Small average swing in Glasgow by-election triple-header suggests SNP have a national lead over Labour of around 4.5% - bang in line with recent polling

Labour are fibbing yet again on Twitter - they're claiming to have "gained" three Glasgow City Council seats in by-elections yesterday, whereas in fact they were defending all three seats, and in two of the three wards they had even won the popular vote in 2022 (at a time when the SNP were still well ahead nationally).  

Maryhill by-election result on first preference votes (21st November 2024):

Labour 35.9% (+1.9)
SNP 29.2% (-12.9)
Reform UK 12.7% (n/a)
Greens 12.1% (-0.2)
Alba 4.2% (n/a)
Conservatives 3.2% (-5.0)
Liberal Democrats 2.7% (+0.3)

Drumchapel & Anniesland by-election result on first preference votes (21st November 2024):

Labour 34.3% (-3.8)

SNP 26.3% (-11.6)

Reform UK 12.8% (n/a)

Independent - Kerr 9.4% (+4.2)

Greens 8.3% (+2.3)

Conservatives 5.8% (-3.7)

Liberal Democrats 2.9% (+1.3)

Glasgow North-East by-election result on first preference votes (21st November 2024):

Labour 34.3% (-9.7)

SNP 32.2% (-10.4)

Reform UK 18.3% (n/a)

Conservatives 5.4% (-3.3)

Greens 4.2% (+1.2)

TUSC 3.7% (+2.5)

Liberal Democrats 2.0% (+2.0)

Although the SNP vote is significantly down in all three wards, what matters as always is the swing from SNP to Labour, and in only one case (Maryhill) would that be sufficient to just about put Labour ahead nationally.  The average swing across the three wards is just 3.9%, which assuming a uniform national swing would point to a national SNP lead over Labour of approximately 4.5% - pretty much bang in line with what the new full-scale Scottish poll from Survation shows.

However, there was also a by-election in Fort William & Ardnamurchan yesterday, and the votes have yet to be counted, so we'll wait to see if that one shows anything radically different.

One thing that's striking about the results we do have so far is the consistency with which Reform UK seem to be leaving the Tories in their wake in Glasgow.  During Ruth Davidson's leadership there may have been hope for some sort of limited Tory renaissance in the city, but the Reform UK factor seems to have snuffed that out completely, at least for the foreseeable future.  Reform are now very much the party of the right-wing vote in Glasgow.

Fresh misery for Labour in Scotland as SNP storm back into the lead in *Westminster* voting intentions, according to sizzling new Survation survey

Progress Scotland have been impressively fast in getting the data tables up for their new Survation poll - faster than Survation themselves, as it happens.  Probably the most important news is that the SNP have broken out of their deadlock with Labour in the only other post-election Survation poll (conducted in September), and now have a clear lead in Westminster voting intentions.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election (Survation/Progress Scotland, 1st-15th November 2024)

SNP 31% (-)

Labour 28% (-3)

Conservatives 15% (+1)

Reform UK 13% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 6% (-3)

It's a similar story on the Holyrood constituency ballot - the SNP and Labour were level in the previous Survation poll and the SNP now have a clear lead, although the swing is bigger than on the Westminster ballot.  On the Holyrood list, the small SNP lead remains unchanged from the previous poll, although that doesn't prevent the constituency swing improving the SNP's showing on the all-important seats projection.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 32% (+1)

Labour 27% (-4)

Conservatives 14% (+1)

Reform UK 10% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 9% (+1)

Greens 6% (-)

Alba 1% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 27% (-1)

Labour 25% (-1)

Conservatives 15% (+1)

Reform UK 11% (+1)

Greens 10% (-)

Liberal Democrats 9% (-1)

Alba 3% (-)

Seats projection: SNP 42, Labour 34, Conservatives 18, Reform UK 14, Liberal Democrats 11, Greens 10

So the 'mainstream' unionist parties would have 63 seats in combination, two short of an overall majority.  The pro-independence parties would be well behind on 52, but in my view the SNP as the largest single party would be well-placed to cling on as some sort of minority government, given the difficulty Labour would face in cobbling together a coalition involving both the Tories and Reform UK.  Even if they were prepared to destroy their own credibility by attempting that, I doubt if Reform UK would play ball, or not without naming an impossible price.

