Latest news with #civil disobedience
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Opinion: We've been silenced on mass migration in Britain
I have lived long enough, in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain as well as in the West, to recognise the signs. Serious social unrest is in the air. And you don't have to take my word for it. Even Deputy PM Angela Rayner, a staunch socialist, warned this week that ministers at last need to acknowledge the public's 'real concerns' about mass migration, while Downing Street officials fear the nation is 'fraying at the edges'. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Reform's Nigel Farage captures the public mood when he warns that Britain is close to 'civil disobedience on a vast scale'. The atmosphere of discontent seems palpable. Last week's demonstrations in Epping, east London , ignited by reports that a boat migrant sexually harassed a girl in the street, have provoked other protests, at Diss in Norfolk and at a luxury hotel requisitioned for asylum seekers amid the glittering skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, east London. Alarmingly for the authorities, groups of protesters appear to be gathering outside migrant hotels around the country every day. Yesterday, it emerged that Essex Police had actually escorted Left-wing, pro-migrant counter-protesters to Epping's Bell Hotel, now given over to illegal arrivals. The force has suggested this was to 'facilitate free assembly'. Last year, of course, a wave of riots was set off by the appalling knife attack in Southport, in which three small girls were killed and seven other people – five of them children – were seriously injured by a malevolent teenage psychopath. Now there are concerns such violence could break out again, fuelled by mounting public rage at the seemingly endless tide of young men arriving illegally on small boats. Keir Starmer has spoken about his wish to see our 'social fabric' repaired, but the Prime Minister and his Cabinet simply don't understand that this mounting crisis has been directly caused by their and their predecessors' unwillingness to grasp the concerns of ordinary people. The traditional values that bind a nation and give it stability – patriotism and loyalty to the whole country instead of splintered communities – have long been deliberately undermined by our political leaders and the State itself. Gus O'Donnell, the most senior civil servant in the country under three Prime Ministers between 2005 and 2011, captured this when he boasted: 'At the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration... I think it's my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare.' Again and again, the public have expressed their opposition to such attitudes at the ballot box. Again and again, the politicians have ignored them. One man I spoke to recently, an ex-serviceman named John, told me: 'I'm fed up with feeling like an alien in my own community.' The Labour Party used to represent people like John. No longer. The Blairite project of 'multiculturalism' has visibly failed. Of course there are exceptions, and of course many migrants make a wonderful contribution to our country. But no one can deny that our society is more fragmented than it was a couple of generations ago. Starmer himself, before he feebly backtracked on his own phrasing, understood this when he referred to our 'island of strangers'. But he was right. Large parts of Britain, from Tower Hamlets in east London to districts of Bradford in West Yorkshire, have become ethnic enclaves. Assimilation or integration of the second, third or even fourth-generation migrants living there is increasingly unrealistic. The political establishment refuses to admit these profound problems, because to do so would be to accept the failure of their world view, maintained despite its obvious flaws for 30 years or longer. Why else would Labour ministers be so eager to fight the battles of the past – from reversing Margaret Thatcher's union laws to threatening to prosecute soldiers who served in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and now investigating police actions during the miners' strike more than four decades ago? As this long, hot summer roils on, I fear that events may force our leaders to confront these mounting tensions in our society – whether they like it or not. All it might take is one spark. An online rumour, a viral video clip, perhaps a single inflammatory post on social media – and Tinderbox Britain will go up in flames. Yes, some far-Right thugs have been present at recent anti-migrant protests. But it is completely dishonest of Labour to pretend that these scenes are purely the work of racist agitators. A report by His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services into last August's riots in Southport concluded that most people who took part in them lived locally. They were whipped up not by criminal factions or extremists, but by disaffected individuals and online influencers. Ideology and political views played little part. The riots were a spasm of protest from a people who felt that no one was listening to them. Millions more who took no part in the disturbances still shared some of those concerns. They are ordinary men and women – largely apolitical. They would indignantly reject any suggestion of bigotry, and they are emphatically not racist. And yet they cannot maintain the silence, foisted on them by successive governments, any longer. As prime minister more than 20 years ago, Tony Blair schemed to make mass immigration an acceptable policy, with a 'marketing strategy' to sell multiculturalism to the country. This was despite a report, commissioned by the Home Office, that warned: 'People feel they do not have permission to freely express their fears.' Even then, in faraway 2004, many Britons believed our borders were 'open and overrun'. Labour's response was to downplay these fears, so that immigration stories were 'no longer automatic front-page tabloid material every time'. That cynical technique has become embedded in Labour's DNA. Starmer cannot imagine doing things any differently. But year after year of enforced silence has not dissipated the nation's fears – or its anger. It has achieved the opposite, by containing them under pressure. Now that pressure is building, and though I hope to God I'm wrong, the ominous sense that something terrible is about to flare up is becoming inescapable. Professor Frank Furedi is the director of the think-tank MCC Brussels.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Wells Fargo is complicit': seven arrested at climate protests outside bank's offices
