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Gary Robertson ⚽ It’s not for the want of trying.

Look, it’s three days til the opening of World Cup 2026 and whilst as a Scot I should be buzzing about the prospect of my national team playing three matches then coming home, it’s really difficult not to view this through a political lens.

Firstly, these thoughts are mine and in no way reflect the views of TPQ or anyone associated with it. FIFA is corrupt as fuck. That’s obvious to even the casual observer whilst Israel are busy committing genocide in Gaza -  Yes, Andy Burnham, it’s a genocide - both their men’s and women’s teams were accepted into their respective competitions.

Russia on the other hand attacks Ukraine - “uproar uproar” from Western governments - and is booted out of practically all sporting events. Israel of course are on the side of the “good terrorists” - USA, UK, NATO et al, and more importantly they aren’t bombing, murdering or maiming Caucasians. The whole thing is fucked and it’s “rules for thee not for me.” It absolutely wouldn’t surprise me if the US went on to win this competition just so the Arsehole in Chief can lift the trophy.
 
Then of course we have the domestic terrorists that are ICE. How many innocent people have died in these concentration camps whilst waiting to be deported? Do we just ignore the US record on human rights? Let’s not forget the two high profile murders of Trumps' personal army - writer and poet Renée Nicole Macklin Good and Intensive care nurse Alex Pretti - but there are others:

Victor Manuel Diaz
Silverio Villegas González
Ruben Ray Martinez
Geraldo Lunas Campos
 
And these are the names we know. The conditions in these ICE camps are some of the worst imaginable; and the stories from those who have been detained in these places of the treatment of detainees puts the IDF in the shade. Whilst we are sat enjoying the opening ceremony human beings are suffering in cages, stripped of dignity and human rights but we’re meant to just enjoy the fireworks? Again I have visions of this being mostly Trump and little to do with football - like a golden statue of the man rising through the floor before angels crown him and he rises high into the air to bless the crowds and the stadium. Then lowered, before the man himself is carried to the stage by numerous teenage girls on a bed of the finest satin and silk, then launching into a piece about how great it is to be him, how he’s always been a rugby fan and MAGA!
 
On top of this (seems trivial but worth mentioning I guess) the ridiculousness of ticket prices - Scotland v Brazil in the cheap seats will cost you over £1000. That’s before food, accommodation. Even against Haiti it’s £410. Add in Morocco at £480 and there’s £2,000 per person. It’s went way beyond the wallet of the average working man. It’s greed, corporate greed. Hotel room prices have doubled, trebled. Hell I read the other day that a particular German lager will set you back $18 a bottle!!
 
The USA under Trump isn’t fit to host the World Cup but then where is right now? The whole world seems to be on fire and the far right Nazis are taking over or at least trying too. Regimes like Trumps and to a lesser extent Boris Johnson’s have made racism, hate and suspicion acceptable again.
 
I want to enjoy the spectacle but I fear my conscience may have other ideas.
 
However you view the World Cup, If you choose to watch it or not that’s on you but the ugly head of Qatar hangs shamefully over this event also. For a brief moment we forgot as Messi finally lifted the trophy of the horrors faced by ordinary people, the slave labour and untold dead who built the stadiums, We rejoiced. Let’s not remain silent on the crimes of the Trump regime.

Til next time ….

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

USA Isn’t Fit To Host The World Cup

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Last night's savage attack in North Belfast in which a man was seriously injured has been described as an attempted beheading.


In this part of the world head chopping is viewed with visceral anathema which might go some way to explaining the revulsion that is said to be saturating Belfast at the moment. Speaking to a former republican prisoner this afternoon I learned that people from the nationalist community are furious, with some talking about joining protests this evening. He will not be turning up.

Not that he is opposed to standing with others in opposition to knife crime. He is not prepared to stand against colour and demonise people of a different skin tone from himself. He made the point that knife crime is nothing new in Belfast, reminding me that the nationalist community was terrorised for years in the 1970s by the Shankill Butchers, who came as close as is imaginable to beheading some of their victims.

On the back of that exchange, in a later conversation with a former member of Sinn Fein I caustically commented that it seemed Lenny Murphy was back in Belfast stalking the streets of North Belfast. He suggested an alternative knife man - the one who butchered Robert McCartney in a Markets bar twenty one years ago.

In recent years I have attended several protests against knife crime, only one of which involved head chopping. On that occasion the person responsible was reported to be a man by the name of Robbie Lawlor who was later murdered not far from the scene of last night's incident. The people who gathered on Drogheda's West Street appalled at the murder of Keane Mulready Woods genuinely opposed the killing. They were not on the street because they did not like the skin colour of the killer. 

The person arrested on suspicion of last night's attack is reported by the PSNI to be a Sudanese national. That has kickstarted a surge in anti-immigrant rhetoric from quarters which were much less vociferous when Ian Ogle was knifed to death in Belfast in 2019. Ogle's killers, because they identified as white and British, did not provoke the same rabid outcry that we are familiar with when the attacker is a different colour. The Irish News has reported that 'far-right activist Tommy Robinson and tech billionaire Elon Musk amplified calls for people to take to the streets in response to the incident.'

