The following article by Dianne Kirby was first published in Unity, the weekly paper of the Irish Communist Party.
FOLLOWING ICJ’s provisional ruling warning that genocide may be taking place in Gaza, every country under the Genocide Convention has a legal duty to take preventative action. The commitment of the British elite to serving US foreign policy meant Britain chose instead to join America in supporting and sustaining the genocide. Palestine was absent from the government composed love-fest speeches directed at the White House and Congress by Britain’s supposed ‘secret weapon’, the medal bedecked monarch. Also unmentioned were Iran, Sudan, indeed all the western enabled wars ripping apart the very fabric of humanity. Ukraine was raised and praised. Following the Russian invasion, Britain, via NATO, inserted itself back into the core of European affairs. Precisely where Washington wanted it. A reliable tout.
As a former empire willfully clings to a declining one, legacy media both sides of the Atlantic deployed a deluge of superlatives pretending that the two sinking states were not partnered in genocide. Unremarked were presidential threats to eradicate an entire civilization. Britain’s journalistic stooges gushingly reinforced their entrenched affectation of a special relationship. In 1944, acknowledging the waning of the British empire and the rise of the American, future British prime minister Harold Macmillan advised, ‘We must play Greece to their Rome’. An arrogant conceit enshrined within the British establishment, shamefully paraded by Starmer’s dispatch of the British king to meet the American one. A desperate attempt to repair Anglo-American relations, remain relevant, and rescue the tarnished royal brand. An unedifying spectacle exposing two outdated institutions enmeshed with the Epstein cabal. Neither is fit for purpose.
The American constitution was constructed to bring order to the thirteen colonies that broke from Britain in the 18th century. It was not designed for world governance nor the needs of hegemonic power. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson suggested that each generation should revise the Constitution to fit current circumstances. The Trump administration reflects the evisceration of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, meant to prevent tyranny, to which every president since and including Franklin Roosevelt has contributed. The monarchy, a relic from eras during which equality and civil rights were beyond imagining, a bastion of privilege and class, reinforces social divisions that damage, demean and delay the emergence of a truly democratic, modern, multicultural Britain.
Britain’s vanity strewn, stubborn Atlanticism assumes American and British interests are coterminous. For the Epstein class they are. However, slavishly trotting behind America, even when treated with contempt, bodes ill for the British majority. Trump’s removal of whiskey tariffs in honour of Charles and Camilla is a hollow gesture indicating that the troubled British economy can anticipate minimal support from its American ally. The lack of a governmental response to Israel’s interception of the present flotilla trying to deliver aid to Gaza is instructive. The parents of British citizen, Ben Trowell, among about 180 activists on 22 boats intercepted by the IDF in international waters near Crete, 600 miles from Israel, are still ‘waiting for our government to speak out against it’. In contrast, Spain strongly condemned the detention of Spanish activist Saif Abu Keshek, demanding his immediate release. Spanish foreign minister Jose Manuel Albares rejected Israeli claims that Keshek and Brazilian activist Thiago de Avila, both transferred to Israel, both beaten and mistreated, were linked to Hamas. Spain also summoned the head of the Israeli embassy in Madrid to formally protest the interception and added its authority to a joint declaration, which included Turkiye, Brazil, Colombia and South Africa, condemning the violation of international law. Daily atrocities continue unchecked in Gaza, as do murderous assaults in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and on those incarcerated in Israel’s death camps. Not to mention the copycat carnage inflicted on Lebanon.
The profound psychosis permeating Israeli society is exposed by Ben-Gvir’s birthday cake. A three-tier affair crowned with a golden noose, stating in Hebrew: ‘Dreams sometimes come true.’ It celebrates the passage of the death penalty for Palestinian abductees.
The cake’s bottom layer featured two guns pointing at a map of Israeli-occupied lands, acclaiming Ben-Gvir’s lethal loosening of Israel’s gun control policies.
Such are Britain’s friends.