Les Monaghan

Thank you @ace_thenorth @jomillerdonny @castindoncaster @frenchgate #doncasterisgreat twitter.com/thesmyth/statu…

🚨 Imagine fighting every day just to exist, then some posh podcast prick calls your life a 'half-life' and pretends benefit cuts are moral. 🤡 Fuck right off with that ableist bs. 👀 REALITY: 💥 547k disabled people job-hunting RIGHT NOW 💥 Only 726k vacancies total – most with zero WFH or access 💥 10.4m working-age disabled ➡️ just 5.5m employed Numbers scream barriers, not laziness. But nah, easier to blame us than fix shit. Podcast “saviours” can shove their concern-trolling. Disabled lives aren't “half.” We're whole, we're fighting, and we're done being scapegoats. ♿️💥✊

@danhind @JW_Gallagher they used the IRA connection among ex-Forces

@JW_Gallagher that and Brexit

This is part of a range-finding exercise. As with Corbyn's Labour Party the major media and their politicians will keep trying different themes in search of a combination of messages that breaks up the Green Party's electoral coalition and contaminates the brand. We can't do ...

His five children were all killed, along with his wife who was nine months pregnant with their sixth child, a girl they were planning to name Haifa, after her martyred aunt. His brother, sister-in-law and all of their children were also killed. open.substack.com/pub/dropsitene…

Al Jazeera investigation reveals how US-supplied thermal and thermobaric munitions burning at 3,500C have left no trace of nearly 3,000 Palestinians aljazeera.com/features/2026/…

Over the past 2 years, Israel has killed over 600 athletes in Gaza and destroyed nearly all 264 sports clubs and facilities, effectively erasing an entire sporting community. Yet despite this devastation, Israel continues to participate freely in global sporting events. The world’s complicity in these war crimes is unspeakable.

I have published the photos I took during the assessment I was part of in northern #Gaza in January 2024. The findings were written up by USAID in a cable that was reportedly blocked by the US Embassy at the time, according to a Reuters investigation.

They have names, flight logs, visitors, videos, photos, sworn statements They have evidence They’ve only released half the files because the rest is so terrible Only a woman has been prosecuted These billionaires think you’re stupid Prosecute the Predators #EpsteinFiles

Everyone should be able to afford food. Everyone should be able to afford a warm home. Everyone should be able to afford deodorant and soap. Everyone should be able to afford the essentials.

26 years ago, there were no food banks. Now, because of rising food, rent and bills, and our poor social security system there are over 1,400.

In the 6th largest economy 103000 people died in poverty in 2024. 120000 died in fuel poverty, couldn't afford heating. Ethnic minorities, pensioners, single working age adults more likely to die in poverty Poverty, premature death is a political choice mariecurie.org.uk/document/dying…

The terrorism arrests…

Don't worry, be happy. All those who feared a dystopian future got it wrong: Try to imagine this utterly intolerable, dystopian future: 1. We reach a point where the corporations have grown so large and so fabulously rich that politicians can no longer afford to upset them by legislating to curb their power. The corporations are simply too big to fail. 2. In fact, politicians only pretend to be in charge of policy. Like other sectors of society, their services have effectively been bought by the corporations. Secretly, the politicians prioritise the interests of these corporations, and the billionaires who stand behind them, over the interests of the publics they are supposed to represent. Democracy serves as a facade behind which a kleptocratic class rules. 3. The corporations use their power to advance legislation allowing them to concentrate their wealth even further. They monopolise huge chunks of the economy, like a parasite feeding off the blood of its host. When they disastrously mismanage these monopolies, as they do intermittently, they lean on the political class – their servants – to bail them out with public monies. 4. The biggest profits are made from war, which is ever-present. The corporations use their politician-servants to manufacture enemies from which the public needs defending. This proves a great success. In a fear-driven society, the public is readier to tolerate austerity – the gradual dismantlement of public services, which the corporations can then take over and run as profit-generating enterprises. The public are persuaded that the flow of money out of their own pockets into corporate coffers – into expanding the war machine – is necessary for national security. The public’s most cherished freedoms have to be sacrificed, they are told, to prevent society from growing weak and vulnerable. And the corporations vilify anyone who questions their power as an internal enemy, allied to the external enemy. 5. This grand deception works only because the billionaires also control the media, which serves their interests. The media tolerate limited dissent to give the public the feeling that there is a full plurality of voices. But anyone who really dissents – who challenges corporate power – is denounced by these very same media outlets as a crank, a socialist, an antisemite or a terrorist. Few hear their actual arguments, either because these labels are enough to justify denying them a platform or because the media corporations use their control over the algorithmic basis of modern communications to make sure dissent is secretly corralled into social media dead-ends. 6. As the rule of the corporations goes wrong ever more catastrophically – the resources needed for endless growth run out; the externalised costs of the corporations’ rape of the planet create ever more toxic waste-products and disturb the fragile equilibrium of the climate – the media’s role grows. