Protesters march through London waving Iranian flags
Large crowds gathered in Parliament Square waving Palestinian and Iranian flags, while also demanding an end to the bombing in Gaza.
Protesters urged the Government to halt all military support for Israel and lobby the country to de-escalate its actions in the Middle East.
It comes after Israel launched a series of air strikes against nuclear and military sites in Iran on Thursday night.
Tehran then struck back on Friday with missile attacks on Tel Aviv.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign announced an emergency protest earlier in the week which it publicised on social media, titled: 'Emergency Protest: Stop Bombing Iran - Stop Arming Israel'.
In a post on X, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign shared a video which showed a large crowd chanting outside the houses of Parliament.
A post read: 'Thousands in Parliament Square demanding our government stop arming Israel and pressure it to stop bombing Iran and end its genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.'
Protesters also held placards which read 'don't attack Iran' amid other banners which read 'stop arming Israel' and 'ceasefire now'.
An Instagram caption from the group read: 'As it commits genocide against the Palestinians, Israel is now bombing Iran. Join us to demand our government stop arming genocidal Israel.'
In a clip on X, the English author Michael Rosen, who was at the march, was shown reading a poem which included a quote: 'They come, they kill, they kill, they go'.
Meanwhile, a group of Pro-Palestine protesters were seen waving Iranian flags at a march in Glasgow.
A crowd walked through the Scottish city in the rain with a number of Palestinian flags and a large Iranian flag.
The protests come after the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, warned that the country would intensify attacks on Iran in the coming days.
'We will hit every site and every target of the Ayatollahs' regime and what they have felt so far is nothing compared with what they will be handed in the coming days,' he said in a video message.
He added: 'We have dealt a very severe blow to Iran's main enrichment site, and if necessary, we will also hit it again.
'There is a huge threat from ballistic missiles, we have taken action to destroy Iran's ballistic missile production capabilities.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Cash use to be tracked amid ‘two-tier society' fears
The Bank of England will monitor the use of cash payments amid fears that vulnerable groups risk being excluded in a 'two-tier society'. Threadneedle Street officials are set to intervene after MPs warned more checks were needed to ensure people can still pay with cash in public places, such as coffee shops, leisure centres and on public transport. There are currently no legal requirements in the UK for businesses or organisations to accept cash, fuelling fears that pensioners and people with disabilities could be shut out. Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury select committee, welcomed the move by the Bank and said it was a 'positive first step'. It comes after the committee revealed earlier this year that vulnerable groups were having to pay higher prices for essential goods amid an increase in the number of shops not accepting cash. However, it also said there were significant obstacles in assessing the true level of cash acceptance across the UK. A study by Link, the UK's cash machine network, in 2024 found that half of those surveyed had been to a business or organisation in the last eight weeks that did not accept cash or discouraged cash use. Yet 98pc of small businesses said they accepted cash when polled by Savanta. A lack of consistent evidence makes it challenging for the Government to determine how widespread the issue of cash acceptance is in the UK. There are concerns that a decline in cash acceptance will lead to the exclusion of vulnerable groups such as the elderly, people with learning disabilities, and domestic abuse victims. Dame Meg said that the Government 'consistently agrees' with the Treasury committee's view 'that action needs to be taken to avoid financially excluding vulnerable groups'. In response to the committee's findings, Emma Reynolds, the economic secretary to the Treasury, said: 'Ensuring individuals have access to the appropriate financial products and services they need is a key priority for the Government.' The Treasury is due to publish a financial inclusion strategy later this year, 'which will examine the barriers consumers face to accessing products and what more industry and government can do to support them'. ATM decline When appearing before the Treasury committee in January, Ms Reynolds said the Government had 'no plans to regulate businesses, big or small, to compel them to accept cash'. Yet the committee has argued that ministers may have to legally mandate cash acceptance in the future if a 'two-tier society' arises. Worries of a decline in cash acceptance have emerged alongside a significant fall in the number of free ATMs. The number of cash machines in the UK fell by 5pc year-on-year to 46,182 in 2024, according to Link. Since the pandemic, there has been a rise in the number of businesses that call themselves cash-free, with others stating that they prefer customers to accept card or contactless payments. Over the last decade, there has also been a significant decline in the number of cash transactions. Cash accounted for just over half of all payments in 2013, but that fell to 12pc in 2023 as the popularity of card and digital payments increased. Blackouts in Spain and Portugal earlier this year prevented the public from making card payments. The committee highlighted the importance of physical cash in emergency situations, warning that alternatives must be in place in the event of a major technological failure or a state-sponsored cyber attack.
