The Kneecap crossover event
Photo by'Tiocfaidh ár lá' an old man says, greeting a friend. 'Up the ra' he adds in a chirpy cadence, as though the IRA rebel slogans are standard-fare casual greetings. He is from Longford, about 80 years old, and holding a placard that says 'No more borders in Ireland'. I wander over to the barricade and someone hands me a 'Love music, hate racism' sticker. It's hard to argue with, I suppose.
I am, of course, outside Westminster Magistrates' Court awaiting the arrival of Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, 27 – one third of the West Belfast bilingual hip-hop trio Kneecap. He performs under the moniker Mo Chara (or 'my friend' in English), and was charged by the Metropolitan Police in May with a terror offence for allegedly brandishing a Hezbollah flag at a gig in Kentish Town last year.
A policeman reckons there are 400 people here. There is a band, they're playing 'Zombie' by the Cranberries, it's only 9.40am. It's a polite affair too: in spite of the flares, the truculent organiser who will not let me speak to the Sinn Féin MPs present (John Finucane and Paul Maskey), the jostling throng that swamped Mo Chara and his bandmates when they arrived, and the woman with no shoes on, you might even describe it as urbane. 'No more bother for the IRA' ranks among the more gentle rebel slogans I have ever heard; at one point a woman's Socialist Worker Party placard ('Defend Kneecap, Drop the Charges, Freedom for Palestine') clatters into another's head – 'Don't worry, these things happen' she responds; Paul Weller is here, no longer as a punk but an elder statesman of British rock.
This is a cross-over event: by my count, Palestinian flags just about outnumber Irish ones. 'Saoirse don Phalaistín,' (Irish for Freedom for Palestine) one flag reads; a woman being interviewed by the BBC wears a Celtic green jersey with 'Palestine' written on it in Arabic; 'Free Palestine!' the crowd chants. 'Free Ireland!' a smaller chorus shouts in response (somewhat off-message, I wonder). At one point I overheard a man with a gentle southern British accent explain that his grandfather was on 'the army council' – that is, the board of the IRA (yeah sure, just like every Gen-Z Dubliner in search of edge!). Behind him, a quiet teenager lifts a tricolour balaclava from his face. I think he is here with his mum.
In the long history of the Ireland/Palestine omnicause mash-up, its purest distillation may just have happened outside Westminster Magistrates' Court during a summer heatwave.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
Related
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
North and South America have always been interdependent
In 1797, following a written plea for troops to counter an incursion by an American Revolutionary War veteran into Louisiana, Manuel Godoy, minister to the Spanish crown, made a note in the margin: No es posible poner puertas al campo ('It is not possible to put up doors in a field'). Both literally and metaphorically, Spain could no longer defend the indefensible. In 2017, the 45th president of the United States signed an executive order to build a wall along the country's Mexican border. Its construction, for which he perversely wanted Mexico to pay, was a practical and symbolic one. The United States was turning its back on Latin America. That the relationship between the United States and its southern neighbours can be changeable is well enough known, but the depth of its complexity is perhaps not. Greg Gradin has spent an academic career investigating the tensions inherent in the 'western hemisphere', from Guatemalan history to Latin America as a proving ground for modernisation theory. In America, América, he expands on his previous work to write an original and outstanding 'new history of the New World'. The proposition he makes is unambiguous: One can't fully understand the history of English-speaking North America without also understanding the history of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America. I mean all of it…And the reverse is true. You can't tell the story of the South without the North. Grandin sidesteps the dangers of comprehensiveness – histories of the region can often be prolix – by exploring the hemisphere's 'long history of ideological and ethical contestation'. Divided into 50 short chapters, the structure allows him to cut deftly between colourful anecdote and unfamiliar intellectual history. What emerges is a vital portrait of a New World in which, despite numerous differences, the relationship between North and South has always been symbiotic and not without a similar sense of purpose. Early on, the English took their lead from the Conquistadors. Captain John Smith saw himself as an anglicised Cortes when he sought to establish Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. Oliver Cromwell's horrific Irish campaign, which Grandin calls a 