have these conversations and be prepared to listen to the problems these people are experiencing. Fascism can only thrive in the absence of a valid alternative.

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What does the Labour Party intend to change?

 The Labour Party cruised to electoral success in the 2024 election with a campaign revolving around a single-word slogan: 'Change'. This replaced the slogan 'For the many, not the few' which Labour used for the previous two elections (and which on election night I likened to how when I was 16, our new headteacher changed my school's motto from 'Learn together, achieve together' to 'Achieving excellence' - my opinion of that pretty much mirrors my opinion of this).

Nevertheless, 'Change' is quite a clever slogan because it means different things to different people, which means that no one can exactly argue that change isn't needed. Almost everyone would like to see a change in something. Here's some ideas for things that 'Change' could mean, and my speculation on what Labour intends it to mean.

One way it could be interpreted is as change in our pockets. This could mean one of two things: everyone being wealthier, or a stand against a cashless society. I'd support either of these things. I'd love us all to have a bit more money, whereas the increasing digitisation of our currency and banking is something I've been campaigning against for a long time (I wrote in April about the campaign to save Halifax bank). Now that Labour is in Government, I will definitely pressure them to keep physical cash as a regular part of our lives. However, I doubt this is what 'Change' meant in the context of the Labour slogan, for no other reason that that my local Labour campaigners didn't seem to have thought of this when I suggested it to them!

It may mean a complete change in the system and the reversal of the absolute horrors of Conservative austerity. Again, this is something I'd welcome, as I'm sure most other people would. Conservative austerity has caused substantial damage to the quality of our lives, and it is this that has caused them to be so utterly wiped out across the UK, including to have lost every single MP in Wales which is where I live. Unfortunately, listening to the rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, such as Reeves' comment that it will be the private sector that takes charge of new housing, makes me doubt this. Still, they're very welcome to surprise me.

It could mean a change to our electoral system. This is the first change I'd wish for that I actually have hope that Labour might achieve. At the hustings, my now MP Catherine Fookes promised that Labour would extend General Elections to sixteen-year-olds, and even hinted at one point that we might replace First Past the Post with a more proportional system. Unfortunately I've learned to become extremely cynical - Keir Starmer has previously declined to make Proportional Representation an actual election pledge, whereas I've got a nasty feeling that this votes for 16-year-olds idea will go the same way as Keir Starmer's leadership pledges. Nevertheless, I am somewhat optimistic; especially given how many minority MPs managed to get into Westminster this time, I think it's possible for there to be enough pressure on the Government to properly change the system within the next Parliament.

It could mean a change to our climate. Naturally, I would NOT support increasing climate change, and I doubt the Labour Party would advertise themselves like that in the first place. Whether their policies will halt climate change or accelerate it remains to be seen - perhaps the Green Party can put the pressure on.

What I suspect 'Change' was meant to mean though, and what I repeatedly said on doorsteps, is a change to the people in Government. I do not believe that Labour had, or has, any intention of changing the status quo, merely of changing the people enacting it. It is a curious truth in politics that much of the time, slogans and titles promise the opposite of what they actually do. In the late 2010s, various MPs resigned from their parties in order to form the short-lived 'Change UK' party, and ironically its main aim seemed to be to keep the status quo exactly as it was. The politicians who made up Change UK generally had the same kinds of politics as the current senior Labour Party officials, and I think that the Labour Party's current understanding of the word 'Change' is probably quite similar.

But this does not mean that I think true change is out of reach. I believe that the outcome of that election, the number of Labour MPs whose vote majorities in their constituencies reduced significantly, and the amount of people now who will demand that their lives and futures improve, have created some great opportunities to hold the powerful to account. The powerful know this and don't want to be held to account so they will undoubtedly throw us a few more cake crumbs that they'd planned to - our job is to strategically determine when to accept them and when to stand up and say that we want more. Watch this space!

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My thoughts on the 2024 UK General Election

For quite a long time, I was told that Labour would win the next General Election by an absolute landslide. The people who told me this (especially if they were people whose political opinions were fairly leftist, progressive and similar to mine) assured me that this would not be because they were actually doing especially well, but just because the Conservatives were doing particularly badly. I always responded by saying that Labour's super-majority was not guaranteed, and that just because another party was doing badly did not automatically mean that Labour would do well. I have said as much on this blog, many times.