It's noteworthy that the replacement of Douglas Ross with Russell Findlay hasn't had a transformative effect on Tory fortunes - at best Findlay has very slightly steadied the ship - and Reform UK remains a bigger problem for him than for anyone else.  Alba are once again flatlining at a level that would be unlikely to win them any list seats at all, a fact that isn't really compatible with the repeated claims from the party leadership that they're making big breakthroughs and closing in on multiple list seats.  It's true that Alba's by-election results have become more respectable in recent weeks, but they've done that by choosing their battles and concentrating their resources.  It's not really any indication that their underlying support has increased nationally.

Although the headline result from the poll was a non-standard, multi-option question on Scotland's constitutional future, the standard Yes/No question on independence was also asked, and the results lend some support to the evidence that there may have been a recent uptick in Yes support.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 48% (+2)

No 52% (-2)

Will the issuing of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu force European countries into a reluctant parting of the ways with the US?

In retrospect there can't be much doubt that when Jeremy Corbyn was at the height of his powers as Labour leader, when he had recently achieved a miracle result at the 2017 general election and looked impossible to dislodge, a number of right-wing figures within Labour got together privately and tried to work out how on earth they could turn the tide and get the party back under their control, and what they settled on was the construction of a largely fake 'anti-semitism crisis'.  As Machiavellian strategies go, that one would have seemed particularly unpromising if it had been set out in advance, and it really is quite astonishing how comprehensively it worked.  Doubtless there was the occasional example of genuine anti-semitism on the Corbynite left, as there is in all walks of life, but generally speaking what the supposed "crisis" was about was legitimate criticisms of the Israeli state being repackaged as "anti-semitism".  Too many people who might reasonably have been expected to be sensible enough to see through the stunt proved all too credulous, probably due to their own underlying disdain for the Corbyn project.  The momentum behind Corbyn, which briefly made him look like a Prime Minister in waiting, was put sharply into reverse, and once again he was back to being dismissed as an abnormal figure outside the bounds of political acceptability.   The tactic undoubtedly contributed to the scale of his defeat in 2019, paving the way for his replacement by Starmer, who was emboldened enough to remove his predecessor from the party on bogus grounds of anti-semitism - an act of unprecedented cynicism and arrogance.  And yet the political and commentator class continued acting as if nothing was amiss.

Having seemed for ages to get away with all of this Scot-free, it's hard to escape the supreme historical irony of the fact that Starmer and co were - unbeknown to them - concocting their "anti-semitism crisis" at a moment in time just before the State of Israel was about to commit the worst genocide of the 21st Century so far, thus unexpectedly putting Jeremy Corbyn very publicly on the right side of history as one of the minority of politicians who had consistently refused to accept Israel using accusations of anti-semitism as a shield to allow them to get on with oppressing a neighbouring people.  By contrast, Corbyn's tormentors like Margaret Hodge and David Lammy were left as the ones being seen to have cosy selfies taken with genocidal war criminals like Isaac Herzog and Benjamin Netanyahu.  The Labour leadership's initial reaction to this problem seemed to be to double down and join with Israel in accusing anyone trying to impede the genocide, or even to identify its existence, of anti-semitism.  But can you really do that with the International Criminal Court, now that they have issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu?  

Israel itself is of course already trying to discredit the ICC as an anti-semitic institution, motivated by a wish to distract from sexual harassment accusations against their chief prosecutor.  The incoming Trump administration will doubtless join in with this smokescreen, and will probably take far more sinister actions against the ICC and its staff too.  But given that the UK is a party to the ICC and fully accepts its jurisdiction, how can Starmer go down that road himself?  Indeed, how can he do anything other than denounce those who try to undermine the rule of international law?  In spite of the way the Labour party has mutated in recent years, there are still enough internationalists within the PLP that it's hard to imagine them indefinitely tolerating a leader who favours Trump and a wanted war criminal over the international courts.  

I said a couple of weeks ago that one of the silver linings of Trump's victory is that it might force European countries, however reluctantly, to move away from slavish loyalty to US leadership.  The ICC ruling may mark a parting of the ways whereby European countries will be forced to make a straight choice between loyalty to the US and adherence to an international rules-based system, because the two concepts will henceforth be opposites and fundamentally inconsistent with each other.