'prelude to empire', was a foretaste of what might befall the Indians and enslaved Africans of North America. The Spanish Conquest of the Americas, as one English investor stated, had 'awakened' Europe from its 'dreams', only to reveal death and destruction. Yet the nightmare of the Conquest would at least produce something extraordinary. The moral conscience of this book belongs to the Spanish Dominican priest Bartolome de las Casas (1484-1566), who, from his encounters with the Indians of the New World, declared: 'Todo linaje de los hombres es uno' ('All humanity is one'). He would become the Conquest's most vociferous critic, having seen with his own eyes the 'ocean of evil'. To this day, his universal humanism remains a guiding light for the region, especially among the social democratic left in countries such as Brazil and Uruguay. Grandin is keen to emphasise that the Spanish empire had 'yielded, by the early 1800s, to a republicanism that was both more inclusive and more activist than its counterpart in the United States'. The torch would later be carried by the Cuban poet Jose Marti, who believed the New World's diversity to be 'a wellspring of spiritual and material strength'. According to Grandin, the reason for this humanist climate can be traced back to Spanish colonialism's early moral crisis, and the fact that when independence finally arrived it was understood to include freedom from 'all forms of oppression'. The unifying hero of the sweeping narrative is Simon Bolivar. But it is Bolivar the statesman and founder of a league of nations that fascinates, not the disappointed revolutionary who 'ploughed the sea'. The enlightened objectives of the 1826 Panama Congress included publication of a manifesto that proclaimed the abolition of slavery, the ratification of the Monroe Doctrine as international law and the adoption of the Roman legal doctrine Uti possidetis, ita possideatis ('As you possess, so shall you possess'). Roman law for the most part has kept the region's borders intact, compared with Manifest Destiny and the taking of the west. No wonder sovereignty remains so highly prized. In the 20th century, Franklin D. Roosevelt's policy of the 'Good Neighbour' would become inter-American co-operation at its best. Those meetings between Thomas Jefferson and Francisco Miranda two centuries earlier, in which the seeds of Pan-Americanism were sown, had finally borne fruit. It is clear where Grandin's sympathies lie (though his discussion of the authoritarian left, especially in Venezuela and Nicaragua might have been more exacting). But with Donald Trump currently taking a Nixonian line in his dismissal of Latin Americans ('We don't need them. They need us'), this magisterial work shows that only within the context of the 'western hemisphere' – and not western Europe – can the United States be fully understood.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
What else could Israel do?
Over the past few days British readers have been able to enjoy a number of hot takes on the situation in the Middle East. First, there have been all the politicians, such as the Scottish First Minister John Swinney, who have called for our government to step in and 'de-escalate' the conflict between Israel and Iran. But even leaving aside whether the mullahs in Tehran can be swayed by Britain or Scotland, 'de-escalation' is the only surefire way to ensure that they continue to pursue a nuclear capability. Elsewhere, the BBC has been playing a blinder. When the conflict began, it decided that its audience would be well served by having the celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall give his thoughts on the matter. At the weekend HFW (as he's known in the Middle East) treated BBC1 viewers to his opinion, too, that 'de-escalation' is the priority and that, to this end, the British government must stop selling arms to Israel. Meanwhile, one of the BBC's own correspondents highlighted the worries of 'those who argue that Israel is violating international law by launching an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation'. I'm not sure what the definition of 'provoked' might be if it doesn't include the Revolutionary Islamic government using the terrorist groups it backs in a seven-front war on you for the past couple of years. Perhaps BBC staff would regard themselves as having been somewhat 'provoked' if they'd been attacked by Hamas, then by Hezbollah, then by the Houthis, then by the Iranian government and so on and so on. Perhaps, then, it's worth going back to first principles. The stated view of the British, American and all European governments is that Iran should never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. The stated view of the International Atomic Energy Agency is that Iran has been enriching uranium to levels required only to develop them. At Fordow and elsewhere, the Iranians have spent decades building