We can therefore expect the type of hatred that flowed onto the streets in Ballymena last year. We can also expect that amongst those who will block the roads to oppose colour rather than crime will be some who gathered at Scarva at the weekend in support of genocide in Gaza. Brutal murder is not something that taxes them too much. Rather than call for last night's attacker to be executed they could demand he be conscripted into the IDF - ready made, no training necessary.

Last night's attack was brutal and savage. There is no mitigation. Whatever about immigration policy, its rights and wrongs, people's concerns and fears, the policy is hardly any more responsible for last night's savagery than it is for the savagery that ended Ian Ogle's life. 

As the writer, Louth For Ever commented on Bluesky:

fascists exploiting a crime are not protesters with concerns . . . They are the organised far right, and the failure to say so plainly is the failure that lets them launder street violence into legitimate grievance.

 

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Protesting Colour Not Crime

Barry Gilheany ✍ The images were appalling and should shame any police service worthy of the name. 

Stabbing victim Henry Novak from Southampton, and a student at the local university, lies prostrate on the ground in the last moments of his life desperately pleading that he has been stabbed and on five occasions the listener can hear the horrifying iconic words “I cannot breathe.” Instead of administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or placing Henry in the recovery position in readiness for the arrival of an ambulance, the body cam footage of Hampshire police officers shows them putting handcuffs on the dying 18-year-old and dismissing his entreaties about his stab wounds with the words “I don’t believe you, mate”. 

The reason why the last words that Henry Novak hears on this earth are him being read his rights is that his assailant, a 22-year-old Sikh male Vikram Digwa who had stabbed him with a ceremonial sword, had falsely accused him of a racial assault. Exactly why these Hampshire police officers decided to believe his lies and prioritise this phantom crime and relegate the obvious distress of his victim will be the subject of an IOPC (Independent Office for Police Complaints) inquiry. There are many, including the local Sikh community, who believe that it should also be the subject of a public inquiry. 

Last week, Digwa was convicted of Henry’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 22 years. On the steps of the courthouse where the legal proceedings were played out, the Novak family made a dignified appeal for no retaliation for their son’s murder; a plea which was ignored and violated in the most despicable way by rioting in Southampton whipped up by the notorious far right thug figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson and by the call by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage for a response of “cold rage”. Not to be outdone, Rupert Lowe MP, leader of Restore UK a far-right breakaway from Reform, called for the execution of Digwa. Pouring flame on the fires from across the Atlantic was the attribution by Vice President JD Vance of the murder to Britain’s “civilisational decline” caused by mass immigration. The barrel of cess was reached (if that is possible) by US Defence Secretary Pete Hesgeth at the D-Day commemoration ceremonies at Normandy who sacrilegiously compared the “invasion” of Western Europe by migrants to that of the Nazis.

Since the allegation of the existence of two tier policing in Britain whereby ethnic minorities and Muslims are perceived to receive preferential treatment in the justice system than white people is at the centre of the rage around the murder of Henry Novak and of other epochs of civil disorder such as the wave of anti-migrant riots after the Southport killings in the summer of 2024, it is necessary to examine the institutional culture that has provided the rationale for the articulation of such grievances. 

At the outset, I must state that while two-tier narratives are ultimately easily disprovable, there have undoubtedly been examples of where misplaced concerns about legitimising racism has had catastrophic consequences. One example concerns the homicides of three people including a student couple, Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley Kumar, and Ian Coates in Nottingham on 13 June 2023 by paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane. The public inquiry into the killings found that racial sensitivities about the overrepresentation of black males in institutionalised mental health care led to a reluctance to section Calocane who had consistently refused to comply with his medication and care supervision regime. Dr Jonathan Gibson – who saw Calocane four months before the killings – testified that he had been repeatedly told that psychiatry was “institutionally racist” … and stated that “I did not believe that it had no bearing on VC’s care.”[1] In the words of Emma Webber, Barnaby’s mother, the outcome was a “catastrophic collapse of responsibility” and an “undoubted miscarriage of justice”[2] The other is the continuing scar left by the legacy of the grooming gang scandals whereby local authority agencies and politicians displayed repeated unwillingness to call out and tackle the systematic (and racialised) sexual abuse of white working class girls and young women by gangs of South Asian predators in Northern towns and cities.

To return to the case of Henry Novak, possible explanations for the apparently disastrous decision making by the police on the night of his murder in December 2025 on his way back from a night out at his campus have been located in the hitherto little-known Police Anti-Racism Commitment which was produced as part of the police race action plan. It is a commitment document summarising what police chiefs will do to end racial bias. The part that has given rise to controversy states: “It does mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being colour blind’ (racial equality).” According to one person familiar with police thinking, the phrasing means that in their interactions with a member of the public, they should take into account the historical experience of their particular group with policing and the context. So, in the current climate of antisemitic attacks, a Jew may want reassurance that hate will be considered as a motive for a claim of criminal damage. Or a black person may need reassurance that a stop and search is not racially motivated but a legitimate action. 