My main reasoning for coming to this conclusion was that I felt that you could have said exactly the same thing in 2015. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of the early 2010s was supremely unpopular, and the huge wipeout the Liberal Democrats suffered at that election was demonstrative of that. That should have been an extraordinarily easy election for Labour's then-leader Ed Miliband to win - but unfortunately, his iteration of Labour was so abjectly unappealing that the anti-Tory vote was widely split, and the result was that David Cameron's Conservatives managed a full majority by themselves. It wasn't until Jeremy Corbyn took over the party's leadership that it became more of a two-party fight again. Whether you supported Corbyn's policies or whether you didn't, it is inarguable that he galvanised a lot of the people who had strong anti-Tory sentiments, and the 2017 and 2019 elections very clearly became Labour versus the Conservatives again, in a way that 2015 just had not been. Since Keir Starmer has taken over the reins of the Labour Party, I have felt that a lot of the problems that prevented Labour's win in 2015 have re-emerged, in particular the party in opposition failing to take especially strong stances against much of the Conservative Government's ideology. In fact, I think these problems have been worse under Keir Starmer than they were in 2015 under Ed Miliband, and I didn't see why taking such a similar approach to one that had clearly failed in the past was likely to have a different outcome this time.

Of course, we've now seen that Labour did get a huge majority of seats at the 2024 election, just as they were predicted to. However, this does not mean I'm going to sit and eat humble pie, because I still don't believe I was wrong. I never claimed to be certain they wouldn't get a super-majority, just that I didn't think it was inevitable. I still don't think it was inevitable. From interacting with people, both across the country via social media and on doorsteps whilst campaigning for my partner (who was standing as an independent in Monmouthshire) I sensed great dissatisfaction from many people not just with the Conservatives, but with the Labour Party as well.

I do not feel that Labour did as well in this election as the amount of seats they won would suggest. They received around 600,000 votes less than they did in 2019, which is generally considered to be Labour's worst result since the Second World War, some of their most prominent MPs such as Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debbonaire lost their seats, and many got in on a much reduced vote count in their constituencies (Keir Starmer's majority was reduced by half, which is absolutely unheard of for an incoming Prime Minister, whilst Health Secretary Wes Streeting came within around 500 votes of losing his seat as well). More significant than this is that in both cases an independent candidate came second, which is pretty unusual under our archaic First Past The Post system. The Green Party quadrupled their seat count, and some independents did get in, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

So why, if we're to agree with my basic standpoint that Labour isn't especially popular and that the Tories imploding wouldn't by itself be enough for them to win, did they get such a large seat count compared to elections like 2015? There are many reasons for that, but I've narrowed it down to three key ones: the 2020 pandemic, the rise of Reform UK and the collapse of the SNP in Scotland.

The 2020 pandemic

I don't see this matter discussed very much in the media anymore, and certainly not in reference to the election, but I believe it's vitally important in terms of exactly how much the Tories fell from grace.

Personally, I had quite a nice time during the COVID-19 pandemic, although I know a lot of people didn't. But whether we were happy or whether we weren't, I feel that that pandemic changed us as human beings, and that the impacts of this have not been acknowledged by the establishment class. For the first time since the World War II, we were all in a situation where we felt we had to collectively inconvenience ourselves for the greater good. Some of us were trapped with toxic partners. Some of us missed loved ones' funerals. Some of us were far shorter of money than normal. Some of us (me included) were lucky enough to be generally okay, but if we were we felt obliged to check in from time to time with people who might not be. But that was okay - because we were doing the right thing, and all in it together.

I remember the day the glue snapped - when Dominic Cummings decided to drive to Barnard Castle ostensibly to check his eyesight, and Government ministers tripped over themselves to defend his behaviour. At this point, that community spirit died. People thought, quite rightly, that they'd been taken for absolute mugs - that they'd put themselves to great inconvenience for the safety of everyone, and the people who made these rules couldn't even be bothered to follow them themselves. At that point, we all decided we couldn't be bothered anymore to follow the rules, even in the interests of keeping people safe, and when scandals like Partygate came out we didn't lose any respect for the Government because there was already none left.

The irony is that from the Conservative Government's perspective, this probably didn't feel especially significant because they've always had contempt for the common people and consider themselves to be exempt from the rules. They're so removed from people's daily lives that they probably saw nothing wrong with what they did. And for ordinary people, the Government playing to a different set of rules is what we've come to expect, and in most cases we just shrug and say, 'So what? It's always like that.' But this was different. This was such an extreme situation, where everyone felt that they had to care for each other, that this felt like a gross betrayal in a way that this kind of thing normally does not.

Another feature of the 2020 pandemic is that it gave a lot of people a bit of time to think. Many found new hobbies, or discovered they had talents that they didn't know about themselves. It gave us the time to think about what we wanted to do with our lives, what values we held and what we wanted to do with them, in ways that normally we don't quite have time for. These feelings have stayed with us since, and there are many people now in creative work that they picked up during lockdown. This time taken has, I think, made it more possible to recognise when our elected officials are taking advantage of us.

