PJP International Conference 2023

There are many of you here today. I met many of you last night at dinner. But I hope to meet those I haven't met so far during the day. What we would like to do before we begin is stop. and observe a minute of silence for all those who have died in both Israel and Gaza. If you could join me in observing a minute of silence, thank you very much if you would like to sit down now if you need anything during the day. just ask, there are people in the back of the room if you need bathrooms or anything else, okay, we'll have comfortable breaks and lunch during the day, okay, so my first guest, well, the first speaker is Steve Cotton, who is the general.

Secretary of the International Transport Workers' Federation and we have to thank the ITF for their support today and for allowing us to use this wonderful building, so thank you Steve. Now I'm going to turn it over to Steve to talk for a moment and then I'll come back, yes, absolutely, it's better to be standing so people can see you. Good morning, good morning to those in the room and good morning to those online. It is very safe and our job. Oh, I turned off the button. Sorry to those online. I'm sure you didn't hear a word.

So, to recap, the ITF is over 100 years old and has 18 and a half million transport members worldwide representing all transport sectors, but we are the only UK-based World Federation of Trade Unions, which which means We have to respond to all union laws imposed on British unions. Our story is one of struggle and I have many friends in the union movement room who have advocated for us to be a dynamic organization to campaign to build power and fight now for justice for working men and women around the world Justice looks very different if you are a Teamster hauling a heavy truck from one side of the states to the other it is very different from the reality of a railway worker in India somehow We managed to unite our movement, the global movement, around four key pillars One, safety and health at work, and during the pandemic, you all saw the value of transportation workers, whether they were on public transportation or whether they were moving food, medical equipment, we keep moving forward, we keep moving forward . around the world and health and safety at work became a key issue in many workplaces and is an issue for unions to organize around.

We also have a strategy for what we do for the future of work and what we mean by those challenges in the gig economy. an area where we see working men and women, particularly taxi drivers, controlled by an app. a terrifying experience for many of our colleagues. Let's imagine being fired for an application. there is a humanitarian approach to that, so there are many challenges that we are responding to and also recognizing. What we call sustainable transportation, we recognize that transportation is one of the biggest polluters in the world and therefore there is a problem: how do we address civil aviation?

How can we assure our members that as we strive to be greener, they will not lose their jobs? different technology different energy these different times of challenges our job is to make sure we understand what's coming and prepare our unions wherever they fit in Global North Global South to be prepared for those challenges the last area I think we'll talk a little bit about A little bit Further on is the Supply Chains area and I think you all saw during the pandemic that the invisible workers in transportation became visible, of course we are behind the first responders, those heroes who responded, but if you talk to the transportation workers transport, they We are a little resentful because they couldn't work at Telly, they couldn't work from home, they had to be out, as always, we lost a lot of drivers in urban centers before we understood that personal protective teams put those processes in place so that Those four pillars are the areas in which we work globally to make policies to organize strong unions, but fundamentally the question is how to build solidarity, so why are we very proud to welcome Jeremy, his wonderful team and peace and justice? the story of your advocacy the spirit of what it is about bringing people together from around the world to unite on what is right because we in the union movement really know what is not right and what is downright wrong, so with Against the backdrop of what is happening in the world today this meeting couldn't come at a better time, you have an incredible group of speakers who will challenge you intellectually with a lot of mutual respect.

There are many divisions in our world, but in the union movement we overcome them by strengthening our trust. building trust in our speakers and actually building solid strategies that can change the world, it's supposed to be five minutes and I'm probably getting really excited about such a platform, but I have to say a little bit about Jeremy as a human being in the middle. During the pandemic, it could take hours, but I won't do it. We asked him to come and talk to our team, our global team, because throughout the pandemic we continued to work because the transportation workers were working and, if you know, Jeremy has a lot of followers. among the political left in the union movement and that means in our staff, so we had a very good opportunity to exchange views, from there we became contributors to peace and justice because I have had the privilege of traveling with Jeremy and he does not. only one follower in the UK, he has followers worldwide, but they are not followers because he is a demigod, they are followers because he tells the truth and when we went around the world and had an audience in Mexico in his parliamentary house with the labor reformers We met with all the important leaders who have the potential to be the next president with a conversation about how we bring best practices on what a good union is to the Mexican unions how we bring those four pillars on sustainable transportation to those processes and I have many examples of where Jeremy helps us promote the message about why it is essential to be a member of your union and why it is vital that we build a larger network, a network that may have differences of opinion, but when we move, we all move together, so I'm looking forward to today.

I want to put on record a huge thank you to everyone here, to everyone online, to the teams that made this happen, yours and ours, and may we have a wonderful day. Thank you very much, so I just want to say a little bit more about the peace and justice project and then, of course, a little bit more about Jeremy. But first of all, Jeremy established the peace and justice project after the general election as a kind of home for the politically homeless. I don't know why he thought something like that was necessary, but he did it anyway and it's becoming more evident every day, aren't our politicians basically failing us, so the peace and justice project for which strives for social and economic justice and does it within the UK, but also wants to do it

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ly and we see what is happening in the UK.

We are very aware of how bad it is, how disillusioned people are with politicians in general, how they see that there is no party. for the working class, but we see that happening across Europe and beyond, don't we? The same thing is happening and instead of addressing what is needed, we are seeing our parties move further and further to the right and that is really worrying. It will be happening at this time when we are in such a bad economic situation, so in my day job I work in a Law Center and I have worked in access to justice for almost as long as Jeremy has been an MP and I have been an MP.

I have been keeping up with what Jeremy has done throughout his time as an MP because he has always been there if you were discussing any issue about the Social Security Act. Jeremy would know if you were talking about refugees. I remember sitting on a platform with Jeremy somewhere. in Islington talking about asylum seekers and what the government was doing at the time and there were about 10 people in the audience, you know, that's very different now, but getting back to political homelessness, you know, I'm old enough to remember that 1997 was so happy. on a day in May and then feeling very disappointed because one of the first things that happened to that MP who was a champion of women's rights was to cut benefits for single parents, closely followed by the worst legislation ever have had for asylum seekers, that Dehumanized asylum seekers who treated them like others who removed them from the ability to work to claim benefits or even to live in the South East which was a Labor government and what did that Labor government send to asylum seekers away from south east London sent They were sent to the northern cities where there was already poverty and what was the result of that.

So today we are here at an International Conference. It couldn't be more timely. Could it be a

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on peace and justice? The peace and justice project has five. demands or five goals right now are not that radical, you know, if you're not familiar with them, a pay increase for everyone than is definitely necessary, right? we have so much inequality, economic inequality, a Green New Deal, you know the planet. We see what is happening, we absolutely need AG greed New Deal housing for many has to be the biggest problem of our time anyone looking after not so young young children looking for accommodation, paying a fortune and will never be able to own a home , but I won't be able to get a council house either, that's a problem, a fair tax system is a lot to ask for and of course welcoming refugees and a war free world, we have to stop the boats here I know. because I deal with asylum seekers every day, where do those people come from, I know that young people have journeys on the road that last for years, that they are sexually exploited in a kind of slave trade and all kinds of things on their way and, However, when I get here, look at how they are treated, it is wrong and they have so much to give, so many skills if only we would use them, which brings me to Jeremy.

I'm supposed to introduce him to Jeremy Corbin like he doesn't know what. Can I say about him? Politics has been pretty depressing for most of my life. To be honest we compromised a bit because it was nothing more and in 2015 I was quite disillusioned with things as were my children who were teenagers and then I heard Jeremy was running to be leader and I knew if he ran he would win because he knew what the situation was for ordinary working class people and that's what many of our politicians miss, right? They are not connected to what is happening.

In the real world, the first time in my life we ​​had a Manifesto that I was proud to go out and scrutinize for the first time. We had a Manifesto that would really address the issues that would solve some of the problems. Now we saw what happened, we saw how the establishment responded, however, we are not defeated. Jeremy became leader because there was a push from below from the grassroots and that is still there and to me they are even angrier and what happened in Gaza has been a turning point for everything that is wrong in our society, so which I will now introduce to you Jeremy Corbin, MP for 40 years, leader of the Labor party, a genuine leader of a Labor party, director of the peace and justice project, thank you.

You hear me, well, first of all, thank you all very much for coming and welcome to all those who follow us online from all over the world today, the time is never the best because somewhere in the world it is 10 o'clock. night and somewhere in the world it is a different time, very early in the morning and so on, many people are making great sacrifices to join us today. There is no perfect time to hold an

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. Steve knows it too. He sleeps okay. to the meetings that are not based on the biological clock, it is like that, um, so, uh, welcome to all of you and I want to say a huge thank you to the ITF for giving us the space today and the incredible help and advice that we have received from the ITF and, As Steve explained, we have been working very closely with the ITF on union recruitment and union building internationally, particularly in Mexico, where I think we have made great progress and great success and last month I had the privilege of being invited. to the ITF executive meeting in Mumbai and it was fascinating because it was a meeting of young transport workers from all over the world and the most fascinating conversation I witnessed was between a train driver from Scotland and a train driver from Botswana describing their different lives and their interaction and that's what the ITF does: it brings people together because essentiallyworkers' interests are the same all over the world the employers are different the systems are different and it is always the attempt to divide when it should be to unite I also want to say a huge thank you to the united European left for the support they have given to this conference that you will hear from the mouths of today's spokespersons and the Belgian Workers' Party, who I had the privilege of speaking at their um annual conference in Brussels last month and the support that we have had from the Ros Luxembourg Foundation um and again they will speak today like this that this is very much an international meeting that we have here today.

I also want to say a big thank you to our entire team at the um Peace and Justice project for the enormous amount of work that has been put into this and the person who has put in the most work and totally dedicated to achieving this is Lara Alvarez, our international secretary, incredible energy and determination put this together put this together Lara thank you, thank you very much for everything you have done and the energy you put into this and um, it is going to be successful because it is also a way for us to develop the international context uh context delmovements here with other places we were founded in 2021 um we delayed launching the project for most of covid and then we got tired of waiting and we did it anyway um it was largely online almost completely anyway and we have a huge amount of people follow us online and there are more and more people who become very active and many things and, as I said, it has been said that this is an organization that is a political home for the homeless, but it is above all an address Read. and today's campaign organization is our first International Conference.

I hope we make it an annual event, but I also hope we can build support for people struggling around the world and what you'll see. From the information that we have today are the five points that we are presenting, but also in today's conference we are moving towards five very important and very interesting areas, the world of security, that is the session that immediately follows this and then If we turn to the issues of wealth tax and worker organizations, there is an incredibly unfair distribution of wealth around the world, where the richest 1% control the majority of the world's wealth, where the poorest 20% of the world's population have almost no assets to themselves by their own name they lead marginal existences and live in poverty and in food shortages and food shortages there is no food shortage in the world there is a terrible food distribution system in the world driving people into poverty and hunger as is happening now in parts of Africa, so there are serious doubts there and then there are questions from workers' organizations to combat them in this country, in Britain, we have We have seen a growth in union membership, we have seen a growth in union activity and we have seen at the beginning an attempt to repair the horror of the last 10 years, when the majority of working class households in Britain have seen their standards fall. of income in real terms by 20% and we have a government that is dedicated to ensuring that the Gap continues and gets worse and worse and we have a Social Security system that penalizes large families, for example, that penalizes people who already They are having difficulties in Co and leading them to desperation and poverty in this the fifth richest country in the world.

The world has more food banks than McDonald's branches and at any given time there are thousands of people sleeping on the streets or living insecure lives, moving from one person's apartment to another just to try to survive. It's right? It is necessary? It's fitting that in this capital city of one of the richest countries in the world you don't have to go far to find someone asking for money to pay for a night shelter for one night, it's obscene and the levels of poverty are so great that in Actually we are all losing. A child who grows up in a poor home in an overcrowded apartment is unlikely to perform at the same level in school as a child who grows up with enough space, access to computers, and all the support they need who doesn't have parents who have to working three jobs just to make ends meet, what do we do? we waste the talents that are in front of us, the doctors, the engineers and all the other great jobs that are being lost in working class communities because of the levels of poverty in them, it's not just here, it's a global phenomenon, so What we, as a project, work with organizations around the world and with unions around the world on union recruitment issues and that for me is very very important, the world of work has changed a lot, it is not necessarily a heavy industry that It employs a large number of people as it did when I was a child, but a variety of jobs in a variety of industries and it is a large number of young people, mainly young people working in the security of the sharing economy, you may be told who work on their own.

They may be told they are free agents to hire for Uber, Amazon, or anyone else. In reality, they are employed. for those companies the reality of their lives is that their economic survival depends on those companies those groups need to be in a union those workers need to be in a union and we must support the development of those unions when I was in Colombia observing the presidential election um we took the time Lara and I took the time to meet the um uh delivery workers Bogatar Union they were working for Uber and companies equivalent to Uber and they were very brave, they managed to incorporate a few thousand people into the union and they were making themselves felt and I said well, who is the employer, they said, well, we are employees of this company, I said yes, I understand, but who are they, he said, we don't know who they are, we don't know where their head office is.

It's just that we don't know where their money goes, we don't even know who they are and most of them had never physically met anyone who their employer was, they were working on cell phones that sent them all over the city in great danger and if anything they it happened the employer was nowhere to be found this is the irresponsibility of the informal economy and that is why union membership and organization is so important and has to be done at an international level it is the same companies here Paris Berlin Washington San Francisco Cape Town you Say it, it is the same companies that do this, that is why unionism has to be as international as the way Capital works and that is one of the reasons why we are so determined to hold this conference today and the last two sessions on It's going to be about land rights and climate justice.

Land rights are a big issue with the purchase of good agricultural land in mainly East Africa by a number of companies and countries driving existing subsistence farmers off the land and out of farming. strategy that actually impoverishes farmers in the poorest countries in the world so that agricultural companies can uh Boost their um Boost their product there and this of course ties into the huge issue of climate justice and the environment. Now all of us here want to see a cleaner world. a fairer world, all of us here want to see adequate environmental protections, etc., the climate change that is occurring does not affect people equally across the planet, it is the poorest people in the poorest societies in the countries The most vulnerable are those who suffer the most, those of Bangladesh. those in island economies and, uh, children growing up in the world's largest, most polluting cities, it cannot be true that many children lose 15% of their lung capacity before even reaching school age due to pollution levels who are suffering.

We deal with that yes through regulation, yes by converting to sustainable transportation, yes by improving public transportation and all those things, but we don't address it by blaming those who work in the current transportation systems or in the current transportation industries or even in industries that If you pollute, you convert, you can only do that through public intervention, which is why I really wanted to include in our Manifesto in 2019 the issue of climate justice, which is about clean air and good quality sustainable food for all, not about the ability to shop your way. out of the pollution into something else or it's a class issue and the project put in an alternative police officer when the police officer was detained in Glasgow and it was absolutely fascinating.

I'll give you an example of how fascinating it is. We brought together environmental groups from Rio and activists for land rights in the Amazon basin in Brazil. This was before Lula was elected, much earlier, and I thought this meeting was going to be a big fight between them. That is to say, those in Rio were not necessarily so upset. about the land problems in the Amazon, that is, those in the Amazon were not so worried about the pollution in Rio, big difference, not even a little, they talked about and understood each other's problems, each other's problems and their common search for justice for themselves and their children. and the need to end the destruction of the Amazon rainforest to the same extent that it was a need to start to really improve the housing conditions and the air quality and the living conditions in Rio, the sense of unity there and that sense of unity a year later led to the election of Lula as president of Brazil with a clear commitment to all the social changes that are occurring.

I've been told to finish on time because we're already a little behind, so I'll just say a couple more things first. Pamela tries to stop me. She was going to give him a shepherd's crook to stop the speakers going on too long, but I couldn't, but I couldn't find it this morning. We begin with a moment of silence for what is happening in Gaza, the killing. of people on October 7 was wrong and that act of terrorism that claimed the lives of 1,400 people was atrocious. Israel's response of um bombing in Gaza has now claimed 11,000 lives just as I was coming here this morning I heard that um the Israeli military, the IDF has ordered everyone to leave the Alifa hospital in one hour a hospital everyone has to go there is nowhere to go and he told them to go west towards the beach this is incredible we are seeing in real time the destruction of life the destruction of what passes for a um public service system in Gaza and every time more killings occur when the Secretary General of the United Nations says that there is disaster, there is famine, there are deaths that are getting even worse in Gaza now, surely, by God, all the governments of the world should recognize this and say to Israel, enough, make sure that there is a ceasefire that can achieve long-term peace and justice.

You can invade, you can control, you can kill, you can ma, but the bitterness continues for decades and decades and decades. Peace never is. It's easy to do, you have to start somewhere and that's why I was so upset by the fact that our parliament in London did not vote for the minimum such as calling for an immediate ceasefire from HE and the cessation of arms supplies to Israel to encourage them. to sign that too, but too often our interest in the conflict is led by the media, obviously Gaza is a big story and we are all seeing every day that there is still war in Ukraine.

It is necessary to seek peace in Ukraine. The conflict still persists in Yemen. Wax still exists. Poverty and the results of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which have been used to bomb Yemen. Indonesia, which barely gets a mention in our media and the most terrible conflict taking place in the Congo, why do mining companies want to obtain large quantities of Co and Colton to feed the mobile phone industry around the world and are they happy? allowing child labor to be used always pretending that it has nothing to do with them, but rather it has to do with them, so we need to have that understanding globally Sara.

I will mention Western Sahara, since you also raised the issue of the occupation of Western Sahara, which I have been involved with all my life and the solidarity that we have to have with them where products are being stolen, what is behind all this ? Of course, oil, of course, natural resources and it's driven by the arms trade and we're working very hard. We've almost finished a book on the arms trade, which includes global contributions from people around the world about the importance of the arms trade to their society and their economy, so today is about bringing all these international issues together, it's about of a global issue in Inequality is about working class organizations it is about the Five Points that the peace and justice project has proposed.

I hope all of you, online and physically here, enjoy this. I hope this leads to great debate and participation, but most importantly action wherever we can and whenever. we can give people that political space to have those debates that lead to areal action on poverty, real action on climate justice, real action on world peace and that is why we do many things in the peace and justice project, there is always a determination to do more than what we do. possibly it can, but with the increase in membership and activity that we have, I am very hopeful that we will grow very, very quickly and be a real political force in this country, we are not trying to take control away from anyone else.

We are trying to unite people to make their voices heard because, at the end of the day, political change anywhere in the world does not arise, it never comes only from parliaments or from elected representatives, it comes from popular action, popular demands and that generates social impact. change we want and my absolute last word is these media when the going gets tough the media closes access they did it to Indian farmers at the very moment they were about to win they did it in Gaza this week we We cannot allow our communications are controlled by private interests, primarily in the United States.

All divisions have developed quite good forms of communication. Many socialist groups around the world have done the same. Gather them all. Bring them all together in a united voice so that we can have some way to talk to each other and be inspired by the demands of agricultural workers in Brazil, by union activity around the world and by that thirst for peace and social justice in a dominated world by greed, free enterprise, pollution and war. round thank you very much thank you Jeremy I learned a long time ago about timing when you are with Jeremy and getting anywhere takes a lot longer than expected because he talks to everyone so we will move on to the next session but first I just want to thank the team again of the Peace and Justice Project.

It's a small team that punches above its weight and a particular thanks to Sam, Artin and Chenade, who you probably won't hear much from, but them. You're usually out there with a camera somewhere but they're the ones who make things happen and I've never met a team of staff who seem to be available 24 hours a day and do it with a smile so thank you so much, I really do. I appreciate everyone and a final thank you, those who are often forgotten are the Islington North CLP team because every time I am at an event for the peace and justice project, you can be sure that there will be volunteers from Islington North who will be helping, so don't forget them, give them a clap too, so if you just give us a few minutes, switch now and we'll upload the next panel, okay, hello, okay, thank you, thank you, remember, buddy, you're okay, they're telling me that It may not be time, but that is the story of my life.

I stole your microphone, well I stole it from you so you can get it back, so you're right n la n n n okay, oh yeah, okay, we can go, yeah, just make sure all your microphones are on, okay, all of them on , deim, can you hear? we, yeah, fantastic, welcome, okay everyone, I'm really sorry for the delay in starting, but we'll catch up a little bit, but maybe not too much, because I know our speakers have a lot to share and of course we'll have questions . For their part, the audience also welcomes this session titled A World of Peace and Security and of course this is far from reality in today's world;

On the contrary, we live in a world of serious and increasing existential threats from the risk of nuclear energy. war on the growing climate catastrophe around the world hundreds of millions live in poverty Millions more face war displacement disease and hunger we have deprivation and dislocation on a massive scale the rich have never been rich, but capitalism as a system the root of These crises are himself in crisis, surely this is the moment for the left to fight for its vision and alternative reality for society, for political and economic democracy and the end of imperialism and for peace and justice.

The left is not making the progress that is needed in In many countries it is the extreme right that is making political capital from these crises that we, the people, face, so I am sure that this is the question that plagues us all. everyone in this very dangerous moment: how can we move forward and win the arguments and win the political struggles, how can we achieve that world of peace and security that we all want, particularly now that we are seeing a genocide taking place before our eyes in Gaza ? So to discuss this issue with us today is our fantastic panel that you bring. powerful political analysis and experience, great activist credentials and an incredible commitment to the cause of peace and justice.

I'm going to very briefly introduce each of them and then I'll start the conversation with our speakers, so first Peter Peter Merton, he is General Secretary of the Belgian Workers' Party, he is a member of the Belgian Federal Parliament and the Antor town council. He is also a prolific writer and his latest book, Mutiny, was published last month. Mutiny is about the multiple crises in today's world and the changes in global relations. and the Mutiny against the World System prevalent in both the global South and North, so it couldn't be more current and relevant today, Peter, so I'm looking forward to it in English.

It'll be okay, great, and then Paul Rogers, um. Paul will be known to many of you. He is Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. He lectures widely on international conflicts such as vested interests in the Middle East and paramilitary violence. He has written and edited 30 books, amazing achievements there and also has open democracies. International security. regular correspondent and broadcaster and then to my right here Walter berer Walter is an economist living in Vienna and has been president of the European left party since 2022. He was previously president of the Communist Party of Austria and also served as editor of the Austrian weekly. newspaper vul Stemmer he has also been a long-time coordinator of the Transform Europe network, which is a huge network of think tanks and educational organizations across Europe associated with the European left party and then joined us online.

A big welcome to Seim Dagdan Seim. He has been a Member of the German Bundestag since 2005, in October this year he left his former party Dinka and is now a member of the Sara Vargan Conect alliance, long-time member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and critic of the prom against imperialism American and NATO. She is committed to peace. and diplomacy and advocates of an independent and sovereign European civil foreign policy and, in fact, she was the first parliamentarian to visit the journalist and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Ass, at the Ecuadorian assembly embassy in London in 2012 and has been since then actively campaigning for Julian's freedom, so welcome.

Sim and welcome to all our speakers, so it's a great panel, of course, there is a lot of knowledge, they are bringing to the table, drawing first on Walter and then, many of the parties within the European left can trace their history back to 1914 , until the historical divided within the socialist movement, some supported the war at that time, others rejected the war and founded new parties. The radical left remains faithful to its historic and defining position against war. Yes, thanks Kate. Well, I'd say I hope so. I would like to. to quote a French writer Paul Valerie who wrote War is a massacre in which poor people who don't know each other kill each other for the glory and benefit of people who know each other but don't know each other, I mean, that's the class content of War and Peace and I think this is the basis of all our considerations at the same time.

I would like to say that if we do not want to share the fate of the social democrats in 1914 being overwhelmed by events, it is necessary to transform this principle or this ethical principle into a concrete political project that would be the idea of ​​a peaceful order. We, the European left party, are about to draw up our electoral program and we are trying to put together some of the essential ideas for the European peace order, I would say that the first thing we have to do is say that the wars in Ukraine stop, In Gaza, we need a ceasefire, we need the release of the hostages, we need negotiation processes to emerge. with viable and realistic solutions to conflicts, that is, I would say, the basis of everything; on the other hand, the crisis of the international political system is the reflection of a much deeper and much more essential crisis. uh, the peace order of Europe, the political order is in crisis, what we need is to return to the principle of renunciation of the use of violence in interstate relations, um, based on this, uh, we need to rebuild trust, uh, between the states, which means we need AR. arms control arms reductions and it's really extremely dangerous that we live now in times where this regime of arms control and weapons production is practically collapsing into a new phase of a cold war, we must resist that uh new nuclear weapons. are stationed in Europe, we must resist the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe following the collapse of the respective treaty and, finally, I would say that we should fight for a Europe free of nuclear weapons, as you may already know.

Or you certainly know the Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons in Europe, initiated by the UN and now ratified by 70 States, is international law, so why not demand our government and the European Union to remove nuclear weapons in particular ? uh, the US and NATO, so in closing, I would say that what we need is a peace movement that galvanizes our parties, the left parties have to play a role in this development of a movement for peace, it is your responsibility and I firmly hope that the European left party and its member parties will take up this challenge to create a broad popular movement for peace in Europe.