The policy came out of the 1999 Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and was supposed to guide the recording and investigation of hate crimes. Whether it was meant to be operational policy looks highly doubtful, with Neil Basu, Britain’s former head of counterterrorism and formerly Britain’s most senior minority ethnic officer, asserting that while police are supposed to treat claims of a racial motivation seriously that does not mean that any claim of alleged hate crime has to be accepted unconditionally. He has said:

When a victim says something you take it seriously, but that is different to believing it. The policy is supposed to stop police officers ignoring victims without investigating.[3]

The National Police Chiefs’ Council has clarified that the document is not formal policy or training for officers. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said that she believes the phrasing is “clumsy.” The policing minister Sarah Jones has said: 

I don’t think it forms the basis of any training or any police activity. We think the language is wrong, it gives the wrong impression. But I don’t think it affects how our training is done.[4].

For many on the right, the murder of Henry Nowak was the outcome of the breakdown of the basis of policing caused by the influence of wokeness, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies and, most totemic of all, the Black Lives Movement post-the murder of George Floyd in the USA in 2020. While rejecting such lines of argument, Kenan Malik does trace out the history and the outworkings of imported Americanised diversity training in policing which has led to the “two tier” narratives. He explains how in the 1980s, in response to the inner-city riots of the time and the widespread anger at racist policing, the state co-opted antiracist activists into the system by providing funding and resources. Goals for equality (a word that became anachronistic at the high-water mark of Thatcherism and beyond) became redefined as a drive for (the rather more anodyne goal) diversity. “Racism awareness training” became established corporate lingo; something which as long ago as 1985, the radical antiracist Ambalavaner Sivanadan described as “catharsis for guilt-stricken whites” and a “degradation” of the antiracist struggle.[5] Such epithets would be equally applicable today to concepts such as “white fragility”.

With the decline of independent, grass roots antiracist movements, “antiracism” became associated with bureaucratised, Americanised forms of diversity training of which for Malik “The Police Anti-Racism Commitment” document is the Gold Standard with its showcasing of performative, corporate guilt-tripping phrases such as “it is not enough for us to not be racist.” and the transformation of the meaning of equality from signifying the right to be treated the same to denoting the right to be treated differently. The decay of antiracism into virtue signalling, box ticking bureaucracy warped the struggle for equality and instilled a reluctance to act over such derelictions of public duty by authorities such as the grooming gangs scandal, the Nottingham and Southport tragedies because of misplaced racial and cultural sensitivities.[6]

But the most toxic legacy of bureaucratised “anti-racism has been to reinforce identitarian politics on both left and right and to allow racism to be rebranded in the language of white identity[7] or ethnonationalist English identity. Or in the victim narrative of alt-Right politicians like Nigel Farage that “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities."[8] No matter that on every available metric on law enforcement, black people are systematically disadvantaged... even adjusting the use of force to account for disparities in the number of arrests, black people were still 1.7 times more likely to have force used against them last year; a figure which probably understates the true disparity, since only 70% of use-of-force reports led to an arrest.. Black people remained more likely than any other ethnic group to be subjected to almost any form of force, from handcuffing to bites from police dogs, from firearms to Tasers, when compared with population or arrest figures. Police officers were also 3.8 times more likely to stop and search a black person than a white person in the year up to March 2025.[9] In the Hampshire Constabulary area, black people were four times as likely as white people to be stop and searched.

But as has been seen repeatedly in Western democracies in the last decade from Brexit and first election of Trump in 2016 through the electoral successes of far right parties and the second election of Trump in 2024; it has been the rocket fuel of almost primordial emotion propelled by the algorithms of social media and the shadow world of plutocrats with very deep pockets that has been the greatest resource of the identitarian right. Migration and the second-tier narratives will remain mobilising forces for it powered as they are by tsunamis of misinformation with the concomitant menace of social disorder and identity-based hatred. To counteract such pernicious narratives, a democratic left that is not suffused with identity pathologies needs to rework a universalist politics of solidarity for our divided and anatomised times. But it is a politics that must not sacrifice public trust in democratic institutions on the altar of corporate guilt.

References  

[1] Gaby Hinsliff, Now is the time for hard truths, not culture -war posturing. The Guardian: Opinion 5 June 2026 p.3

[2] BBC East Midlands News 8 June 2026

[3] The Guardian 4 June 2026 p.6

[4] Ibid

[5] Kenan Malik, In weaponising Henry Nowak’s death, the right has come full circle on identity politics. The Observer 7 June 2026 p.28

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] The Guardian 6 June 2026, p13

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Tiers Of Justice And Rage 🪶The Fall Out From The Murder Of Henry Novak

Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.


Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Ninety Seven

 

A Morning Thought @ 3170

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.


This post is based on a talk I gave at the Ecosocialism conference in London on Saturday 30 May, about the Fare Free London campaign, in which I participate, and the wider movements of which it is part. I was on a panel on “Organising the climate movement” with Tyrone Scott of War on Want and Sophia Brown of Greens Organise - Simon Pirani.

For social movements, and the labour movement, to take on the challenges presented by global heating and other ecological crises, the most important thing is to integrate this with broader struggles against social injustice – that is, the struggle to resist, and supercede, the tyranny of capital.

A “make them pay” demonstration in London, September 2025. Photo by Steve Eason

It is not enough to assert that averting ecological disasters is inseparable from fighting capitalism. We need to develop movements based on that inseparability.

In the UK, we are doing this at the end of a 40-plus-year neoliberal onslaught on working-class rights and working people’s living standards. During that time, traditional social democracy has collapsed and the traditional structures of the labour movement weakened.

