Chris Nineham on our movement on manoeuvres and the assisted dying bill

You wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media which completely ignored it, but Saturday’s huge Nakba demonstration in London marked a massive groundswell of popular opinion in support of the Palestinians. This is a big problem for the government.

As the crowds assembled, I met firefighters and paramedics, a large group of Imams from mosques across the country who had come together to march for the first time, a Christians for Palestine group and a delegation of lawyers. Later I was introduced to the leaders of the Bangladeshi Student Society who said their students were out in force on the march and ran into the contingent of lecturers from Goldsmith’s university who had three times as many people on this demonstration as on previous ones. One family told me it was the first time they had all marched, another friend told me it was her sixty-year old dad’s first demonstration of any kind. Even lots of the stewards turned out to be volunteering for the first time.

Unsurprisingly there was a mood of outrage at the horror in Gaza as Netanyahu escalates his attacks from the level of a genocide and the government here continues its collusion. But there was also a sense of pride and joy at the sheer scale of the turnout.

Rightfully so. Saturday showed that all the attempts to intimidate people through arrests and claims of antisemitism have failed. It showed that the media and politicians virtually ignoring the carnage in Gaza hasn’t normalised it. It showed that even after twenty-six national demonstrations, the activist base has not been demoralised.

This is so important because we are beginning to see cracks in the monolithic establishment support for Netanyahu. Labour backbenchers are starting to complain about Starmer’s position on Palestine, even some pro-Israel Tory MPs like Mark Pritchard have called out Netanyahu, there have been front page demands for action against Israel in the mainstream media, and dissent has even broken out in the ranks of the Jewish Board of Deputies. As a result, Starmer loyalist Sarah Champion MP has been touring the news studios suggesting a reset in the government’s approach to Israel. As we announced on the demonstration too, the Coop supermarket chain has voted to stop trading with Israel.

It is shocking none of this happened earlier, it is only a beginning, but it is very significant all the same. It is an expression of the fact that Israel is isolated like never before. Even Donald Trump appears to have realised that uncritical support for Netanyahu is unsustainable. On last week’s trip to the Middle East he didn’t even stopover in Israel, focussing on building up his relations with Saudi and the Gulf states instead.

Change is happening in other words, and though we don’t know where it is going to end up the fact that it is happening at all is partly the product of the unprecedented cycle of protests there have been for Palestine in this country.

It is it is crucial that the movement continues to mobilise, because it is when cracks start to appear on their side that change is possible. Whatever the mood on the ground demonstrations have to be organised and mobilised. One of the things that was noticeable in the build-up to the demonstration was the number of people out leafletting and organising in communities and workplaces to build the demonstration. I could tell things had shifted because in my borough of Tower Hamlets, at least seventy teachers and support staff from three different schools were out on lunchtime rallies leafletting in the run up to the demonstration.

Congratulations to everyone who was involved in all this. In the weeks ahead we will have to be organising more protests and marches. It is crucial that we are doing more of this work to reach out to the growing number of people who understand that we can and must bring the catastrophe to an end.

A matter of life and death

It seems doubts about the assisted dying bill are growing in parliament. Many MPs are angry that so little parliamentary time was given to what was a chaotic debate in parliament on Friday. Esther Rantzen, who is championing the bill, angered more by her insulting claim that opponents of the bill were motivated by ‘secret religious beliefs’.

More importantly, concerns are growing about the effectiveness of the safeguards on offer. The Royal College of Psychologists expressed these concerns in a widely read report that outlines some of the dangers of the bill.

They argue that there needs to be a holistic assessment of all patients’ situations and in particular ‘unmet needs’. As they say, poverty, untreated pain, inadequate care or housing can all make a person want to die. But there is no provision in the bill to assess these kinds of factors.

Many health professionals too are pointing out that the so-called safeguards are not much more than wish lists, bearing little relation to the actual situation in healthcare. They are making the obvious point that staffing levels are already beyond crisis level and there is no provision for the extra staff that would be needed to carry out the level of assessments and monitoring that are called for in the bill.

People do live in unbearable pain, but whatever one’s views about the principle of assisted dying, introducing it in a situation in which palliative care and social care provision is being slashed to the bone clearly carries enormous risks.

How can we trust a government and a health system that fails to deliver basic necessities for so many vulnerable people in society to introduce such a complex new system for assisted dying?

The clear danger is that in this context assisted dying can become a replacement for proper care. That is why those raising their doubts are in my opinion right.

This week: On Monday I am very pleased to be speaking at Liverpool’s Writing on the Wall Festival on a panel about the dangerous attacks on democracy, though I am sad to be missing the London launch of Kevin Ovenden’s tour of meetings about Malcolm X. On Wednesday evening I will be protesting outside Scotland Yard against the attacks on the right of assembly and calling for all the charges to be dropped. As a key priority I will also be mobilising for the movement’s next big national march on 7 June when the People’s Assembly will be leading the charge against Starmer’s new austerity.