Thank you so much. Walter Seven addresses you next, so he is very active for peace. prominent critic of NATO, how do you see the left internationally in relation to the issue of peace? Hello Kate. I hope you can hear me very well. Can I receive a signal? Yes, can you listen? I can hear you? Okay, so, thank you very much. Much for inviting me here today and for this really important international conference and for the efforts of Jeremy Corin and all the friends of the Peace and Justice project. I believe that the issue of peace should be at the center of an agenda of progressive movements or parties.

The practical work to oppose war rearmament and weapons experts is the centerpiece of each and every one of the Progressive Forces according to researchers. from Brown University in the US 4.5 million people have died in wars waged by the United States with the support of NATO or a coalition of those willing over the course of the last 20 years to make the war one of the normal forms of social relations in the West and this cult of violence and death to impose imperialist domination in favor of the uh We must oppose the geopolitics of the oligarchs and large corporations.

The French socialist Jean Jes once said that capitalism carries war within it just as a cloud carries rain, so if we want to reverse the unjust conditions in our societies in which the rich get richer and the poor earn more and more, we have to take into account the war economy and with the US and its ships we are now dealing with countries that not only brutally exploit workers but also violently appropriate natural resources and access to markets as a form of new colonialism. one that also gives rise to large-scale racism within the Northwest countries and also in these times the resources necessary to rearm and equip third parties for these proxy wars are enormous on the western side and continued to grow, so it can be To say that the Soviet Union perished due to its weapons policy and the same seems to be true for Western countries today.

Germany plans to spend 20% of its general budget on the army in the coming year 2024. German Federal Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. wants to conform even further and make the German military finish quote, I quote "Ready for war," so this is language we haven't seen since the Nazis' 4-year plan to rearm Germany in 1936. The policy progressive and leftist today means standing up. to warmongers and who fight for a peaceful and sovereign foreign policy that favors the balance of interests and rejects aggressive militaries like NATO. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Peter, for describing the war in Palestine as a new global turning point.

How do you see the left developing in the big ship changes happening in the world today? Yeah, okay, good morning, so, and thank you for having me. here yesterday I forgot all about Brexit uh and then I forgot about the passport because I forgot about the borders and Brexit but it was like that I tell everyone because I think half of the panel already knows it but it's a luxury Theproblem is a problem of luxury, being able to forget about borders and being able to forget about Brexit because I think most people in the world do not have that luxury and if you are looking at Gaza and what is happening in Gaza and what that is happening in Gaza for a long, long, long time, you know my problem was really a luxury problem and I think if we are talking about War and Peace, what is happening now in Palestine and in Gaza is It is a new phase in the world order and I finished my book Mutiny two months ago and I was talking about turning points when it comes to the South, the global South, towards the north because, as a European, I traveled to the South and I learned a lot about how people look towards the global North and I saw some turning points after 1919 in 1919, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States in 1990 attacked Iraq for the first time and they said, "Okay, we're going to be the world leader and we're going to be the best guarantee to have peace and progress in the world".

It sounds crazy now, but at the time they really said it, we are going to lead the world as the only superpower, but very quickly there were some turning points that were happening and I think the most important one was the Iraq war in 2003, the illegal war in Iraq in 2003, it was a turning point because there was no mandate and this whole war. against terrorism if you look at it now, 20 years later, what is the balance of this whole world, is the world safer now than 20 years ago, is the Middle East safer now than 20 years ago, is there less terrorism now than there was? 20 years? 20 years ago and we all know that the answer is not like that, they changed the world in 2013, then in 20089 uh 789 there was a financial crisis and I think that the global belief in this Wall Street financial system controls the world, it not only controls the United States Joined.

United States but controlling the world with the dollar the hegemony of the dollar in 1978 it was clear to everyone in the world that this system is not a safe paradise in which this system cannot be trusted, of course, people on the left who knew, etc., but in 20078 It became clear to everyone that this Wall Street system could no longer be trusted and it is not a coincidence. I think that as a reaction to this financial crisis of 2009, the bricks of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa were born, it was a reaction to the financial crisis. crisis to look for an alternative in the financial system, so the second and third turning point was the war in the United Kingdom, Ukraine, but the issue of sanctions because, eh, count, most of the countries of the South They no longer followed the orders of the United States and they were going against the sanctions policy of the United States, so now we are in a new era and I think it is a new doctrine of extreme and inexplicable aggressive violence live in front of the chamber and if they succeed if they succeed with the support of the United States, all international law, all that is left of the United Nations will fall apart over a long period, but the good and then I will end with that, the good is in On the other hand, Israel and the United States are isolated.

Look at the vote on Cuba, only two two countries uh against the lifting of the blockade and in the world there is again a movement like in 2003, a very powerful movement to support Gaza, so I think that We're also on the positive side of a tipping point where there's a world with a unanimous voice going against this war stance, and then, um, over to you, Paul, uh, so we've seen a recent shift. in the union movement towards support for increased military spending this was the result of the debate at the recent Congress of Your what explains this what explains I think it is this microphone can you hear me what account I think it is the The continuation of a cultural change that put security in its conventional form at the top of our thinking and is seen in many different ways;

However, it is linked to two other important trends that have already been talked about a little this morning and that will become much more later today, one is the whole question of the new neoliberal economy, now more market fundamentalism , which is essentially creating a system of more and more wealth and more and more marginalization, and the other is really the beginning of something that faces us directly in the future. that we face and that, of course, is climate breakdown and that is sudden, it is accelerating and it has to be addressed quickly, so we have the three issues basically, economy, environment and security, and what is happening in the unions on that particular date it is really a constituent part.

Now the real problem here is that all of this can be sold from an environmental point of view. We can move towards radical decarbonization much faster than we thought just 10 years ago. Thank goodness, technologies in this case are changing really rapidly in the economy. The side is much more difficult, but people are aware of what is happening, which I think is important. On the security side, we have a lot of work to do. Basically, all the major countries that are weapons producers are countries that have a military industrial complex, the military itself, the public officials. The industry is enormously important, very profitable, with very high degrees of corruption supported by the sale of weapons and also the universities, the think tanks and the rest, all together, all the exchanges, create a very strong culture.

One person I know described it as a culture that is full of harmonious masculinity which makes it even worse and the point about this is that it has to change there are groups that are now trying to rethink security and Britain is the Security Group that is rethinking there are equivalents in other countries, check which one is What is worth considering is that we are basically facing interrelated problems across three different areas, environment, security and economy, they interact at all levels and essentially we see the securitization of the entire climate issue, now we have to close the castle doors against immigrants now the problem with all this is that we have to see things in a different way, can we have hope?

Yes, because as Peter was just saying, things are changing in many different areas and I think we have to change, it's a simple thing. There is no way except to make our way so that we can move on to a more peaceful world. It's going to be hard work, but we can work together to do it. Thank you, thank you very much, really, Paul, so I'm going to ask one more round of questions to the speakers um and then there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions and questions online as well. Can I ask the organizers if people know how to send me their questions on WhatsApp?

So I hope yes, okay, yes, okay, y'all. I know, okay, so my second round then, Walter, would you? Oh, so I'm G. Basically, I'm going to ask you about the relationship between working for peace and other struggles because I know that we are all aware that there is a lot of interrelationship between the different struggles that we are involved in, so Walter, could you comment briefly about the relationship between policies for peace and for social and ecological transformation? Yes, yoska fish, former foreign minister of germany and a very prominent speaker of the green party recently wrote in an article for an austrian newspaper now europe is at war we have to AR ourselves this is the absolute priority everything else progress social home consolidation is second and that is in fact the choice we have to make either we opt for social progress or we opt for Armor man for militarization just a figure to prove it um the only war in Ukraine caused CO2 emissions of 100 million tons, which is equivalent to the emissions of a medium-sized capitalist economy uh like Belgium one year of war is equivalent to the emissions of an economy like Belgium, so it is obvious that war and ecological transitions are mutually exclusive.

I share Sim's point of view that, when we talk about peace and war, we have to talk about capitalism and I want to emphasize in this context when talking about peace and militarization we have to talk about ecology and when we talk about eology we have to talk about peace because There will be no social progress nor will there be ecological progress unless we stop wars and militarization and this I have to tell people if you don't talk about peace you don't have much to say to the ecological crisis one of the paradoxes of today's world is that the weapons and the army are excluded from the statistics on climate change Koto protocol Paris agreement what what is this, manipulation, it is a manipulation because the central issue in ecology remains the question of militarization and that is why I believe that we must establish a dialogue with the environmental movements, we must maintain and maintain our dialogue with the unions because the condition because everything is the maintenance of peace, thank you very much seven, again to you.

You said that social cuts and war are two sides of the same coin. Could you tell us how this is evident in Germany? Yes of course. I mean, we're looking at this. In very concrete terms, in Germany, while the defense budget will increase to €85.5 billion, there is no money left for the Maternal Health Care Foundation in the 2024 budget, here it will be cut by 93% along with many other programs social. budget lines so that the enormous cost of war and preparations for war are paid directly from the pockets of workers. The war that the West is waging against Russia can only be described as a social war against its own population, so while real net wages of employees fell by a historic 4% in 2022 since the beginning of the 49th federal republic as a result of the high energy. and food prices, due to self-destructive sanctions, this flooded profits of 171 billion euros into the Dex cers, the German Stock Exchange companies, so the war also leads to massive redistribution, from bottom to up in Germany and our task is to put an end to the most senseless economic war in history to put an end to these senseless sanctions against Russia and this economic war is being waged with the simple argument of wanting to hit the enemy's oligarchy, but in reality it is only enriching our oligarchy by driving our economy into recession and a considerable part of the population into the financial rain so many people simply can no longer afford the rising energy and food prices in Germany, for which, keeping this in mind, cuts to social services and war are simply two sides of the same coin, this also applies to a considerable up to economic war whose means uh uh are peaceful, although they end with our self-destructive swas and belly and that is why we are for the end of armed supplies to Ukraine, but also for the end of sanctions because they are hitting our own population and uh, I think that uh, no oligarch is our oligarch, whether they are Russian oligarchs or German oligarchs, we are on the side of the working class in Germany, thank you very much, really, Sim and now Peter, with you again, could you comment on the importance? of international law in our work for peace, perhaps in relation to Palestine, no.

I think if you look at the war in Ukraine and what happened after February 20 and 2 in the international community, it took three weeks, four weeks. Before there was even an ICC investigation, they sent more than 40 ICC people to the International Criminal Court to investigate possible war crimes in Ukraine. It only took two months and three months to get an arrest warrant for Putin for displacing 6,000. Kids, it took a month two months to get immediate sanctions against Russia. We are now discussing in Europe the eleventh package of sanctions against Russia. The eleventh since the war, a military embargo was immediately imposed against Russia and resistance was built in Ukraine. and now, if you are looking at the situation in Gaza and I think everyone in the world is looking at where the IC investigation is, what prosecutor Khan is doing, he was going to go to Rafa and then he left.

Where is there no investigation? It's happening, it's a scandal. There really is no arrest warrant. There are not 6,000 displaced children. There are almost 6,000 children murdered in Gaza right now. Where is the International Criminal Court? Everyone is watching. Where is the International Criminal Court? military embargo why unions like the ITF in my country the transport unions had put the blockade of military weapons on the agenda and I really salute unions everywhere to achieve that level of humanity if it is from the bottom up I salute you , but this action had to be taken by the United Nations and by all the European countries of the EUR and this double standard cannot continue like this and, as I said, I think it is not just about G, of course, it is about Gaza, but about the future of the United Nations, the future of international law, because if Israel can do this kind of unprecedented extreme violence, uh War of Destruction, no country in the world will be safe after this, Israel will face others countries and they know it.

The European Union also has to act and, therefore, in my opinion, the European leadersand European countries have to join the petition to bring Netan and the leaders of the Israeli army before the International Court, the Criminal Courts, they should ask. ask the British government, we should ask the Belgian government, we should ask them to act in the same way. The second thing is that there is an association agreement between the European Union and Israel so that Israel does not pay taxes. for the products that have been being exported to the European Union they are duty free and Israel has full access to the knowledge and technology throughout Europe that is in the association, so it is mainly about economic advances and it still continues today as well that it has to be like that. it has to be abolished it has to be abolished immediately and third uh I already said that there has to be a military embargo we cannot continue living to give weapons to this war of Destruction and I think there will be press of yes yes if you see and I will end with that, I am, I'm, I'm glad there's half a million people here in London, then a million people and sometimes people think it doesn't make a difference, it does make a difference. that people around the world are now protesting and waging this this movement uh unanimously against what it does and we will continue until international law prevails we have to do it comres thank you very much indeed and then um Paul finally to you before we take audience questions, so we've been hearing how significant spending on weapons and weapons production is, how that's escalating and contributing to wars, where can we access good data and information about what's happening, you know in terms of the arms industry and what measures we could take here in Britain to oppose these developments.

I think when you look at the world's weapons industries there are enormous amounts of information available, but it's available in military newspapers and in military newspapers you get versions of it. Very summarized in the mainstream press often extremely inaccurate, but the information is there. One of the projects that the peace and justice project is almost finishing is a new and important book, as mentioned before, on the international arms trade, because that really, if you understand how that works, you get an idea of ​​how that works. military-industrial complexes, it's not easy, but you can do it and the point is that there is good information about our own campaign against the arms trade.

The CND and other movements do it easily in Britain, one of What I think is very important here is that when you look at this or any other area it is very easy to feel intimidated, but at the same time, if you are prepared to do it, remember that One person told me: The real trick is being able to say outrageous things in an acceptable way, because it seems scandalous to talk about reducing the arms trade, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be acceptable and it's actually a trick we have to learn to be able to communicate. better in terms of what we say and we have to say it with confidence and confidence improves with knowledge and we have the sources that may be available, we just have to consult them always remembering that it can be discouraging for anyone We are part of something much larger and that's the crucial thing to remember when basically maintaining our self-confidence right now thank you very much thank you really Paul um I think that's very useful advice because I know we all want to do everything we can, but sometimes we feel discouraged, so that's very helpful.

Interestingly, only one question has been submitted for the panel, so I'll read it and then approach each speaker and if they want to comment on that comment, or if not, give it to us. your final messages, so the question is to talk about the war and the struggle of the people, the struggle of the people of Kashmir is being silenced even more now that India is becoming powerful, how can we help them? If you have any ideas or comments on this, please share it. Otherwise, give me your final notes on the comments for this discussion, so Walter again, I'll take you first.

Oh, he waits. I have another one that just arrived. How do we approach arms factory workers who resist disarmament out of fear? of losing their jobs, okay, so that's another one, so please comment on any of them and just your final comments. Walter, well, how do we address the workers in forgiveness? It doesn't work, yeah, I think maybe that. It has to be oh, thank you yes, how do we address the workers in the arms? Yes, thank you, how to address workers in the arms, uh, industry, uh, I think it's a pretty similar problem to how to address workers in ecologically harmful industry. about a just transition, I mean, it is about creating good jobs for useful jobs and this makes a planned transition necessary, a just transition, it makes NE necessary to take into consideration the interests of the working classes, their participation, so I think We are in a moment of historical transition and the second observation I want to make I think is important to hint at the fact that today we have 20 wars going on simultaneously and that means we need a new world order.

To accept that we are going to live in a multipolar world, we need to organize a peaceful transition. That's why we put so much emphasis on maintaining peace and equality and, finally, let me tell people of my generation that we were out. uh fighting against the illegal and unjust war of the United States in Vietnam we went out uh in solidarity with the Chilean people we went in 2003 uh responding to the call of the World Social Forum to fight the war in Iraq we were against the war in Yugoslavia I say this simply to demonstrate that we know who the enemy is, that is, we know why we oppose NATO in Europe and we know why we want Europe to be freed from the threat of nuclear war that comes from the nuclear weapons that the United States basically provides in Europe and I .

I think this must be the core of the peace movement in Europe, thank you, thank you very much Sim, yes, I think for the left what it is now is that we must advocate for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. and the Middle East and we have to join the arms industry or dock workers who are against the transportation of weapons supplies from the Middle East to Israel, that is the order of the day, the killings must stop. and we must apply pressure here so that our governments are no longer prepared to fight US proxy wars and, secondly, we need a strong welfare state, not an arms state that devotes more and more resources to arming third parties like Ukraine. justice are inseparable and our task is to fight for a politics for the majority that gives voice to the anonymous and defends our common interest, the common interests of the working class in the West and the global South, who are fed up with the neocolonialism of the West and The third thing we have to do is not let ourselves be taken for fools by war propaganda.

I'm really fed up that there are still people who fall for this propaganda. which always works the same way to cancel people like Freedom Fighters or Peace Fighters like Jeremy. Anyone who calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine is a Putin supporter in the eyes of warmongers. Anyone who advocates a ceasefire in the Middle East is considered a Hamas. supporter of warmongers and anyone who stands up as a party against this stupid economic war as the majority of the population wants us to do, is raised as right-wing, we will not allow ourselves to be silenced in the face of this war propaganda, so let's not allow ourselves to be silenced or to be deceived by saying what is happening is that what counts is the revolutionary act paraphrasing Rosa Luxenberg thank you fantastic that's great St thank you very much uh Peter your final thoughts I was in South Africa a month ago at a popular assembly conference international and there were a lot of people from the global South and they asked me where are you from and I said Belgium and they said oh poor you and me why um yeah, the far right and Europe Europe is a big problem and okay that's a new way of looking at it to Europe, perhaps they are wrong.

I said that the problem in Europe is not the extreme right, the problem is maybe a little self-confidence on the left and that the left can be proud again and I think that if you see Co as if it were clear who turns the world it was clear that it was a job in a working class and this to be proud to be a worker to be proud to belong to the working class to the class that does things that creates things, uh, this pride, we need to have it again because I think that also in the question of war.

Beyond this intimidation Beyond this extreme violence from Israel and the United States, there is also some fear in Washington, there is also some fear. In Israel there is fear of losing this world harmony and this world order and we have to see beyond this fear and all this violence and be proud and I think it is important that we can also advance in Europe with a working class it is also as if the workers or transportation workers decide to block the guns, we block the guns, it can happen, we can realize things like that and I think we have to discuss this narrative also this positive narrative about the working class and I'll end with that about socialism because I think capitalism is one of the final stages of capitalism, this world cannot continue like this and, in my opinion, socialism is the simple things, a house for everyone, free education for everyone, free public. healthcare for everyone simple things everyone on the planet wants simple things and I think we also have to articulate that we are against capitalism and being in favor of socialism another economic order a fair economic order that is my opinion thank you very much Peter , now we are all going to come to live in Belgium for the struggle and then, finally, Paul, well, first of all on the question of the unions.

He should have said this in response to the first question: unions have often been at the forefront. of arms diversification look back to the Lucas Aerospace shops in Britain in the 1980s and the work CN did with unionists in Barrow on the nuclear side; By the way, on the whole Barrow side, it is extraordinary that Britain still has nuclear weapons, you know? It's a historical illusion of post-imperial grandeur, that's what it is and the point is that a submarine, depending on how it's armed and used, could kill about 20 million people in 120 minutes, that's how, and in my opinion, Any country that has part of its defense based on that should be considered some kind of rogue state of which there are nine and we are one of them, that's how I put it, so the first point, the second point, just to reiterate before what we were going through before and is that the three things linked security environment and, uh, economy, everyone thinks that they have all their interrelationships, you can't handle them all together in a single campaign easily, everyone can think well, what can I do alone to recognize that you are part of everything, that's the crucial thing and then finally, um, a new word and a definition, a new word exists a little bit now is lismo because essentially what it's about in our security is lismo, you maintain the lid on the stuff you never go under and see why it's boiling in the first place. and the second definition, a different definition of prophecy, is that prophecy suggests the possible and what that means is that this is perfectly the time when we have to show people or tell people what the alternatives are, they are already there in almost every case where I had to be able to shout it from the rooftops to achieve it, so remember the new Prophecy that will work well thanks to our fantastic panel.

We've had a lot of ideas and a lot of analysis of things to help us move forward in the fight thanks to you, the audience, for your attention and for the couple of questions there, so I think now we have a little tea break, maybe a a little shorter than planned, but again we will have a big round of Applause for our speakers and for San, I'm Yanis, with an invitation for you to join the annual peace and justice project conference on November 18, where I, together with others, we will discuss the question of uh. distribute the wealth, tax it and make it work for the many, not the few.

Anor Bavon put it brilliantly and summed it all up perfectly when he said that the great question of our age is how wealth persuades poverty to use its political freedom. It has taken decades to keep wealth in power, but the relevance of this question has gained strength. It really concentrates the mind to think that after the great financial collapse, the near-death experience of capitalism in 2008, at a time when the majority of people in Britain, in my native Greece, throughout Europe in Central America, were being crushed by inhumane levels of austerity at the time, our central banks were printing something like 35 trillion dollars to give to the rich so the rich could buy more media. and develop newforms of proliferation while the rich slept while wealth grew and grew thanks to the Tre money that liberals and neoliberals accused us socialists of invoking while using it and taking it in the name of the rich.

Politics used its media empire to poison our political debates and thus manage to isolate itself from the astonishment of many. So how do we reign wealth? How do we tax it to moor? Poverty is a tax on wealth. symbolic reasons why symbolic because I'm going to argue on November 18 that it's not enough join us or tune in on November 18 during the annual peace and justice project conference to learn more about this topic, for example, I'm we're going to argue that we need a corporate tax on income, not on profits because let's face it, they have the best accountants and can hide profits, we need an inheritance tax and yes, we need the law that forces conglomerates to hand over a substantial part of their shares to a social capital fund where dividends are accumulated to finance a basic income for all see you on November 18 carpedm as technical will.

I'll continue okay, so welcome to the second session, my name is Claudia Webb and okay, I think we're good. I'm going to go, so my name is Claud Web. I am the Member of Parliament for Leester East and I am very delighted to be here with you all today, with this conference that the Peace and Justice Project has organized. I am very proud of my home. The city of Leicester is not only proud because we are the city where minorities make up the majority, but also proud of our diversity and proud of everything we have achieved and I know this very well because it is the city where I was born and where I grew up, however. in my constituency of Leicester East, as proud as I am of our diversity and all we have achieved.

We have some difficulties when it comes to wealth and income, those difficulties that our government does not want to talk about and does not want to do anything about those difficulties relate to the fact that our average income is about 10,000 less than the income average of the rest of the country for a full-time worker, which means that four in 10 children live in poverty and it means that inequality is pronounced and difficult and if it were not for our multitude of faith-based organizations that provide food banks and food, I'm not sure how our communities would survive and that brings me to the heart of our topic today in terms of This second session, which is about the estate tax and social justice, and to help us with this session today, I have a brilliant list of speakers that we have here in the room, we have Roger McKenzie who is the international editor of the Morning Star. um Roger has many years of experience at the highest levels of the trade union movement and you will remember uh Roger served more than one decade as deputy general secretary of Unison, the country's largest union.

Roger has a long and distinguished record of fighting racist, sorry to interrupt, ladies and gentlemen, comrades, but can someone unmute him so he can hear what's going on? the pond I hope you can I hope you can hear us perfectly well that's brilliant and I was just going to say that, Roger, you've been brilliant in the fight around these issues, social justice and the anti-racist movement and Since Johannes has interrupted us, I'm going to go directly to Johannes de Rarus. Johannes, it's a pleasure to have you, Johannes, okay, we already have it, Yanis, did you give me my German name, which I have never had in my life, but as an internationalist I will accept the German version of my name too thanks yanis um renowned economist world he is also a PO politician by profession he has a renowned politicianhis career was Minister of Finance in 2015 and member of the Hellenic parliament from 2015 to

2023

in Greece of course Johannes is a co-founder and member of the Coordinating Committee of the Democracy in Europe movement dm25 um and a pan-European organization is what it is that aims to demonstrate Europe for its people.

He currently he is the Secretary General of an organization called me25 and I'm sure he'll tell us more about that as it goes on, but Johannes matters and of course we are. delighted to have Jannis with us today also in the room where we have uh Prem sea uh Prem Sika is the Emirate Professor at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield. He is also a member of the CH 2nd Chamber of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom. and uh, who took office in 2020 and Prem uh has an academic and research career that is surpassed by no uh um and his specialty has been accounting audit investigations uh corporate governance insolvency regulation of globalization tax evasion uh bribery corruption and all of the things that we really need to have in our movement, so I'm very glad that we have a Prem with us today and finally I want to introduce you to Ken Loach, of course, and Ken has been a brilliant social activist throughout his life. and an award-winning English film director and his films and television documentaries, as you will be, as you know, his television dramas have all been socialist inspired and they have all been accessible to us, um, I don't think Ken needs It's much more an introduction, um, but it's brilliant that we have Ken with us here today, so we'll touch on this topic: the estate tax and social justice.

I want to first turn to Roger McKenzie, if possible, and just Roger, can you just tell us what the starting point is for social justice? Can everyone hear me? Do you have your green? Yes, I have my little light on. Well, first of all. Thanks for the invitation. at this great conference um I guess my starting point is that I'm happy to be able to get my name out there so thank you cloria um I mean, for me, the starting point um is not some kind of academic discussion, it's the basic point that There are millions of people around the world who don't know where their next meal is coming from and for me that's the starting point.