In other words, we are doing this as part of rebuilding our movement against capitalism in new forms.

Here I will look at Fare Free London’s (so far very modest) contribution to doing this, and to the sort of alliances we hope to build.

I will also say something about how our movement engages with the state, and with institutions that mediate society’s relationship with the state, such as trade unions and political parties.

We need to consider what it means to demand that the state does things – whether providing free public transport, or anything else – and what it means to organise social forces that can challenge the state.

Fare Free London’s experience

Fare Free London is a small organising group of volunteers, with no staff and hardly any funds. We do street stalls, participate in meetings and demonstrations, speak at trade union and political meetings, and publish stuff on our web site.

We hope to organise at borough level; so far we have one active borough group and embryos of at least two more.

One priority is to form a national campaign and there are now Fare Free campaigns in Manchester and Yorkshire.

The next point is about failure. When confronting such an enormous threat as global heating, we are bound to experience failures, and Fare Free London was basically born from the failure of a previous campaign, to stop the Silvertown tunnel.

That campaign had been conducted by a small group of environmentalists since 2012. From 2018 it expanded thanks, basically, to the wave of activism around Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future.

Despite our mobilisation, and the level of public opposition to the tunnel project, the Greater London Authority, controlled by Labour, went ahead with it. And in 2023, with the tunnel almost built, we had to choose between simply winding up the campaign, or trying to build on what we had achieved – a strong alliance of community organisations, trade unions, environmentalists and academic researchers. This is where Fare Free London started.

And now a point about success. Where we have had success, it has been largely due to the political power of the demand for free public transport.

🔴It is visionary, and links immediate fights with a vision of the sort of cities we want to live in, which is essential to socialism as I understand it.

🔴 It cuts right through the reactionary claim that tackling climate change necessarily costs ordinary people money. It says: here is something that benefits you, now, and is a substantial step towards decarbonisation.

🔴 It challenges neoliberalism. It prompts the question, “how are you going to pay for it?”, providing an opportunity to question neoliberal narratives about the need for austerity.

Interaction with existing institutions

Politicians of all parties have introduced partial free public transport, mainly for specific age groups e.g. over 60s or under 11s, as a populist measure. Don’t forget, it was Boris Johnson, the ultimate populist politician, who brought in the Freedom Pass for older people in London.

Such populism has often gone hand in hand with the privatisation of bus and train services, the hiking of fares for those who pay them, and the appalling degradation of public transport services – buses in rural areas especially.

In our campaign we are still learning how to deal effectively with this populism. I think we should be pointing out, first, that it shows that the state can provide free public transport, if it wants to, and second that, without social pressure to make public transport a public good, a commons, the demand for free public transport can be gutted of its potential.

Populism exerts social control in many ways. In this instance, by presenting people with things they want, and making them appear as gifts from on high. We need to take agency back into the hands of social movements.

There are examples of such populism not only from politicians but from trade union leaders.

For example, last month Maryam Eslamdoust, general secretary of the Transport and Salaried Staff Association, called for universal free public transport to be introduced, in response to the fuel price crisis caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran. Her statement followed decisions by local authorities in Pakistan, Australia and elsewhere to make public transport free in response to soaring fuel prices.

We welcomed this call – but also talked to friends and comrades in that union who explained that in recent years internal union democracy has been trampled on, activists victimised and expelled and rank and file structures gutted.

So the call for free public transport has not been discussed in the union at all. So, in front of us is a campaign to win grass-roots support in the TSSA, and not allow free public transport to be owned opportunistically by bureaucrats.

Another relevant issue is the position of elected councillors.

Prior to the elections this month, together with our friends in Manchester and Yorkshire we convinced more than 200 councillors and candidates to sign a pledge to use their platforms to advocate the extension of free public transport.

The pledge specifies that “funding models would have to change”, that is, it recognises implicitly that most levels of local government have little or no control over the funding required, as a consequence of decades of neoliberalism.

How to support, and push, elected councillors working in the very limited framework will be an issue for all campaigns, not only ours.

It could help to look back at the lessons learned from left Labour councils’ fights against cuts in the 1980s.

(At Saturday’s conference, members of Greens Organise spoke of their own pledge, signed by a much larger number of Green council candidates, to resist government-imposed austerity, to organise communities to fight back and to press for democratic control of local resources. They are planning events later in the year to consider this.)

Alliances

Just as free public transport can address immediate threats to working-class household budgets, and help tackle climate change, so programmes of insulation and heat pump installation can address soaring fuel bills and simultaneously cut fossil fuel burning.

For this reason we have sought to work together with groups campaigning around energy costs, such as Fuel Poverty Action. There is much further to go.

A big challenge is coming up: the government’s Warm Homes Plan, under which funding is to be provided to retrofit homes with insulation, and install heat pumps and solar panels.

Such changes could simultaneously slash households’ soaring energy bills and make substantial reductions in the UK’s level of gas consumption, thus simultaneously and demonstratively tackling the assault on living standards and the threat of climate disasters.

A national march for housing rights, April 2026. Photo: Steve Eason

But, done the way the government is planning to do it, they could fail all round.

Energy researchers and campaigners are warning of exactly such a failure. Previous schemes crashed, wasting billions, because construction work was poorly regulated – and that has not changed.

