Left Populism, Israeli Terrorism, Summer Heat, The Brain-Body

In the UK the anti-immigration, anti-woke Reform party led by Trump ally Nigel Farage just cleaned up in local elections. If the results were replicated at a general election the party, just four years old, would be the largest force in government and Nigel Farage would likely be prime minister.

This comes just 10 months after Kier Starmer’s Labour party won a landslide national victory. After being granted a mandate last July, Starmer, who basically said nothing about how he was going to govern and cruised to victory on the back of Tory hatred, decided to do politics really, really badly. He replicated Farage on immigration, aped the Tories on austerity, copied the right’s anti-woke talking points on culture war issues and unapologetically funded genocide. Labour as a political force is finished under Starmer. People want populism. They want to punish elites. The only way to stop Farage being prime minister is for the British political left, led by Jeremy Corbyn and the left-wing MPs that were purged from the Labour party, to form a new populist left political party that directs anger away from migrants, Muslims and internal cultural enemies towards billionaires and class issues. The left everywhere has a very good anti-elite story of its own to tell, it’s just there’s few national level politicians to tell it. At some point very soon it will become unforgivable for Corbyn not to use his credibility among the British left to help start a new political party. He doesn’t need to be leader of this new party. He probably shouldn’t be. But he’s the only person with the following necessary for such an undertaking. He’s the only person who can galvanise a movement around him.

So far Corbyn’s response to Reform’s gains has been to tell a party that hates him and will never listen to him what they are doing wrong. He really needs to stop wasting his breath. They kicked him out and would prefer him dead. A new left party in the UK should then take its lead from the governing parties in Mexico and Spain. In those countries, wealth taxes, windfall taxes on energy companies, immigration, nationalisation, public investment and anti-elite, class-based rhetoric have been a winning formula. A new party of the left in the UK would also need to be in conflict with large parts of the mainstream media. They would have to relish this fight, work with independent media and enjoy being outsiders. This is the only way to avoid a Nigel Farage government and the further horrors that would bring.

Hopefully Corbyn and the British left figure it out in time.

Israeli terrorism strikes Europe

On Friday Israel drone bombed an aid flotilla in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. The flotilla, which was bombed off the coast of Malta where Greta Thunberg was waiting to board, was attempting to break the siege of Gaza which has seen no food or water enter for nearly two months. Under maritime law, bombing a ship in international waters is an act of war against the flag country of the vessel. The vessel had been sailing under the flag of Palau, but the country, an ally of Israel, revoked its flag just days before the attack. Of course, nothing has been done. Western politicians have been silent in the face of Israeli terror in Europe. We can well imagine the response if Russia or Iran had bombed a ship in the Mediterranean: war. But as it’s Israel, anything goes. Telling Israel not to do terrorism, demanding Israel stop starving two million civilians, would, I suppose, be antisemitism. This all happened in the same week the EU mobilised its so-called civil protection mechanism to help Israel fight fires started by Israeli settlers, fires which spread because Zionists have planted millions of non-native pines and shrubs to pretend they don’t live in the Middle East. For children being burned alive in tents, however, there is no such civil protection mechanism on offer from the EU. European solidarity extends only to invasive trees planted by settler colonialists it seems. As the Belgian MEP Marc Botenga commented, it also demonstrates Israel’s priorities: enough planes for genocide but not to fight fires.

All the takes have been taken on Gaza haven’t they?

Everything brings us back to the necessity for new political left formations with the courage of their convictions. We desperately need politicians with the prospect of actually winning power who, among many other things, will speak out against and confront Israel.

A new Corbyn-inspired party in the UK would do this.

The summer lurks

Northern Europe has had a week of summer weather. The temperature in London nudged close to 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) as the UK experienced its hottest early May on record. Drought conditions across the north of the continent, into Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and the Caucuses, are beginning to establish themselves.

This heat comes after many countries received only three days of rain in two months across February and March. April in the UK was also the sunniest on record.

We think of drought being bad because of its impact on crop growth and therefore food prices and availability, but the consequences extend beyond this. A study by climate scientists in Barcelona this week found that drought and heat waves are reducing the ability of ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide. So the more heat, the more carbon dioxide sticks around in the atmosphere because the vegetation isn’t vigorous enough to extract as much out of the air. Plants, instead of using energy to pull down CO2, switch into self-protection mode. The study backs up numerous others on the topic, confirming this as a dangerous feedback loop. All this as the collapse of our climate has pretty much dropped out of the political discourse.

Another thing new left political parties can and must focus on.

Immune system and the brain

Finally, some biological science. Researchers at the University of Bristol have found that mental health conditions including schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD, depression, and bipolar disorder are more prevalent in people who test positive for certain proteins which are expressed by the body’s immune system. Among the 735 immune response-related proteins measurable in human blood, the researchers found people with these neurological conditions all expressed 29 specific proteins, pointing to a potential causal role being played by these proteins in people with these neurological conditions. It also leads me to question whether the increase in neurological conditions since 2020 is related to the fact that billions of people have had their immune systems activated in a way that wouldn’t be the case without a new year-round virus on the scene. (I appreciate these conditions were on the rise well before covid but there has been a marked uptick in recent years which is only expected to accelerate.)

In any case, hopefully the findings will help researchers develops drugs that target the immune system rather than just the brain, an approach which too often fails people.