You can have any other discussion you want, but if people can't eat, they won't go. to listen, they can't move, they can't do anything, so it seems to me that part of our discussion about social justice needs to be about how we are going to address that basic problem and the fact that it is not and this is really really important, I think this is characterized as something that affects the global South all the time. Not well. It is not like this. There are millions of people in the global North facing this same problem too and I think it is overlooked.

My colleagues in the media, who for some reason know the reasons and can waste time having that discussion when we all agree on it, if you want, but will actually miss that point because of what it means. and the anger that it will generate, but I also think because of the movement that it will generate and for me that's something that I hope we can have time to talk about, but for me that whole social justice thing is key, but um it's what it's about. of food, it's about making sure that people can eat, that people have a place to live, and to me, it's like this, if you're going to have a discussion about taxes, if you're going to have a discussion about laws, that's all. really important things to have, but the first question people will ask you when you go to them is: can you get me some food?

And we've seen that WR is big right now in Gaza, haven't we? I mean, I've been writing about this every day and it's the most horrendous thing I've ever had to try and really put into words the fact that a nation is deliberately making sure that people starve in addition to killing them and killing them. adults and killing children, they are starving people, so when we have this broader discussion, peace, social justice, taxes, all that food and those Bas, that basic starting point for me is fundamental. CIA, thank you and you just mentioned that you just mentioned there.

The global North and the global South were touched upon, what are those differences in terms of social justice between the global North and the global Soul? Well, I think it's a pretty critical question, I say that for myself as someone who is, you know, a descendant. um from people from the global South um who live in the global North I have a particular perspective on that that is based on my history um from um the PE my people who were enslaved all those years ago who I will never know, you know, I will never know those people. , what I do know is that somewhere in West or Central Africa, these people were dragged from their homes, enslaved and taken across the Atlantic, all of that history and the history of colonialism that followed slavery, I think it gives me and the people who watch and, um, you have the same story as me, a particular perspective, um, about our place in the belly of the Beast and how we have to have a particular role, um, in articulating that experience to all others, and also later.

I think how we link that experience to movement building in the global South as well, so that's what Deo talked about all those years ago about that double Consciousness thing that I think still exists for us and that we have to think about how we can working with other comrades in the global North to build a movement that makes a difference for the working class and peasant movements because that is also too often forgotten in the north, but also how we can contribute to achieving this. that's also in the global South, so I think the short answer to that question is it depends on who you are, but the result is still the same in terms of the necessary need, I think, to build the movement that is really going to take on. the need to make real differences, not just have good academic debates, which is great and we go to them all the time, but to have a real debate that is linked to how we can link theory to action, how we can make sure that the Things we talk about can be translated into real actions in the global North and also in the global South.

Thank you, thank you Roger and I just want to ask if I can turn to you, Ken, just in terms of your thoughts on social justice. and inequality and how we really respond, what are your thoughts? Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me to come and I am amazed to be in a meeting that will touch on economics with Janis and Prem. Seriously, I am out of my depth here, so I will have to resort to generalities and first principles in the to the extent that I understand them. I absolutely understand that I agree with Roger that inequality is a physical issue.

It's about food. These are homeless people. um the S the signs of poverty on the one hand and the signs of grotesque wealth on the other um just to a couple of statistics um just as an indicator no longer uh of life here and you are absolutely right to emphasize the importance of the South and this is a global problem, but the facts that apply here, the accommodation and government statistics show that at the moment there are 125,000 children in temporary accommodation and you think about the effect that has on children and the effect that has on not having friends nearby and having nowhere to do homework the close nature of a family living in a hotel room with a feeling of permanent permanence with no possibility of escape, that is devastating and in terms of hunger, the trust that is such half a little more than the total number of food banks distributed three million charity food parcels last year 3 million and half a million went to children just what children wouldn't eat unless you put an extra can in a basket collection in the supermarkets and we talk, and you rightly talk, about the hunger that is being imposed on the people of Gaza, our government knows that when they close the benefits for the people who desperately need money and who have nothing, they will go hungry and this is a conscious decision by this government and I think it started under a Labor government and the financial penalty if you don't jump through the bureaucratic hoops is that you will starve because poverty is a crime and, my God, you will have to pay for it and that is what we have to oppose.

They use hunger as a weapon to discipline workers, so you have to take any shitty job available, whatever the level of exploitation, because otherwise they tell you that you are starving and that is the morality of this government and I see it repeating itself. I am afraid among Starma Gang also in terms of inequality. Again, I can only say again that we call ourselves radicals and uh, uh, radical means in the root the same word as radish. I believe in the root, so what is it. What causes inequality and I believe that in our society is the essence of class struggle because there are two interests in conflict: the interest of those who sell their labor and the interest of those who exploit and manufacture it. make profits the interest of companies and speculators is to maximize their profits so we get more investments the business grows if we do not make profits we fail the interest of the workers we know what job security is a decent salary home health care a social salary Education pensions health, those are the demands and, of course, they are in conflict.

When times are good, we can win concessions when times are tough and driven​​because of the tough competition between corporations and businesses, then they make cuts, just think where we are. We were in the post-war agreement, the unions won great struggles, but they won the eight-hour day. Where was the 8 hour day? Now vacation pay is over for many workers. They paid you to go on vacation. It's not a big deal to ask of the informal economy. you don't get that sick pay, you're off the hook if we found out making a movie about cheap drivers drivers, so Jimmy pointed out that the so-called self-employed workers if they didn't do it if they didn't show up to so to speak fulfill their contracts what happened they were fined because they were sick a man missed his appointment as DI suffered from diabetes B man we knew met his wife his widow missed her hospital appointments because she couldn't afford the F of 150 shillings a day what happened he died he died and that's the cost of the collaborative economy and the rights that we lost, so that is an essential conflict and I think we have to do it when when we are dealing with how we end inequality we have to go to the core and the core is the class struggle now how Can the attack intervene in that, I don't know and I'll leave it, let me, let me ask you, well, let me ask you this, let me ask you, can we eliminate taxes? this inequality well, um, no, I don't think we can, I don't think we can eliminate it with taxes, I mean, it's, it could work as a palliative to suddenly transfer some of the wealth from the very rich to the people we desperately need it to finance. our Public Services, of course, you know who would say no to that, but in the end we can win a battle, but if we don't address it at its source, then we will be fighting the same battle again, um, but Obviously, I defer to Yanis and Prem on this because they are the experts and I clearly am not, but I think so.

I think there are other things to say about this, but I think this is a point. This is a point where we can find unity throughout the world and across Europe, certainly across Europe and AC and across the world, and it is an issue like the impending climate disaster and, like the desperate need for peace, it is the same enemy in all three. and that is very important and that is why it is so important. I think we support the United Nations in this and the United Nations has been very strong on the issue of peace.

They have also spoken about the need for urgent climate change. and we must encourage them to talk about the need to end this human rights inequality because, and I think this is the work of those who aspire to lead the left, what we have to say is that we have a common enemy and that is the The enemy is corporate power and they are driving each of these evils we face. If we find that common enemy, then we can have a united front, so that was the main point I want to make: we have one enemy and they are responsible for every three, one of those three disasters, thank you, thank you and you are certainly giving some answers experts.

I have to say um jannis. I'm going to turn to jannis now, if I can, jannis, can I link that question to my last question? you can and you ask the same question, can we really, can we eliminate taxes? Well, inequalities. Today I'm going to defer to Ken Ro, the expert political economist, because Ken said it all. No, we can't, but we can have some palliative care, so, uh. the tax system can um uh divert some of the economic value that has been Jan, yeah, let me interrupt you a little bit. Can we take Jannis down a notch?

You're very loud, Janis, so we're going to turn you away. It's not your fault Yanis That's what my daughter always says Dad, can you slow down a little? I'm glad you have someone who can do this now we're listening to you okay please okay okay then I'm. I completely agree with Ken. You can't end inequality through the tax system or even seriously address it, but what you can do is improve its harmful effects for many, so a combination of two things is needed first. a tax system that taxes the ill-gotten gains of the scandalously powerful owners of capital that must be done immediately and secondly the property rights over the capital assets must be transferred to those who operate them in the first place, They work with the workers and, secondly, the rest of society, let me know, last Tuesday I was giving a talk. at the United Nations uh in New York precisely on the issue of tax justice uh on a global scale uh this was a United Nations event uh and more or less I'm going to tell you what I told you uh but tinged more in the language of Marxist political economy because of the privilege I have today of addressing an audience of comrades, to put it bluntly, a global wealth tax is as feasible today as global socialism, in other words, is.

Not the economic operations development organization, the OECD supposedly a year and a half ago passed legislation legislating an agreement between developed nations supposedly to tax corporations at a minimum of 15% and not allow them to transfer their profits from a jurisdiction to another as they do through Luxembourg and Ireland, as you well know, to avoid paying taxes, that agreement is nothing more than what I call OECD laundering, it is a facade, behind the scenes, behind the facade, the corporations continue to pay absolutely nothing, look at Amazon Amazon booked a 44 billion European revenue gain in Ireland last year and paid exactly zero, a very radical figure for them to always find ways to change, so let's say Jeremy had managed to become prime minister and John the Council of people like Che, what could he do?

Of course, I could campaign internationally, but I couldn't introduce a global wealth tax right now, even if I had one, two or three governments, substantial governments, controlled by progressive socialist union forces, so here's my I think one very specific proposal may be wrong, but it is concrete. I think what we need are four things, four taxes, to make an immediate impact on the mind. The numbing degrees of inequality and exploitation we face in the global North and in the global South, so the first tax is, of course, a tax on windfall profits, that is, a tax on the profits of energy companies , the supermarkets and all those conglomerates that have managed to take advantage of Cod's stories about the cost of living crisis, because it is one thing to say that We know that the price of gasoline has gone up, the price of food has gone up at the point of production, but when you have supermarkets during the cost of living crisis that widen the difference between price and cost and widen their price cost margin, that is a huge profit that you need. have to pay taxes and we need to have punitive levels of taxes on that, that's not enough, it's not enough because those conglomerates can hide their taxes very easily, they regret the tax, their profits, they can declare zero profits when they have huge profits, everything that they need.

What needs to be done is to increase the deductibles, so, for example, a power generation company can hide its total profits by buying itself a contract, an intellectual property contract that has effectively been made within its own structure corporate. He has a company in Luxembourg that sells part of it. of paper that is worth nothing, you know, a billion pounds to your electricity company in Britain, that counts as a deductible that, in the end, essentially covers, conceals, disguises a billion pounds of profits as a cost, so we know. We need other types of taxes too, so the second tax, which I think is absolutely essential, I call the cloud tax.

You can call it whatever you want, but it should be a tax that is not applied to profits but to income. On receipts, take Amazon, there's no way you can tax amazon.com's profits because their accountants and corporate structure are too complicated for even sophisticated government officials to unravel, so what do you need to get right? your income 5% on any receipt and any purchase that someone makes in the UK in Greece Indonesia and so on from amazon.com 5% on income that is very easy to manage and essentially what you are saying is for companies that have more than a certain amount of turnover they are not small businesses or small startups impose that cloud tax and I am using the word cloud because these companies operate on the basis of what I call cloud capital, which is a combination of satellite Internet. from cell phones to servers Data farms and all those wonderful ways that they have discovered to create surpluses and extract rents from the rest of society, so this is the second tax proposal, the third tax proposal, it is not so much a tax, It's um. go to the heart or the roots, as one would say about the shift in capital ownership rights from the few to the many, so let me give you an example every time you use your phone and post a review or even you.

As you walk around London or Birmingham or wherever you know, Google's stock rises because Google knows through your phone where you've been, by knowing where you've been, Google Maps becomes more useful because it can predict for all of us in On behalf of all of us, traffic jams and how long it would take you to get from A to B, which increases the demand for Google's services, which increases Google's ability to extract rents from our society, so with Just by having our phone in our pocket we are contributing to the capital of the capitalist something that has never happened in the history of capital until now, you know, if a factory owner wanted to get his hands on a new steam engine, a new rotating Journey or, these days, an industrial robot, would. be manufactured by proletarians inside a factory, today we are producing capital for these cloud devices.

I call them these hyper-capitalist or technological feudal lords, uh, and more and more of the most successful and profitable companies are moving to the cloud, so what do you do about it? Society is to produce part of the capital directly through free labor and not get dividends, so here is a proposal. John McDonald knows this because we discussed this many years ago. The proposal is actually very simple, any company with more than a certain number of workers. your workforce or a certain amount of turnover will have to give 10% of your shares, 10% of your shares to start to an equity fund that will hold these shares on behalf of the public of all and uh the dividends that accrue in that Social Equity Fund then they go to the bottom we can decide how this happens it could be a universal basic income it could go towards health education uh common goods uh and finally we need to seriously reform the VAT we need to have many more goods and services that are zero rated at the level of V8 and many others that need to be taken to great levels, especially those that go hand in hand with the destruction of the planet and one last point in On the world stage, it is essential that we work with the global South with the bricks, with the many governments around the world who are looking for an idea and some inspiration on how to bridge the growing and widening gap between the global North. and the Global North South, so here is a very simple, very practical idea, that can be implemented even before the Global North agrees.

You can start between countries like China, Indonesia, Thailand, South Africa, for starters, they may decide that they can agree to denominate all of their. They trade among themselves in some common accounting unit, not in a common currency account, common accounting unit, and they agree that whenever there is a deficit or a surplus in their balance of trade or whenever there is an increase of capital from one country to another, they will will charge a small percentage. a tax on imbalances, whether trade imbalances or capital flow imbalances, and those taxes are accumulated in a common fund which is then used to invest in the green transition of the least developed and developed countries, so these are some ideas for change us from the realm of appreciating the crashing and mind-numbing levels of national and global inequality to practical things that can inspire especially young people to join us in joining movements like ours to bring about change that starts at the national and then arise. internationally thank you, thank you yianis, that was brilliant, we are all experts now, even you Ken, we are all experts now, so I just want to ask um jiannis, you, the notion of whether taxes themselves will be enough, I mean, obviously.

You've already said that they probably won't be enough and Ken has indicated that as well, but I'm going to look at your recent book, it's called Uh, which you published this year and it's called "The Technological Feudalism That Killed Capitalism." Yanis lost alone in that question damn, it seems that Google has intervened we are back here we go you are back well we thought we thought Google had heard youso just in terms of your book what killed capitalism I mean clearly we need the end of capitalism to move towards a more just society, but tell us a little bit about your book about how we ended capitalism.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity on this, but this is a bit of a theoretical question. By the time I'm happy to talk about it, you see, I have this vision that's reminiscent of Rosa Luxenberg. Rosa Luxenberg expressed it from her prison cell and she gave us something to think about when she said: will it be socialism or will it be barbarism? that was a brilliant question because it shook us Marxists out of complacency that it will definitely be socialist no R said it could easily be something else it could be barbarism socialism is not guaranteed it is not written in the stars that socialism is going to disappear My opinion is that in the last 15 years, especially after the financial sector collapse of 2008 and the emergence of what I call Cloud Capital, capitalism has managed to create a mutation of capital that I call Cloud Capital, I alluded. before Which is much more toxic than the standard Capital was and which was, so you know, it's a bit like a Capal virus um, a virus that mutates into a very toxic version, uh, so toxic that it kills its host , so my hypothesis. in the book techn Fidelis to which you so kindly refer is that capitalism was eliminated by Capital, which is a charming Marxist-Hegelian irony and what we have now is something worse, it is a kind of feudalism.

I call it technfeudalism and let me draw the distinction, you know, Henry Ford Westinghouse, Thomas Ederson, you know they were monopoly capitalists who had run the corner markets, uh, bribe governments, usurp societies, uh, so that let's all buy their stuff without any competition from anyone else, really, uh, but they made us buy their stuff mister zukerberg mister U basos they don't mind selling us their stuff what they do is they have created new digital fifs venues because amazon.com is a fifm digital the moment you enter amazon.com you leave capitalism because even though there are there are many buyers and sellers on amazon.com amazon.com is not a marketplace uh the algorithm owned by a man J bases matches because of a particular seller in a way that maximizes J Bas's ability to extract rents from that seller of a vassal capitalist effectively um They, you know, you know, charge up to 40% of the price you pay, so it squeezes out the profits of the capitalist and becomes an income for Jeff Basos.

And you, on the other hand, have been completely isolated from any other consumer market. There's no way you can have some kind of market crash experience there, so the moment you go to amazon.com, goodbye to capitalism, even hello to techn-feudalism, which is a clear and present danger for the world because the moment you have 20 30 40% of capitalist profit that has already been extracted from the proletariat, is extracted even from the standard capitalist class and ends up in the financial sector, aided and abetted by the central banks, that is not It is the capitalism that marks Haek Fredman, even Hatcher would have recognized.

It's much, much worse and it makes our lives much harder because it's no longer enough to organize mental workers and auto workers and print workers like we used to do. Once upon a time we won the 8-day shift. hours, as I may suggest, remember. This before now we have to organize what I call Cloud, which serves the people who provide free labor for those Techn Fudal Lords, you know, kids who upload videos on Tik Tok, build the social capital of Tik Tok and not they get not a cent for Or have you heard of The Mechanical Turk?

The Mechanical Turk is an abomination. It's created by Jeff Basos for Amazon as we speak today at this very moment as we speak even on Saturday. um, I checked two hours ago 43 million people. This morning, Saturday, November 18, these millions of people were working on Mechanical Turk from home making peace rates just like the fish rates in K Marx's famous chapter in D Capital volume one, working for a pittance for a pittance. and working for a pittance. as long as they had to do it to be able to pay the rent through their computers, of course, but that is genuine proletarian work that is sometimes paid with Amazon tokens, sometimes with dollars, no more than 80 cents, 90 cents per time, uh, how do we organize these?

Workers, how do we, delivery workers, organize ourselves so that our work is a lot for us? The tax system is just a small lever to achieve radical change. We have never been more needed to make humanity sustainable and when I say I mean we, the progressives, the left, and we have never been less powerful, more disorganized and defeated, so let's get started, thank you and more. I just want to, I just want to turn very quickly to Prem Prem, what do you think of the situation? government narrative on taxes thank you Claudia uh this can you hear me hello yes oh can you hear me now try this try this yes ah it's working no oh can you hear me now oh okay well uh first of I'm very grateful to the organizers for inviting me to this wonderful event and a reminder that all revolutions start in small rooms and sometimes there is a counter there and that is me here.

Now you asked me a very interesting question. but before we answer that, we must remember that in this country, in the late 1970s, a right-wing coup began and part of that coup was actually restructuring the state, so the state has been restructured and no longer guarantees the rights and well-being of people. rights social progress has been reversed it is no longer corporate we all remember how the state invested in biotechnology Information technology uh Aerospace uh type of industries uh that we all use now instead the state became a guarantor of corporate profits as demonstrated by privatizations, outsourcing and a large amount of subsidies and it is within that context that we come to understand what has happened to taxes.

A key narrative is that only the rich and corporations matter, so governments are hell-bent on reducing effective corporate tax rates, even though they recently raised the corporate tax. rate from 19 to 25%, but corporations get a lot of relief, but the effective rate is much lower, so they reduce the income tax rate so high-income people are taxed at a lower rate, so capital gains, for example, are taxed. in a range of 10 to 28% salaries in the range of 20 to 45% Dividends are taxed in the range of 8.75 to 9.25% recipients of investment income, i.e. rents, dividends, profits from capital pay zero National Insurance zero even though they can use the NHS receives social care if they have an accident an ambulance will definitely come to pick them up but they don't pay any national insurance so these narratives have now been normalized and are not defies anywhere in the mainstream media to say whether this has any merit.

So as far as the rest of us are concerned, the narrative is good, we don't really count. Your personal allowance may be frozen. Their income tax thresholds may be frozen, and the government now says these sick and disabled people will have to work or lose. their benefits and they want to withdraw free prescriptions for those who do not work and the response from laboratory workers yesterday in those times was that the conservatives do not go far enough, so we live in times in which not only has the state. but democide has become normalized, so 1.5 million people have died between 2018 and 2022 while waiting for an NHS appointment last week, the chancellor said he will not give an extra billion pounds to NHS England to reduce the waiting list that is currently almost 8 million, but now suddenly found 4 billion that next week will deliver a cut to the inheritance tax, so this kind of this is the big narrative that we really have to disrupt, we have To challenge, without workers there can be no wealth, in reality it cannot be generated. even though they keep telling us that AI is coming, it will replace us well, it can also replace the people at the top, but they have a control, they are basically controlling the state, so the workers, the common people just stay away. has become can andf. uh to what is good for capitalism so we need to democratize so everyone said that taxes are just part of the answer we need to democratize let's see Yanis refer to Amazon and Google and how taxes change and we in In the last Labor Manifesto we had a requirement that would require all large companies' tax returns to be publicly available so that we know how these things are changing.

I used to work for an oil company. I know how profits are transferred. Well, I know how to avoid taxes, so let's see. in the tax return of all large companies along with all the correspondents they have with lawyers and accountants so that we know how their plans are really designed, we need to hold directors personally responsible for ingenious plans to avoid taxes, many of them are very simple , if I may just let me, excuse me, just a minute or so, an example that was brought to me by the work and pensions committee to help with this BHS investigation.

BHS was full of questionable tax practices that were all legal, just to give you an example. BHS had stores in the UK from which it traded and around 98% of the BS shares were held by Lady Green, who lived in Monaco where there is no income tax, so the plan that emerged was very simple. . BHS sold freehold ownership of its properties to a company. in Jersey and who controlled that company, Lady Green, so basically the left hand sells it to the right hand, but of course BHS now needs the properties to trade, so there is an aale and lease back, so that the result of that is that BHS is now suddenly paying rent. for the same shareholder who controls both entities, those rentals are tax deductible in the UK, but of course in Jersey they didn't pay tax because profits not made on the island there are other complications that generally don't pay tax, so all were paid in dividends. to Lady Green, who lived in Monaco, there is no income tax, so big companies are doing this and we have a remedy.

The remedy is that we will say if any entity, any individual, any company is paying interest, dividends, anything to another entity in a place like Jersey, where there is no tax or corporate tax, we will withhold tax at source, we will deduct at least 20 % here and we will say that if they can prove that they are taxed elsewhere, we will release them, okay, but the argument used to be within the EU, we can't do that. that argument was never really true, we certainly can do it now if we want, so we have to deal with these things, but the state that is totally captured by corporate interests who fund political parties give jobs to MPS and others, in other words, is the corruption which is institutionalized and we need to change the political system thank you, thank you preme, that was a complete and frank response.

I want to understand that in the last session the audience did not have the opportunity to ask a question, so I want to give the audience in this session the opportunity to ask a question, so I think we have time for a couple of questions. I also have a question from someone online that I want to answer, but maybe if I do. A couple of questions. I can see the com here with the hand up. Do you want to go? Not behind you. Go ahead, we have a microphone here for you too. Can you hear me?

Go ahead, okay. I have something for Yanis. Can you hear me? Yes, I have a comment for Janis. Can we have a question? Well, it's also a question because I want to, no, no, I just need a question because we don't have time. You know, we see you? We are talking about everything I see and hear about is within the framework of the capitalist imperialist system. I just want to say that you talk a lot about what Mark said, but Mark, you know, one of the decisive and most important things about Marx is that he supported the first proletarian dictatorship of the Paris Commune, you know, he supported the first proletarian dictatorship that was demonstrated in the Paris Commune, so what would you say to that?

Okay, Janis, do you, do you want to take that, I think it is? Great question, very briefly, very, but can a short answer? If I also supported the Paris Committee, I mean, I didn't leave then, but if I did, I would have. This was an incredible moment in European history. It was a brilliant moment. The question is what do we do now when there is no communication because remember Marx did not create communication, communication created itself and then Mark supported it, so the question now is very simple, how do we create an economic democracy where there is no communication?

There is a difference between profit and salary and those who own the meansproduction are the ones who really work on them because this is what worried the brands. You will have noticed that there was an element of that in one of the measures I proposed. Remember when? I said that large companies operating in the UK should transfer 10% of their shares into a common fund. Well, that's a small but crucial first step, because imagine that 10% becomes 20% as you get closer to 100%. What we have is common property or proletarian property of food choices as to the word dictatorship, don't surround it.

Marx was a Hegelian. Marx was in the business of usurping and undermining the propaganda of the time that spoke of democracy and what it told the people. The powers that be were that there is no democracy, especially in the 1840s, 1850s and 1870s, what we have is a dictatorship of the aristocracy and the capitalist class and we want a dictatorship of the proletariat because that is our democracy, I don't believe it. . which is sensible for Bandy and to use the word dictatorship today as our own Vision. I grew up in a dictatorship. I can assure you that you do not want to live under a dictator.

Thank you and I have, I have. I have two hands. I'm G for take. Take these two questions. I'll do them together and then we can. So, sister here. Can you hear me? Can everyone hear me? um I can only say one, ask one question, just one question. Well, I'll ask a question, so it's for Janis. I'm sorry, you know. I thought I found the whole panel really very interesting and I wish there was more time, but there isn't, so I respect you, Claudia, for that, thank you, but Janis. My question for you is about your proposal to create a common fund between brick-and-mortar economies.

