Category: Articles

For two and a half years, the British people were promised that we were leaving the European Union on March 29. But we’re still there.

Theresa May’s government suffered another humiliating defeat last Friday when for the third time Parliament rejected her deeply flawed exit deal with the EU.

In all my life I have never seen our Parliament in such a state of chaos. Every single proposal about leaving the EU has been rejected by the majority of MPs, not just Theresa May’s deal, but all the alternatives that were put forward last week.
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The Trump administration is spreading its intervention and aggression across Central and Latin America, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE.

PRESIDENT Donald Trump signed into law the “Nica Act” (Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act) on December 20 2018, over two years after the draft legislation was first approved by the US House of Representatives in September 2016.

The Act seeks to use the US’s “voice, vote and influence” within international financial institutions, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank, to stop them providing “any loan or financial or technical assistance” to Nicaragua’s government.
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With Evo Morales campaigning for re-election in Bolivia later this year, the left must raise awareness of the threat of growing US hostility, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE.

The Trump administration is ramping up pressure on Bolivia, where Evo Morales is standing for re-election as president in 2019, along with current Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera as his running mate.

To give just one example, Trump recently called on multilateral development banks and the IMF not to fund loans to Bolivia until it fully complies (in US eyes) with the international Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.
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Last week the Conservative party suspended 14 members following accusations that they had posted abusive Islamophobia comments on social media.

None of this came as a surprise to me because I have been aware of the scale of Islamophobia in the Tory party for years. My view is shared by the former Chair of the Conservative Party, Lady Sayeeda Warsi, who has often called for an internal inquiry and urged Prime Minister Theresa May to deal with this problem urgently.
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Although British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt maintains that ties with Saudi Arabia help keep the UK safe, no one can deny the domestic and foreign crimes of the Saudis and no Western government should be supporting them.

On Saturday, as part of his Gulf tour, Hunt was in Riyadh for talks on human rights and the Yemen conflict. This comes after his failure last month to convince Germany to lift its ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which, in Hunt’s words, was damaging for the British and European defense industry.
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WE ARE QUICKLY RUNNING out of time to make the necessary steps required to prevent global warming exceeding the critical point of a 1.5 degree celsius rise. The International Panel on Climate Change has argued we have just over a decade to take the decisive action to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. We face a direct existential threat if we do not rapidly switch from fossil fuels by 2020, and a failure to do so will mean runaway climate change.
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Rewriting history when it comes to Hugo Chávez’s role in Venezuela and Latin America’s past is part of the current US offensive for ‘regime change,’ says KEN LIVINGSTONE.

YOU won’t read about it much in those parts of the media currently arguing for war on Venezuela, but when Hugo Chávez first became president in 1999, Venezuela had endured a wave of economic and social catastrophes in the preceding two decades.

Up to seven in 10 people had been left in poverty.
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Both historical and current experience in Central and Latin America shows the social progress and people’s rights are not things that are on the agenda of US-installed regimes.

The crisis in Central America continues to escalate. Last week, President Maduro of Venezuela released a Facebook video warning that leaders of the US empire were conspiring “to get their hands on our oil – just like they did in Iraq and in Libya.”
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Calling for the overthrow of the government of President Nicolas Maduro is a new and extremely serious development in the US’s longstanding strategy of aggression towards Venezuela, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE.

IN recent weeks, we have all seen how the US has been ramping up its “regime change” strategy towards Venezuela, both directly and through its right-wing proxies in the country and the region.

The thrust of the US strategy is to delegitimise the presidency of Nicolas Maduro and secure a transition to a new government led by Juan Guaido, who they and their supporters internationally have claimed is now Venezuela’s president, against all the norms of international law.
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Britain’s conservative newspapers are obsessed by claims of Russian intelligence interfering in UK and US elections and Skripal allegations, but they have no interest in exposing the illegal activities of MI5 and MI6.

The Undercover Research Group worked with the Guardian newspaper to expose the fact that in the last 50 years 124 organisations have been infiltrated and spied on even though many of these were anti-war and anti-racist activists, environmentalists or animal rights groups – a total of 144 spies targeted them.
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