facilities deep underground in order to avoid those facilities being bombed from the air. Which is definitely the sort of thing that a government would do if it was not lying and had nothing to hide. During this same period the regime has continued to state its ambition of wiping Israel off the map, calling for the destruction of the 'little Satan' (Israel) and then the 'great Satan' (America). It's unclear if the Iranian government has come up with a 'Satan' category into which Swinney's fiefdom might fall. But I think that we can safely conclude from all Tehran's statements that they consider Britain as a whole very much on the 'Satan' side of the ledger. Indeed, if you want to read accounts of how the UK actually runs the world and is the malevolently scheming power behind the USA and everyone else, you need look no further than Iranian state media. As a side note, it might also be observed that the regime has been sending hit squads to take out opponents in Britain and America. As well as operating in cells within the UK, Iranian agents have been found trying to kill critics in Brooklyn; President Donald Trump's former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo; and his former national security adviser, John Bolton. The Iranians have proved masters at outwitting the international community, and since Israel is their stated first target it was inevitable that the Israeli government could not be as sanguine as, say, the Scottish one over the question of exactly when Iran would develop the levels of enrichment necessary for a deliverable nuke. Anybody who really wants peace should have spent recent years working harder to stop the Iranian regime in its tracks. But in the final analysis what were all these other governments ever going to do about Iran's race to the bomb? The Iranians long ago worked out that they could play for time, not least because they work within a different chronological framework from the rest of us. If you believe that history is to be judged by when the hidden Imam reappears and heralds the end times, you might easily take the view that western governments come and go. As indeed they do. So all the ayatollahs ever needed was to deceive, develop and wait. If Israeli pilots had not bombed the Iranian nuclear project, who else might have done it? The RAF? The French? The Germans? After all these years and all these talks, the only country that ended up taking action was the one with the most skin in the game: the one that the Ayatollah Khamenei and his predecessors have always said they want to annihilate. The world's sole Jewish state takes the threat of its annihilation seriously. Among the few things that can unite the Israeli left, right and centre is the conviction that life in their country will be made impossible – if not ended immediately – once Iran has the bomb. So they acted. In these circumstances, I'm not sure what calls for 'de-escalation' actually mean, other than being a way for irrelevant people to try to prove their relevance. But anyone interested in peace in the Middle East – and the wider world – would do well to wish for something rather different: a swift and intense escalation to finish off the Iranian nuclear project once and for all. That way, a roomful of the country's negotiators won't be able to continue running rings round whichever second-rate muppets govern western countries in the years to come. There's a low-resolution viewpoint in the West that everyone in the world has the luxury of living as we do. But not all people have the good fortune to be in Fife or Inverness. And of course, at times in our own past we didn't enjoy the luxuries of peace either. Perhaps we could recall those times and remember that at our own moments of greatest peril, nothing short of total victory was desirable for us. And nothing short of total victory should be desirable for our allies either.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Starmer's war zone: the Prime Minister is in a perilous position
Sir Keir Starmer was alerted in the early hours of Friday by his national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, that Israel's assault on Iran was 'under way'. The Prime Minister got a text message while in his flat above No. 11. It was not a bolt from the blue. Downing Street has not said so publicly, but the government was told in advance what was coming. Publicly, Starmer's relentless emphasis has been on 'de-escalation' of the crisis. Privately, ministers have been expecting an Israeli offensive since December. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, led a cross-Whitehall tabletop war-gaming exercise into how events might unfold on Monday last week, four days before the first air strikes. The reason for this public reticence is fourfold, involving strategy, espionage, law and politics. There is a genuine concern that the later waves of Israeli strikes, aimed at forcing regime change rather than destroying Iran's nuclear programme, are directed towards a goal which is both un-obtainable and unknowable. 