Of course, this one itself would only result in the Tories doing badly, not necessarily in Labour gaining seats - but I think it does explain a big part of why they were so much more unpopular than normal.

The rise of Reform UK

Reform UK is the new name for the Brexit Party, which advocated for a no-deal Brexit in the late 2010s. Although they are not the same party, it bears a striking resemblance to the UK Independence Party (UKIP), mainly due to the ongoing association both parties have had with the politician Nigel Farage, who is Reform's current leader and serves as the MP for Clacton.

It wouldn't be accurate or fair for me to say that Reform doesn't have any coherent policies, because it clearly does if you take the time to read them, and my local Reform candidate Max Windsor-Peplow gave some quite thought-out and complex answers to questions during the one single hustings he attended, even if I didn't agree with what he said. However, what I can say is that when canvassing on doorsteps and meeting Reform voters, it was quite rare for them to be able to coherently explain what their policies actually were, besides vague comments like, 'It's all the immigrants, isn't it?' Reform may have some policies, but they have not taken the time during their campaign to make clear what these policies actually are, or what the causes are of our societal problems.

What UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform all have in common, and what Nigel Farage in particular is exceptionally good at, is that they purport to be the main anti-establishment option for voters. This is demonstrated by the fact that they received the third highest vote share nationwide. People were sick of both the Tories and Labour, Reform UK recognised this and presented themselves as being a credible alternative. Just as a personal anecdote, I found that potential Reform voters were some of the most easy to talk to about my partner Owen's campaign, even though his actual politics are radically different from theirs and Nigel Farage's. This is because a lot of the time, this wasn't actually about anyone's policies; it was about wanting to send a message that people want to be listened to a bit more, and voting for a really good independent does that just as much as voting for a party like Reform.

In reality, Reform UK is not anti-establishment - its organisers have just learned how to appear to be, when in reality they care very little about ordinary folk and are connected to exactly the same kind of powerful individuals as the Conservatives are. This can be seen by how much they are featured in the mainstream media - Nigel Farage is one of the most frequently-featured faces on Question Time in spite of the fact that until last Thursday he'd never been an MP, whereas someone like Caroline Lucas of the Green Party has appeared far less often despite having been in Westminster for fourteen years. With the complete lack of impartiality from the UK's media, a truly anti-establishment politician could never hope to receive this amount of prominent coverage. The aim is to purport to be anti-establishment whilst driving the UK's domestic and foreign policies increasingly to the extreme right.

However, there are some major differences between UKIP and Reform UK. The most important one for this election is the fact that UKIP's aim was not really to gain seats - it was more to spook the Conservative Party into adopting more of their policies, in particular to pressure David Cameron into ordering a referendum into the UK's continued membership of the European Union. Reform UK isn't so interested in this, perhaps because it could see that at this point the Conservative Party was dead in the water. Its aim is more ambitious than this - it's to take advantage of the complete drop in support for establishment politics generally, and for this they do need seats.

In my constituency of Monmouthshire, the newly elected Labour MP Catherine Fookes unseated incumbent Tory David TC Davies, who had held the seat since 2005. Her majority is roughly the same amount of votes that Reform got. I will not say that this is fundamentally the reason why Labour won that seat, as I don't believe Reform's voters would necessarily have otherwise voted Conservative (I actually think my partner Owen could have got more votes as an anti-establishment candidate in the absence of Reform). Nevertheless, the fact that Reform was more interested in taking votes from the Conservatives than UKIP were has overall benefitted Labour.

Although I'm concerned by the rise in Reform, I do really hope that by sitting as an MP it will become apparent to the populace how devoid of practical measures to improve our lives Nigel Farage actually is. In the meantime, I'm confident in the left's role in presenting decent principles as an alternative. But these will not come from the Labour Party, they'll come from people who are truly anti-establishment and not just purporting to be.

The collapse of the SNP

I believe that the performance of the SNP is the most crucial reason why Labour did so much better in this election than they did in 2015.

In 2015, pretty much all the other parties were wiped out across Scotland as the SNP dominated, winning 56 out of a total 59 Scottish seats. This was embarrassing for all the other parties, but particularly for Labour, as Labour has traditionally dominated Scottish politics. The reason for the SNP's success is not because Scottish voters have fundamentally different values to voters across the rest of the UK; it's merely that they happened to be presented with a valid alternative to neoliberalism when the rest of the UK was not.