Bit of a problem for Keir Starmer that a big part of the ICC's rationale for issuing the arrest warrant against Netanyahu is "knowingly depriving the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival", ie. exactly what Starmer said Israel had the right to do.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) November 21, 2024

The Empire Flops Back: 61% of the Scottish public demand powers are transferred from London to the Scottish Parliament

This morning brings word of a new Survation poll for Angus Robertson's Progress Scotland organisation, which goes 1990s retro by asking a multi-option question on Scotland's constitutional future, rather than a straight Yes/No question on independence.  The results have been given as an exclusive to the Daily Record, which is fair enough - if you can get Pravda to report on a bad news story for Labour and their Precious Union, why not?  The only snag, though, is that the Record have - true to character - presented the results in a somewhat garbled manner. But as I understand it, these are the top preferences of voters:

Independence inside the EU: 34%

Independence outside the EU: 8%

More powerful Scottish Parliament inside the UK: 19%

The status quo inside the UK: 22%

Abolition of the Scottish Parliament, return to direct rule from London: 17%

There are two ways of looking at these numbers.  If the two pro-independence options are combined, they come to 42%, and if the three non-independence options are combined, they come to 58%, which is a bigger gap than in conventional Yes/No polls.  But that can perhaps be partly explained by the very fact that there are more non-independence options than pro-independence options - some people without strong views tend to gravitate towards the middle option, no matter what it might be.

On the other hand, the three options that involve a more powerful Scottish Parliament command the support of 61%, compared to only 39% for either the status quo or for fewer powers.  So clearly the "line in the sand" and "enough is enough" narrative from unionists has failed to chime with voters.

*  *  *

Something very peculiar has been going on in the comments section of this blog over the last five days or so.  What appears to be one person has been posing as an army of befuddled and indignant "casual readers", all posting anonymously and all with suspiciously identical writing styles, who purport to be downright *furious* that this blog used the easy-to-grasp concept of swing, introduced by David Butler as long ago as the 1950s, to extrapolate from last Thursday's local by-elections to a potential general election result.  He's tried to dismiss Butler's concept as "hocus pocus" or "not cutting the mustard" - well, good luck with that, mate.  The true reason for his anger is likely to be that the calculation shows that the SNP would have a national lead of around eight percentage points, putting them into landslide territory in Westminster terms.  But he doesn't actually dispute the calculation, and nor can he, because anyone can replicate it for themselves.  Instead, all he's left with is repeatedly spluttering "you can't extrapolate from local elections to Westminster".  

Of course you can.  In doing so, all you're saying is that if people vote in the same way in a general election as they do in local elections, and if last Thursday's results were typical, the SNP would win big across Scotland in a general election.  So is there any particular reason to think people vote differently in general elections from local elections?  Well, yes, recent history shows there is a modest amount of divergence.  But here's the thing - the SNP have actually tended to do less well in local elections than in other types of elections.  So if you make an adjustment to take account of that phenomenon, the SNP's big projected national lead would actually increase in a general election context, not decrease.

As the president of the Donald Trump Fan Club Of Somerset might put it: "what's your point, caller?"

A response to some 'feedback'

Even by normal standards there has been a truly industrial scale of trolling on the last three threads, and I've had a bit of it on Twitter as well.  Lesson: if you really want to upset the unionist contingent, all you have to do is point out to them that three Labour by-election wins are not actually as impressive as they would like to believe.  Their synthetic indignation at the idea that anything other than the winner of each by-election matters reminds me of someone watching the first few points of a match between Novak Djokovic and some minnow, and theatrically screaming "OH MY GOD, DJOKOVIC IS GETTING ABSOLUTELY SLAUGHTERED" when the minnow has a routine hold in his opening service game.

As I'm in a generous mood, I'll explain in a bit more detail why the results (with one exception) were not that great for Labour.

Whitburn and Blackburn: The SNP won the popular vote in this ward by just one percentage point in 2022, even though they were twelve points ahead of Labour nationally.  So on a uniform swing, they would have needed to be eleven points ahead of Labour nationally to win the ward on Thursday.  Although several polls have shown the SNP recovering since the general election and moving back into the lead, there has not yet been a lead of eleven points or more.  On no planet were the SNP favourites to win this by-election - although, as it happens, they very nearly did.

Doon Valley: Labour were more than two points ahead of the SNP in this ward in 2022, even though the SNP were twelve points ahead of Labour nationally.  By any standards, that makes it an unusually Labour-friendly ward.  To have won it on Thursday on a uniform swing, the SNP would have needed to be ahead of Labour by about fourteen-and-a-half points nationally.  No, it is not a major problem for the SNP that they are not fourteen-and-a-half points ahead nationally at this stage.