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Britain is broke: how inflation-linked debt costs us £60bn
Britain is broke. That was the depressing conclusion of the Office for Budget Responsibility's annual report on the future of the public finances published this week. Of course the fiscal watchdog did not choose those exact words. Instead it used 65,000 other words, but if you were to distil the overall message, it's hard to come to a different conclusion. The watchdog chose to focus its report this year on the ruinous cost of the triple-lock pension promise and the strain that net zero will place on the public purse. But in Westminster, all the talk is about how a little-known policy decision made decades ago is putting the government in an uncomfortably tight fiscal straitjacket. That decision was to start promising investors who lent money to the government that their cash would be protected from the ravages of inflation. Or in more technical language, the government started issuing index-linked gilts that were tied to the retail prices index (RPI) measure of inflation. This innovation meant investors could lend the government money safe in the knowledge that if inflation rose, the amount of interest they would receive and the amount returned at the end of the term of the loan would rise so the real value of their investment would never fall. Conventional gilts offer no such protection. The lender is just paid a fixed amount of interest each year, and a fixed amount of cash is returned at the end of the term. The consequences of this policy for the public purse are only now beginning to be felt because of the higher levels of inflation since the pandemic. The numbers are stark. In 2020 the government spent £25 billion a year on debt interest, but in the last tax year it spent £105 billion. By comparison, it spends £60 billion on schools, £55 billion on defence and £20 billion on the police. So who is to blame and how did we get here? The short answer is politicians. The long answer is more complicated. Decisions on the type of debt to issue each year are made by the chancellor but they are informed by officials and subject the demands of the market. The record shows that particularly high levels of index-linked gilts were issued under the chancellorships of Gordon Brown and George Osborne. However, the policy itself was first introduced by Geoffrey Howe, who was chancellor in 1981. Howe made the decision in part because the early Thatcher government was struggling to borrow what it needed after the economic crises of the 1970s, but also because it signalled that the Treasury was serious about cracking down on inflation. By promising to protect the real value of money lent to the Treasury, investors were reassured that the new government would not repeat the reckless and inflationary policies of the previous decade. There was also strong demand for this type of government debt from the pensions industry because it helped to fund the inflation guarantees in final salary schemes. • OBR rings alarm on pensions, climate change and the fiscal rule In the decades that followed, index-linked gilts, or 'linkers' as they became known, were hailed as a clever innovation because they met this demand and actually saved the government money. The reason was that investors would accept a lower rate of return on index-linked loans than conventional gilts because of the inflation protection they offered. Provided the RPI rate remained low — and over the next few decades it generally did — the government benefited by having to pay less interest on its debts. Indeed, an official analysis in 2023 found that the Treasury cumulatively saved £158 billion by issuing linkers in place of conventional gilts between 1981 and 2022. However, the equation dramatically shifted in 2022 when inflation surged to a high of 14.2 per cent. Suddenly, the amount the government had to pay to service its debts ballooned. Britain's public finances were hit uniquely hard because over the preceding decades the UK government had issued so much more index-linked debt than anyone else. By 2022, nearly 25 per cent of Britain's outstanding borrowing was index-lined, more than twice as much as any other G7 country. Italy has the next highest holding at 12 per cent but US debt has only 7 per cent and Germany less than 5 per cent. This meant that between 2019 and 2022, debt interest costs increased faster in the UK than in every other OECD country. The proportion of this increase that is down to linkers is subject to debate because the pandemic greatly increased government borrowing generally and the interest rates on conventional gilts also increased. However, an analysis by The Times of RPI rates and the stock of outstanding government debt, suggests the decision to issue linkers over conventional gilts cost the Treasury £62.8 billion in higher interest payments during 2022 and 2023. To put this in perspective, a penny on income tax raises only about £6 billion. These higher borrowing costs are set to continue for years to come as linkers mature and are repaid. It is one of the main reasons why the annual bill for servicing the nation's debt is set to hit £132 billion by 2030, according to the OBR. Whatever the exact cost of linkers, there can be no doubt that they have severely constrained Rachel Reeves's ability to enact meaningful policy, or borrow to invest in Britain's creaking public services. To make matters worse for the chancellor, investors in the gilt markets are acutely aware of the government's inflation-based debt problem so they scrutinise her every policy decision. Any move that suggests Labour might abandon fiscal responsibility rapidly raises the interest rates they demand to lend to the government. That is a major problem when the Treasury needs to borrow more than £250 billion this year and why these investors have been nicknamed the 'bond vigilantes'. The bond market really is an ever-present sword of Damocles hanging over the government. Anyone who doubts its power should remind themselves what happened to Liz Truss following her disastrous mini-budget. Perhaps understandably, no one is jumping to the front of the queue to take the blame for creating this situation. A Treasury source said that successive chancellors had to decide between the 'short-term attraction' of index-linked gilts and the longer-term risk. The 'red hot' demand from the pension industry made those decisions harder. However, the source admitted that, in hindsight, the issuing of index-linked gilts 'went too far'. While no politicians have publicly blamed the officials who advised them, questions have been asked about the role of civil servants. The principal official