Moreover, the government’s plan will not undo much of the damage done by privatisation of electricity supply on one hand and the consequences of decades of neoliberalism in the housing market on the other.

At best, the plan will be a sticking plaster. At worst it will, on one hand, further undermine the position of tenants in the private rented sector, and, on the other, lead to heat pumps being fitted in houses that are not properly insulated, and don’t work properly.

This would provide the far right with another opportunity to rant about “net zero” being a fraud.

Campaign groups who deal with energy, housing and construction are actively engaged with this. A broad coalition has put together demands to “make green fair”. For a group like ours working on different but adjacent issues, strengthening our links with such groups is essential.

We need to think about how to bring housing issues to the centre of organising work .

Historically, the labour movement at its strongest has brought together workplace issues with housing issues, just as it has forged links with feminism and anti-racism, for example.

Here we should consider the alliances in practice that we need, in the world we live in now. This is a work in progress to which we can all contribute.

🔴 Participants in our session split up in to breakout groups, and at the end we heard reports from these about organising priorities. One group said it had discussed the rapid advance of renewable electricity generation in China, and saw this as an example to point to. I said that I do not agree.

It is true that there has been a very rapid, state-coordinated expansion of solar and wind power in China, and that it is the world’s number one producer both of its own renewable electricity and also of solar panels, batteries and other equipment. However China continues to burn coal at a planet-endangering rate: 4.8 billion tonnes last year, or about 25 times the level of UK coal production when at its highest.

Such issues deserve discussions of their own, which take time, and I hope that we collectively find ways to arrange these. I wrote about Chinese energy systems e.g. here, here and here.

🔴There was a thought-provoking session at the conference about “Ecocide and war”, with Hamza Hamouchene, co-author of Dismantling Green Colonialism and Kimia Talebi of Energy Embargo for Palestine. This article covers some of the issues that Hamza addressed.

🔴 Another session that I found worthwhile looked at “Big Tech, AI and the climate crisis”, with Dan McQuillan, author of Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, Anne Alexander, a researcher at the University of Cambridge (see her substack here), and economist James Meadway.

☭ People & Nature is now on mastodon, as well as twitter, whatsapp and telegram. Please follow! Or email peoplenature@protonmail.com, and we’ll add you to our circulation list (2-4 messages per month)

Organising Action On Climate And Social Justice 🔥 What Next

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Sixty Four years ago, I stepped into the world of soccer when my father took me to my first live game. 

It was 22-October-1962, the venue was Windsor Park, Belfast. Northern Ireland were hosting England, a game that resulted in a 1-3 defeat for the home side. It was the start of a love affair with the game, Yeah, I have been unfaithful, straying into affairs with other sports, which include but are not limited to Gaelic football, cricket, darts, squash, tennis, badminton, snooker, even pickleball which I have played with my daughter earlier this year in Dublin. But despite my wandering eye and sporting promiscuity I have remained wedded to soccer.

To my mind it is the beautiful game. That endearing quality is undermined and compromised to the point of extreme ugliness when the beauty of the game is used to sports wash genocide, when soccer is promoted as a beauty pageant that serves as a mask to conceal the most ugly creature on the catwalk. Imagine a scenario where we all gather for a Bride of the Year competition and out struts the thirteen year old corpse of Margaret Thatcher, propped up on either side by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The compere, Keir Starmer, calls on us to open our nostrils and breathe in the perfumed scent, to applaud and marvel at the beauty of this stunningly striking woman. Even those who believe in miracles would think to themselves: Nah, no god out of all the thousands the human race has invented since it evolved as a species, could make that monster look attractive. That's the Bride of Frankenstein, not the Bride of the Year.

No matter what scent is sprayed to mask the putrefaction, allowing the genocidal state of Israel to take part in international sporting events is simply an exercise in painting a smile on the face of a corpse.

So, when Glasgow Celtic announced that Martin O'Neill would assume the permanent coaching spot at the club, and that Robbie Keane, who managed the racist thug-supported side Maccabi Tel Aviv during the genocide, would not be getting the job, the two words that leapt to mind were Hail Hail. I am not a Celtic supporter but admiration has to be extended to those fans who protested the much anticipated signing of the former Maccabi manager with their No To Keane campaign. 


It is this type of ethical persuasion that needs brought to bear on the upcoming game between Ireland and the genocidal state. Richie Sadlier because of his unqualified call for the game not to proceed has been described as 'the deepest-thinking, most intelligent and most socially-aware pundit in Irish sport.'

If only the FAI and Dublin government were not averse to that deep thinking, intelligence and social awareness, the Irish tricolour could billow in the breeze, not as a symbol of racist hatred but of pride as Ireland steps onto the winners podium and then to the highest step in the middle to claim the ethical gold medal.

Cahair O'Kane in the Irish News outlined what the government can do to help instead of pious handwringing:

If you had a strong government standing behind them, it’s a simple fix: pull out of the game lads and we’ll foot the bill for you, and we’ll be seen to do it too.

Our government, unfortunately is not for standing behind anything of the sort. It would rather fork out to prevent fuel blockades than prevent genocide. A government behind homelessness in this society is determined to bestow a get out of jail free card on those behind the homelessness of Gaza. 