'Be careful what you wish for,' says one security source. 'There is no guarantee that what would come next would be any better. You might just get a younger, more organised ayatollah.' The second reason is that one of the British government's priorities since the crisis began has been to keep the UK's embassy in Tehran open. This is not because the Foreign Office has developed an uncharacteristically energetic approach to consular care for British nationals in the theocratic state. The embassy is a base for intelligence officers running what (limited) assets the UK has in Iran. 'It is useful for us and for others who have no embassy there,' whispers a nodding, winking official. Translation: the CIA wants MI6 to remain in business. 'Our visibility [of what Iran is up to] is not good,' one of those involved in crisis management admits. Without a presence on the ground, the confusion would be worse. Part of the explanation is that the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, is again flexing his muscles. 'The AG has concerns about the UK playing any role in this except for defending our allies,' one official who has seen the legal advice explains. Consequently, the armed forces have not joined the efforts to shoot down Iranian missiles fired into Israel in the last week, unlike in October, when the RAF helped defend Israel against an Iranian salvo of 200 missiles. Britain has played a role in protecting Jordan from stray missiles but no more. The final reason, however, has the most potential to determine the fate of the Starmer government. After a period of globe-trotting in which the Prime Minister was dubbed 'never-here Keir', Starmer's handling of international affairs has generally been seen as a positive, continuing full-throated support for Ukraine, avoiding a run-in with Donald Trump, signing multiple trade deals and even getting US approval for the Chagos Islands deal. Until now, foreign affairs have been a refuge from his domestic travails. But international events are throwing up problems which threaten to torch the government's economic plans as well as widen fissures in Labour between the leadership and much of the parliamentary party. In short, foreign affairs are now a danger for Starmer where they were once a distraction or an opportunity. The conflagration over Iran risks raising inflation and delaying cuts to interest rates. The price of oil has already risen to $76 a barrel. If the mullahs close the Straits of Hormuz, blocking shipments from the Gulf, experts think it will rise above $100 and perhaps as high as $130. This week, at the G7 summit in Canada, Starmer was delighted to get Trump to sign an executive order enacting the trade deal with the UK which reduces tariffs on cars from 25 per cent to 10 per cent. 'It is worth £14 billion of exports,' says one of those involved: 'It probably saves our car industry.' The Prime Minister's first move after Trump signed on the dotted line was to call Adrian Mardell, the chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover, to tell him the good news. But while Scotch whisky exporters are also delighted, Britain's ethanol industry is warning it will be wiped out – and losers always shout louder than winners. Problems also loom for the NHS, since Trump regards the health service's bulk–buying of drugs for far less than US healthcare companies pay as industrial cheating – particularly given that American billions paid for the research. Anything which drives up the cost of medicine could render the 3 per cent NHS budget hike in the spending review irrelevant. On the political front, Labour's soft left is no longer willing to tolerate a morally neutral stance on Israel. When the French proposed a conference last week to pave the way for recognition of a Palestinian state, 'there were strong rumblings for unilateral recognition', a Labour MP says. Complicating everything is the presence in the Commons of five independent pro-Gaza MPs and the fear on the Labour benches that that number could be 20 or 30 after the next election. Those whose seats are at risk include high-flyers such as Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood. 'The moral–outrage politics that lie beneath Gaza are more difficult for the party in the medium term than the Iraq war was,' an MP says. 'Muslim voters are less loyal to the party. Iraq, at the time, was seen through the prism of government dishonesty, rather than because it was a moral outrage.' Pressure to take a tougher line with Israel over its offensive in Gaza is not confined to Labour's backbenches. Hamish Falconer, a former diplomat who is the Middle East minister, 'has been pushing internally for a while' says one MP, noting Falconer's potential interest in the leadership one day. 