I Discuss the UK’s General Election, Warmongering, Protest and Julian Assange’s Release with Andy Bungay | Andy Worthington (original) (raw)

The graphic for my podcast with Andy Bungay on July 13, 2024.

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I’m pleased to have just posted on my YouTube channel the full audio recording of an interview I undertook on July 13, nine days after the UK’s recent General Election, with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south London. Some of what we discussed drew on the article I wrote just after the election, Despite the Landslide, Labour Have No Vision and Only Won the UK General Election Because the Tories Lost So Spectacularly.

Parts of the interview were broadcast live that evening, with the full interview subsequently included in a longer version of the show posted on Andy’s MixCloud page, as the latest instalment of a monthly show, the Colin Crilly Takeover, incorporated into Andy’s weekly show, The Chiminea.

It was a great pleasure to chat to Andy about the relief that so many people were feeling about being rid of the cruel, corrupt and incompetent Tory government, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to explain how so much of this derangement was because of Brexit, when, after Theresa May lost her struggle to try and make it work in a rational manner, we were burdened with a succession of dreadful Prime Ministers — Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak — who fundamentally gave up on governing, and focused instead on deranged fantasies: treating the UK as a tabula rasa, a lawless blank slate which they intended to remake as little more than a corrupt kleptocracy and an authoritarian nightmare, a place where refugees would all be treated as criminals, and flown on a one-way trip to Rwanda, and any kind of protest was akin to terrorism.

The podcast is posted below, via YouTube:

Despite this relief, it’s by no means clear that the incoming Labour government led by Keir Starmer will provide any miraculous cure, in part because Starmer and his inner circle are so wedded to big business, and in part because of Starmer’s troubling authoritarianism, which, just this week, saw him remove the whip from seven left-wing Labour MPs (including the former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell) for daring to vote for an end to the Tories’ miserable two-child benefit cap, which has condemned vast numbers of children to poverty.

I explained to Andy that I was also troubled by Starmer’s former role as the Director of Public Prosecutions — the country’s chief prosecutor — as it would be infinitely preferable to have a defence lawyer as PM, and I drew attention to the case of the five climate activists who had just been convicted of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” — an innovation of the Tories in last year’s dreadful Public Order Act — after a disruptive, farcical trial that brought the law into disrepute. I expressed my fear that Starmer’s authoritarianism meant that it was unlikely that he would have any sympathy for those disrupting “business as usual”, even when their reasons for doing so were so evidently urgent.

Since our interview, the activists have received record-breaking sentences for their actions — engaging in a Zoom call to plan disruption of the M25 in 2022 — as I explained in my article, After Punitive Sentences of Climate Activists, Labour Must Repeal the Tories’ Draconian Anti-Protest Laws, but, as I suspected, it is by no means certain that Labour will repeal the Tories’ dreadful legislation. Laws that increase authoritarianism are rarely, if ever repealed, as the last 40 years of British history has shown, and especially not when centrists — or the centre-right, as Starmer’s Labour Party might best be described — are in control, with their desire to police any and all kinds of justifiable outrage to such an extent that they are effectively neutered.

I also explained my fears about Starmer’s militarism — his inevitable support for NATO’s ongoing, unwinnable and unjustifiable war in Ukraine, and, of course, his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which he made clear in the days after the attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7 when he declared, in a radio interview, that Israel had the right to withhold fuel, food and water from the Palestinian people, even though, as a human rights lawyer, he must have known that doing so is actually a war crime.

Hopefully, as I also explained, his surprising appointment of the respected human rights lawyer Richard Hermer KC as Attorney General will make a difference, as Hermer, along with other lawyers, directly contradicted Starmer’s position a few weeks later, criticising Israel’s “siege” of Gaza, and noting that it was almost inconceivable that it could be within the bounds of international humanitarian law.

Discussing the situation in Gaza, in the tenth month of Israel’s genocide, I described it as “something so grotesque that none of us have ever seen anything like it before”, and noted that, while we should all, of course, condemn the slippery, opportunistic Benjamin Netanyahu for leading Israel’s actions, we shouldn’t lose sight of the significance of two fanatical messianic settlers in his coalition government, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who quite explicitly seek the extermination of the entire Palestinian people.

Returning to the recent UK election, we also spoke about the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn as an independent, and the state of the left in general, in which I pointed out that this election showed, in particular, that there are now five major parties in English politics — Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and Reform — but only two have the lion’s share of power because of our ridiculous, antiquated and unjust ‘First Past the Post’ voting system, and that the only way to change that is for a proportional representation system to be introduced. As Andy countered, that would lead to Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party securing a significant number of seats, but as I explained, I am 100% certain that they wouldn’t get re-elected, because they, like their leader, are nothing more than “bellyaching useless people”, who would be scandalously poor MPs.

Turning to the case of Julian Assange, with whom I worked on the release of ‘The Guantánamo Files’ in 2011, I spoke of my joy at his release — a rare glimpse of light in the darkness — and pointed out how there should never have been a US extradition request, because, when Julian and WikiLeaks published the files leaked by Chelsea Manning, they did so with the world’s major newspapers, and it was idiotic of the US government to think that there could ever have been a prosecution that wouldn’t have fundamentally involved the entire mainstream media being put on trial. I did, however, express my disquiet about how, to secure his freedom, Julian was required to agree to a plea deal that involved him having to falsely admit that he “knowingly and unlawfully conspired with Chelsea Manning” to commit espionage against the United States by obtaining and disseminating classified national defence information, and that he was wrong to have thought that such actions were protected by the First Amendment.

There was much more in the show, and I hope that you have time to listen to it. I’d be interested to hear from you if you like this kind of podcast format, as I’ve been thinking lately that I should maybe do some more audio-based work rather than just focusing on my beloved written word. I’ve also been wondering if anyone would be interested in me recording and making available audio recordings of my articles.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.