Perhaps I will be excused by my fellow Drogs fans who are part of Drogheda Stands With Palestine, when I suggest that while Micheal Martin is the government Taoiseach, the ethical Taoiseach is  Shamrock Rovers captain Roberto Lopes who stated last month:

We have to stop the game. As players and fans, our natural instinct is always to get out there and compete, but this is a moment where we need to look at the bigger picture. We can't ignore the humanitarian catastrophe in Palestine; the sheer loss of life there has to take precedence over any sporting consideration. Ireland has an opportunity here to lead—to be a pioneer and do what others won't. We need to be brave enough to say enough is enough. We can't just stand by. Please, stop the game.

The message that the activists of Drogheda Stands With Palestine send out continuously is simple: Don't make Irish soccer a home for genocidal Israel. Instead of a cead mile failte there should be a sign above the turnstile with one word that even the Judeo Nazis - a phenomenon identified by the Israeli philosopher Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz after the Six Day War - will understand: Verboten.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Stop The Game

Dr John Coulter ✍ My initial reaction when the political jungle drums were sending out a message that former UUP boss Doug Beattie of Upper Bann was considering his position within the party, was simple yet blunt - oh no, here we go again!

And by ‘here we go’, I mean the devastating rift that hit the party like a political tsunami over the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 when the UUP was virtually evenly split between the Yes and No camps.

The rival lobbies formed themselves into pressure groups. The No camp had Union First while the Yes camp opted for Re:Union. The end result was that the UUP lost its position as the leading party in Unionism to the DUP in the Assembly in 2003, followed by Westminster in 2005.

In the Assembly, the UUP is now at its lowest ebb in terms of numbers. With Doug Beattie resigning, the Stormont MLA group is now eight compared to the 1998 elections when it had 25 plus Assembly members. At Westminster, where once the party was in double digits in terms of MPs, it now has one - Robin Swann in South Antrim.

There has been much speculation that under current leader and North Antrim MLA Jon Burrows, the UUP is being nudged ideologically to the Right on the political spectrum to form an unofficial coalition of the Right with the DUP and TUV so that pro-Union parties get the message to transfer votes to each other in next May’s crucial Stormont and local government elections.

But Unionism’s real challenge is to persuade the tens of thousands of pro-Union supporters to actually come out and vote on polling day. Instead of chasing this mythical centre ground, Unionism should be concentrating on building its credibility amongst the so-called ‘stay at home’ electorate, especially in loyalist working class localities.

For several years, the UUP has been living in an ideological cloud cuckoo land that it has to win votes back from the supposedly middle of the road Alliance Party.

Whilst many Unionists may have voted for Alliance as a protest against the disunity in Unionism, the political mask has slipped in Alliance and the party is now firmly a part of the Pan Nationalist Front with the SDLP and Sinn Fein. This is the real message which the UUP has got to get across - that Alliance is now an Irish unity republican party.

There has also been much talk about a so-called realignment within Unionism, with the liberal wing of the UUP and the pro-Union faction within Alliance forming a new-look Liberal Unionist Party, whilst the Right-wing of the UUP joins up with the DUP and TUV to form some new kind of Loyalist and Unionist Party.

But one fact is certain, setting aside the debate on ideological realignment, the current Beattie/Burrows unofficial civil war has the potential to do untold damage to the UUP come May 2027. The battle lines are strangely similar to 1998.

The Yes camp wanted the Good Friday Agreement to work and were seen as the new liberals in the party under the late Lord David Trimble; those who were sceptical as to whether the Good Friday Agreement could succeed wanted to rekindle the opposition which had brought down the Sunningdale power-sharing Executive in 1974.

Under Burrows, the opinion polls have steadily become more favourable for the UUP. Burrows brought a media dynamic to the party. His positive media profile and use of social media gave the firm impression of a party which knew where its ideological direction was going.

This would be no repeat of that explosive post Brexit European election when the UUP lost its MEP seat to Alliance, a European seat the UUP had held since 1979. But the UUP was a divided party over Brexit, sending out mixed messages - is it a Leave party or a Remain party?

The Alliance bounce was clear because Alliance was categorically in the Remain camp, while the DUP and TUV were equally firmly in the Leave camp. Voters were totally confused on what the UUP stood for.

Unionism has to educate its power base that Alliance is no longer the ‘soft U’ Unionist party that it was under Lord John Alderdice; Alliance has become Sinn Fein ‘lite’. That’s the key message the UUP has got to repeatedly hammer home to pro-Union voters.

And there must be a clear statement that the lunatic fringe strategy of ‘Vote Mike, Get Colum’ is firmly dumped in the dustbin of history.

If there’s going to be a purge in the UUP as a result of the Beattie/Burrow ‘political handbags at dawn’ spat, then it must be of those policies which want the UUP to resemble the now defunct liberal unionist movements of the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI), once fronted by former Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner, or the NI21 party once fronted by former UUP MLAs John McCallister and Basil McCrea.

The propaganda war must be stepped up. Alliance must be seen, not as a traditional middle of the road, progressive and pluralist party of the moderate centre, but as a clear nationalist party which has adopted the political ground once held by the defunct Irish Independence Party fronted by former British Army officer and Protestant John Turnley

The UUP has got to put out the message - the so-called liberal unionist experience to copy the Alliance party has floundered and the UUP needs to return to its natural and traditional Right-wing position on the political spectrum.