I mean, for starters, Brazil and China are at odds over China's extractive investment in the Amazon. I don't see how and there is enormous political opposition throughout Latin America. to China, which is seen as a neocolonialist, um, indulging in expansionist neocolonial practices, so I would like you to just respond. I mean, I would like you to say a little more about your proposal about how a common fund is going to emerge. of a group of economies in which there are enormous tensions and conflicts and simply wait there before responding. I'm going to take my brother to the front here.

Oh hello everyone, my name is tah mza. This is a question for Actually, with white economy we also have shadow economy, so many politicians from other countries think that UK is a safe haven for them and they bring the money here with different means, so how can we tax them and how can I monitor them, thanks and Yiannis, do you want to move on? Well, very briefly, there is no doubt that there are big conflicts within the bricks to begin with, so yes, I mean look at the conflicts between China and India, not so much between Brazil and China.

Let me state for the record that I am personally politically, morally and philosophically opposed to the extractive processes of both the fossil fuel industry and, in general, the mining sector. Having said that I think you misrepresented China and misrepresented the way China is viewed in places like Brazil. Talking to my Latin American comrades, including the Brazilian government, is not the impression I have. China is not an imperialist country in the sense of Great Britain, in the sense of Belgium, in the sense of the United States. They have never overthrown a government and assassinated its president like in Chile, they have not interfered in the politics of any country, including Brazil.

They are in the business of doing business and the problem in Brazil is the Brazilian regimes, including Lula's. who for their own reasons wanted to extract minerals from Brazil, but since we don't have much time, let me, let me, let me, let me get to the heart of the ISA, the heart of the isia is that despite these differences, the government. of China, the government of India, the government of Brazil, of South Africa understand that they face a clear and present danger from Wall Street and Silicon Valley and the American military industrial complex, which is a very powerful reason for creating circumstances that they extract from the trade between them and the capital that flows with them within them they extract funds to invest in the transgreen transition that both President Luna and President X completely and absolutely agree is essential for humanity to have a future so they can reach that kind of agreement I think it's doable I don't think it's going to be easy um and that's all thanks and Prem to you thanks uh uh yes uh I think the problem with your POS is about illicit financial flows, clearly you need that there are.

There are some necessary conditions that are needed for illicit financial flows and the main one is secrecy, without secrecy you cannot have illicit financial flows. I remember going after ministers in Parliament because I found out that some mafia bosses had set up a bank in the UK and it was called which I won't do here in Parliament, uh, and these people were for years and years making false statements. in the company house because anyone from anywhere in the world could form a company in the UK, use any name, any address of their choice and they submitted information. in Italian language and when you translated from Italian to English, the director said his name was the chicken thief, the occupation was fraudulent and the address was the city of uh 40, the city of 40 thieves, Alibaba district in Italy, and that was accepted year after year and Since then, the government has changed things, but it has not gone far enough.

Opaque trusts can still be created that completely hide the identity of people who may benefit and who may own property. There is no real law enforcement and the brains behind these schemes are usually large companies. of accountants and lawyers and even smaller firms as well, uh, in this country, uh, you know, so we have to control that even within the United Kingdom we are not very good at controlling illicit financial flows or tax evasion schemes, You may be interested in that, as 2010 HMRC says it has failed to raise £450 billion in taxes, that's the official HMRC figure.

It doesn't include things like the example I gave you about BHS and many other companies are shifting profits one way or another if you were to add that we are looking at around £500bn of tax not collected by even a large accountancy firm and all What has ever happened in the UK has been investigated, fined, prosecuted, shut down by any government, not a single one, and they are often called enablers, we need to focus on the enablers and if anything, some of these companies They are currently advising the labor bench. they send their people to government departments they write the laws and everything else, that's what I meant before when I was talking about political corruption, we need to verify this so they find out that they are the people who are telling the governments that Capital you need to pay taxes at a lower rate.

The rich need to pay taxes at a lower rate, so they are the people who advise the government on quantitative easing. There is no quantitative easing to alleviate poverty in this country, but there was quantitative easing of £895 billion that was spent. directly to the government unions, corporate bonds drove up property prices and the top 10% of the population in this country benefited to the tune of between 128,000 and over 30,000,000, that's the increase in their wealth through quantitative easing, which is why we need a 1% wealth tax. of the population of this country has over 70% more wealth than 70% of the population combined so we need these things so these people who are transferring money to the UK are hiding wealth but that can be done within from the United Kingdom, can be created. a trust, no one knows who's behind this, we talked about it in the Lords, the government isn't really listening, so the wealth tax, if I can go on, was part of the title here, just a, a minute, a second, yeah, one, okay, what, just a minute.

Everyone, thank you, look, we can equalize the capital gains tax rate with salaries and collect National Insurance for the same thing that raises 25 billion a year. We can tax dividends at the same rate as salaries and collect National Insurance so it raises another six to 10 billion. We can guarantee that tax relief on pensions at the moment, a third of that amount goes to little more of four and a half million people who pay taxes at 40 and 45% if we restrict to 20% for all those who generate another 14 and 500 million, there are almost 50 billion that I just gave them with the small reforms that control wealth , it's the workers who need tax privileges and incentives, not wealth, thank you, thank you for that and I don't want to eat too much of the next session.

Well, I think we're going to take a break and have lunch, but let me say this. I want to give our panelists the opportunity to say one sentence each about how they would round out this discussion. Can I come to you first? Roger, can I just say that online we had a question and my apologies, if you're listening online, we had a question about repairs and the link to this I think is an important question, but we just don't have time to respond. and we also had a question from a garment worker who wanted to remain anonymous from Leicester, they wanted to know how we get our 2.1 million back that we're losing a week in wages, um, but I don't have time.

I asked the panel to respond to that, but it's your turn, Roger, who just rounded up our conversation, yeah, I mean, it's a real shame we don't have time to deal with some of those, look, um, how quickly . which is kind of the thing I've been reflecting on throughout this whole discussion and it comes back to another superstar, actually known as Chomsky and something I heard him talk about a while ago about people because they basically think we're attacking to people, which is how they can get away with doing the kind of things they do to us because they don't believe that we can't and that kind of stuff is really cool to me. because I think that clearly we are people, but we don't assert ourselves enough and I think that, frankly, and this is the point I really want to make, we should stop cooperating with these people because it seems to me that that is why we need, frankly, more strikes and maybe this is how people take things back in Leicester and we need to start standing up and saying we are not prepared to put up with this rubbish anymore because we are people and we are prepared to come together to build a movement that will bring real power to the working class in this country and for the working class and the farming communities around the world, thank you and, if I can, I can turn to you with some final thoughts, yes, well, there are a number of ideas and I.

I will be very brief. First of all, there is a question that hangs over all of these conversations that we are having and that is whether it is possible to elect a left-wing leader with a radical agenda in this country, given what happened to Jeremy Corbin because there was a clear determination on the part of the establishment to do what Peter Oborn called the right-wing journalist, but one main man called it a political assassination and now that was a modest program, an important program and it curtailed the power of capital and look what they did to him he lied and the interesting thing is that it was the right of the labor party that was the Killer, they didn't need to pick a toy to attack him, the labor party writing did and note that the labor party under Jeremy and John and the small group that carried him to ascend to the largest party in Europe 600,000 out of 200,000 plus a surprising achievement were very close in 2017 and then the establishment decided that we are not to have this and a general act in the army.

I was told at the time that the army will not tolerate a Corbin Leed government. Now this is an important issue for our democracy and we have to consider the other thing. We know that the left always fragments for me. I have good comrades who are very supportive of peace and justice. Good comrades in other organizations. Too bright people. We have a great group of bright, experienced people who understand the real problems we have to face. together, not necessarily in the same organizations, but we agree on the same basic principles and we remain good comrades even if we know slightly different organizations until the time comes when we say that we are now a movement and I think the other danger is the danger of the far right because as capitalism becomes more desperate CL shuts down the voice of the left and you can see how clearly they have done this on the BBC, the most sophisticated voice of the ruling class.

A Bane self - contemptuous but ruthless and isn't it curious that Iraq war warmongers Blair Brown bossy Campbell now appear as um uh elder statesmen sought out for their pearls of wisdom on television all the time quoted in major press articles del Gardien and the rest, while Jeremy, who got it right during theIraq war, which he foresaw, The Who, foresaw and wrote about the ensuing chaos in the region, the mass killing, etc., got it absolutely right, he never asked to talk and that. says everything about how they control conscience and democracy and manipulate them and we have to be willing for this, you know, we really have to be willing for this and I think the leadership of the unions is fundamental Prem and others have said because this is the kind organized worker and it is the point of production and well done, well done, the nurses and the consultants, well done to them, but let's not forget, let's not forget the organized working class and let's turn off the switch and then they are in trouble and they always like protest for the victims of you know, poor people, pass the hat, have a colle, there is no charity, justice is delayed, let's go for justice and organize and take that industrial well strike, let's take, let's take the power in our own hands in that way by withdrawing the work we have a large political organization with many, many different groups but yet all marching at the same pace and then we start to have some strength because they say well, we are weak, but my God, I can do it anyway solidarity with everyone, thanks and Yan, can I pass it to you?

Brief final thoughts. I'll take my Ken's tail. It is essential that we maintain the support of organized workers. At the same time, industrial strikes are not enough. They are essential but they are not enough imagine if we combined the workers' withdrawal with an international campaign to support a particular union that is um um that is attacking through a consumer boycott, so on November 24th this ugly thing that we Americans have infected us with Black Friday, a day of hyper-consumerism, the progressive International of which I am a very proud member and so is Jeremy and other comrades.

We're hosting our annual Black Friday hash, make Amazon pay, make Amazon pay. International rolling strike, a strike that begins on November 24 with the first flight coming, of course, from the east, in Vietnam, then continues to Bangladesh, India, Germany, Leap Frogs to New Jersey and ends in Seattle, where the Amazon headquarters, so millions of workers will be on strike to make Amazon pay, imagine if we simultaneously organized an international campaign that day, don't visit amazon.com, you don't care much, just one day no one visits amazon.com, that It would be an even bigger blow to Jeff Basos than that day. strike in warehouses is that combination of withdrawing labor and withdrawing consumption, especially on platforms, which is a very powerful way to support justice programs around the world.

I support you and I support you, thank you, now we are eating on your break, your lunch, um, I can. I see Lara here saying finish it, but I have Prem alone with one more point, well, thanks, uh, uh. I think from the examples I gave you about tax reform you would have realized that none of them will raise taxes on the majority of people that they actually result in. redistribution they simply say: well, we are not going to tolerate the fiscal anomalies and the advantages of the rich and the interest rates have been silent what is the result the result is that the rich have become even richer because they got the savings they got the money so again State policy is driving L Truss saying the other day that we had to cut the minimum wage, he said we had to cut benefits and he said especially that sickness benefits are the lowest in any OECD country .

They are based in the UK, so the government hasn't actually declared war on poverty, it has declared war on the poor and we have to respond to that. We need to rebalance the tax system. We need to appeal to democracy like transparency, like I said, let's make everyone pay taxes. go back public let's see what the rich are doing that make it so that in some Scandinavian countries the world has not ended we need directors elected by the workers of the large companies that we need we can identify the name of consumers with absolute certainty in the banks insurance company water gas Electric companies allowed us to create laws that say customers will vote on executive pay.

Let's see how these company directors get away with evading taxes or shoveling trucks full of sewage into rivers; they will not be able to escape, so capitalism has actually prevented democracy. I liked it, there is a veneer, they talk about democracy, but in reality they don't want to empower people and consumers. That is still the goal of socialist movements, we want to empower people and that is where I will stop, thank you, thank you and just to finally say thank you to our panel to Janis to Roger to Ken to Prem thank you very much brilliant session and thank you all you thank you very much no oh n old and strong chance that I think you all will know it's an injury to one injury to well well done guys you know it's good so when I say injury to one you say injury to injury to one injury to injury to one injury to injury to one injury to those of you with the fist, you get bonus points well done uh I hope to get a nod from the organizers when we can start.

I don't know who I should get the nod from. Well, we can start, although people are coming in. Okay, I think most of us are here. right, you guys are happy to start, okay, so I'll just stick to the beginning because that's what I'm used to. My name is Mika nondo esog. I am a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. I also organize. as a popular educator not only for the NSA but for various popular movements, left progressive organizations, political parties on the African continent under the international popular assembly, which, our friend from Belgium, Peter mentioned that he was at a conference we held about a month and So our job is to try to connect the grassroots struggles, particularly in Africa, of course, but across the global South or what we generally know as the global South, and figure out the ways in which we can build elective campaigns that be anti-imperialist and anti-imperialist. capitalist and many of us are socialists, so today I am very excited because of my connection with the NSA to chair the session that will deal with unionism and how we organize across borders, something extremely fundamental at the moment in which we we find.

Now, I'm going to briefly introduce people and give them two broad questions, allow them each to address them, and then hopefully in half an hour, if everyone can keep the time, allow them to open up to the questions. from all of you because I think that's actually what we want, is to hear from everyone and have a little bit of dialogue across the space, so first I'd like to introduce you to Steve Cotton, who I think you all met this morning, in any case. I don't need any introduction, but briefly, the Secretary General of the International Transport Workers' Federation.

Thank you for kindly hosting us in his building. An applause. I think it's worth. Then we have Valentina Orini at his side. representatives of the Italian metallurgical union called f f de f along with Valentina we have Chris Smalls, who I am sure many of you also know, is a union leader from the United States who carried out one of the most important actions of our time: a big strike in 2020 at Amazon and I founded the Amazon Workers Union so welcome thank you Chris and last but not least is Len Mcclusky who I asked if I could introduce him as a poet but most importantly he has been the general secretary of one of Britain's largest unions for over a decade have come together and played an important role because, he says, over 50 years in union organisation, welcome Lyn, before we start, I just want to check everything what ordered online, everyone can listen to us online, cool, cool, so the first one.

The question I wanted to ask is broad because we come from very different struggles: what are the current and pressing demands of the various working class organizations and peoples that you represent and what kind of work are you doing to move forward? They already know the precision of the blow. towards capitalism because I hope you know that all of us here should be in our lives trying to destroy capitalism as much as possible, even if it's in our little dents, but you know, slowly but surely, chip away at it because we know that Sometimes you want to have these massive actions.

That brings changes, but unfortunately it is a long and difficult road. In fact, I was at Highgate Cemetery earlier in the week paying my respects to KL Marx and it was an important reminder that this is how it was 100 years ago, we are carrying on the aluta struggle. so I hope you're with us on that, so I'll bring it up first. I'm going to go one by one and you have between three and five minutes. I already told you, thank you. How's everybody? Hello everyone online. So to continue today's conversation that I mentioned earlier, the ITF has 18.5 million members around the world, the Global North, the Global South and of course the fights are different depending on where in the world you are. that you fit, so our first job is to make sure that this organization.

We're sitting in our head office, but we're really global, we're responsive, and what do I mean by that right? Yes, we are part of the establishment, but we are also part of an organization that ensures within all of our sections. so we have activist leaders as part of the transition of this organization since 2010 with our president Patty Crumlin about us being a more dynamic organization now it's very easy to say we want to be a dynamic organization, what does that really look like? This organization is about making sure those voices, so for us it's labor issues.

How do we make sure they translate into our political movement and then into our campaigns? So what does that really mean? I mentioned the four issues above, but we can add human rights. rights to that and how we mobilize around it, but the challenge really is how do we build power in the different parts of the transportation movement so that we have organizations in this building and in all of our global offices with the capacity to actually build unions. We were talking about Palestine earlier. We have had a plan since 2014 to unionize taxi drivers in the West Bank and support the labor movement there, which is part of a progressive process, so despite the unacceptable situation we are facing in Gaza right now, we have always been in a position to try to empower workers and of course our method of doing that is our institution, but we are also very proud of our institution because we are truly responsible, so within all those sections we have a governing body, but We could be talking from the ticket collectors in Bogatar, where we also have a project that we might be dealing with, how do we combat the World Bank when it modernizes?

So if we want to bring sustainability together, we have projects in Nairobi that we are working with. Existing taxi drivers transport drivers to a bus rapid transit which will ultimately be a regulated job with guarantees on the occupational health and safety of the vehicles, the safety of drivers and employees, but also ultimately In many different ways we have a 75-year-old man, which seems like a long campaign, but maybe not as long as the history of brands. of go, where we really target what we describe as flags of convenience to make sure that the world's seafarers have a global standard. and the ITF is the only World Federation of Trade Unions in the world that has achieved a global collective bargaining agreement, so we sit down in front of all the big shipowners in the world and bring all our unions together because today's seafarers are mostly Filipinos , Indians and Russians.

We Ukrainians negotiate and negotiate an unprecedented global standard, so it is actually a power that has been built over time and then each and every member can have a different Collective Agreement in their own environment, so our Philippine Sea Rates Union 130,000 has hospitals has medical services. because there is no social security in the Philippines, in Russia it is a challenge right now, we have been declared enemies of the Russian state, unfortunately, which is a challenge for us because we have people, we had 1.7 million railway workers, 880,000 sailors and They have now had to suspend themselves from the ITF for fear of being imprisoned due to the comments we made about Ukraine and the challenges this poses for the ITF.

I'm trying to keep an eye on the moment when reality is Amazon and me. I'm really looking forward to hearing what Chris has to say, he's one of those people where we have to balance the reality of aconsumer with the treatment of workers and they are one of the promoters of the less responsible method of employment, notoriously anti. -union, so the work that we see we have seen a lot in the states, particularly after the pandemic, people stand up and say that they are dissatisfied, that they are dissatisfied with their safe health and safety conditions, that they are dissatisfied with They have no control over their working hours and, as Jeremy said earlier, many people, many working class people in the global North and the global South, have to work many jobs just to have enough to feed their children. , educate their children, so these are things that the ITF works on.

To build power and capacity, we had a fantastic conversation with some of your colleagues about accountability, so yes, we are part of the establishment that provides us with the facilities to have this infrastructure, but we are very accountable to the politics of our unions and We have continued to evolve without aging. I've been around almost 30 years, not as long as Len in the ITF, that should be a sign of respect. The reality is that the expectations of the workers when I joined the ITF. was predominantly dominated by the North American unions, the European SNU, now we are truly global, we have India, a huge economy, the largest population on Earth, we have massive growth, we are trying to make sure that the democratic process is balanced Wherever it comes in, next year we will do it.

For the first time, we created in 2018 at our Congress in Singapore, we created the Arab region and now we have half a million Arab workers in the ITF and next year is our Congress year and we will gather 2, 2,500 people in total for maresh Morocco, one to celebrate our inclusion, but second, to set ourselves a next 5-year work program on accountability and compliance, of course for us, similar to you on the peace and justice project. You are building networks, you are building a group with a strong Opinion within the union movement: our job is to defend the rights of workers, but we must know that they are not alone, no matter where you fit in the world, if you are part of the chain of supply, whatever part you should feel like.

You are never alone and you know that a victory for one is a victory for all promote our successes, let's talk about when things are successful, the Amazon Project is successful and we have seen in the global North, the pandemic throughout the global North, salary of two digits. increases one to reflect on the enormous growth of inflation, but also people want to take action, that's why we are immensely proud to welcome you all and propose a new challenge, thank you Valentina, everything is fine with the microphone, yes, it's fine, thank you so much. Thank you very much for inviting M and thank you very much for the organizer too.

It is a true honor to be here at this aspirant conference and a few words about our organization. I am representing here what is the largest Metalworkers' Federation in Italy and also. the oldest because it was founded in 901 and um when it comes to the question that you raised Michela um we had a strike in Italy yesterday so I'm very because it's very useful in summarizing what our demands are. I believe that we are living, as has already been said this morning, in very difficult times and I believe that as unions we have, I would say, a double responsibility because, of course, we have the demands that come from the working class for our workers, who say that there are a salary increase is necessary there is a need it has also been said for public health for real access to public education a real opportunity to have a voice in the future because I am referring to the industry, especially because we cover and negotiate for our workers that we have national collective agreements covering from steel workers to ICT companies, all metal workers in Italy and all workers feel, I mean, that they are afraid of losing their job in the near future or that there will not be enough investments to guarantee them a job and, of course, at the same time that negotiations are being held and we are also fighting with the government and investors about the fact that we want to have adequate investment and clarity in the industrial policy of the future at the same time that I said , we have a double responsibility because as unionists we cannot be corporate and simply campaign for a wage increase in this situation we have to campaign for peace we have to campaign against the right we need to campaign for social justice and even if it is complicated because when we meet with workers in the workplace, I mean, it's a very complicated topic to discuss, I mean, it's not the first thing we would love to discuss that.

We have a responsibility to discuss, I mean, what does social justice mean? I think it is very clear also from the name of the foundation that there is no peace without social justice and there is no social justice without peace, so that is why with our unions we were very committed in recent years and especially in this period as well. to organize a demonstration for peace, previously asking for a ceasefire in Ukraine, now also asking for a ceasefire in Gaza and I think that in that sense, I mean that our national and international role as a Union is also to raise our voice and We, and this is also very, very crucial, what happened to our unions a few years ago, two years ago, we were attacked by a far-right party.

Basically, they were denying vaccination and they had a demonstration and part of the demonstration left and they have a head for that moment. We organized an anti-Rist demonstration in our countries, it was the first national demonstration after covid and there were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets and we were overwhelmed by the international solidarity of other unions, so we thought that was the case to use this powerful force that we received and the solidarity that we received and we launched an anti-fascist Manifesto that has been signed by many unions around the world and um so because this is a situation where, as I said, at the beginning we have to expand our solidarity and our campaign not only to improve the condition of workers, of course, is a problem, but also with a strong social and political responsibility that we have as a working class movement that you are currently leading with the most concise use of time, so thank you Valentina, Chris , thank you.

Can everyone hear me? thank you for inviting me back to London it looks like London Chris Smalls is currently the president of the Amazon Workers Union, the first union in US history for Amazon workers, we were victorious last year on April 1st, capitalist, yes, you have to clap, big deal, thank you. you, um, yeah, when you talk about disturbed capitalism, welcome to America, where it's run by corporations, not on the microphone, okay, can you hear me now? Okay, I understand you, so yes, when you talk about disrupting the capitalist system, you know when. you're talking about living in America, I can tell you all about it and taking on a trillion dollar company is not an easy task, Amazon employees, they know over two million workers around the world, so this is an international struggle and our struggle is your struggle right now we are at a point of no return uh when we talk about climate when we talk about women's rights when we talk about war we are talking about ceasefire no matter what movements you make we are part of in the end of the day we are all part of the working class we are all workers and this is our fight right now, it is quite a fight, so in the next few years in the United States one in four Americans will have worked or will work for Amazon, they have already hired and they laid off our entire workforce in the United States, so we are talking about disrupting the system, something that has been missing, in addition to the laws that are outdated and we can talk about that too when we are talking about the root causes of capitalism and the system we live in, we need better laws, we need laws that represent the 21st century and represent the working class, we don't have that in America, we need politicians, elected officials. not just talking about it, but putting a P pen to paper and writing about it and making sure that it's solidified in our legal system as well, we don't have that in America and when we pat ourselves on the back for the victories, in a way It distracts us from what the root causes are and even from our Victory, as historic as it is, we still have a There is a lot of work to do, this is still the beginning because I can tell you that three years ago, two years ago, even a year ago , no one knew who the hell I was and that's a good thing because when I got fired from Amazon three years ago, I didn't know.

I don't know that I'll be sitting here right now as union president, which means I made a decision three years ago during the pandemic when they let me go for leading the strike and continuing to advocate for workers' rights even though I was gone. employee in the company. I knew he was bigger than me. I knew he was bigger than the next person who walked in there. I didn't want them to go through what I went through after putting five years of My Blood Sweat and Tears into the company so unionizing became our only option it's our only option as workers to protect ourselves and as a working class it's the same thing there is no Calvary coming for us no one is coming to save us we have to save ourselves and what I have learned in my last three years and my short organizing journey is that organizing works by bringing people together regardless of their background, whatever it may be. your political ideology, no matter what your beliefs are, when you unite people for the common good of a greater good, you can be victorious no matter how rich or powerful the opposition is, people want to know how you defeat a company of a billion dollars.

It's very simple, no amount of money in the world can equal the power of the people when we come together, but like I said, even though we won the victory, there is still a long way to go in America. Union density is less than 6% in the private sector, less than 10% in the public sector. Most people don't even know what unions are, as we see strikes and We see how victoriously the strikes are winning their contracts but still not reaching the massive majority of the younger generation. We have to educate them because let me tell you now if you have told me, like young Chris Smalls, that I can be.

As cool as a rapper is as a union organizer, he probably would have done it at a younger age a long time ago, but unfortunately they don't teach us the real labor history in our country, they don't teach us about union organizing and our workers. human rights in our country I am pretty sure that the same thing happens here too. Education about the true history of the Labor Party wasn't taught to us as children and to be honest it's not attractive, it's not attractive to even talk about unions, it's not cool, why do it? You think I'm pretty popular it's because I look different, I talk different, I don't look like the traditional President of the Union, I can tell you that right now, but I'm sorry, To the younger generation, no, don't be offended, but just let them know.