Fast forward to 2024, and the SNP has lost huge numbers of seats. There is no one single main reason for this, and I don't know enough about Scottish politics to feel comfortable speculating. I feel that there were just too many small things that made the SNP far less appealing than they were ten years ago, including having constant changes of leader since the departure of Nicola Sturgeon. It is this, to me, that has caused the Labour Party to get so much more success at this election, as Scotland is the nation where the Labour vote has increased the most (in England it remained fairly static, and in Wales where I live it actually fell). Again, I don't believe that this was because of radical differences of value between Scottish voters and the rest of the UK; merely that the Scots had become accustomed to having a decent alternative to the main parties, and without one fell back towards supporting Labour as they traditionally would have.

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For me, I'm very optimistic about the new Westminster make-up, in spite of the fact that I really did not think Labour deserved to win an election. The fact that they won such a landslide in terms of seat numbers but dropped so much in terms of actual votes is something bizarre that has never happened before. The Government knows that seats they thought were safe are now perhaps not so safe, and for this reason I feel the time is ripe to put pressure on them to really stand up for the things that matter to us.

But we must not be complacent. If we are, our NHS will be privatised, our civil rights to protest will be stripped from us, and our general quality of life will be radically reduced before we can say, 'We shall not be moved'.

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The avoidance of being seen as 'political'

 As I've mentioned a fair few times on this blog in recent weeks, my partner Owen is standing for Parliament, as an independent candidate for the constituency of Monmouthshire. I encouraged him to do this because of his extremely popular disability rights campaigns in the area, and to support the ongoing campaign to stand left-wing independent candidates more generally (since my last blog, I've learned of a few more who are doing this in Wales).

I'm really enjoying this campaign - I've never done anything like this before and I have no idea of Owen's chances of winning, but I am meeting a lot of people on doorsteps who say he's a breath of fresh air when compared to the establishment politicians. We're going out canvassing pretty much every day, interacting and swapping ideas with various other independent candidates who are standing around the UK and there's a really enjoyable vibe of just doing something and trying to get something achieved. But it's also forced me to confront something else, something I've been aware of for a little while - the idea of being 'political' is quite often avoided in polite society.

'Don't talk religion or politics' is something you're told whenever you're in polite company. When I was at University, if I was ever invited out with someone, it would often be followed with, 'But please will you not spend all evening going on about politics?' Talking in too much detail about politics is, for some reason, considered to be quite rude. Social media has thankfully broken down that boundary a little, and made it more possible to leave comments on things. I think this is partly because online it's easier to back your statements up with facts - if you feel you don't know in much detail what you're talking about, it's possible to do a quick Google search and check before returning to the conversation, in a way that in person you just can't do. I know that I personally feel a lot more informed about the world as a result of my social media activity, and I know a lot of other people do too. I also think that this is a big part of the reason people feel uncomfortable talking politics in the first place - that they're worried about looking stupid in front of someone they perceive as knowing more than them.

But it's more than that. Campaign groups that very specifically exist to create some kind of societal change take pride in advertising themselves as 'apolitical'. The chef Jamie Oliver described himself as not being political in campaigning for children to get better-quality food in state schools. The film Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story features a scene in which conservative activist Mary Whitehouse (played by Julie Walters) insists that her Clean Up TV campaign at the BBC is 'not political (I have no idea if the real Whitehouse ever said this, but even if she didn't the scene is still indicative of what people understand 'political' to mean). And as the partner of someone standing for Parliament, I've found that people I work on campaign groups with are slightly hesitant to talk about this. For example, I'm quite heavily involved in anti-war, pro-Palestine activism, and although many of my fellow members have been excited and supportive of Owen's Parliamentary campaign, it's been suggested that it's probably not a good idea to talk about it officially through the group, even though Owen is one of the very small number of candidates who is unequivocally calling for the state of Palestine to be recognised by the UK. This is again, in the interests of not wanting to be 'political'.

I should make clear that I don't say this to criticise anyone who tries to avoid looking too political. If they believe that their campaign is better-served by not giving any politicians any kind of support, I respect that decision. However, I think it does raise the question of why that is? I believe that any action that tries to change anything is, by its very nature, political. I would say that every single example I've given is of people who were trying to change the political status quo, something I regularly try to do myself. I think if you're doing something political, I don't see why it's a dirty thing to be upfront about that.

We talk about politics as if what happens in Westminster, in Holyrood, in Brussels or in the White House is completely separated from our own day-to-day lives. But in reality, they're completely inextricable. We get to exercise a vote every few years that in reality means almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, and then the politicians take it upon themselves to act in whatever way they see fit, irrespective of what general people actually want. The only way to make any kind of impact on that is to behave in ways that are unashamedly, uncompromisingly political - if people don't act in political ways, politicians with great power will never take action that people want or need.