Conventionally pro-Union voters in Alliance will see how the party is drifting steadily towards republicanism, and the currently under-fire leadership of the UUP must work to purge the party of this daft centre ground nonsense.

This unofficial UUP was working if the opinion polls are taken into consideration. But if the Beattie/Burrows bust-up continues to fester, the party should remember the old maxim - no one votes for a divided party.
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

The ‘Double B’ Rift Has Echoes Of Yes/No Debate That Split UUP

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Ninety Six

Anthony McIntyre 🔖 For seasoned consumers of literature on the North's violent political conflict, not every book hits the spot.


For those that do, even then the spot is rarely targeted with such pinpoint accuracy and potency to assign a destiny to the work that would allow it to remain in the literary stratosphere long after others have reached their sell-by date, their star long faded. Stratospheric greats in the literary skies that leap to mind include Ed Moloney's A Secret History of the The IRA, Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing and Dean Godson's Himself Alone. Time is the sole measure of a book's stamina, but the newly published Neither Confirm Nor Deny by John Ware is a hot contender to make that star bound odyssey.

While the North's armed groups were awash with agents, Brian Nelson and Freddie Scappaticci - both run by the British Army's Force Research Unit - are the two that weave their malign aura throughout this compelling read. They are the characters through which the author narrates a harrowing tale of lost lives that could have been saved, of decision making in state institutions that ensured people died when they could have lived. It is a tale of torturous logic pursued by the British state right up to the present day where the policy of neither confirming nor denying the status of an agent, even after they are dead, has drawn down skip loads of ridicule on the heads of state and security officials who continue to behave remarkably like the Soviet officials they often caricatured during the Cold War era.

Evil is a word which, like sin, drips too much with religiosity. In a secular world it has the sound of fish and cheese. But if for secular reasons evil is not applied to RUC Special Branch and the Bill Mooney run CID, baleful works just as well. Michael Kearney's life was decided by a vote amongst cops to either release him to Milltown cemetery or charge him with explosives possession and place him in Crumlin Road. Callous indifference won out and Michael Kearney died on a dark border road at the hands of those who included some guilty of what they falsely accused him of.

When Paddy Murray meets with his Special Branch handlers to inform them that the IRA's Internal Security Unit has summoned him to a meeting in West Belfast, they tell him not to worry as they will be monitoring the house. They did but drove off after two hours with Murray still inside the execution chamber, from where he was taken out, hands tied, eyes taped and shot dead. IRA personnel undoubtedly pulled the trigger that sent Murray into nothingness but they alone were not culpable for his death. And it is difficult to suppress an image of the Branch driving away from the scene chuckling to themselves 'sucker' in the full knowledge of the fate that awaited their man. In the hierarchy of agents, protecting Scappaticci was prioritised over saving Murray.

While the author does not state it outright it is easy to infer from the pages that agent handling was primarily designed to defeat the IRA rather than the loyalists. The British were not about eradicating terrorism as they called it, but using the terrorism of the UDA as a foil against that of the IRA. Nelson was not dissuaded by his FRU handlers from killing but to narrow the killing zone so that only IRA personnel, not innocent civilians, stepped inside.

Prior to finding a way to frustrate the IRA campaign, ensuring it ended in failure, the British state found itself up against a formidable and ruthless opponent. It might even have felt trapped on the horns of the wartime dilemma so astutely identified by Albert Camus: many actions are as unavoidable as they are unjustifiable. But this does not constitute the grounds for a pardon application by the British state. To this day it has yet to admit that its dirty war in Ireland was just that, or to acknowledge that if unavoidable, it was certainly not justifiable. This refusal is the engine driving much nationalist disquiet and feeds the thirst for books like Neither Confirm Nor Deny.

There is also a peculiar irony at play. Ware has been criticised by a mullah-like triumvirate at the top of Sinn Fein's smear squad responsible for the issuing of hatewas against those the party disapproves of. Yet the three to differing degrees were involved in either covering up for Freddie Scappaticci and his crimes or minimising his role. By extension, they were also covering up or downplaying the British state's dirty war in Ireland and the war crimes which that form of unclean endeavour inevitably gives rise to. Perhaps two of them fell for the guff and signed up to silliness, but Danny Morrison believed Scap was a tout and nevertheless chose to launch a weapon of mass deception into the public square.

By contrast, Ware who has been to the fore of many exposés throughout his five decades plus career in journalism, in Neither Confirm Nor Deny not only nails Scappaticci in his role as the agent Stakeknife but hammers even longer nails into the British state security agencies who were responsible for the Stakeknife operation. Neither Confirm Nor Deny is nothing short of a searing indictment of the British security establishment.

Not that Ware is implacably hostile to the British state. He is no clenched-fist, beret-attired revolutionary at the head of a guerrilla phalanx urging it to storm the doors of Thames House. This is not agenda driven journalism where the objective is to erode the institutions of the British state. Ware wants the state to perform better, not euthanise itself. The wrong he identifies, he points out rather than pontificates about.

But, thanks to people like John Ware, and no thanks to those ostensible republicans who have sought to smear him, much more is now known about the role of the British security establishment.  Theirs was not the rule of law but the rule of law enforcement.