I say to the younger ones. generation when I walk through elementary schools and middle schools and see 10-year-olds the same age as my children and they tell me that Jeff Basos is a bad man, we are doing something right. We are making unionization cool again, we are making unionization cool again now we have to seize this moment and we have to continue to spread that message and educate young people, educate our community, even our own family members and ourselves, because this is a revolution, but the revolution begins with ourselves, so go home today after we leave this conference and have these conversations with your loved ones, your friends and family who may not know about our struggles, especially those in America, but let them know they can do it. something about it right now thanks Chris come to me um thanks Villa I.

I should start by telling you that at lunch I asked maaa if I look as cool as Chris and uh without hesitation she said no and she said no yeah , you are older. Chic, which I quite like, you know, the question that M has asked is what do people in our communities want, what do the workers that we represent want and it's quite simple, and my involvement over the last 50 years both in the domestic sector as in particular at the International Arena tells me that workers, wherever they come from, have the same aspirations and the same fears and people simply want a decent home, a decent and well-paid job, they want a decent education for our children and They want decent old-age care and dignity for our seniors.

Now, given the wealth of our global nations, it is not difficult to achieveObstacle, of course, is the capitalist system to which we are subject. The workers are equal. What do the workers want? They want good salaries. They want good conditions and they want safe conditions to work in. They want to be in a position where they have some security in their job and the most important thing I have found is that they want respect. They want to be respected by their employer. Now the only way to achieve all that is through a political setting and listening to Chris, who is in a country that is enormously difficult given the political nature of many decades of being anti-working class and, indeed, in Europe and the rest of the world the political situation is important and only politics can change. of all our nations with organized labor organized labor is the key to resistance is the key to achieving change and that is why organizing workers is extremely important.

I want to bust some myths too because the media and certainly in the UK and it's applicable. In other places I constantly tell you that right-wing politicians and I include right-wing politicians in the Labor Party in that also constantly tell us that well, the unions are in decline, there are only 12% here and 20% there, eh, you're on the decline and you're not as relevant as you used to be and I used to ask a question. I used to say well, if we're in decline and we're not relevant, why don't you just leave us alone? Why do they keep attacking us?

Don't they just let us waste the V? The reason of course is that unions are often the only defense for workers and in many of our major sectors in the UK our density is extremely high and unions are extremely powerful. they are the only voice increasingly now as we wonder if the Labor party is the voice of workers, the jury is out, maybe not in many people's minds, but it is organized labor that is an absolute key to moving forward towards and that organized work. It extends beyond national borders, everyone says that if capital is global, then labor must be global and that's why global union federations, the ITF, are incredibly important when I was General Secretary of United.

I was involved in all the global union federations, my favorite. and Steve always likes me to tell him that this is the f for one simple reason: bureaucracy in our movement can often take a wrong turn. People gather from various parts of the world and talk. I haven't seen you in three months. I haven't seen you in six months, I haven't seen you since the last Congress, it's great to meet people, we go into rooms and talk about things, but talk is cheap, it's direct action that is absolutely essential in everything we do. why the International Transport Federation is my favorite because they do things that highlight solidarity.

Focus: If I had time, I could give you many examples of how workers in different countries have helped in strikes. I was involved in a strike with British Airways, not so much. a long time ago and the reality is that, due to links through the ITF with workers in other countries, it was in a position to confidently inform the company that it would ground all British Airway planes, wherever they landed, never They would take off again. To say that thanks to solidarity through the ITF and through the links I have with international youth I was able to say with confidence that this is the power of the workers.

It's been great to hear the other discussions and that Peace and Justice should take a lot of credit. put this together because conferences of this nature increase confidence. The most important word I have encountered in my time representing workers is trust when workers are confident. Anything is possible, there is no power and that's why it's wonderful to me, Chris, because it says Amazon. the only recognized union in the US is everywhere Amazon of defeated unions everywhere here in the UK, both my own unit and the GMBB are doing a great job trying to break through but we have never succeeded despite our history.

Despite the quantity. of wealth we can have as unions, we have never done what you did and you should be extremely proud of yourself because you have sh. I want to let myself take an extra minute or two, one of the things I did when I was young. The shop steward at Liverpool docks many years ago was involved in many strikes and of course the story in our Union and indeed in the states and in other countries is that very often the workers fighting for justice to make Advan, uh, starve again. work um it's an inevitable fact that that happens which I always felt when it happened to me and you know I lost my house and my favorite little car um after a six week strike I always thought to myself if I would ever find myself in a position of power I'm going to try to do something about it when I was General Secretary of United we created the largest strike fund not only in Europe but I think in the world even higher than some of our American unions and the power that gives The workers are huge, £70 a day when they are on strike, which has resulted in literally hundreds of successful disputes and I have been, I was going to say, preaching, I don't mean it that way.

I have been speaking with my colleague General. secretaries in the UK to say start a strike fund because starting a strike fund gives power and confidence to workers and that's what we have to do, we have to cross oceans and borders and national borders to build that solidarity listen to Jannis and Prem um and Ken before it was about power, that's what the ITF is about, that's what organized labor within our borders is about and we should spread the word. The establishment sees us as their enemy and they are right, we are and that is why we have to work to achieve the ordinary aspirations of workers around the world and those that I have explained at the beginning are not difficult to achieve if we simply challenge the power and the distribution of the wealth that workers create thanks to us.

To allow questions in, I just have one question that you have already started to address in various ways, but on the question of solidarity, for example, in South Africa, one of the big things that we are trying to push forward is the building of a -Africanism as a sense of right of continental solidarity because, in South Africa, for example, we are a stronger industrial class, but with the levels of unemployment we see other African workers as the enemy because they are paid cheaper, with higher costs lower, lower working conditions. Etc., so it's been a real struggle to educate and build this awareness that you know the person on the other side of the border is not our enemy, the enemy is up there, no, no, it's not God per se, but the capitalist is up there.

Oh, so I wanted to hear from you in two minutes, if possible, so we can get questions from everyone. What does it mean to generate solidarity? What are some of the concrete tactics and long-term strategies that you all have been following? They could go first. So, to continue, we had a very big conference in Johannesburg and we are very proud to now be a member of the RTF and one of our resolutions was exactly about that xenophobia among African workers and one of the most moving moments of that conference. It was that all the South African geographic unions came together to commit to educating, mobilizing and building power among South Africans because ultimately employers don't bring other Africans to South Africa for anything other than paying them less money, so our conversation was how come on. to build this program and how we are going to work with it, that is a practical example.

I think the biggest one and it runs parallel to what Chris has been doing with Amazon is global supply chains, so our counterparts are the big transportation companies and in certain parts of the transportation sector are highly mobilized and have many union members, but in reality we are defending corporations, the customers of the transport companies have a responsibility and this is where we talk about rights, so there are human rights that we have. We have UN resolutions on human trafficking, we have UN resolutions on child labor, but we also say to the big corporate brand: do you know who is in your supply chain?

Do you understand it? So it doesn't matter if you are moving tea from India. from planting on a non-union truck on a ship that is likely unionized, then going to a warehouse somewhere else, the reality is that transportation employers need to know that there is a risk to their reputation, that if they don't care about their supply chain, we will expose it, we will expose if there is child labor, we will expose if there is human trafficking, if you can imagine, we will tell you a very short story, fish from Norway is transported to Thailand, in Thailand, people from Myanmar, part of he is human trafficking and some kids will peel the fish and then send it back to retail in northern Europe, can you imagine that?

And the responsibility and the vulnerability of the brands that participate in that process, so our job is to formulate, formulate a strategy to make sure that we have unions in every part of that process but we also go to transportation customers and say look. This is the beach of Human Rights, that's why the UN was created to maintain minimum standards, so on one level we have organization on the ground in those warehouses, we have organizing on the fishing boats of the fishing factories, on the other hand, we are saying Let it be your fault, shame on you for exploiting all these people. in that process, thank you, well, when it comes to international solidarity and solidarity, I mean, it's something very concrete and it can basically refer to important things that Chris has said, it's like I realized that it was bigger that I and I believe that we must realize that the entire fight we are leading against national and international fraud is bigger than us and I say this because we realized a few weeks ago, when workers at United Automotive, the University of Washington and the US was leading an incredible fight against Stantis. and GM we said that this is bigger than them and this is something that will say about the condition of those who fight against multinational companies, that's why we decided to organize a workers' delegation with our general secretary or we went to old Piet.

There are lines for GM and Santis to support the fight, since it is the same that we had a meeting and an expert exchange of information with our colleagues in Scotland, they were involved in a dispute and there was an Italian company that sent them different information than the The reality that they are implementing in Italy, so I think solidarity is really something concrete and we have to show up and stand shoulder to shoulder with our comrades and let them know that the struggles they are leading are really bigger than them, like Chris already. he said and then we have to be also I would say uh creative and think about the struggle in a different way uh not simply to appeal to repoliticization and cool down the trums movement but also to have new instruments that we experienced in Italy the first, I think the children were the first court case where we took an algorithm to court and showed how uh um.

The injustice behind the algorithm made no difference to people who were absent due to health or other problems and classified people based on their availability and We want that court case and for the first time an algorithm to be processed and show you to Al how unfair it was in its creation and last but not least, I think that, yes, with international solidarity, it is really important like me. I said before that we stick to the principle of the working class, which is internationalism, also from our perspective because, I mean, if I look at the wave of strikes that we had under the fascists in Italy in '43, there were workers fighting for bread and F peace together and this is that we are in a work situation in which again we have to fight and fight together for peace, for bread and peace, thank you Chris, two minutes, two minutes and then we will open ourselves so that it is so . your questions are ready, yes, so solidarity for me is definitely not a slogan.

You know, when we talk about the word solidarity, since it is the word you are really talking about love, because when you talk about solidarity you do it because. "You believe in something and in many things. In my short organizing journey, a lot of people use the word solidarity but they don't really know what it means because if you ask a lot, you ask people what the word solidarity means to them." I'll give you a different answer, but when you organize for a greater cause, you have to unite people, as I mentioned before, and the only thing that will really unite people is love and the love of fighting, the love of standing your ground. .

The shoulder, the shoulder, unites people and that is the solidarity you have, that bond, building that relationship and obtaining that trust, because that is organizing at an international level, thewhich is why I feel my presence is important to come and go to the UK because The first time I came to the UK and Jeremy was there at Soas where the Coventry lead organizer announced this was before they even really started their Campaign. They were inspired by our victory in Staten Island, so they saw that victory and then they said: I know what we are going to contact the GMBB and get our campaign going, then I came back the second time they already did three or four strikes, so I just to know that that solidarity spread across the sea, yes, the sea, international solidarity, showing up is showing my love and appreciation for the work you are doing, we all have to do that and we must remember that you cannot have one foot in and one out, it doesn't work that way, so when you talk about solid solidarity, be prepared to sacrifice because that's what you have to do to survive the kind of movements we're in.

I'll try, I'll try, and I'll talk quickly, sorry, before I jump. I just wanted to remind people online, please submit. your questions. I know we can't see you, but we really want your participation, so submit your questions online. Yes, of course, building solidarity is about talking to people and that's in the UK for example, that's what we do all the time. various unions try to develop relationships by talking to each other very often we operate in the same company in the same industry so it is important to talk internationally, it is essential to have those conversations and what the conversations are about.

It's all about five finding common ground. about making it clear that together we can be stronger and it works in international solidarity, internal solidarity is really crucial. I have been involved in so many disputes where we have been successful in different ways. In my own Union we developed what we called a leverage strategy and this was a situation that was not a replacement for industrial strikes, um, but in many situations where industrial strikes were perhaps not practical or not working enough and were actually it's about a detailed look at the companies that you're involved in and tracking where the power is and where the money is and uh we don't use that strategy liberally every time it's been used it's been successful.

I'll give you a very quick story. One of my favorites because it reminds me of a scene from The Godfather, but we had company. We had seven construction companies led by Balabit that decided to leave the National Construction agreements that were going to destroy any type of organization in the construction industry and we had a strike against them and it was a powerful strike, but they are powerful companies and we hit them in different ways, but one of the wonderful ways again through the ITF, our brothers and sisters in the truckers in the United States, and many of them came to the balab crust that this huge multinational came to uh M. their headquarters main in uh in New York and they occupied the building um the anecdotal evidence was that the C oh said what the hell is going on here what is going on and well it's about this dispute about what the hell am I interested in the dispute in the Kingdom United because it was resolved that way.

I got a call at 8 o'clock in my office from the head of Bal BC here in the UK and he said, let me, man, how did it come to this? How is it possible that we never meant this? Come out and I said that's simple, send me an email saying now that you're stuck with the national agreements, it arrived 10 minutes later and the other six companies collapsed the next day and it was because we quickly had another dispute in the construction industry, a dispute over the blacklist. J Stewart was fired and at Cross Rail in London and one of the main contractors the three main contractors was fovial a Spanish multinational and we stopped this Spanish multinational that ran and was responsible for a bridge in Toronto, in fact, it was in Toronto, in a meeting with one of our sister unions, the Steelworkers Union, and someone said to me, Lenny, what are you doing?

And I said what he said: you have stopped the bridge. The bridge is stopped in Toronto due to fovial. I didn't know that, although obviously my team had to jump in to do this kind of thing. Foval left and the next day flew to London and resolved the disputes with SA jop Stewart. was put back into operation and then that type of direct action that type of power of how it is built or the steel work as I mentioned, we established a new Union, not just a bilateral agreement, we have a series of bilateral agreements with different European unions that We created a new union of workers that comes together, which is a Bonafide uh Reg Ed Union in the states of Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland between our unit and the United Steel Workers to challenge the different companies that we both deal with.

We introduced schemes where workers uh in the different plants met workers in the US plants and the success we've had with employers as a result has been fantastic. The best thing is that you are looking at me very well, as well as all the other panels we are working with nearby. time, but could we answer two questions? If you can keep them pretty short, I see a hand on the back and a red cape here. Let's ask those two questions. I feel sorry for those I looked at and deliberately chose. women of course my personal preference sorry come on hello thank you very much my name is Sarah and I must say I have worked in the trade union movement in the UK and also in Belgium so I have an insider interest. um but to get to the point, I mean, thank you very much because the panel was very interesting and actually had a lot of things, but we don't have time, so I'm going to focus on one, which is to do a little bit with messages and communication um already you know and uh uh Steve did you start or did you say that you know that uh this you know that we have we have different in terms of workers there are different um I don't remember exactly how you phrased it but you know there are differences yeah there are differences but I think what Len was saying about the fact that at the end of the day the struggles are all the same and like I said, it's in terms of the messages and how we communicate it. and then the other kind of link to that is also this idea that you know, we know, you know, we're among friends, we also know that, um, and I think it was Valentina who made this thing about how we balance, uh. the interests of you know the workers that you represent because they are concerned about you know their working conditions, their jobs and everything else and other workers, um, who you know they may consider to be coming in and undermining and Michaela who referred to the situation in southern Africa is the same as Brexit was partly due to these European workers coming here and undermining us and across Europe we are faced with the same type of message, so in terms of the question, what can you know?

Do the panelists know what they can suggest? What do you see in terms of how we can improve communication and messaging in terms of international solidarity? You know, and making sure you meet the workers and the people that The families understand that actually yes, you know that our struggles are all the same and only if we work collectively do you know that we are really going to achieve the changes that we want, thank you very much, let's respond to the other question. and then I think if you can in a minute try to conclude with as short an answer as possible thank you red coat hi thank you um my question is I'm just a councilor in Hackney and I'm part of a growing trade unionist and migrant woman, it's very important to say that Due to all the abuses against migrant workers, there is a growing movement of workers, activists and mental health professionals, we are pushing for mental health to be our fundamental human right. to hear what you think about mental health work as mental health and can we lead an international campaign to finally protect workers' mental health?

Thanks, great question, so take a minute if you can and answer as many as you want. Answer such fantastic questions, first point. and I think Jeremy mentioned it before, it's about telling the truth when it comes to communications. Everyone in this room is subject to biased information. They're seeing it in Gaza right now, where they're pumped with information and it's incredibly difficult to determine what it is. the truth is at the ITF we have been investing in our Communications team we are organizing digitally we have to change the way we do business there can no longer be a bunch of men in a smoke filled room it has to be a new environment where we say the truth but building a coalition around the truth and to that point about educating people, I think Len said it, we all said it, our institutional governance, those committees have to be super relevant, they are not an opportunity to get on a plane and leave, some were nice, it's an opportunity to have real conversations with a sense of integrity and responsibility for the people we represent, so it doesn't matter if you're a bus driver in London, Delhi or Washington, they all faced to the same problems, dissatisfied passengers, excessive traffic and we have to talk about that and then produce a strategy and then I just think about the issue of well-being and I don't think we have seen the end of this conversation at all, the pandemic comes into clear focus and when we talk about We are very proud that the International Labor Organization has considered safety and health at work as a fundamental right, one of its fundamental pillars, and at the ITF we are looking at well-being, work-life balance familiar, all the things we take for granted. and we're all sitting here on cell phones and taking pictures, our work lives have changed dramatically and the separation between work and life is getting very, very confusing, so yes, we'd be happy to be part of a conversation about reinforcing boundaries and reinforce what is expected. deworking people, so for the ITF it is a privilege to be part of this panel, thank you very much, thank you very much Valentina, can I use your thank you very much about solidarity?

Not international solidarity, but um look, I mean it's a complicated question and also in a sense. very easy to answer I think it is uh what we have to invest in is the contamination and inspiration among us and also in the ability to choose to fight and together make it visible as was the case of the Amazon workers in New York as I was for the UAW in the US or what the fight that the Swedish unions are leading now against Tesla would be like because those are, I would say, fights that speak to the roots and the possibility of the existence of commerce. unions and we have to invest and spread the fight that we are leading, especially in some cases of companies and in some special cases because they are, we would say, inspiring and really link to the roots of our existence and vice versa.

The and um, the mental health issue that has been raised, I think it's a very big problem and in some ways we rediscovered it after Covid because I mean, it emerges as a big crisis and, but it also goes behind it. together Hand in hand with health and safety and with the fact that we saw it in our countries, especially because we have. I mean, I would say it's a very good loan in terms of health and safety, but this doesn't apply and it was like that. part of the strike that we are carrying out now in the country and that will also take place next week, so yes, I see room and room for maneuver in this sense and I think it is a quite sensible issue also due to the growing The competition that is being generated among workers is also in the fight for the future, so that is very important and I share it.

Thanks, go ahead Chris, yes, for the first question. As I mentioned before, first things first. when you talk about communication for the common good, and starting these conversations at home, I say it all the time, in various speeches we have to create our own propaganda, that's basically what we're doing today, you know? this Peace and Justice Conference is Our Truth here is our truth our experiences in life everyone who has been on the panel the people here in the audience you all have a story to tell and we are here to listen and create this space for ourselves we must share and build, so on the left and in the movements we are in we have to create our propaganda for ourselves.

You're not going to see it on the BBC, you're not going to see it in the New York Times. You're not going to get it on MSNBC, they don't understand grassroots organizing, they'll never tell you the truth, so if you go there looking for answers, you're already doomed, they want the answers they have to be on the front lines. You have to be involved in the movement and to find the truth we have to create it for ourselves, as I mentioned, the Calvary is not coming for us Amazon, they control the market, they own the Washington Post, so what are we talking about here?

We have to make sure that people come to us because we are the people and we take advantage of those commonalities and when they talk about mental health, someone has been to Cuba. There is no mental health crisis. There are no homeless people. 0% crime rate.Union country, it is possible. possible, then the reason I believe many workers are going through a mental health crisis is because of the physical aspect and the working conditions they endure. Trust me, a full-time Amazon worker working 40, 50, 60 hours a week where he was. solitary confinement for 12 hours a day, that's not a daily commute.

That's not including my two and a half hour commute, so imagine, as an average Amazon worker, what that does to your mental health for years, so any worker can reverse that and protect our mental health. We have to protect our human rights and the rights of our workers, that is the first thing we have to do, thank you. I'm going to use my two minutes to deal with mental health, it's a minute and a half because one of the U, one of the great people who fought for mental health was Jeremy Kin and I just want to end this topic.

Why did Ken Lo talk about that? Why did the establishment attack Jeremy Corin? Why are they still attacking Jeremy? kman because they are afraid they are afraid they are afraid they are afraid they are afraid of his values ​​and because he tells the truth and people especially the young people come to him that is why they continue that is why they attacked them that is why they continue to attack him and the reason is simple. I am delighted that Chris is here for the purpose of explaining to us that in the United States, even though the Democratic Party has been in power, as much as the Republican Party, there are still no protections for ordinary workers and what is What's happening in the UK right now is that the establishment has made a decision and I'm not talking about the right of the Labor Party.

I'm talking about the establishment that runs our lives and never again. In 2017, would you allow Jeremy Corbin or a Jeremy Corbin to get that close to power? They set out a strategy to dismantle The Voice, the radical voice of ordinary workers in the Labor Party. They have a tool arranged in K to maintain what they are trying to do. do and please listen to this, they are trying to turn the Labor Party into a reflection of the Democratic Party in the states, not only to marginalize the left, not only to marginalize but to eliminate radical thinking within the Labor Party and that is why organizing in the workplace joining unions to promote the ideals of unionism is important, but it is equally important to develop and organize a radical voice for ordinary workers and if over time perhaps sooner rather than later an alternative voice emerges let her speak for the workers, then join her. and give you the support that you desperately need and in that regard I would like to thank all of our esteemed panelists.

Thank you very much for all your contributions. I'm sure everyone agrees it was fantastic and I think we can put an end to an injury. to one an injury to all an injury to one an injury to all thank you This time I saw more fists hi I'm Jamie Driscoll the independent Metro mayor for the north of the time I'm the Metro mayor of the Newcastle area all the way to baric and the Scottish Borders I was elected in 2019 I remember speaking to a school teacher in Ashington, a former coal mining town in Aumand that suffered from underinvestment for decades, the teacher told me that when I drive to school in September I pass 20 or 30 children at the bus stop they have just left school and are waiting for the bus to get to Newcastle for their university courses and she said that when I passed by there in January, there were four or five of them left in the cold and wet and dark because it takes over an hour to get there and then they have to get off the bus and then walk through the city center to the university and as a result these children are missing out on their opportunities in life and we are all missing out on potential of what great things they can do.

I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s and I remember we had park rangers, we had youth clubs, I never saw homeless people sleeping. At the gates, bus drivers help parents with boogies after he left the army as a tank driver. My father worked shifts at ICI. My mother worked part time as a telephone operator at the time and despite raising four children they could afford to buy a house when they were young there is no such thing as a food bank people just didn't need them I left school at 16 years old I worked in a plumbing factory and if you wanted to order some new materials you had to get an order book and carbon paper.

Remember carbon paper and you had to hand write an order, walk around the factory, hand it to one of the women in the typing group and they were all women at the time and then she would put the paper in a typewriter, type a letter. These days an envelope is sent to the supplier to order materials, you get a scanner and a beep sounds, so what I want to know is if we are much more productive today, where has all the money gone? Why can't we pay the park managers? and young workers and guards on trains why do workers queue at food banks?

Well, it's because tax evaders and oligarchs are stripping our country of assets. Do you remember Stor Marwin two years ago when 5,000 North electricity for a fortnite children studying by torchlight families huddled together? candles chairlifts without power the company responsible for maintaining that network is the Northern electrical grid they make 125 million profits a year with a turnover of 355 million 125 million a year extracted from our region instead of reinvesting them in resistant infrastructure who owns the North power GD well, it is privately owned by bsha haway Energy, formerly known as the Mid-American Energy Holdings company, run by an American billionaire who has a personal fortune of $12 billion.

I can't help but think of this better system and we see the same thing in our NHS, probation, local government and PFI Outsourcing and privatization is not about efficiency never was, it is about the mega rich taking our money and leave people struggling to get to work on expensive buses while the drivers are underpaid. Austerity has shattered the UK's resilience. hit so hard because emergency planning and preparedness was underfunded because fire and police budgets were cut ambulance services on their knees local authority capacities destroyed 3 million people used food banks last year that are piling up such a crisis for the future have gone beyond stripping us of our infrastructure assets, they are now stripping our children, our parents and our families, and yet the newspapers and our establishment politicians tell us that our transportation system and our Public services cannot be publicly owned and yet our European neighbors own their transport systems, their energy systems and in some cases, our privatization is designed to extract profits, that is the purpose of these companies.

They are quite open. Our privatized trains are purchased by financial companies and the trains themselves are rented to operators during the year when the pandemic hits these companies. nearly a billion pounds in dividends from the rail system to tax havens is holding back our economy, it is holding back our planet and it is burning down our children's future - and I don't mean that metaphorically until we get my children's climate emergency under control. The future will go up in flames I was talking to Nelson, my 15 year old son, he has just returned from a banner to raise awareness about the climate emergency.

He told me that, logically, Dad said we know we won't keep global warming at 1.5. degrees that are gone we are on target for more than 3° I know that is the world I will have to live in in my generation, we will not worry about pensions, he says, or if we can afford to buy a house, we will worry if there will be food in the stores, yes there will still be Law and Order, he is 15 years old and that is the future he sees, that is the future that his generation sees, but it is also logically said that we have hope because if we despair, we will give up and We need to hope that we continue to act because everything we do will make the future a little less worse.