Just on a personal level, I view nearly every conversation I have as being somewhat political. This is why I struggle if I'm ever asked not to talk politics, because the way I live my life every day is a reflection of my views on the world. A conversation about the weather becomes a conversation about the climate, which becomes what we're doing to our planet and the ecological emergency. A conversation about what I had for breakfast becomes a conversation about my diet, which is built around the views I hold regarding food production. This is why I tend to say, 'If you don't want me to talk politics, it's probably better if I don't come at all', because this is the person I am and I don't feel I can make that commitment, or that anyone would be better off if I did.

Particularly when canvassing, the nature of who people are planning to vote for inevitably comes up. I don't probe if someone doesn't want to talk about it, but I find it fascinating the number of people who invariably consider their voting choice to be as confidential as their bank PIN. I would understand this if we were living in a police state where you could be harassed or arrested for voting in the wrong way - but we are not. I actually believe that were we able to have more of a conversation about who we're all going to vote for, we'd be able to discuss these matters more openly, come to understand what people feel and and why. I think that very few people, even if I fundamentally disagree with their opinions, have views that I actually would not understand. If we could share that with each other, I believe we'd be a more politically healthy society, and that this would be a good thing.

There's another thing that makes people disapprove of constant political discussion, and that is that people find it boring. My question to that is: why? Why does a discussion about the way we live and function bore you? The answer is quite simple: because it's been made boring. Everything about the way politics is conducted in the UK is designed to be really dull. When we watch politics on the television, we see boring men in boring suits, sitting in boring rooms and using boring words that a lay person might not understand, and more often than not they're contravening people's human rights. There are some states where the force of the military keeps people from engaging in politics. In the UK, they don't bother to do that, because the subject is made to sound so dull that not enough people try to engage in it in the first place. Although, I do think this is changing. The tightening of laws regarding protests, the introduction of photo ID at polling stations and various other things, are all designed to suppress political engagement, and the reason it's being done right now is that people's living standards have got too low. Simply making it boring doesn't work so well as it used to, because people are actually looking to have these conversations.

I'm very torn as to whether to be optimistic or pessimistic at these developments. There's valid reasons to be both, but I am on the whole an optimist, and although I disagree with the suppression of political action, I think it's a good thing that people's increasing willingness to engage is frightening the establishment powers enough that they're taking these measures in the first place. I really hope that by the time they start suppressing people, the genie is already far enough out of the bottle that it will stay out, and people will continually want to engage. It's just a real shame that it takes things getting so much worse in the world for that to happen.

At hustings, Owen typically attends wearing a jumper and his signature hand-knitted beanie hat. He stands out amongst the establishment politicians he sits next to - but I've heard a lot of people talking about how refreshing it is that one of the candidates actually looks and acts like a human being. Let's see how it goes.

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It is an embarrassment to see who is standing against the Labour Party

 This evening, along with my partner Owen Lewis (independent candidate for Monmouthshire), I attended an online talk by the Transform Party regarding the various independent candidates standing against establishment politicians at the coming UK General Election. The meeting was really just to bounce ideas for campaigning, fundraising and getting decent media coverage. I think it's probably better if I don't say who else was there as I don't know if every attendee would be happy with that being on record, but I will say that it was a really interesting meeting and actually reassured me about a lot of the things we're doing in Owen's campaign.

Shortly afterwards, I caught the end of the televised debate between the various political parties, around about the time the representatives were giving their closing statements. Deputy Labour Leader Angela Rayner asserted the oft-repeated line that 'Keir Starmer has changed the Labour Party' (they never seem to want to go into detail about exactly how, do they?) Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer aptly responded, 'Angela's right, he has. He's changed it into the Conservative Party.' I've worked with Carla on political campaigns in the past, I have a lot of respect for her and I think she's right - this is exactly what Keir Starmer has done (I wrote in my previous blog about how similar the Labour Party's campaign feels to the Conservative one from 2017.)

This is why there are so many left-wing independents planning to stand at this election, and why they're all keen to link up and support one another. It was acknowledged at the meeting that because of the First-Past-The-Post system we aren't particularly expecting that many to win, although we are cautiously optimistic that at least some will, and hopefully that will lead to more coming in at the following election. But something has occurred to me about these independents that I think is significant in a way that is separate to their likelihood of getting the seat. For the Labour Party, the specific kinds of people who are challenging it as independents should be one of the greatest embarrassments they've ever seen.

Here are some examples of who is standing.

Jody McIntyre in Birmingham Yardley, challenging Labour's Jess Phillips

I'm starting with this one because it really excited me when I found out about it. Jody McIntyre was one of my earliest political inspirations - I remember, from back in the early days of the Con-Dem coalition, the way that Ben Brown on the BBC tried to humiliate him when a police officer violently pulled him out of his wheelchair at an anti-austerity demonstration. During the interview, Jody conducted himself with great decorum, revealed that he actually wasn't capable of moving the wheelchair by himself, and asked quite reasonably how in those circumstances he could possibly have been believed by the police to be a threat.