Seven people were arrested as hundreds of climate and Indigenous rights activists participated in non-violent demonstrations at Wells Fargo's corporate offices in New York City and San Francisco on Wednesday, in what marks the launch of a summer of civil disobedience against billionaires and corporations accused of cowering to Donald Trump. In New York City, dozens of protesters stormed the lobby of the bank's corporate offices, disrupting employees by blocking the entrance and calling out what they describe as Wells Fargo's complicity in the climate crisis. Wells Fargo, currently ranked 33rd in the Fortune 500 list, became the first major bank to abandon its climate commitments – just weeks after the president signed a slew of executive orders to boost fossil fuels and derail climate action. The US bank is among the biggest financiers of planet-warming oil and gas companies, with $39bn in fossil fuel investments in 2024 – a 30% rise on the previous year, according to the most recent annual Banking on Climate Chaos report. 'As dozens of teenagers die in climate-driven floods in Texas and thousands die in heatwaves around the world, it's unconscionable that a bank like Wells Fargo would just completely walk away from its climate goals,' said Liv Senghor with Planet Over Profit, the non-profit group that led the New York protests. In San Francisco, seven people were arrested as activists blocked every entrance of the bank's global headquarters for several hours, with members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribal nation locked themselves to a sleeping dragon tripod. The Standing Rock and Cheyenne River tribes spearheaded the 2016 and 2017 fight against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) – the opposed fossil fuel pipeline built through Lakota lands that Wells Fargo helped finance. 'DAPL was built through the Lakota Unceded Treaty Territory, without proper consent. That land holds our history, our spirit, and our ancestors. We're in a time where we should be protecting the Earth, not pushing more oil through it. We owe that to our people and the future generations,' said Trent Ouellettefrom Waste Wakpa Grassroots. Wednesday's protests were part of the Stop Billionaires Summer campaign – a series of planned civil disobedience to disrupt the tech billionaires and corporations backing the Trump administration's dismantling of democratic rights and climate action. It follows last year's summer of heat campaign targeting Citibank, another major fossil fuel funder. This year Wells Fargo is being specifically targeted by a coalition of non-profit organizations, who accuse the bank of capitulating to Trump and supporting the rise of planetary destruction, autocracy and land occupation – in the US and Palestinian territories. In San Francisco, about 150 activists also painted a giant community mural outside the bank's headquarters with the words 'Wells Fargo Funds Genocide', pointing to the bank's investment in companies that provide tech and/or AI to the state of Israel including Palantir – which also has contracts with Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). 'Today's actions are just the beginning of a response to Wells Fargo's enabling of the rise of authoritarianism,' said Leah Redwood with the Oil and Gas Action Network, who helped organize the San Francisco protest. 'Wells Fargo is complicit in so many injustices … the climate crisis or union busting or Trump's mass deportations or the atrocities in Gaza.' Last week, protesters across the US targeted Palantir, accusing the tech company of facilitating Trump's expanding surveillance, immigration crackdown and Israel's human rights violations across the occupied Palestinian territories. Wells Fargo is among the US's largest banks, worth almost $270bn, and with more than 4,000 branches across 39 US states and territories. It is also among the biggest financiers of fossil fuels since 2021 – the year that the International Energy Agency warned the world that there could be no more fossil fuel expansion – if there was any hope of avoiding total climate catastrophe. Since then, the bank's investments in fossil fuels have topped $143bn, according to Banking on Climate Chaos. In 2021, Wells Fargo's chief executive, Charles Scharf, described the climate crisis as 'one of the most urgent environmental and social issues of our time'. In February, Wells Fargo dropped two key commitments – the sector-specific 2030 financed and facilitated emissions reductions targets and its goal to achieve net zero emissions in its lending and underwriting by 2050. At the time, the bank said: 'When we set our financed emissions goal and targets, we said that achieving them was dependent on many factors outside our control,' adding that 'many of the conditions necessary to facilitate our clients' transitions have not occurred.' The announcement comes just months after Wells Fargo quit the world's biggest climate coalition for banks – the Net-Zero Banking Alliance – followed by the rest of its US banking peers. That exodus started one month after last year's election victory for Trump. According to a recent investigation by Rolling Stone, the Texas attorney general boasted about how his office 'bullied' Wells Fargo into abandoning the alliance and other climate pledges. In addition to dropping its climate pledges, the bank has also abandoned its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals – ending policies requiring diverse candidates for senior-level roles. A summer of non-violent disruption is planned for Wells Fargo including a national day of coordinated action on 15 August, in an effort, activists say, to pressure the bank to reinstate its climate targets, stop union busting, and end its financial ties with companies accused of destroying both people and the planet. Climate activists are also preparing to support unionization efforts at the bank, where workers have already voted to unionize at 28 branches. Wells Fargo currently faces more than 30 allegations of union-busting. Wells Fargo declined to comment on the protests or any of the allegations about its investments and policies.