Now he is much wiser than me. I was when he was 15 years old. With young people like this, maybe we have hope and there is hope in the Northeast. I negotiated a £6bn transfer deal to take control of our transport system and I intend to transform that transport system. BL and Ashington youngsters will no longer turn down jobs in the Valley team because they can't get there. I want to build a total. Transportation network from Beric to Barnard Castle, in case you want to test your eyes, I will fully regulate buses, Metro TR and trains with a single ticket that will take you through all modes of transportation with on-demand transportation included in the rural areas that feed the same Total.

Transport network with secure bike parking at every public transport interchange with car clubs covering the entire region so everyone can access a zero-emission vehicle when they need it without having to own one up front. I want new Metro lines, new railway lines and new super bus routes. so mass rapid transit is faster than car travel connecting all parts of the northeast and that's plus reopening the leam lateral line to bring more trains here as part of our national rail network and yes the behavior change is a factor if you have only ever been dropped off at school in a car this is how you think adults should get around so I am going to make public transport free for under 18s to ensure long-term use of our public transport system and the massive increase in use will increase income which will allow us to keep fairs down there is no conflict between addressing the cost of living crisis and the climate emergency I reject the revival of culture wars between Smart technology motorists and passengers can retrofit our traffic points with transponders on buses so that the lights change when the approaching bus passes quickly and then the lights change back to green for cars.

Each bus full of passengers takes 50 cars off the road, so a doctor on call or a plumber with a van full of tools is more productive by spending his time doing his job instead of sitting in traffic and will Design the equality from the beginning no one healthy or disabled should be isolated and everyone age gender race will feel comfortable and safe traveling better manual transportation means better health more wealth and less emissions and we can make it more democratic I have also already led a citizens assembly to help me develop the climate change policy we have implemented here in the North East creating thousands of jobs in green industries.

I will be running a citizens' assembly on transportation to make sure it is appropriately democratic and based on the needs of passengers and not administrators, and I will do all of this with the limited set of powers I will have as soon as I am elected mayor of Authority expanded in May. But imagine what we could do if central government powers were used to regulate our essential public services and transport our water companies extracting billions in dividends while our pipelines and reservoirs need billions in investment. I can't be the only one who thinks that dividend money should be transferred to investment and it wouldn't cost the government much to simply regulate them properly make our power companies meet their Net Zero goals stop our water companies from pumping wastewater into our rivers and tax all profits at 100% until they do.

This way, their share price would fall and the public could buy them and manage them like the public wealth enablers they should be, with the goal of managing them in the long-term sustainable interest of people and future generations and as for those children in Ashington. waiting at the bus stop. I have worked with Northumberland County Council to open a new rail line connecting Ashington via BL to Newcastle. It connects to the national rail network of the tine Metro System and those children, in fact, anyone from Ashington can get to the center of Newcastle for half. an hour quickly in a reliable and sustainable way we can do this throughout the country we have the technology we have the money if we prevent it from being stolen the only thing missing is political will and that depends on us if our current leaders do not do it It is not enough Well get new ones, the shy gang is coming out. penston's Striking Distance wants to help these please contact me so yeah so you know as far as I'm concerned we can we're here to serve thecommunity, not to govern it.

And one of the general themes that we're talking about today is hierarchies and people who maintain hierarchies and that has to do with money and that has to do with power and that has to do with social justice and climate justice. , but it is the hierarchy who deserves it and who does not and we saw it and I will talk a little about grenal. I know Loki is going to discuss it later, but it's what happened around grenfall before, during and after and I've written a book about it. 12.99 in bookstores any profits for charity I don't want to make money from it thank you um confirmed my suspicions about the council um how they treated social tenants of second class citizens no it wasn't worth doing a good job building them um and when they murdered socially to 72 of our friends and neighbors um they were supposed to feel pitifully grateful that we gave them new homes um and we had endless arguments about it, so you didn't give them anything, there is a replacement, they have a replacement house now they don't we've given them nothing, don't expect people to be grateful, so we've given them a million pound house, why aren't they so happy with it because it's right next door? a far away station and every time they hear a faringer and they get activated and they can't sleep, so you know, all these things still fool people like that.

It's about excluding certain groups of people and including others and how dare they in a borrow, that's so mixed, uh, middle class white people in Kensington is 46%, I think, and uh, all the others are beautiful. The mosaic of diverse communities is 54%, that's up to 100, anyway, not entirely, but you know, it's not a predominantly white area. and how dare they pretend that is how dare they treat people as passive recipients and they are very good at it and they are much better than us at sending messages, we are decent people, we have to improve our narrative anyway.

I'm going to give a very brief introduction about our speakers and then you'll have five minutes each to make your case, you'll talk about your campaigns and what you'd like, five minutes each, then us. I'm going to have a couple of audience questions here, a couple of online questions if we can make the technology work and then towards the end I'm going to ask our speakers to come up with some key points, um, uh. and I would just like to know what works because we know what we know, a lot of the problems that are going to come out are all over the world, they are in Grille and they are here in West Papa with the same problems, it's the same problems really about crushing some people and elevate others and we need um to really address that somehow so um Mika um here Michaela L uh who's a penny move?

Sorry I'm not, I'm R, it's okay, I'm sorry, it's okay. I have that different name, sorry, sorry, yes, I wrote it. I want to show up so everyone knows okay so she can show up anyway and we're going to hear about um uh social justice um and that's climate justice uh VJ that's online uh We'll be talking about land rights. um, he's an academic and a writer, a great writer on third world issues, uh, Benny, who's here from uh West Papo, who lives in Oxford now, um, can you tell us your own story, nominated him for a Nobel Prize in Peace and everything.

With all due respect sir, um and um, I've been looking into what's been happening now, it's absolutely horrible, I have very little idea about it, uh, Loki, uh, FR and former neighbor who has been campaigning on Palestine for a long time. Talking about um uh will be about gral I think um and his forensic dismemberment of British and American foreign policy is something we should all learn from actually um it's the passion and the facts together that um which Make it all very powerful and I have to Sharon, who will be talking about the Indian farmers protests and sectarian violence, environmental justice and all the intersections there, so there are three main themes that we're going to look at. it's what it's what what are the issues that concern us uh about stability and permanence and how when people when refugees are placed somewhere they need the stability that they need to really give meaning to their lives um and we really need understand that much better and why why it's so important why that's that um why it's crucial for people who are moved to displaced places for whatever reason, whether it's war or weather or whatever else it may be and how they need agency. when they have their permanent home they should have agency they should have voting rights and they should be able to pay um like a job however they want um and how we do it, how we actually do it, we have policies to cover most of these issues and they are completely ignored, then, how do we do it?

I'm going to let people respond however they want and first of all we're going to give you ma thank you hi hi. going to hurt one, okay, great, so the question of the dignity of housing and land, and when it comes to refugees, I think it's a great question that we should all address and it's very important that you here have better refugee reception policies, but what do you think? refugee crises it surprises me when I watch the BBC and they say let's just send them back to Rwanda etc, but no one talks about what the structural basis is, the material basis why people feel they have to leave. your countries, how is it possible that we have African countries where about 35 African countries are dealing with debt problems? 60% of those countries spend 60% of their income servicing their debts, their loans, so what is the fundamental structure that we have?

We are trying to address and we all know that it is as much capitalism as it is imperialism, but with these conversations about refugees we cannot simply talk about the consequences without locating the cause and the cause is not the African people who are simply fleeing because we are ungovernable and we have no sense of our own history and our ability to govern ourselves is that fundamentally we need to talk about things that I know the peace and justice project has talked about a lot of reparations that we need to have, I think a serious conversation and on the African continent we are making everything possible to build a campaign, we need a debt strike, why do we pay the people who stole our resources and now we must pay them for looting us?

So we are trying to build this Consciousness and I think this moment is ripe right now where, regardless of what you think, I heard before that people talk about bricks and China, the fact is, and I talked to Africans about this all time, with respect to China, people do not see China as a neo-colonialist. You may disagree with some of the private companies. You may disagree with some of the deals that are made, but for us right now we see China as an alternative that gives us space options to leverage our collective interests before we could just in the '70s, '80s, '90s, We just had to say thank you IMF, we will take whatever we can get now, we actually have a moment where we can not only make governments serve the interests of the African people, but we can also push to make our governments more accountable. . the types of agreements they make and the types of financing and conditionalities imposed on them.

China does not give conditionalities. Now you have to liberalize your different sectors. Common resources must be privatized. They Yes. I think we should press. As Africans, look closer at our agreements and find out what is the best way, but it is up to us as Africans to fight with our national bisi and try to use it so that we can harness the interest of the working class as a whole, so before. We can talk about what has to happen at the end, we need to talk about the beginning and I think that you here have a great task ahead of you: to point out the structural problems that have been inherited from 500 years of humiliation of colonialism. and how the last thing I will say as an anecdote that I really hope you guys step back and make sure the jeremes of the world get into positions of power is that I was shaking when I saw David Camon in the photo from a few days ago and the reason why was shaking is because one of the biggest crimes for which he has not yet been held accountable is the bombing of Libya in 2011.

Libya had one of the highest human development indices. Libya was planning to leverage its gold to fund, you know, a new currency in West Africa. Libya was irrigating the desert trying to fight climate change and what did David Cameron and his ilk do? They bombed it, opening paths for more jihadist extremist violence to enter. They create instability. and yet they want to tell us about the refugee crisis they created, so I want you to hold David Cameron responsible for the crimes in Libya. I'll give you mine. I'll give you mine. Hello, first, say hello to everyone. called wah wah wah wah wah wah I'm standing here on behalf of my people first.

I would like to thank Jeremy Corin and his foundations and team for inviting me. Second, all the panels. I respect them, they defend their beliefs. Justice and freedom for humanity. My name is Benny Wender. I am an independent leader of Papa Occidental. I am exiled here standing in front of you. I am from West Papua. Anyone here has been to the Pacific. The Pacific is made up of Micronesia, Polynesia, Melanesia. I am part of the melanesian melanesia made up of the five countries papini Salomon Island Fiji new calonia, they are now free but unfortunately papa was a colonial power that handed over another colonial power that we are now under the Indonesian colonialism that people talk about. end of colonialism but imperialism colonialism still exists I always thank jery cin for standing up for humanity, particularly people like West Papua, Western Sahara, Kashmir, Palestine, any part of the world that has no voice.

I want everyone here to applaud Jeremy Cobin. w w any human being, any Liberation movement around the world will remember Jamie coin is a man of humanity in the world, let's say for humanity secondly, dad of the West is a forgotten dad of the West is the home of B of paradise this is the home of paradise B of the three kangaroos they are home to the rainforest but today they have become the home of the Indonesian army Indonesian massacre 500,000 men women since Indonesia invaded 1963 anyone here knows about West Papua please raise your voice hand thank you thank you West Papua is occupied territory three things we face West Papua in the Pacific particularly in West Papua ealde genocide our freedom was taken from us by the Indonesian government we have fought for Liberation we are fighting for the independents of Colonial Indonesia ISM 50 years 60 years West Papua banned journalist Amnesty International rescue totally burned talking about the refugee West Pap Refugee 13,000 Liv in papun guini in 1960 2018 so far between 100,000 and 60,000 are displaced as I speak in West Papa still displaced.

I sympathize with the people of Ukraine and the people of Gaza that they face. I really appreciate that everyone here stands up for humanity, our fight is for peace, for justice, for freedom, people live together, respect each other, that's about humanity in this room we are the same family, we say a planet, we are human if someone Cut your hand what color does it come out, is it red or white or black red we are a human family West Papa's situation is getting worse and worse West Papa's genocide is committed by Indonesia Indonesia pretending to be good, they promote democracy, but in West Papa not 60 years old journalist are a gang like North Korea 60 years old maybe you can go to the other part of Indonesia but West Pap restricted restricted Me I escaped from prison They arrested me just because my people want freedom I went out into the street I led my people peacefully I raised this flag of the morning starthis is the flag of the morning star if you hold this flag of the West dad you will be arrested 20 years 15 years Philip Karma finished 15 years I was 25 years old I am the luckiest person To escape alive if I don't escape I am still in prison 2025 I was released just like Nelson Mandela.

I am lucky, but I brought the message to the world, that is why this flag is important. Wherever I go, I hold this flag. This is the symbol of peace, the symbol of unity. of freedom from the EOS side of West Papua, all the multinational companies, you name it, anyone here knows who the big company was that operated in West Papua, anyone here knows today. I want to tell you that BP is free for me. They dwell in the west. Dad collaborate with Indonesia. Destroy our forests and our rivers. our indigenous people of the Mountains the forest is our Supermarket the land is our mother there is our wealth we do not have any wealth we do not have Millions of dollars but the land is our wealth The forest is our Supermarket our first aid kit medicine hut our Rivers polluted our The mountain that is destroyed becomes as if they were entire giants.

The giants keep working at amultinational company working together to help Indonesia. Indonesia is a crime. Humanity is why it's important to everyone here. Believe in justice and freedom. Please defend humanity. Just the last one, thank you and my people are watching and this. it's the best medicine if I spread a message to the world this is the best medicine for them thank you very much, thank you Benny and now we will hand it over to VJ who is online five minutes if you can please VJ thank you uh yeah , you can hear? Yo, okay, yeah, perfect.

First, thanks to Jeremy and Laara for inviting me to join. It is a great privilege to be with you. Sorry I'm not there, but so be it. You know, as Mika said, there are several. great processes in our time, um, the processes of war, climate catastrophe, death, etc., and these are the biggest drivers of pain in the world and what is increasingly clear to people is that the authors of these pains basically they are not that difficult to identify. To understand, it is not difficult to understand where these things come from. They are deepened by the neocolonial structure in the world that the NATO G7 countries promoted in some way.

In fact, I was very interested to read a recent European Foreign Affairs Council. The relations document that came out on November 18 is a fascinating text. In the text there are some facts that surprised me. They looked at surveys from across the global South, but also within Europe, and this is what they found in most non-Western countries, for example. I want an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. Most non-Western countries want an immediate ceasefire by the Israeli authorities against the Palestinian people. The survey data shows it, of course, it is also reflected in the streets, but at least for me it is quite surprising that the data. from Europe was equally aligned with the data coming from the global South, so, for example, when it comes to the war in Ukraine, most countries, at least the 11 EU countries that were surveyed, most the populations want that war to end and, in fact, forget the war in Ukraine the acceleration by the United States of a war against Taiwan here are the numbers very interesting numbers 62% of people in EU member states would prefer remain neutral if the United States starts a war against China only 23% would support it in fact, in the United States only 8% of Europeans in Europe were willing to send troops alongside the United States against China and then, here is what interesting, in the United States itself only 32% would be in favor of a war against China, against China over Taiwan, the majority of people around the world want the war to end.

The majority of people around the world want an end to the climate catastrophe. Most people around the world want an end to the dead crisis and yet, of course, this is not what NATO countries are allowing to be on the table. You know, a recent study came out that showed where the EU, the British and we have put their resources, they are not putting their resources into investing in their own countries. I mean, you can't even build a train in the UK that goes to Manchester. its infrastructure is crumbling, it knows this very well, but instead of using its own social wealth to benefit the people of the UK, the US or Europe, it is investing its money in war. 75% of the world's military spending is spent by NATO countries and NATO allied countries, including Japan and South Korea, you know that a country does not have a moral or ethical point of view based on its Constitution or what its leaders when they feel that it is especially moral, you know, morally, you know, a high place. no, Rishi sunak's speeches are irrelevant um in fact, K stama's speeches are irrelevant your true morality is how you spend your money your true morality is in your budget if you spend more on war than on building necessary things uh things that people need to face illiteracy face hunger build public transportation if you spend more on war than on all those social things that's what you are your civilization is a civilization of war and in fact instead of collaborating to solve the problems of war to solve the problems of the climate catastrophe to solve the problems of the debt and so on instead of collaborating with the NATO countries, including and let me say especially Britain, push the war above everything else.

British Britain, the British government is so proud to have an aircraft carrier called QE2 off the coast of China. I am very proud to have participated as the poodle in America's wars since you joined in the destruction of Iraq and then David Cameron in the destruction of Libya. I am very proud of everything the British government is nothing but your pride, your patriotism is not there for your own people and that is what the polls show all over the world, not just in the global South where there is definitely a new mood that says we have no faith in you say this, of course, to the west, but also in Europe, Britain, the United States and In Canada, most people say we have no faith in you, tragically in Europe, in the United States, etc., because the left has weakened so much that the energy of that disenchantment is being captured by the extreme right, it is very important for us. on the left to think carefully about how to get out that energy that the extreme right is taking advantage of, how to get out that energy of disenchantment with the current world in which we live, how to take that energy and build majorities to create an adequate civilization, a socialist civilization, thank you very much , thank you very much uh BJ M, hand over to Loki now hello, okay, so as Emma said, I lived next to Greenfeld Tower at the time of the fire and what I want to talk a little about is the integration. but not in the liberal form of integration of particular powerful bodies and I would say that Gfell has a lesson, but unfortunately we have not absorbed that lesson, also Palestine has a lesson about British participation in the genocide.

The fascist VI Ence, who is being visited on the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza right now, has a lesson and we must learn it, so to start, uh gfel, these were 72 of my neighbors, one of them, Yassin , who died there. since he was 14 years old he died there with his whole family curled up in bed we saw people from the window calling to us we saw a helicopter coming towards them and then turning around, that helicopter was in fact working for the police and the media. Photographs were taken and put on the front pages of newspapers. Of the Shuk family, six family members spanning three generations died in that fire.

He took a photo of them from a direct plane. meaning that the helicopters that gave people in the building the impression that they could come to their rescue were actually being used not only to monitor them for police purposes but also to take photographs of them for the media. What is interesting is that Grenfell was a manifestation of the austerity imposed on important life management institutions such as the fire service. Who do you think was the newspaper that published that photo on its front page? Who do you think was the editor of the newspaper? at that time George Osborne was the king of austerity in this country now what we also have to remember is that the insulation that was placed in the building and the cladding that was placed in that building was manufactured by the American company arconic um the El main shareholder, of course, was Black Rock and where did George Osborne work after working at the Evening Standard?

He went to work for Black Rock, now arconic, the American company would only be in a position where he could insulate and install cladding. in buildings across this country in the wake of the Kyoto accords and two things: this is where an attempt to deal with climate change meets deregulation, which is why we had consecutive governments from Michael Hesseltine, all the way through Margaret Thatcher to John Prescott, actually his role in managing the approved B document, which is the way the uh government explained building regulations to businesses during his time, creative ambiguities were placed in the building regulations that, instead Rather than being directly prescriptive about what materials can and cannot be placed there, they were performance-based, meaning that all a company would have to do was prove that their materials didn't work in a particular way, not that they wouldn't include specific materials, of course during the Thatcher years they went from having 325 pages of building regulations to around 20 five pages of building regulations and this is the way neoliberalism kills people, but the bottom line is that when the government, Following the Kyoto agreements, he discovered that we have to reduce carbon emissions, one of the best ways to do it. is to insulate buildings and, therefore, reduce the amount of energy consumed within homes.

What happened was that those companies and the lobby groups representing them changed their names after Grenfell took the opportunity to get the big payout that came. Through the isolation of buildings across the country, we have seen no significance in the climate movement in dealing with what Gfell told us. If you have a deregulated construction industry and you want to insulate buildings you need to make sure that the materials that are put into those buildings are non-flammable and after grenfell, frankly, there was no excuse, grenfell was exceptional, lied rather than widespread , our community was backed into a corner and you know, and this is where I want to get to about integration, one of the things that Len was talking about before was this issue of the construction industry and the way in which it sought to suppress the demands of its workers. , the demands of the workers within it, well, we all know about the blacklisting scandal where there were 3,000 workers within the construction industry who were blacklisted, what were they blacklisted? on the basis that they were blacklisted, yes, on the basis of their unionization, yes, on the basis of health and safety concerns, but also on information that was provided to them by the special demonstration squad, information provided to private companies by state institutions to include those workers on the blacklist.

If the construction industry was at that level of integration with the British police at the time, are we to assume after Grenfell that there was no cooperation between these large construction companies like arconic and the British state to suppress what we could do to calm down? ? by silencing us by preventing us from being able to demand rights not only for our community and this was, I think, the big problem and it was definitely a policy affirmed by the government, you turned our community into something so different from the rest. of the country, oh, it's the Muslims in social housing in Kensington, they don't deserve it, not forgetting the fact that our life expectancy was 25 years different to those who lived in the south of the B, so instead of understand that those of us grenfell In Grenfell, who were fighting for the rights of people across the country, many of them tenants, rather than seeing themselves in our community, people believed it was something that simply affected our community , so this was a very clever way to atomize what Grell showed now.

The other issue of integration that I want to address is that it is impossible for me to be here while, at the same time, I am a father and I see images of children pulled from the rubble without heads on their bodies, without limbs on the floor of a hospital bleeding to death. die being kept alive by doctors who are the heroes of humanity ventilating them by hand. I'm not going to come here and not talk about what is being done to some of the poorest human beings in the world in Gaza, we have to understand that over the last three decades there has been an integration of Israeli intelligence agencies , Americans and British, and I'm not saying that I'm going to flippantly explain to you exactly what I mean: you have no sovereignty in this country, police, British police. in this country they use Israeli spy clothes to hack phones comes from a company called celebrite that was founded by veterans of unit 8200 in Israel's military intelligence unit it is the equivalent of gchq uses Palestine as a laboratory for spies on them and their communications and blackmail They were told that the British police are currently using celebrite to hack phones, plus the British police use a company called Nice Systems for investigations.

Nice Systems is a subsidiary of Israel's largest weapons company, Elbit Systems. You have no sovereignty when we talk about it. the same company that handles the data of the Ministry of Defense of the central office and even the NHS the name of the company is Oracle founded by the seventh richest man in the world Larry Ellison with the purpose of serving the CIA who is LarryEllison Larry Ellison is the largest donor to the Friends of the IDF charity in the history of that company's existence, furthermore, do you know who was offered the management of this communications company that handles Ministry of Defense data?

Benjamin Netanyahu was offered the position of director of Oracle, and let me tell you something, Britain today is not simply not calling for a ceasefire and, frankly, we need to move far beyond these lukewarm appeals that we are making to our government. Britain is engaged in a war against a non-state state. Britain is involved and I will tell you exactly how the British air base in Cyprus is providing passage for American planes to drop weapons directly into Israel for use in Palestine. Britain has provided a spy plane over Palestine. Britain is a signatory to the arms trade treaty, which means it cannot export anything, any weapons to any state for which it has any reason. we believe it can be used for violations of international humanitarian law.

Britain is doing that right now, it is breaking its own regulation on the arms trade. We have a moral duty to close those weapons factories that are transporting weapons right now to kill those people in Gaza and you. We know what's leading us in an interesting direction when we look at that company arconic causing all that damage in our community on the streets of North Kensington arconic not only makes flammable insulation for buildings around the world, they also make the F35 that Israel has used to bomb Gaza, we are now in a position where we are not outnumbered, we are super organised, to quote Malcolm clear with the public about the way our society is organized power is organized in a more sophisticated way than at any previous time in human history they tell us that resistance is futile we say that resistance is fertile and we will plant seeds for trees that we may not sit in the shade of but we will plant those seeds thank you very much, thank you very much Loki, we always learn a lot, as well as being passionate about you, about your own feelings about this, yes, I know, we all are. learn a lot um and we are all mobilized now to naron thank you thank you thank you Emma um I am delighted to be here thank you to the peace and justice project for inviting me here it is an absolute privilege to be part of this conference I come from India and I would like to take the next few minutes to talk to them about another type of struggle for land or land rights and the biggest movement that India saw in its recent history, the farmers' movement.

The last two years, which continue, stopped at the borders but continue and left us very crucial lessons for the construction of popular movements and for peace and justice, and that is what I thought I would tell you about India while I know that it is predominantly agrarian, not many people know that the majority of workers still depend on agriculture. Most people still live in rural areas, but the various state policies have been trying, has been tried several times, to push people out of um Agriculture and into urban areas like Reserve Army to be deployed by the emerging um complexes industrial uh Farmers have been resisting it most of the farmers 87% of Indian farmers are subsistence farmers, they have their own land in less than one hectare, but that is their security, that is their dignity because the jobs urban areas that have been created in the last decades after liberalization do not provide a living wage.

People who migrate from villages to urban areas live on slave wages and have to return to their villages if they are sick if they don't find work and um their own experience during covid was very eye opening when the government imposed lockdown in Three days and all the workers who lived in the cities had nothing to eat and they began walking back to their villages, not in hundreds or thousands but in millions. They walked back because there were no trains, there were no buses and no one took care of them, they told them. who were alone and knew they were on their own returned to their small plots of land and used covid as an opportunity.

The Modi government passed three farm laws which they said were for the benefit of the people, they said for the farmers, this will free them from the clutches of the credit loan middlemen that you are suffering from because the agrarian crisis is a reality. lived. Farmers in India have been suffering from an acute agrarian crisis manifesting mainly in farm suicides for the last two and a half decades. More than 400,000 farmers have committed suicide. U for hanging himself by drinking pesticides, which causes 48 deaths by suicide every day and this happened because of his induced policy. They were GMO crops, BT cotton seeds that failed and the farmers had to take loans to continue farming and they have been Under this crisis, these three farm laws were passed and the farmers were told that they were for their benefit and the farmers knew that They were not for your benefit.