Colinton/Fairmilehead: The SNP weren't even starting from second place in this ward - in 2022 they were in third place with just 17% of the vote, in spite of being miles ahead nationally.  The idea that there is any shame in failing to win here on Thursday is completely ludicrous.  There was in fact a technical swing from Labour to the SNP, although admittedly in practice that was mainly caused by movement from Labour to the Lib Dems.

Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse: As I stated several times yesterday, this was the one and only result that was genuinely good for Labour and disappointing for the SNP.  In 2022, the SNP's lead in the ward was a little above ten points, very similar to the national picture, meaning on a uniform swing they would only have needed a tiny national lead to win on Thursday.  So yes, this particular one was a poor outcome, but it's one out of four, guys, one out of four.

SNP return to gold medal position: latest batch of by-elections suggest they have big national lead over Labour

First things first: I have an analysis piece at The National about yesterday's crop of four by-elections, and you can read it HERE.

The results were certainly a mixed bag. Labour's vote was well up in two and well down in the other two.  The SNP vote was up in one and down in three.  Of the two wards where Reform UK stood, they had a very good result in one and a poor result in the other.  The Liberal Democrats had a sensational victory in one, but didn't really trouble the scorer elsewhere.

All you can really do in these situations is look at the average, and the average swing from the SNP to Labour across the four wards was just 2%. Because that's measured from the 2022 local elections when the SNP were twelve points clear of Labour nationally, it points to a Scotland-wide lead for the SNP of eight points - putting them firmly in landslide territory in Westminster terms.

Really the one and only genuinely good result for Labour yesterday was in Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse, which is frustrating because that was also the only ward where the SNP appeared to have a realistic chance of winning.  However, even there the swing to Labour was only 8%, rather than the 9% falsely claimed by Anas Sarwar.

Anas Sarwar caught fibbing about the swing in Ayrshire by-election?

I've had to go old school on this one and calculate the percentages manually from the raw results published on the East Ayrshire Council website, but I'm fairly sure I haven't made any mistakes - and the swing to Labour appears to be a smidgeon above 8%, rather than the 9% claimed by Anas Sarwar on Twitter.

Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse by-election result on first preference votes:

Labour 39.4% (+11.2)

SNP 33.3% (-5.1)

Conservatives 20.2% (-1.8)

Liberal Democrats 4.7% (n/a)

Independent - McNamara 2.4% (n/a)

Doon Valley by-election result on first preference votes:

Labour 32.2% (+9.1)

Conservatives 25.6% (+8.9)

SNP 23.7% (+2.9)

Independent - Ireland 10.7% (n/a)

Liberal Democrats 4.2% (n/a)

Greens 3.0% (n/a)

Independent - McNamara 0.6% (n/a)

Whitburn and Blackburn by-election result on first preference votes:

Labour 30.9% (-6.5)

SNP 28.9% (-9.7)

Reform UK 16.3% (n/a)

Independent - Lynch 11.9% (n/a)

Conservatives 6.7% (-11.8)

Liberal Democrats 2.7% (+0.3)

Greens 2.6% (-0.5)

Colinton / Fairmilehead by-election result on first preference votes:

Liberal Democrats 36.3% (+23.9)

Conservatives 19.6% (-0.7)

Labour 19.5% (-13.9)

SNP 10.8% (-6.5)

Greens 5.3% (-0.1)

Reform UK 3.6% (n/a)

Independent - Wilkinson 2.3% (n/a)

Independent - Henry 0.8% (n/a)

Scottish Family Party 0.7% (-0.9)

Independent - Brown 0.7% (n/a)

Independent - Bob 0.3% (n/a)

Scottish Libertarian Party 0.1% (n/a)

Whatever else happens, the SNP *must* avoid triggering an unnecessary by-election in Stephen Flynn's seat - that's priority number one

I agree with a lot of the comments that have been made about Stephen Flynn's attempt to get a seat at Holyrood.  There's an obvious double standard in forbidding dual mandates simply to put a spanner in the works for one SNP faction, and then suddenly deciding dual mandates are absolutely fine when it suits the interests of the ruling faction.  And while in principle there's nothing wrong with standing against an incumbent constituency MSP in a party selection (internal party democracy dictates that nobody should have a guaranteed seat for life), the optics are terrible because it's such an obvious case of punching downwards - the challenger is far more powerful and influential than the person he is challenging, and he's essentially trampling all over her in the service of raw ambition, much as Douglas Ross did to David Duguid.  I don't really agree that this has got anything to do with "men" and "women", though, because ultimately Flynn's factional advantages can be traced back to Nicola Sturgeon.