responsible for advising the government through the Brown and Osborne period was Sir Robert Stheeman, who was chief executive of the Debt Management Office (DMO), a Treasury agency created in 1998 when the Bank of England became independent. The DMO took on the bank's role of issuing and servicing gilts, with an objective to 'minimise financing costs over the long term, taking account of risk'. While there is no public record of Stheeman, who was earning £145,000 a year when he left in 2024, explicitly calling for more linkers, he did repeatedly describe them as a 'key part of the UK financing programme' and emphasised their cost advantages under certain market conditions. Last year, his replacement, Jessica Pulay, noted the markets' robust demand for index-linked gilts. However, ascribing any blame to officials at the DMO is tricky because they have no decision-making role and are only there to advise and execute government orders. So as successive chancellors were making merry in the bond markets, drunk on the illusion that inflation was a historic problem, did anyone raise the alarm? The short answer is very few. There were some warnings but they were muted. For example, in the mid 2010s, the House of Lords economic affairs committee highlighted that the UK's large share of inflation-linked debt made the public finances unusually vulnerable to inflation shocks — however it was presented only as a theoretical risk. Given the extended period of low inflation the country had benefited from, few took much notice. It was only when the OBR raised the alarm in 2017 that the Treasury decided to act. In the 2018 budget, Philip Hammond announced the government would gradually reduce the proportion of index-linked gilts it issued. Over the next five years, the share of government borrowing raised using linkers fell from 23.5 per cent to 12.4 per cent. However, it was too little, too late. Decades of much higher levels of issuance, and the fact that the inflation uplift on these debts kept their value rising, meant that by 2022, when inflation surged, more than 25 per cent of all outstanding gilts were still index linked. Rumours in Westminster suggest that for years the Treasury did not want to address the risks because linkers were considered a useful tool to constrain excessive departmental spending and the profligacy of No 10. The theory is that having a high proportion of index-linked gilts meant that large increases in public spending would be inflationary and therefore prohibitively expensive. Whether that theory is true, remains to be seen. However, what cannot be disputed is that Britain's debt experiment will handicap chancellors for years to come.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
UN Gaza investigator Francesca Albanese says US sanctions against her a sign of ‘guilt'
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, has responded to news that she will be sanctioned by the Trump administration with a post on X saying 'the powerful punishing those who speak for the powerless, it is not a sign of strength, but of guilt'. On Wednesday, as part of its effort to punish critics of Israel's 21-month war in Gaza, the state department sanctioned Albanese, an independent official tasked with investigating human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories. In two posts on Thursday, she wrote 'Let's stand tall, together' and urged international observers to focus on the crisis inside Gaza. 'All eyes must remain on Gaza, where children are dying of starvation in their mothers' arms, while their fathers and siblings are bombed into pieces while searching for food,' she wrote. She also spoke to the Middle East Eye's live show saying: 'It looks like I've hit a nerve. 'My concern is there are people dying in Gaza while you and I are speaking, and the United Nations are totally unable to intervene.' Albanese, a human rights lawyer, has been vocal in calling for an end to what she describes as the 'genocide' that Israel is waging against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel and the US, which provides military support, have both strongly denied that accusation. Israel has faced accusations of genocide at the international court of justice and of war crimes at the international criminal court (ICC) over its devastating military assault on Gaza. The sanctions on Albanese set a dangerous precedent, said the spokesperson for the UN secretary general, António Guterres, adding that the special rapporteurs did not report to Guterres and he had no authority over them. Jürg Lauber, the UN human rights council president, said he regretted Washington's decision and called on all UN member states 'to fully cooperate with the special rapporteurs and mandate holders of the council and to refrain from any acts of intimidation or reprisal against them'. The UN rights chief, Volker Türk, called for a halt to 'attacks and threats' against people appointed by the UN and other international institutions such as the ICC, whose judges have also been hit with US sanctions. In recent weeks, Albanese has issued a series of letters urging other countries to put pressure on Israel, including through sanctions, to end its deadly bombardment of the Gaza Strip. The Italian national has also been a strong supporter of the ICC's indictment of Israeli officials, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes. She most recently issued a report naming several US companies among those aiding what she described as Israel's occupation and war on Gaza. On Wednesday the US secretary of state said on social media: 'Albanese's campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated. 'We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defence,' Marco Rubio wrote. He announced Albanese would be added to the US sanctions list for work that had prompted what he described as illegitimate prosecutions of Israelis at the ICC. Albanese has been the target of criticism from pro-Israel officials and groups in the US and in the Middle East. Last week, the US mission to the UN issued a scathing statement calling for her removal for 'a years-long pattern of virulent antisemitism and unrelenting anti-Israel bias'. The statement said Albanese's allegations of Israel committing genocide or apartheid were 'false and offensive'. The US sanctions are the culmination of an extraordinary and sprawling campaign of nearly six months by the Trump administration to quell criticism of Israel's handling of the deadly war in Gaza. Earlier this year, the Trump administration began arresting and deporting faculty and students of American universities who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and other political activities.