Since then, I've often wondered what happened to Jody McIntyre and what he went on to do, as I hadn't seen his name mentioned anywhere - until now. Jess Phillips is a member of Labour Friends of Israel, although she's quite good at talking the talk about Palestine and appealing to the significant number of Muslim voters in her constituency. Personally, I've always found her to be quite problematic as a politician - I will always remember how, on the night of the 2019 General Election, she appeared on TV laughing and joking and clearly delighted with the result, before realising the cameras were on her and quickly shifting her facial expression into one of sadness.

The fact that a severely disabled human rights activist, someone who has been abused for his disability in the past, and someone who has campaigned for the human rights of Palestinians for fifteen years, is standing against one of the most well-known Labour MPs, should shame the party.

Andrew Feinstein in Holborn and St Pancras, challenging Labour leader Keir Starmer

Andrew Feinstein is from South Africa, and is from a Jewish background - he's actually the son of a Holocaust survivor.

Having been persecuted for his anti-apartheid politics throughout the 1980s, Andrew served as a member of the South African National Assembly from 1997-2001, under President Nelson Mandela. In 2001, he resigned in protest against corruption from within his party, moved to the UK and has since fought corruption in various areas from the heart of London.

I've written a fair bit about Andrew's campaign on this blog, because it's been one of the few things that I've really felt motivated by in politics over the last few years. I'm not the only one either - I think his decision to challenge Keir Starmer for his seat is one of the main things that has prompted other independents to stand. I've also met Andrew personally - he came to do a talk near where I live in Abergavenny earlier this year, I found him so inspirational and he was one of the earliest people who encouraged Owen to stand.

I said earlier that Labour never wants to go into detail about how it has changed - but if pressed on the matter, politicians will trot out that they've done an amazing job dealing with anti-Semitism. I don't think this is true at all. On the contrary, I think Labour has made anti-Semitism far worse. Labour's attitude makes anti-Semitism inextricable from opposition to the state of Israel - and when the state of Israel is committing war crimes on the scale that it is, that has serious consequences for any and all Jewish people. Jewish people have also regularly been suspended and expelled from the Labour Party on the grounds of anti-Semitism. To be clear, I don't believe it's impossible for Jews to be anti-Semitic, just as I don't believe it's impossible for women to be misogynistic, gay people to be homophobic or black people to support white supremacy. These are offensive and unacceptable views, and should be called out irrespective of who expresses them. But if people in these groups were regularly and consistently accused of these things, that would concern me greatly, and it concerns me greatly how hard it is to be a Jewish socialist in the Labour Party - far harder, from what I've seen, than being a non-Jewish socialist.

I don't know how well the campaign for Andrew is going, although I've been advised by friends working on it that there are a lot of people in the constituency who are very interested, and that the kind of voter Keir Starmer is trying to target with Labour aren't the types of people who generally live in Holborn and St Pancras. But in some ways, I think that isn't really the point. For the son of a Holocaust survivor, and a personal friend of Nelson Mandela, to be challenging the Leader of the Labour Party for his seat - a leader who has built a major part of his campaign on tackling anti-Semitism - is probably the greatest humiliation the Labour Party could experience right now. This is the case irrespective of how well Andrew Feinstein actually does.

Owen Lewis in Monmouthshire, challenging Conservative Secretary of State for Wales David TC Davies (marginal constituency, Labour putting a lot of resources into it)

This last example I've shamelessly chosen just because Owen Lewis is my partner, and I therefore know the details of this one inside out. Owen is a popular local campaigner, particularly on disability rights. Before I knew Owen, he worked for many years at Tudor Street Day Centre, helping adults with learning difficulties and mental health problems get the best out of life and achieve as much independence as possible.

The campaigns started when Owen learned that after closing its doors in 2020 due to the pandemic, Tudor Street Day Centre had not re-opened, leaving the local disabled community without their much-needed services. This campaign is still ongoing; it's been hugely successful so far, with great support from the local community (I think the Day Centre would have been knocked down for housing by now were it not for Owen's efforts). Nevertheless, it has still not re-opened. Owen set up a local community group, run by volunteers, to replace the services Tudor Street Day Centre used to offer - this project has proven to be a real lifeline for some of the most vulnerable people in town. Nevertheless, it could be better. The building it runs from, whilst good in some respects, is not equipped for people with some of the most severe disabilities. The continuing goal, which keeps getting kicked down the road, is to get Tudor Street Day Centre re-opened.