Flynn's justifications have been almost comically insincere at every step along the way.  In the immediate aftermath of the general election he said that the possibility of switching to Holyrood was not uppermost in his thoughts, when in reality he must have already been plotting in some detail how he was going to do it.  Then when he made the announcement, he insisted he was only doing it because there was so much interest from others in what he might do - nothing to do with the fact that there was a deadline to put himself forward and he could scarcely challenge a sitting MSP in conditions of total secrecy.  Most ludicrously of all, he claimed the reason for his decision was to avoid "sitting out" an important electoral contest for Aberdeen, as if the only conceivable alternative to muscling in and seeking a dual mandate was to let voters down by being a passive bystander.  Well, why end there, Stephen?  Why not seek a perpetual triple mandate by standing in every single local election, Scottish Parliament election and Westminster election?  If you don't, you're bound to let the people of Aberdeen down by being a bystander at least two-thirds of the time, and that would be a frightful, beastly, caddish thing to do.

I know we like our politicians to be confident and to have the gift of the gab, but when the self-serving insincerity is quite so transparent, I wonder if it does more harm than good.  My biggest concern now is that because the backlash against Flynn's antics has been so severe, there may be pressure on him to do a partial U-turn and accept the same rule that applied to Joanna Cherry.  That would be the worst of all worlds, because it would lead to a by-election that the SNP could easily lose.  The best solution to this problem would be for Flynn to accept that he already has an important job as leader of the fourth largest group at Westminster (bigger than Reform UK, bigger than the Greens, bigger than Jeremy Corbyn's group of independents) and to dedicate himself to it.  But if he insists on switching to Holyrood, the least worst outcome is for others to accept his dual mandate for a couple of years, albeit perhaps with a disapproving frown.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - after the Rutherglen debacle, the SNP have got to learn to stop chucking away parliamentary seats like confetti.  They've lost quite enough seats already, so whatever else happens they must avoid being reduced from nine to eight.

Keir Starmer, genocide denier

Although Keir Starmer going out to bat for the genocidal Netanyahu regime (and giving it feminine pronouns) is very much the established norm, on some level I'm puzzled by his decision today to double down on David Lammy's insistence that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Ultimately this will not remain a matter of interpretation for self-interested politicians - the question of whether genocide has occurred will be adjudicated in international courts and also by academics.  When a legal and academic consensus of genocide is established, and I do think that's now a question of 'when' rather than 'if', Starmer will clearly be seen to have been catastrophically on the wrong side of history, and that's bound to be detrimental to his legacy.  It really is odd that he's not leaving himself a bit of wiggle-room.

In one specific sense, of course, Lammy was just indisputably wrong and there should have been no great difficulty in publicly admitting that. He suggested that not enough Palestinians had been killed for it to be genocide, and using that word would trivialise 'real' genocides like the Holocaust in which millions died.  However, the first legally recognised genocide in Europe after the Holocaust was the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, in which "only" 8000 people died. That's less than a fifth of the minimum death toll in Gaza (likely to be a massive underestimate) and is a little over 0.1% of the number killed in the Holocaust.  Ultimately defining genocide isn't a numbers game, it's about the nature and characteristics of the act.

In the long run, the UK government's good relations with Netanyahu could end up looking as poorly judged as having good relations with Hitler - the only real difference between the two leaders' actions is one of scale.  It's interesting that one of the reasons given for scepticism over the claims that Donald Trump is a fascist is that true fascist governments of the past have tended to be violently expansionist.  Well, Trump may not tick that box (notwithstanding his fury when Denmark refused to sell him Greenland) but Netanyahu certainly does - he's made no secret of the fact that he's going all-out for annexation of what both he and Bill Clinton call "Judea and Samaria", ie. the sovereign Palestinian territory of the West Bank.  The Israeli government also meets a number of the other criteria for fascism, notably militarism, suppression of opposition and a belief in racial supremacy.

An authentic fascist leader is committing an authentic genocide in plain sight in the year 2024 - and yet he remains the West's number one buddy.  That's going to have long-term consequences for leaders like Starmer, probably well beyond what most people can imagine right now.