These laws were passed to drive them off their small plots of land because they knew this. It is not for agriculture, this is for an agricultural business, that is why they stood up under their unions and said and started marching towards Delhi when they learned that the three farm laws were not going to be withdrawn and their fight was against the subjugation of the food market. agricultural communities. as they said uh what was pushing them as perennial casual workers in unwelcoming cities so they told the Modi government to withdraw the laws and then the laws were not withdrawn under their union flags waving their union flags they started marching towards Delhi and millions came to Delhi they were stopped at the borders of Delhi but the farmers said the police and the state were very worried and the farmers said they were not going to return and they sat where they were stopped and built created many cities where they were.

They stopped they came in their tractor cars they came with their food they came with the ration that would last them they said months and the farmers were left on the road at the barricades that the government had put up preventing them from entering Delhi for 13 long months 13 long months They defy the cold, they defy the heat, the water, the rains and the complete apathy of the State. 700 of them died because of complete apathy and the conditions that were created for them and then, but they kept saying: we will fight generation after generation for which we fight. again and again, but we will not give away our lands because our land is our dignity, our land is our pride, our land is our livelihood and the women came, the women came, half of the farmers who came, uh, were women.

Farmers, women who have not even been given a farmer status in politics or in social hierarchy but they came and took roles women do not own land they do not even have small plots of land because women are generally not given land but women whose only relationship was with the land was their work with their hands and they felt that that was their connection to their lands that were being taken and they were determined not to give up their lands uh The farmers created alone I'll take two more minutes to say how they created the farmers this strong movement for 13 months created a protest scenario where they were squatting, which was running towards miles and miles of colonies.

They created a protest stage where not only the agricultural leaders spoke, not only the farmers but also all the other people from all over Kia everywhere. India The fishermen came with odd jobs, the nits came, the low level people came, they all talked about their experience of being bled dry by the same corporate greed and when they got there they saw what the dots were that were connecting them and they started building Then they realized that the only effective resistance they could build against authoritarian government and corporate greed was common experience and their solidarity with which they could exert moral pressure and from that stage of protest they started this great movement and continued Resolute . in their resistance and in their solidarity and they tested the indomitable spirit of Mr.

Modi and after 13 months the laws were again WR um Mr. Modi Mr. Modi came on television and said well, I have not managed to convince the farmers, some of the farmers that these laws were for their benefit so let's withdraw the laws um so um, he was not kind, he was not honest, but the farmers came back, but they left a big mark on the consciousness of India and they also gave us crucial lessons on how to build movements in construction. solidarities to connect the dots about different people who are being oppressed by the system, the lesson was that states are disenfranchising people, they are pulverizing people's rights section by section allowing them to fight their battles in silos, while resistance is a collective resistance. what Alli needs to build by making alliances with solidarity and connecting the dots and that is what the farmers did and that is why we were successful and we continue to teach that lesson and I think that is something very crucial to build the popular movement how to build these connections and that's what I wanted to share with you thank you very much naan and all our speakers uh we have a little bit of time we're going to answer two questions from the audience here and if we can figure it out the two technical questions uh online and then we're going to have a two minute round, hopefully, and then there will be another session and we should invade, so is there any questions from the floor that anyone wants to ask us? speakers and we can have whoever wants to respond, yes, ma'am, and would like to say who you are, where, what you represent or thank you, hello, are you listening, hello, yes, I don't represent anything, I'm just myself. m va uh I'm a therapist um I just wanted to ask a question and maybe it's not in the text, how do you stay calm?

Hello, hello, how do you stay calm and how do you manage? Because I'm struggling, okay? This was a pretty emotional session, so yeah, thank you. If we had two questions, we'll ask one more and then I'll go around the panel and they can answer. It's another question from the floor that anyone would like. to ask yes sir thank you thank you um my name is wild kabani I am a composer and a filmmaker I made some I co-produced some films that some of you may be familiar with there are a lot of us in open Bethlehem um I just wanted to know if the panelists We are all familiar with the fact that at least 26 states in America have bills that have been passed to boycott, uh, to not allow the boycott of Israel, I'm just curious to know that, okay, thank you very much, let's get the panel, let's get started, let's just get started , Loki.

Do you want to respond to some of that Hi, so I guess for the first one, one of the things that I've learned over the last few years is that traumatic experiences can impede the brain's ability to produce serotonin, and serotonin is vital for the um. calm the management of fear, pain and anxiety, decrease the escalation of these things, so once I understood that I was able to take certain steps to try to repair what I felt would probably have been some aspects of forms of lack of production of serotonin um ultimately I think it's having a purpose and focusing um purpose having a clear focus is essential um in terms of the question about the states um yes, absolutely, but I think we also need that and you know, and that's the direct consequence of a very well-coordinated and funded deployment, not just in the US.

Here too, it's a broader conversation, but I think we also need to not consider BDS as a panacea when it comes to the Palestinian cause. I think it's quite a comfortable way of not risking too much by saying "well you know I'm not going to believe this or I'm going to encourage the government and I'm okay with that and absolutely that's how you know historically when you look at South Africa." look at the Musicians Union here, they take credit for being the first to stop their members from going and performing in AP part of South Africa, it was all important, it was all part of the attrition struggle, however I don't think it's the best. everything and end it all and I think there is a liberal impulse, um certainly in this country to lead people to believe that this is where their activism for Palestine begins and ends.

There are examples of community-enforced BDS, which I mean, that's not outside of a Gun Factory and saying, "Well, I don't want to buy guns." Well, you're an individual, you wouldn't buy the guns. Would you enter the weapons factory? You break the door, go in and close it. That is imposed by the community. Yes, that has worked in this country and that is something that I think cannot be left out of the history of how things have happened even in karmas. Let's be clear: Kama is more pro-Israel and right-wing in Israel than Margaret Thata and I. I'll tell you why and I'll tell you why when n Ali when n AliThe Palestinian cartoonist was murdered in this city by Palestinians working for Israeli intelligence.

What did Margaret Thatcher do? Did Israel's external intelligence agency base close? Mossad in this country K Stama would not breathe in the direction of Israel's external intelligence agency, certainly not those based in this country. In fact, K Stama hired Assaf Kaplan, who was a student of unit 8200 in the same unit um uh that I mentioned before, so we are a long way from that, but in terms of this country in K's own constituency, Elbert's London office Israel SystemsThe largest weapons manufacturer was permanently closed by the continued action of Palestine and the local people who came and made it impossible to operate, on top of that, in the town of Oldum, Sleepy the Sleepy, was seen The local community hang out around the Fanti Technologies subsidiary of Elbit Systems.

They distributed information in the local community saying what was being done in that factory and the Palestinian action reached the community and closed the factory again and again and again and again and again and again and the community demonstrated there again and again and again And you know. what El system sold that company at a loss Elbert Systems no longer exists in Odum there are things we can do apart from controlling what we consume or do not consume and what we order or do not order and frankly although I support the Barkley boycott, for example, you're talking about the biggest goals possible, you're talking about goals that don't overlook a few hundred people canceling their accounts, yes we need it to be bigger, yes we need thousands of people, yes we need hundreds of thousands of people , but it is quite possible that your own community factories are making products that the British government is breaking their own laws by exporting to Israel, and the vast majority of the time you go before a jury and make that argument and are acquitted all the way. the case of the nine they ran from Derry to here in London today there are eight people on trial in this city for closing Elbit systems so let's get active to answer the questions no, I think the only thing for me is to be with people like this find your people find ways to get organized like the Great Joe Hill said, don't cry, get organized and it doesn't mean you shouldn't cry, we should take the time to cry, but let us channel that energy into getting organized and getting better, not like you. said we're not out we're not outnumbered we're out organized BJ would you like to answer those questions sorry uh yeah well you know uh I don't know how to stay calm because uh I'm not sure about calm in general in my own life, but I have been in the movement for almost 40 years.

I have been a member of a Communist Party, the largest Communist Party in India, the CPIM, for 40, almost 30 years, we have a million members. I know I take comfort in the fact that we're all fighting together, whether you're in my organization or not, it doesn't matter, we're all fighting together to defeat something that's pretty ugly and not calm, you know, that's the other one. The thing is that in itself it's a frenetic beast, you know, that can't stop accumulating more and more, you know, like Mark said, accumulate, accumulate, that's the profit you know for capitalism, but the interesting thing is that more and more.

I've seen this in Britain, more and more, the people in power don't want to have the debate, they don't want to have the conversation, on the question of Israel, you're very familiar in this room that you're sitting in, that's rather . Instead of having a discussion about Israel, they brandish the concept of anti-Semitism instead of dealing with real anti-Semites, they manufacture anti-Semites to impede democracy, and so when you say, "Well, state after state in the United States, they're banning this that and the other they love Ban things they say no Palestinian demonstration no Palestinian flag when they say no Palestinian flag what do people do they fill the streets with flags so they are terrified of having the discussion the debate because they no longer have arguments You know, it's quite pathetic to see David Cameron come back.

I mean Slim is the representative of the British ruling class. For God's sake, don't you have more credible and capable people or do you have to keep recycling the same old guys over and over again? to the United States, you can't find Young Blood to take over the mantle of liberalism, you know you're going to have the same old guys who've been at this for 50 or 60 years, you know, harping on again and again. again and I don't know if you saw this but for Biden he came out of the meeting with shijin ping and once again said well xijinping is a dictator on the internet there is a video circulating of Blinken's response to that Biden says that and blinks, oh, I want I mean, they don't have the argument, it seems like they don't even have the people to argue and that's why they need to ban us, it's banning and intimidation is like spending on weapons systems. because not only are they building weapons to bomb you, but they are also building weapons to take over the information channels, shadow ban you and remove you from Twitter and all that, these are weapons, we are the ones who say let's have a democratic discussion, they are. those who say no, we don't want to talk to you, we want to imprison you hello, what's going on with your own values, wow, thank you, it's working, it's okay, thank you, uh, people talk about calm and, uh, calm, uh, no I don't know, but for me I am a revolutionary, at some point when I come people ignore me at some point.

The Rebellion people also wake up and want to present particularly my opponent, the Indonesian government, you know, it's really difficult, but this state, you need the Cal and dealing with the situation with the c, otherwise they will be stigmatized as terrorists . Anyway, I was interned 10 years ago I couldn't travel from here to another part of the country, but I'm lucky to have a lawyer, you know, in the UK and Australia My name is Jennifer Robinson, they took me out and I'm traveling alone again to Indonesia trying to imprison me here, even in this democratic country, but they chased me everywhere, they chase me, but at some point on an emotional human level, but you can't. the guilt you have to continue persistent and that is why you never give up the human being can make history history never happened themselves the human being makes history you are the one who makes history today, that is why I am in the right place and we continue fighting for our right Justice, freedom and democracy, particularly in West Papua, may be too far away, but in fact, we talk about the boycott and we know the history of South Africa's anti-RA movement, people power is now Africa, free South Africa and my people also try it. boycott the Indonesian product because West Papua is a palm oil is huge, massive, they destroy like all of London, check all your um noodles that Indonesia produces in West Papua and all this production, maybe next year we will launch the band because the Islands of the Peaceful, eh, Peaceful.

The council of churches has already announced that 18 countries in the Pacific want to boycott Indonesian product, so I hope that next year we will announce Myself and Jamy has already made some video, so please join us and I will support you. any boycott is yes, I support it, thank you lastly. I believe that many of us, most of us, live in systems and societies that have sunk into darkness, we are also witnessing the process of collective dehumanization when we turn on the television or read. news, I think it is difficult to stay calm, but the collective struggles, the people taking to the streets, the working classes coming out, the marches that we are seeing everywhere, are also giving us a lot of hope and I think it is a moment not to do it. remain in remorse, but it is also a time to show courage and courage is contagious once it finds its transmission circuits, it swells and rises and it also gives inspiration to other people and calls them to action and I think this is what we need, we need a lot.

Courage at this moment in history and that's what we all came together to promise thank you, thank you very much naan and Lara has been indicating to me that we are going to have a session, I'm sorry, because of course we have invaded absolutely we will. do it in a second, thanks, yes, that's a good idea, thank you very much, so, yes, I think I was seeing some of the themes here, one of them is obviously creating debate and informing us to remember humanity. and the dignity of being very aware when people use divisive language to try to divide us and it is done very easily.

As for being calm, I wake up angry every day and that's what gets me out of bed. I wake up like this. I'm angry and I can't stay calm about all these things, but the thing is to focus on educating myself and getting the word out and trying to work together and I think those are some of the messages that you're thinking about for today um and so yeah, actually, in our thousands in our millions we in our thousands in our millions we are all Palestinians in our thousands in our millions we are all Palestinians thank you very much thank you do you know someone else is oh I see this It's not me, it's not okay, thank you sir, thank you very much , it was a pleasure to meet you.

I have learned a lot now yes, yes, it has been a period of time where environmental conditions have gotten worse and worse. Sorry if this is contributing to climate anxiety, carbon emissions have increased, temperatures have increased, sea levels have increased, biodiversity has decreased etc etc. I was struck by a comment by Paul Rogers in the first session that said that we live in a culture of hegemonic masculinities and I can't help but think that if we can do it differently, if we can take advantage of more feminine or feminist forms of communication, of organizing legislation, things could be different and I am First of all, I am delighted to have an all-women panel, which is not that common and I am also delighted to see so many women climate and environmental activists these days that that has gone increasing since the beginning of my career and I will introduce the four speakers that we have um the first one is not in the room and she was not on Zoom either but she has sent us uh a couple of video responses atti VI Villa is part of the Awaka indigenous community of the C NADA from Santa mat in Colombia is a final year student of political science at the University of Havana in bogatar Colombia was a participant in the climate action sale and building bridges for climate action projects atti Vivian is part of the coordination team of united by climate action, a platform made up of 30 young people from Latin America and the Caribbean with experience in the fight for climate justice in their different contexts, are also part of climate lab, which it supports by coordinating its advocacy work Scarlet Westbrook in the middle here is a young journalist and activist for Climate Justice at the age of 13 she became the youngest person in the world to reach a senior level in government and politics and at the age of 14 she wrote her first article for the independent newspaper Scarlet was a prominent organizer of the school strikes for climate justice and her women of the future Young Star Award in 2020 and Diana Award in 2022 for her humanitarian work Scarlet is passionate Scarlet is passionate about climate education.

She co-authored a parliamentary bill with Labor MP Nadia Witam and campaigns with young people. The organization teaches the future Tory Choy alongside I am a climate justice activist organizer and writer from Hong Kong. She is the author of It's Not Just You, which explores the intersections between mental health and the climate crisis. She is also an activist with the Stop Rose Bank Coalition and the climate justice lead for Brian Eno's Earth. percent a coordinator of Climate Live International and member of the climate resilience project and Nashan Singh, who you have already been introduced to, but Naran is a Delhi-based researcher and human rights law activist who has worked and published extensively on the informal sector workers, especially female workers and the precariousness of their work and lives also worked on the vulnerability of the internally displaced and those affected by mass sectarian violence.

Now shiran supported Indian farmers during their protests in 2020 2021 and has been visiting Kashmir since 2000. She has written extensively on agrarian issues. crisis and the struggles of the landless for land rights and her latest work is a co-authored book This Land is Mine. I'm not from this earth, so I'd like to start by asking you three a question, just to let us know. what it's like or how relevant it is to be a woman or a feminist in your climate activism so Tori, do you want to start? Oh, it's on. Can you hear me? Can you hear me well?

I'm going to hold up my lapel microphone in the interest of that um thank you Susan. I want to start this with something that resonates. I'm sure you've heard that climate change is a man-made problem that requires a feminist solution um and and to go. a little bit intersectional feminist a little bit deep, you know, the solution partly because we have a lot of people who say they are feminists who actually are, oh can you hear sorry, I'm sorry, okay, I'll have to be very still, I Do I move and gesture? a lot, so I'm sorry, um, yeah, andwe have a lot of people who claim to be in service of feminism, but in reality they are recreating many of the same power structures that we see and you know for me when I think about this issue, I think a lot about how care is politicized and engendered, um, and in how so often you know, under the contract or under the constructs of patriarchy, that carelessness is something that is glorified and most of the time when In fact, if you look at the research, many men are afraid to associate themselves with work environmental because they are afraid of being perceived as feminine and also queer, which is something that I have seen quite a bit in the environmental movement and then if we look a step further, in fact, there is a political scientist named Cara dager who talks about this idea of ​​masculinity Petrom.

I don't know if anyone has heard of this term before, but it is the association with oil and gas as an integral part of masculine identity that is coming through. on the far right specifically um in places like the United States among conservative white men to the point that they don't even see oil and gas simply as commodities and as something that they know they are interested in for the economic means of the EC; It's actually something they use to reinforce their identity because they see it as a form of power autonomy and individualism in many ways, and as a result, it's no surprise that most people who deny climate change tend to be conservative white men. and we see that in many cases, not just in the United States.

United States, but we also see that in the United Kingdom, but I also want to make a caveat, going back to my earlier point about intersectional feminism. You know, we've had a lot of women in power in this government. You know, who hold environmental ministerial positions. or also the energy secretary positions that, frankly, don't act in the interest of feminism, frankly don't act in the interest of climate justice, so you should be careful about defending them simply for being women, um, when In fact, we found out that many women in politics don't advocate for an equitable planet, and to me I guess it's a way of being wary of the co-optation of identity politics.

I would prefer to see allies act under this umbrella. of intersectional feminism instead of just saying that I'm a woman and therefore my opinion on the planet is correct, so that's something I want to be aware of, thanks Scarlet Story, we're a little M with Mike on this . Okay, so we know that climate justice and gender justice are inextricably linked. Women are 80% more likely than men to die in a natural disaster and 14 times more likely to be displaced. We also know that when natural disasters occur, women are more likely to. trying to help other people and therefore putting yourself in danger so the statistics are very clear: women are much more disproportionately affected by the climate crisis than men when we look at political and technological solutions and all these other things.

They do not take into account or take into account that gender gap in their solutions. We need to address the root causes of why women are more disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. One reason is that when a natural disaster occurs, there are fewer, safer places for women to go where they will not be affected, for example, by sexual violence or because women are already less socioeconomically privileged and have less access to accommodation. Cheaper is also a factor explaining why women are more disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. I think especially now that we're seeing a lot of liberal feminism as a boss when it comes to the climate crisis, which refuses to address that the reason women are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis is actually capitalism, neoliberalism and political ideologies rather than other forces, um and I also think that when we look at the climate crisis, it's women who are most affected by it, but it's also women who are talking about it.

Every prominent climate activist we can think of is more likely to be a woman, you know, whether it's Greta Tberg or Vanessa. nccar or so many other people women disproportionately have all kinds of caring professions for us um and that's not equitably or adequately recognized at all so I think being a woman and being in the climate movement um is particularly important because we're disproportionately affected by the climate crisis and we are also disproportionately taking the lead on this. Thank you. I think so, based on what my co-panelists have said, women are bearing the disproportionate share of the crisis and, um, I mean speaking from my work experience.

In India we know that every time there is drought, crops are lost. The majority of the rural population is affected and the impact on women is such that there are now studies that have shown that domestic abuse is increasing. Child marriage. Marriage of minors. And there are also attacks. on the bodily integrity of women, their autonomy of sexual security is attacked, so all these impacts happen on women and these are taken up by um there are feminists um climate U Justice um people from the movement but something is also happening in parallel in India where uh what makes this whole climate justice field very, very unsafe because of the criminalization of ancestry because as India takes a turn more towards authoritarianism, there are now new laws that have criminalized ancestry and they criminalize voice, so raise these issues as much as possible. who are under climate stress.

It is extremely difficult for activists to fight these battles for justice. So, as a feminist, what do you do in a situation like this? I think that what we have learned and what I have learned, and with all my colleagues, We now think politically as feminists, we build alliances with other people. We know that the field is full of male academics and activists and we have to try to foreground our agenda in the agendas constructed by other actors. So I think that as a feminist activist my role is to build alliances with all kinds of larger movements that fight for justice, that fight for the right to ancestry, the right to voice, the right to speak, but at the same time, put the agenda at the forefront. women's agenda feminist agenda in this broader agenda setting thank you all.

I have a couple of specific questions and this one is for Scarlet and Scarlet. They've been doing a lot of campaigning outside the system or trying to pressure the system to change, but at the same time they've been trying to get a climate education bill through Parliament and I was wondering how you feel about both approaches. Are you more sure that one works better than the other? both necessary Could we have your reflections on that? I'll try not to attack the microphone this time. I think the kind of campaign method I've used is a bit unconventional in the sense that I often shout outside Parliament itself that I end up working on it.

I think that when we want to achieve a campaign objective we can't just use a strategy to do it, we have to use absolutely every avenue offered to us and just close down and tear down all those walls, um. you know, despite being in Parliament, our bill is very popular being in the Labor Party Manifesto, we haven't put together that much of a legislative program yet, the Conservatives integrated some aspects of the climate education bill that Nadia Wht and I write, but most of it is not integrated yet. I think being in Parliament always has to be accompanied by being outside because if you spend too much time there, power takes your mind and that is why we see so many MPs who go to Parliament as if they have principles and want to save the world.

Get out and don't vote for a ceasefire if we don't stay in the communities that are organizing to change our own principles. I think that's one of the reasons why Jeremy, for example, has stood by so many principles, he has always stood by those same principles. communities of activists always on those picket lines at those protests and, you know, still being in the real world, I don't think Parliament is particularly the real world when there are a lot of people who went to Eaton and then Oxford and the PP had exactly what same. Same thing lives um so my kind of tldr here is that although it may be unconventional to do both strategies, I think it's really important to try to take down every possible war to try to fight every possible way with every person you meet. you find.

I can and stay on the ground and with a clear focus of what it is you are trying to achieve and who you are trying to achieve it for. Thanks Scarlet and Tori, this is one for you and I know you've been working on it. about climate anxiety and poor mental health and I wanted to I think I've read it, if I've read it right, explain this as a failure of the system rather than pathologizing poor health and anxiety. I wonder if you could tell us more. About that, yeah, sure, for those who haven't heard of the term ecological anxiety, it emerged in the last decade as a sort of popularized term to describe the pain and worry we feel in response to dangerous changes. in the climate system, so this can be anything from mental to somatic changes that we feel in ourselves as well and something that is actually very interesting to me as someone who is in the climate movement and maybe affiliates with these emotions and he feels them and is surrounded by people. who also feel these emotions is that too often the remedies that address them are done almost in such a way as to eradicate these feelings and in fact I think these feelings are very adaptive because they are literally our body telling us that there is something incredibly bad with the system in front of us the changes in the climate right now and I really notice the kind of narratives that say this is a pathology or an individualized failure because it's not and it's something that I also find incredibly interesting.

It's that when people try to separate the system we're in from the climate crisis, emerging capitalism, frankly, is making me feel bad, it's making a lot of people feel bad and also the climate crisis is fundamentally making me feel bad, but who is causing the climate crisis? We have to ask ourselves these questions, you know, if that's what makes me feel bad, frankly, I would say that a remedy to get rid of these emotions or, rather, address them at the root, not get rid of them, is to face the fossil fuel industries. who have continually bribed politicians who have pushed to deny climate science who continue to make unprecedented profits at a time when so many people are suffering right now, and yet they tell me that my ecological anxiety is irrational and that it is something I need to look at it on my own terms and as you know I have met climate conscious psychologists who have told me that maybe I just need to go for a walk in nature or maybe I just need to do some yoga and everything will be fine and these are people who position themselves as authorities in this space to tell young people what to do with their mental health and taking into account that more than 60% of young people around the world say they are terrified of the future that awaits them.

They are going to inherit and for many people it is not even the future that they are inheriting, but what is happening now and what has been happening in the past, so I see system change as a fundamental way of looking at this crisis. mental health and the climate crisis and fortunately there are organizations like the Climate Psychology Alliance that say actually the first thing we can do to stop ecological anxiety is we need to keep that carbon in the ground. Now I would take a step. Also, I say it's not just about the carbon in the soil, but the system that allows that carbon to be extracted from the soil, and you know, I discuss and the editor of my book, Ka, is here, we have very long discussions about, In reality, How to Get Away From This Extractive System is what will lead to much better mental health for everyone, so I would encourage anyone who encounters these dialogues to say, "You know, you need to do this, you need to do that." I can do that, but the most important thing is that we need to change the system that makes us feel bad.