On this campaign, Owen has dealt with MPs, prospective MPs and councillors of all descriptions and political persuasions. Some have been more helpful than others, but the end result is the same - Tudor Street Day Centre has still not re-opened, and the message is sent out to the local disabled community that their needs are not the priority for local politicians. Owen has therefore built his election campaign around the rights of people who are disabled, elderly, unwell or vulnerable in some other way. Sometimes people interpret this as being a single issue campaign, but it is not. In every political decision that is made, some people are affected more than others, and those who are affected more tend to be in more vulnerable groups. Owen's work is aimed at redressing this balance - making sure that on every policy the next Government enacts, from climate policies to addressing the ongoing situation in Palestine, the rights of every single person are considered, right down to those with the quietest voices.

This one is slightly different from the other examples I've given because it's a Conservative MP Owen is challenging, rather than a Labour one. Nevertheless, the local council is Labour-run and it's a seat the Labour Party is particularly keen to get. Owen (and I) would love to be able to support Labour in this election. But we don't feel that their values will cause the most vulnerable people in the community to get their building back. To be fair to the local Labour candidate Catherine Fookes, she was actually very kind and encouraging when Owen told her he was planning on standing against her. We have nothing against her personally as a candidate. But we do have a lot of things against the Labour Party's position on disability rights - not just because of the Tudor Street Day Centre campaign, but because of Labour's track record, how in the past people who couldn't work due to disability or illness were vilified, how when she was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Yvette Cooper (now the Shadow Home Secretary) decided that disabled people were fit to work if on a single day they could lift an empty cardboard box and put it back down again.

As Owen's partner, I can testify to the fact that he has no personal political ambitions. He is doing this purely for the local community, because he does not believe that disabled people will be safe under any of the other candidates. For a party that is meant to be for the people to have one of its most marginal seats challenged by someone who does not trust that they'll protect the most vulnerable people in our societies is an absolute disgrace.

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The candidates I've mentioned aren't the only independents standing. But it points to a general point about how Labour doesn't know what it actually stands for. It doesn't have any concrete ideology that is different from the Tory one. I wish it did - I wish we didn't need all these independents standing and had a party we could trust to get behind. Nothing summarises this more than the party's current slogan. In 2017 and 2019, the slogan was 'For the many, not the few' - this was something we could actually get behind, a recognition that for too long politics had only served the super-rich. This has now been replaced with the single word 'Change'. To be clear, this does not mean a change in anything to do with the current political status quo. It only means a change in the people doing it. The Labour Party motto may as well be 'It's our turn now' - it would mean exactly the same thing.

These independents, whether or not they win any seats, are the opposition now. We have to recognise that, because Reform and Nigel Farage are out to position themselves as the opposition. They are not the opposition. They are merely capable of framing themselves in anti-establishment rhetoric. In reality, they come from elitist backgrounds and in power would behave in exactly the same way as the Conservative Party, and unfortunately now, the Labour Party.

One interesting thing I have observed is that of the independents that I'm aware of, Owen is the only one standing for a constituency that isn't in England (if anyone knows of any others, please do tell me!) Naturally, left-wing voters in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland tend to have their own parties to support - but these parties still have flaws, and I'm very interested to see how this movement will extend to the devolved nations. Hopefully, Owen will play a part in that.

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Keir Starmer's election campaign feels almost identical to Theresa May's

 In 2017, then Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap General Election, in spite of the fact that in the year she'd been in Downing Street she had repeatedly insisted she wouldn't. She claimed that the reason was because she felt that she'd be more able to negotiate a good Brexit deal with the EU with a bigger Parliamentary majority - but it's generally agreed that the real reason for her decision is that she was miles ahead in the polls at the time. The UK media had given her a ten-month-long honeymoon period, the Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn was generally seen as being unelectable and having just triggered Article 50, she was expecting to absorb all the people who'd voted UKIP in the 2015 election.

I remember very clearly the day I learned of the 2017 General Election, and I almost had a full-blown panic attack. Everyone was saying that the Tories were primed for an absolute super-majority, and I believed them. I believed that Theresa May would be in power for a very long time, that Jeremy Corbyn would be removed from the Labour Party and we'd lose any hope of ever going forward. But it didn't work, for two reasons: 1) Jeremy Corbyn did a much better campaign than anyone was expecting, and 2) Theresa May proved herself to be robotic, dull and quite embarrassing to watch. In the end, although the Conservatives were still the largest party, they lost seats whilst Labour gained them and this was generally considered to be the Waterloo for Theresa May. (Of course, in 2019, my fears about 2017 did come true, albeit with Boris Johnson rather than Theresa May - this was the worst day of my life.)