'He is trying to position himself in the PLP [Parliamentary Labour party].' The first move was to sanction two Israeli ministers who publicly backed the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Ministers were content with the way the decision landed. The two Israelis, from the hard right, are not popular with British Jews and neither the Board of Deputies nor the Jewish Leadership Council criticised the move. When Starmer spoke to Benjamin Netanyahu after the first air strikes on Iran, the Israeli premier did not even mention it. But that direction of travel makes a nuanced position on Israel and Iran more difficult. Senior figures talk about a 'multi-front regional war', drawing a distinction between some fronts (Gaza) where 'Israel needs to be restrained' and others 'where Iran has been the aggressor' and Britain is prepared to see Israel act more freely. When David Lammy gave a statement to the Commons on Monday, he felt the need to point out (primarily to his own side) that Israel views Iran's nuclear programme as a threat to its existence. 'There are a lot of new MPs on the Labour benches who don't know a lot about it,' observes one party source. An MP describes Lammy's speech as 'Janet and John does the Middle East'. The next flashpoint could be the government's national security strategy, which will be published early next week, before Starmer heads to Tuesday's Nato conference in the Hague. Insiders describe it as a 'hardening and sharpening of our approach to national security' which will lead to a 'more un-apologetic and systematic pursuit of national interest' – a far cry from Lammy's talk of 'progressive realism'. Its author, John Bew, who advised Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak on foreign affairs, is a Labour man but also the biographer of Castlereagh, the realist's realist. The review contains three pillars: 'security at home', 'strength abroad' and 'sovereign and asymmetric capabilities'. It links economic prosperity and defence technology to the military and intelligence agencies. The bit that will have some Labour MPs clutching their pearls, however, is an acknowledgment that 'multilateral cooperation' and 'institution building' – the classic Labour foreign policy formula – 'will not be enough [in] the current climate'. A summary circulating in Whitehall reads: 'We may have to act outside our comfort zone if we are to deter and defend ourselves against threats.' One of those who has seen the review adds: 'We'll have to work with people who we don't naturally necessarily share values with in pursuit of the national interest and national security.' The challenge of multilateral cooperation will then be laid bare at Nato, where the secretary-general, Mark Rutte, is pushing for member states to commit to 3.5 per cent of national income for defence and 5 per cent in total on defence-related spending. Rachel Reeves committed Britain to 2.6 per cent by 2027, with no mention of how the UK would get to its stated target of 3 per cent. The only good news for Starmer is that Nato is taking a broader than usual definition of spending. The budgets of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, as well as support for Ukraine and the cost of maintaining the Diego Garcia air base, can all be thrown into the pot. Before that, British officials expect Starmer to have to make a major decision on whether to join a US-Israeli military effort against Iran, a decision which could enrage both Trump and Labour MPs. Starmer's team, like the rest of us, spent Tuesday evening waiting for the President to reveal his plans on social media. Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, recently told his British counterpart, John Healey: 'What he writes on Truth Social, that is the best indication of present thinking.' On Tuesday, Trump demanded 'UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!' from Iran, by which the Brits believe he means it giving up its nuclear programme. 'There is a strong likelihood that we would be asked to contribute [military assets],' an official says. 'There are those who would want nothing more than to just bring Iran back to negotiations and de-escalate immediately,' says one Whitehall figure. 'And there are those who are thinking this has been a problem for the past 20 years and maybe we should just explore the idea that you could blow up the problem and it might go away.' Lammy is 'on the far left of that spectrum'. Lord Mandelson, the British ambassador in Washington who attended a Cobra meeting in London on Tuesday, is nearer the other end. What of Starmer himself? The same criticisms that have dogged him in his handling of domestic affairs (see the belated U-turn on a grooming inquiry) can now be heard about foreign policy. 'If anyone can tell me where the Prime Minister is, I would be astonished, because it is not entirely clear,' grumbles a senior civil servant. The answer is:no longer in his comfort zone.