An example of Ware's probing comes with his illumination of the murky depths within the British state that the policy of neither confirm nor deny both reached and corrupted. The much vaunted separation of powers was demonstrated as transactional when Lord Chief Justice Carswell allowed himself to be persuaded out of court to behave improperly inside it, all for the purpose of satisfying MI5's need to protect the policy of neither confirm nor deny. Carswell listened to evidence from Scappaticci he knew to be perjured yet ruled in accordance with raison d'etat rather than justice.

The reader will come away from this book realising that leading lights of the republican world and their counterparts in the British judicial world, both referred to - one accurately the other mockingly - as Lord Chief Justices, engaged in collusive activity for the sole purpose of concealing from the public the role of Scappaticci. Danny Morrison and Justice Carswell - that's a thought that might keep the reader awake at night for longer than they are comfortable with. There is some consolation to be drawn from that: the delaying of the nightmares that the revelations in this book might spur.

A book sans padding or lacunae, it never lets up. Not a sentence wasted on frivolity, it is placed on the shelf once the last page of a page turner is turned, the density of its gravitas weighing heavily on the mind.

John Ware, 2026, Neither Confirm Nor Deny: British Intelligence, Lawless Agent Running and the Suppression of Truth. Publisher Merrion. ISBN-13: ‎978-1785375804

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Neither Confirm Nor Deny

Ukraine Solidarity Group ✊ A Digest of News from Ukrainian Sources ⚔ 1-June-2026.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ Ukraine’s military recruitment crisis.
⬤ China sends message.
⬤ Iron Man returns.
⬤ Kharkiv Hell’s Kitchen.
⬤ Occupied territories report. 
⬤ Russia indoctrinates children.
⬤ Russia tortures prisoners to death & commits other systematic torture.

News from the territories occupied by Russia

New Russian school textbook shows unoccupied Ukrainian territory as ‘Russia’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, May 29th)

Melitopol couple tortured in pre-trial detention (Mediazona, 29 May)

The Face of Resistance: Crimean Political Prisoner Volodymyr Maladyka (Crimea Platform, May 29th)

The health of Crimean prisoner Dmytro Shtyblikov has deteriorated sharply (Crimea Human Rights Group, 28 May)

Crimean Tatar political prisoner illegally returned to Russian captivity and denied treatment for cancer (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, May 28th)

Savagely tortured, then sentenced by the Russians to 13 years for letters to her Ukrainian defender son (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, May 27th)

Health of woman, 68, imprisoned by Russia, worsens (Ukrainska Pravda, May 26th)

“In the ‘DPR’ torture chambers, they used electric shocks and filed teeth” (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, May 26th)

Disinformation as a weapon against cultural rights (Crimea Human Rights Group, 26 May)

Weekly update on the situation in occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, May 26th)

Russia brings new ‘treason’ charges against young Crimean Tatar political prisoner after months of torture (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, May 26th)

Russia sentences Ukrainian military pensioner to 18 years after itself admitting there were no grounds to imprison him (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, May 25th)

Massive sentences against Yalta couple two years after Krystyna Markova was abducted by the FSB and vanished (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, May 25th)

April 2026 report: Life Under Occupation (AlterPravo, 12 May)

News from the front

Russia spends a year and hundreds of lives to capture a Ukrainian village. And fails (Meduza, 29 May)

“No gas, no electricity, no heat. They won’t survive another winter”: Ukraine set to evacuate residents of Russian-occupied Oleshky (The Insider, May 27th)

Ukraine’s Achilles’ heel: How Kyiv is overcoming its military recruitment crisis (The Insider, May 25th)

News from Ukraine

Military medic Oleksandr Krokhmaliuk tortured to death in Russian captivity (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, May 29th)

Forged from hell on earth: Hell’s kitchen in Kharkiv (Ukrainer, 28 May)

Russia hits Kyiv with hypersonic ballistic missile in ‘deranged’ attack (Guardian, May 24th)

Civil society on a dual front in Ukraine (International Viewpoint, May 23rd)

War-related news from Russia

Armenia: Moscow turns the screw on Yerevan (Mediazona, 29 May)

Mapping power: Russia’s “game of thrones” (iStories, 29 May)

Propaganda film teaches Ukrainian children to “love life in Russia” (Meduza, 29 May)

Dzerzhinsky statue: The Iron Man Returns (Riddle, 13 May 2026)

Analysis and comment

Andriy Melnik: a fascist’s state funeral in a non-fascist state (Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres, 29 May)

Ukraine: Türk warns against dangerous escalation and urges return to negotiations (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, May 28th)

Playing host to Putin and Trump, China sends a message (Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres, 21 May)

Research of human rights abuses

Statement of the Human Rights Centre ZMINA on the development of the Action Plan for the implementation of the National Human Rights Strategy (Zmina, May 28th)

The Expert Opinion (Amicus Curiae) of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group in Criminal Proceedings No. 42025000000001123 (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, May 26th)

International solidarity

Humanitarian aid report (Solidarity Collectives, 25 May)
  

🔴This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. More information at Ukraine Information Group.

We are also on twitter. Our aim is to circulate information in English that to the best of our knowledge is reliable. If you have something you think we should include, please send it to 2U022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com.


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News From Ukraine 💣 Bulletin 198

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