Do Brit Nats *really* think they can sell Prime Minister Badenoch as acceptable to Scotland? They may need to try, as new poll shows a Britain-wide Tory lead

During the Tory leadership contest, I suggested that a Robert Jenrick victory might open up a potential new path by which independence could happen, because he was using withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights as a wedge issue to try to get elected, which would be like a red rag to a bull for many liberal Remainers in Scotland.  Of course Jenrick did not win, and some Tories like George Osborne specifically voted for Kemi Badenoch because they don't want to leave the ECHR, and yet the paradox is that the new path to independence may still be there.  Badenoch has not ruled out leaving the ECHR and has said there may be some circumstances in which it will be necessary, but even beyond that issue she's just extraordinarily right-wing as an overall package.  Many commentators have described her as far-right, and although some might argue that's an exaggeration, I think it's fair to say that at the very least she occupies a grey area between the mainstream hard-right and the far-right.  So if she becomes Prime Minister, or even if a realistic expectation develops that she's going to become Prime Minister in 2028 or 2029, the familiar debate will start again about whether the UK has become too extreme a country for Scotland to feel comfortable within.

Looked at from that point of view, the early signs are ominous for the Brit Nats, because More In Common's first GB-wide poll since Badenoch became leader shows the Tories surging into the lead.

GB-wide voting intentions (More In Common, 8th-11th November 2024):

Conservatives 29% (+3)

Labour 27% (-1)

Reform UK 19% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 11% (-3)

Greens 8% (-)

SNP 2% (-1)

James Cleverly's elimination from the leadership election was supposed to be Christmas come early for Labour because he was purportedly more voter-friendly than Badenoch, but that ignored the fact that the biggest obstacle the Tories have faced in recent times is the split in their natural support base between themselves and Reform UK.  Badenoch would seem to be far better placed than Cleverly to woo Reform voters back, and although there's no real sign that she's succeeded in doing that yet, both the polls conducted since she became leader have shown the Tory vote increasing rather than decreasing (with the caveat that the increase is minor and statistically insignificant in the case of the Techne poll).

*  *  *

You may well already have seen the video below, but if not I urge you to watch it, because it moves discussion about the genocide in Gaza into a radically new phase.  Apologists for Israel have until now tried to play a philosophical game by arguing that it doesn't matter how many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians are mass-slaughtered, as long as Israel can nominally claim to have been targeting Hamas in each strike, regardless of how wildly implausible that claim often is, eg. "yeah we bombed the hospital and killed dozens of patients and doctors but that was only because the terrorists buried their GOLD there".  The idea is that it may not technically be genocide if you can muddy the waters about "intent" and "purpose" and make a case that civilians have only been mass-killed "incidentally".  But when you have a credible witness setting out how Israel have on a daily basis used drones to precisely target individual children to murder, you move beyond differing interpretations of possible 'indirect' acts of genocide, and are left with indisputable evidence of a genocide that is every bit as direct, calculated and industrial as the Holocaust, the Srebrenica massacre or the Rwanda genocide.  European politicians have thus far been let off the hook of facing up to that fact thanks to Israel doing its utmost to prevent any independent witnesses to the genocide, so that the pretence can be maintained that this is simply a conflict like previous ones Israel has been involved in, albeit with the customarily insane number of non-Israeli civilian casualties.

To answer the question asked by John Mason and others "if Israel wanted to commit genocide, why haven't they killed ten times as many people?", I'd have thought the answer was pretty obvious - they want to exterminate Palestinians at the maximum scale and speed consistent with retaining the support of the United States.  For any other country that would be an almost impossible balancing act, but not for Israel - and with the incoming Trump administration offering Netanyahu a blank cheque, we may now see the rate of the mass killings increase dramatically to something akin to the murder of Jews in the gas chambers.  The obvious question for us in this country is: what, if anything, will Keir Starmer and David Lammy say and do while this happens?  And if they do nothing other than moronically parrot the words "Israel has the right to defend herself", what will be the long-term consequences for themselves, the Labour party, and the continued viability of the United Kingdom?  

Where is the International Criminal Court?

British surgeon Nizam Mamode broke down in UK Parliament, describing Israel’s quadcopters DELIBERATELY TARGETING CHILDREN who had just been bombed.

pic.twitter.com/oGPYyDFBoz

— sarah (@sahouraxo) November 12, 2024