The next question. Actually, Tori, I'm going to come back to you first and it's about climate justice as a direct result of colonialism. Could. Can you tell us something about that in the context in which you work or are active? Yeah, sure, I think you know a lot of maybe liberal environmentalists have seen climate change as apolitical, it's largely an environmental phenomenon and it's not. it's political um and what we've seen as colonial forces often target natural resources for their own benefit um displacing the local population by extracting from these resources so that the local population cannot benefit from them um without regard to their well-being or the well-being of the planetand you know I'm going to use the example of what's happening in Palestine as a very clear example of where we're seeing settler colonialism directly impacting people's climate resilience and predisposing them to greater climate risk because as we know that the ethnic cleansing and mass displacement of the Palestinian people has resulted in the appropriation of their water and their land and has also prevented them from returning to what you know as your indigenous Homeland in many ways and, in addition to that, we are seeing how Do you know that Israel is also backed by imperialist nations like the United States, which spends more money on military efforts than on climate initiatives despite being the largest historical emitter of carbon dioxide and the US military being the largest industrial emitter of carbon?

I've never heard of them talking about it, it's really interesting, you know, they'll gladly talk about what's causing, uh, in many cases, I'm talking about, you know, the Democratic Party here will often talk about what's causing the climate crisis. and They'll say, well, it's carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and then they'll approve things like Project Willow, but they rarely talk about their own military's impacts on the climate crisis, and they're obviously funding the IDF. that is something that is very obvious to me as a climate injustice and then when you look at somewhere like Gaza, 90, 97% of all the water in Gaza is not drinkable or usable and that is partly due to the increase in sea ​​level that contaminates the aquifer that Gaza depends on and also because the IDF and Israel refuse to allow Palestinians access to resources that would improve water quality, so sewage leaks into these systems and causes more than 20 % of deaths.before this latest outbreak of conflict was due to water pollution and on top of that, what you really see in Israel is this enactment of green colonialism where they promote themselves as people who defend environmental rights and What they really have is their organizations that go to places like the occupied West Bank and plant native European pine trees and so far since the 1960s we have seen over 800,000 native olive trees being cut down and completely eliminated and even banning the practice of using black goats, which would take care of the land, they also banned it in the 1960s and that increased the risk of that land suffering from forest fires and that is what we would call green colonialism, it is something that is not an ancient phenomenon, it We see it happening in the Messiah in Kenya too, where the indigenous people are displaced from their lands and they even have a saying that is incredibly, um yes, quite disgusting, which is to make the desert bloom and they use it to greenwash their image, for what many of us have probably heard about pink.

Well, the Israeli government also does a lot of greenwashing and, more recently, many of you will have heard that there is a big fight over the untapped potential of Palestinian oil and gas. You know, I'm not saying that's the only reason. Why so much genocide is happening, but it's one that is very much underlined by the fight for new oil and gas resources and we've seen our own Prime Minister's father acquire licenses in that region to drill for oil, so you know. follow the money, that's always what we have to say, follow the money um and Palestine and what's happening there is a very clear example of why the climate justice movement needs to support the Palestinian people and I haven't seen enough people in the climate. movement that does that and it's abhorrent, frankly, and climate justice, like many other justice movements, has been co-opted for purposes that only serve what we would call the physical environment when people are a part of that too, thank you. now we have eaten who is going to talk images of Colombia peace col min the e the Sharon very quickly I think that the rapacious um rapacious looting of um resources that began during the colonial era um where the process was not only lands and um mountains and rivers were looted , but also the claims of the indigenous peoples of the IND who lived in those lands and what was buried beneath them, their knowledge systems, were delegitimized in the name of being obscurantist points of view and the entire discourse of modernity actually put them in against. any progress um that um if they were um um protesting this looting but what we see today is that the same policy continues in India right now all the areas that are inhabited by indigenous people U the adivasis um are being evicted from their lands are Newer and newer laws are being passed, policies are being passed, their rights to their own land waters are being changed and they are being pushed off their lands and, once again, their knowledge and systems are also being legitimized, so there is a continuity in the process that began the violence of the Conquest and the looting continues and now it has reached a stage in which it is criminalized, so the Adivasis are criminalized when they claim their own resources, which are common resources, they are criminalized and called anti-national laws on sedition laws on unlawful activities laws on preventive detention are being used against Adivasis and at this moment hundreds of them are imprisoned in Indian prisons and those who fight to defend the rights of the Adivasi people are also criminalized and human rights defenders and human rights lawyers are um imprisoned so um it is like that the continuity of um Colonial um um Legacy continues and continues to be very very ENT that needs to be combated with um drawing these lessons because there is a Nexus um State and corporate nexus that is devastating the lands because what lies beneath what indigenous people believe is the soul of their communities.

It looks like boita like cobalt like minerals that are being rapaciously mined right now. I would like you to invite some questions. I have one more question for the panel, but I'm saving that one until the end, so does anyone in the room have any questions? Yes please, he will need the microphone that comes here for his friends on Zoom. My name is Tesa Santana from Mongolia and my question is related to informalization. and this confident urbanization in Africa because we are losing our internal territories agriculture is here particularly in my country it has become an agricultural desert uh women are moving to the city and integrating into the informal economy and the state is committing feminicide because they get shot at any moment because they sell on the street trying to survive and they get beaten in their shops, their products are stolen and they die in the street or they starve to death, so I would look at it in terms of uh uh, the fight for Greenland and how These countries, how can these struggles be integrated, how do you see that they can be integrated into the general and global struggle in favor of or in resistance against imperialism?

Because, on my account, I could see a border with the Congo. We live in an era of barbarism. Angola obtained 36 of the most strategic Min minerals that are necessary today, so people are being uprooted from their lands so that these extraction companies can extract minerals and agriculture, since by dying we do not have, we cannot feed ourselves because the It's been grounded so that's my question thank you and it's such a critical question. I think we'll jump right into if I don't know which of you would like to respond or respond first. I think it's a very good question.

I think we're seeing more as a society how all these different struggles are linked. We know that the climate crisis or the impacts of the climate crisis are felt disproportionately by women and people who come from low socioeconomic backgrounds in countries that were or are still colonized. and therefore the fight against the climate crisis is also a fight against imperialism. We know that these fossil fuel companies and extractive companies return to colonized countries from which they have already stolen basically everything to now try again to steal more resources to fuel this crisis. Green Industrial Revolution just like they did during the current Industrial Revolution or the first Industrial Revolution and I think the way we fight this is by recognizing that all of these systems are inextricably linked.

Colonialism greatly exacerbated the climate crisis because it embedded this inequality of wealth and power and meant that countries like this could develop massively if you can call it development at the expense of other countries and we cannot allow that to happen again. I think the way to stop this is by doing things like this here. you know, creating a global movement that opposes imperialism, that recognizes all the different forms that it takes and recognizes that all of these problems, gender inequality, climate, injustice, racial inequality, socioeconomic inequality, they all come from the same problems and we have than putting up a united front against them thank you.

I'll just add to what Scarlet was saying: the Palestinian youth movement talks about this idea of ​​sharpening contradictions, which is essentially when you know the contradictions in society, whether you know, unveil, unmask what this what the government is doing in Palestine and abroad it is becoming increasingly clear and people who were not very radical before or not necessarily informed about what was happening are beginning to see the government for what it really is and, as a result of that, what we are What we see is people who were perhaps once politicians are starting to get involved in these conversations, as we have seen with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets across Palestine and what has happened as a result of that is that people are advocating for a Free Palestine, but now they are also advocating for a free West Papua, a free Congo and a free Kashmir.

Everyone is waking up to these realities and I feel like as a result of this this is going to snowball and it's really fantastic that you've raised your voice here and you've been. I share your stories because every single person in this room will remember that and take that away. I bring him to the work he does, but I also want to denounce the climate movement and denounce a large space of incredibly anti-black justice. Why are so many of the genocides occurring on the African continent not recognized? You have many congal friends who never thought that any of these fights would reach the pro and as Scarlett said.

What we're seeing is capitalism with this green denominator, now green capitalism, but it's not green or equitable, if it results in the murder of the most dispossessed, it's not equitable, it's not climate justice, frankly, um, and that's what we have to do. interrogate as a movement I just want U yeah, just a little information that um um Israel um we heard, we read it in the newspaper sent a message to India that they lost their construction workers, they lost their caretakers because now To the Palestinians who were doing these jobs they are no longer allowed to go there and India agreed to send half a million workers to Israel and this was on the news but all the unions came out and said no to this and said no we can't Can't send its own people to dangerous places, but there is one more thing that we thought was very important to say: it is not just sending workers to a war zone.

The Indian workers will probably go because there are no jobs and they will go, but we will not go. destroy solidarity to go because we will be strikebreakers no, there has to be a no to such a movement at all costs and that is what we decided to continue fighting in the streets um um against such a policy of sending Indian workers to break solidarity with the Palestinian people break the strike um and um being in the service um of the Israeli occupation um we have another question from the floor um um I think the woman in the back hasn't asked a question yet you have to wait for the microphone I'm afraid I guess my name is Faari.

My question is: um. I know everyone is talking about the entire country, but to me, the country has been missing out on what is happening now in Sudan. You know the situation in Sudan and the world. uh Humanity um in Sudan and the crisis exceeds six million and they do not have a place and there is also EOS like more than six thousand people died at the same time, he is a Refuge and they are not treated the same as uh Ukrainian and I want it to be Justice to analyze this situation and what is happening in Sudan.

Thanks thanks. Do we have any questions online? No, maybe we can answer one more. I think there was a person in the front here. to make sure that the people with the microphones do their solidarity exercise with Sudan. Hi, I'm Ros, I'm a mother of four, a grandmother and an artist, and I just wanted to ask about this horrible accusation of antisemitism every time. uh an individual wants to point out the atrocities that are being committed, uh, that our government is endorsing and I think it's a really big issue that it's silencing people, um, a lot, even as I say, even artists, but I mean many artists. they're not making any noise and I think it's because they're just terrified and I just want to know what the panel thinks about that and how they know how they can find the courage and the uh I don't know what common sense it takes to resist that, thank you because I'm not an anti-er um, two things.

Looked atJeremy Corbin and secondly Nam mod and Jewish voices for peace. There are many Jews who are in solidarity with Palestine and you know. I also want to take this time to recognize our Jewish brothers who have been completely villainized by their own community for doing so, that is not easy and I have friends in the Jewish community who have been disowned by their own families because of where they are and that is not something easy but your courage gives us strength and I think we should lean on each other in these times of need so I am actually from Kashmir so I think I know very well the struggle that comes with trying to speak. talking about genocide and then, in the context of Kashmir, being accused of being anti-Indian, for example, I think it's a really damaging narrative to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism because then I think it's really damaging especially to the Jewish people, which we're not Zionists and you know we are having a massive rise in antisemitism and islamophobia right now.

We've seen, I think, their 1, 1800% increase in anti-Semitism. I think one of the best ways we can combat one. Calling people anti-Semitic for being anti-Zionist and also anti-Semitism is denouncing anti-Semitism when we really see it because anti-Semitic cases are on the rise and this Palestinian Liberation movement is a Liberation movement for everyone. There is no room for any discrimination there and as a movement I think we are pretty good at this, we call out racism and discrimination when we see it, so continue to do so and continue to recognize that this struggle and Liberation are for everything that we shouldn't. that they do not silence us and that we must continue to defend what is right.

I guess I just want to say that when you started, um, um, um, as soon as the bombing started we saw feminist women from both sides of the border coming out singing and talking about liberation from everything and that's where our hope lies and that we have to amplify and develop, so yes, thank you, thank you for the answers. My last question is, perhaps, I hope to end on a hopeful note and that is to ask each and everyone about alliances. and the importance of building alliances and we've talked about that, I think elsewhere today, but if we could get Attis' answer first, this, Poli or SK, would you like to say something about building alliances?

I've had a really strange childhood and I've spent every year since. I turned 13 or every day since I turned 13 in the climate movement and I think that really taught me about the power of alliances because effectively this movement raised me, whether it was spending my 17th birthday at a meeting with Jeremy and others. MPS um or you know, like being bullied at school and then asking other organizers for similar life advice and that kind of thing has become a community not only in terms of strategic goals and wanting to have the same political outcomes but also in everyone's terms.

The people I organized with also basically raised me and helped me become who I am today. I think alliances are incredibly important. That's why we are here today. That's why we keep going despite so many things in the world is incredibly terrible and then also how we win. I believe capitalism and colonialism were successful because of how effectively they created division. I have mentioned Kashmir, the reason Kashmir is in this situation right now is because of the British. I just drew some lines on a map and we thought, here we go, we need to overcome those arbitrary lines, overcome those divisions and come together because that is ultimately what will win us this battle, this battle for a socialist world that works for everyone. , not just those who can afford it too, so just saying that arbitrary lines have been drawn and the lesson of Palestine also tells us that there is a history that precedes the moment and we have to be aware of that and build alliances taking into account that history and that is the only way to move forward, the only way to really put up significant resistance to all the operations that are happening on the issue of alliances.

I would like to invite everyone to show solidarity. As I mentioned. or rather, as Susan mentioned, I am part of an organization and movement called Stop Rose Bank, which is trying to shut down the Rose Bank oil field in the North Sea, which was recently approved by our own government and is a justice serious climate crisis, so I First want to say that as climate activists and as members of the Campaign to Stop the Rose Ban Oilfield, we stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine and oppose those who profit while causing harm to the people on the planet here and everywhere now. said company is Ithaca Energy Ithaca is one of the largest North Sea oil and gas operators in the United Kingdom.

It owns 100% of the Cambo oil field, which we successfully closed, and 20% of the even larger Rosebank oil field, both of which if developed would be disastrous for our climate and for millions of people already in the front line of the climate crisis. Itha invests absolutely nothing in renewable energy. Ithaca has also lobbied our government against the Windall tax that is designed to recoup some of the obscene profits from oil and gas. Companies are winning to help millions in this country who now cannot afford to heat their homes. Ithaca made over £700m in profits in the first half of this year, which wasn't enough for them, but that's not why we're here today. and I would like to invite my comrade K to say a few more words about free Palestine, can everyone listen to me?

Thanks no, we are here today because isa's parent company, the deet group, is one of the largest energy companies in Israel. D is also on the UN Black List of companies that profit from doing business in occupied Israeli settlements in the West Bank such as Peter Frank and Tala Amnesty International UK has said Ithaca and DEIC must live up to their international responsibilities and stop doing business with Israel's illegal settlements that settle civilians in occupied territories. It violates international law for companies that benefit in the context of this illegal situation or contribute to systemic violations against Palestinians and have therefore benefited from doing business in occupied lands while Palestinians time and again pay the price in solidarity, we call for a ceasefire now. the end of the suffering of the Palestinian people and all civilians in this conflict and the end of the speculation that is destroying lives and ruining our planet in our millions, in our billions, we are all Palestinians, thank you when I say enough is enough, you say Rose Bank, stop it, stop it.

A, thank you when the seas rise and the bombs fall, remember that we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, thank you all very much and just to conclude, when I used to go to Labor party conferences, Dor Butler used to say to the women. group we are all phenomenal so we are all feminists all environmentalist environments all phenomenal thank you very much to the panel thank you very much to all of us who are by the way thank you very much to everyone who has done a fantastic job today We just had a very short final session for this wonderful conference we have held, but first of all, on behalf of everyone here, I am sure you will agree that we must thank all those who have worked so hard to put this into practice. conference to make sure of the technical work, the volunteer team there Sam Francesca Lara Karen Allison Arton had to leave a little early because she had a family emergency, we wish her the best, so she had to leave and I want to say a big hello.

Thank you to all the organizations I mentioned at the beginning that helped us, but I also want to especially thank the Bakers Union for the support they have given to the Peace and Justice project and it has been a pleasure to work with on the unionization of Samworth and other places, today We had five great sessions and I also want to thank everyone who came and followed us online today and probably still are, and thank Progressive International for spreading the word around the world. about this and we are an integral part of the progressive International which brings together unions, political parties and organizations from around the world that have a genuinely progressive agenda to try to change things and I am very pleased to say that international transport workers In their latest executive , the Federation agreed to participate with the International Progressive Workers Party in Brazil.

Brazil, for example, is involved with many groups in India and around the world, so we are an integral part of all that and the objective of this conference was to try and give meaning to all the issues that we have raised now I absolutely declare myself guilty we tried to do too much today each session could have lasted at least twice the time we allotted each speaker could have reasonably spoken except me, for at least twice the time they were allotted, so what we really want are two things : one, your comments about the conference, your comments about what you learned from it, what you got from it, and what you thought could have been done. differently or could have been done better.

I think that's important, but also your comments about the organizations and the work that you're involved in to try to achieve social justice within our society and, as you'll see on the show, the peace and justice project. has the Five Points, which I'm sure everyone here would agree with: they are five points that can unite people, unify people in their fight not only for social justice in the UK and across Europe, but also for global social justice, which has to be environmental justice, it has to be workers' rights, it has to be the end of wars and it has to be a reallocation of resources from the arms industry to peaceful processes, that is why our book about the arms industry that will be published next year will be our second The book, the first poetry for many, is working very well.

I'm sorry if you couldn't get a copy today because they were sold out and we are going to print a lot more so they will be promoted and The whole point of the poetry for many was that Len mclusky and I enjoyed the poetry and we enjoyed the discussion about it, but it also helps people explore their own interests and their own imagination because you will not achieve socialism or social justice simply by reading economic textbooks. I'm very sorry, I'm very sorry, if I have been a little offensive to any economists present, that was not my intention, but I think everyone will agree that social change comes from the spoken word of music and everything else and that's part of it, so we are absolutely on it and Sam will assure you that he has been working very hard to mobilize musicians in support of Gaza and a thousand have signed up for the musicians for peace in Gaza and we will be holding a concert with no thousand of them.

I guess it might be a bit of a long gig if we did, we haven't announced the numbers yet, but we're working very, very hard. On that, now I want to conclude with two, there are two more people to talk to. I want to ask you to give a very warm welcome to Le read Muhammad read Muhammad is Palestinian and I think it is absolutely appropriate that we close this conference with the voice of the people of Gaza like all of you. I'm sure they follow their cell phone and listen to what's going on. Is incredible.

Hospital Escuela I'm not sure what school it is. In northern Gaza apparently it has been completely destroyed this afternoon, so it goes on and on what is wrong our politicians cannot utter the simple word ceasefire now in order to address the real problems the long term problems this conflict did not arise from nothing comes from 70 years of occupation comes from the siege of Gaza and justice is achieved by achieving peace, peace is achieved by providing justice to the people who deserve it and that is what we are determined to do so we are working with everyone in this and other conflicts because it is very easy to get carried away by the media last point from me the media is key to much of what we say and we lack access to the media as Jannis Farus explained very well the way that algorithms lead us into the silos we are encouraged to live in and lead us to the news information that other people want us to understand.

I want to see it come together across The Radical Media in this country and around the world so we can build a real alternative. to Murdoch, to Fox News, to everyone else and the values ​​that accompany their way of reporting news, so I want to hear the voices of what is happening in the Congo, in Yemen, in West Papua, as well as, obviously, from what is happening in Ukraine. and Palestine and so many other conflicts around the world, the point that you raised this morning about the occupation of Western Sahara barely gets any coverage, it's been going on since 1965 1975, I'm sorry, and again, that's another conflict that's hardly been discussed. mentioned, so it's our job to give space toour information system through our website and the information is there for all of you, we want to receive news from you, you want to get those things out so that the peace and justice project can develop, not in competition with anyone, but by providing that roof . that tent that home that space for people who have been forced to become temporarily homeless for political reasons Leanne will speak from time to time Lara Lara Álvarez, who has put so much energy and effort into this conference, will then say one last thank you and goodbye Read, please advance ladies gentlemen and respective elders.

It is a great honor for me to be with you here today. Obviously it is a difficult and critical time, but even more important is that we are here together, united in our campaign for peace and justice around the world. My name is lean Muhammad and I am a British Palestinian born and raised in London today I speak to you all as a Palestinian granddaughter of the 1948 neba survivors neba means our Palestinian catastrophe in Arabic and today it pains me to see another necka unfolding right in front of our eyes in

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in the past we believed that if there was access to the Internet and digital media in 1948 like today, the Palestinians could broadcast the NECA in real time and the international community would have intervened to prevent it, but my grandparents would not be refugees, they would still living in their homes in Palestine what fools we were because it was never about a lack of evidence, it was about oneself, it was about the very refusal to see us Palestinians as human beings, what is happening in Palestine can no longer be described like genocide.

It's even an examination of Beyond Mass, it's total Asia. How do I begin to tell you the feelings of living in a world where Palestinian suffering has become so normalized where the idea of ​​a ceasefire to stop the slaughter of their people within 42 days remains a controversial issue? issue for world leaders where this is all on film that has never been so clearly documented the death toll now exceeds 12,000 and we still have politicians justifying this a world where we cannot mourn our dead because we are too busy convincing the world that a genocide has occurred is taking place in the same world where human rights depend on a few who decide who is classified as human.

Now the Nea is the story of my family, the story of when my grandparents were forced and expelled from their homes in Palestine by Zionist militias. and ended up being refugees in Lebanon among hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who were exiled. They thought it would only be a few days, maybe weeks at most, months before their return, but today, 75 years later, they are still living in a refugee camp waiting to exercise. their right of return and this displacement of the Force was the basis for the founding of the State of Israel. Palestinians in Gaza today are the majority of refugees displaced in 1948 and now say they are experiencing a new NECA a population of 2.3 million of whom half are children under complete siege without access to water, electricity, fuel or food, our people are bombed from air, land and sea, and you have seen entire neighborhoods that have been leveled, schools, universities, shelters, refugee camps, hospitals, mosques, churches and medical facilities that have been damaged or destroyed and more of a million Palestinians have been destroyed.

They have been left homeless and we collectively know very well that once Palestinians cross into the Siai Desert in Egypt in search of safety, that temporary stage will become permanent displacement, just like the situation of our grandparents, as the Gazans, heaven is closer than Sinai. What we are seeing today in Palestine is nothing new and should not surprise anyone; It is the result of decades of Israeli policies and violations that have been imposed during 16 years of siege of Gaza, 56 years of military occupation and 75 years of dispossession. and exile, and the UK is not only complicit in this unfolding genocide, it is also responsible for it.

The UK has a pending and ongoing colonial death that our generation will never ignore or forget, and the government has made very clear this week its position that its relationship with Israel is more important than our Palestinian lives and I need you to understand that it will never we will be the same again our lives will never be the same our children will never be the same the number of children murdered in Gaza in just In more than a month it has exceeded the annual number of children murdered in all global conflict zones since 2019, according to Save the Children, that is, one Palestinian child killed every 10 minutes.

More than a month of attacks have torn apart children from divided families' lives at an unimaginable pace and a ceasefire is the only way to ensure their safety. I want the children, women and men of Gaza to know what freedom feels like. I want my grandmother, who is the next best survivor to come back, into our house and I want my people. experience what Justice is like the eyes of the world are now on Gaza, but Palestinian friends are also under attack in the West Bank seeing rapid escalations of violence by Israeli settlers with over 200 Palestinians killed in the West Bank alone since 7 October. war against all Palestinians, an entire people, an entire identity, and every day we see the violent effects of not addressing this historic injustice on the settler front lines in Jerusalem, whether under Israeli bombing in Gaza or in the fields of refugees in Lebanon for us, the Palestinians. there is no physical education in PTSD and the family trauma we have endured never ends, everyone has the right to live with freedom and dignity and we Palestinians are no exception and that is why we have to continue fighting against injustice, not only for the good of Palestine but for Humanity for human rights against Supremacy Against Racism and against imperialism now is the time for us to channel or anger into action, so keep taking it to the streets, keep showing up, keep talking, keep Palestine viral, keep posting on social media, keep targeting the companies complicit in these human rights violations keep boycotting keep organizing keep the momentum going keep Palestine alive in your conversations in building your movement and in their hearts it is very important that we come together collectively and raise our voices loud and clear to demand that Britain and other members of the international community recognize, without any complicated qualification, that Palestinians not only deserve to live free from violence, oppression and discrimination, but also to live without the fear of being arrested, having their homes demolished, being shot by Israeli snipers, or having their children literally die of fear.

As Palestinians right now, children in Gaza, are scared to death under Israeli bombing, but our right to self-determination is equivocal at the UN, the bottom line is that your solidarity is now more necessary than ever and the fight to defend The fundamental rights of Palestinians is a universal right. You ally yourself with all the struggles for freedom, justice and equality and your allyship is very important because we know that as Palestinians and here as British Palestinians we cannot do this alone. Thank you so much. Millions, we are all Palestinians. Thank you. Thank you for your wonderful words. and thank you all for being here since 10:00 in the morning for being here for all five sessions.

I think we say something very, very important for our lives, for our hearts, peace and justice, so we must continue campaigning for peace peace here and abroad peace in our homeland peace in Latin America peace in Europe peace in Middle East peace everywhere and we also need justice justice here and abroad it is very important that we unite and together we change change this government this current government and not only here also abroad we can continue with this with this climate Injustice with we can continue with this H taking the land for the indigenous people we can continue to ignore what is happening in the Middle East we can continue to ignore what is happening In Latin America we have to make sure that we need to change civilization, which BJ mentioned in the previous session, he said what kind of civilization we wanted so I think we want peace and justice and thank you very much for being here and Hopefully we will meet again very soon and next year and then follow us on our social media channels Facebook Twitter Instagram and keep campaigning for peace and justice.

Thank you very much to all. A big round of applause, please, for Lara Alvid and Jeremy. Corbin wonderful team thank you we're done