One of the things that always strikes me about 2017 is how quickly Theresa May managed to dive-bomb in popularity. At the beginning of the campaign, the belief that the British public would adore her was to such an extent that their campaign materials had 'Theresa's Team' written on them instead of 'Conservative Party'. Her rhetoric was all about her as an individual rather than about the party - the phrases 'If I win/lose seats' and 'We need to strengthen my hand' were heard constantly. But within a few short weeks, suddenly she was a public laughing stock, and even staunch Tories were talking about how unrelatable she came across. Having spent several years perfecting her image as a professional and reliable head-teacherly-like figure, when she had the spotlight on her it became apparent that she was hideously out of her depth.

The reason I'm talking about this now is that when I watch Keir Starmer campaigning for Labour, I can't help but get déja vu. Like May, he's cultivated his career more about looking like a safe pair of hands than what he actually stands for. His appearance is designed to look authoritative, but not in a way that's too scary. But it's more than that. Much of Theresa May's rhetoric is now being repeated by Keir Starmer almost verbatim. On the 'missions' section of the Labour Party website, the first subheading is 'Strong, stable and secure foundations'. In 2017, one of Theresa May's greatest embarrassments was the constant repetition of the phrase 'Strong and stable' whenever she was asked a difficult question. This isn't the only time Starmer has repeated May's own phrases - a few months ago, Starmer told local councils that there was 'no magic money tree', again echoing May's words in 2017. This is not only repetitive, but it is also nonsense - as we saw in 2017, Theresa May managed to find £1bn within a single day to bribe the DUP into supporting her in Parliament, and I have no doubt that Keir Starmer would do exactly the same if he was in that position. The proverbial magic money tree exists, and politicians shake it constantly whenever it benefits their own careers.

Earlier this week, Keir Starmer came to my hometown of Abergavenny. Whilst he was here, a group of Palestine campaigners confronted him about his lack of enthusiasm for an immediate ceasefire. Keir Starmer ignored them and wouldn't stop to talk - his priority was purely to talk to Labour groups who already supported him. This is much the same as what Theresa May did - May even went as far as arriving by helicopter to remove the remotest possibility that she may be confronted by anyone who didn't support her. May also attracted controversy by refusing to debate Jeremy Corbyn on television, instead sending various colleagues to represent her. Starmer isn't going quite as far as that, but this excellent video explains how he's refusing to debate anyone but Rishi Sunak, meaning the smaller parties are likely to be locked out of TV debates. This is effectively the same thing as when Theresa May refused to debate Jeremy Corbyn - Jeremy Corbyn would have given her a tough ride and proven himself to be a more effective orator, whereas Rishi Sunak is not going to fundamentally challenge Keir Starmer's mission statement because they both essentially believe in free-market capitalism. Like May, Starmer is refusing to debate anyone that he's worried might say something he can't easily come back from.

There's a reason why Starmer and May are so similar to each other. It's because neither of them are particularly interesting politicians, they are both extremely weak at thinking on their feet and the entirety of the mainstream media is behind their campaigns. Behind the scenes, each of them has had conversations with their senior advisors where they've been told, 'This election is yours to lose, you'll be promoted as the safe pair of hands, so in the meantime just stick to the people who already like you and don't do anything embarrassing.' If you try to say anything interesting in an election campaign, you run the risk of being called out by someone - so the solution is to do nothing of note whatsoever and wait for the other side to screw up.

But, as similar as Starmer and May are to each other, there is one major difference. Theresa May was a sitting Prime Minister campaigning against a Leader of the Opposition who had a great amount of empathy, and was capable of relating to ordinary people on their level. Keir Starmer is a Leader of the Opposition campaigning against a sitting Prime Minister who has been abjectly awful and expects to lose. Theresa May had someone giving her a decent fight, and made it easy for them. Keir Starmer has no one like that, and therefore has an advantage that Theresa May didn't have. For that reason, I really have no idea how this is going to turn out for Keir Starmer and Labour - I don't believe that their success in this election is guaranteed at all, but on this occasion that also raises the question: 'If it's not them, then who?'

At this election, unless you happen to have an unusually good Labour MP like Zarah Sultana, I urge all voters to veer away from the major parties. Neither of them will offer anything in the way of positive change. My partner Owen Lewis is standing in the Monmouthshire constituency as an independent candidate, and most of my campaigning will be for him to win this seat. Ideally go for an independent, but if you don't have a good independent standing, a good idea is to go for the Green Party, or Plaid Cymru if you're in Wales or the SNP if you're in Scotland. Remember - in 2017 Theresa May did a deal with the DUP when she lost her majority. The only way to get decent change is to control the options Keir Starmer may have to do a deal with.

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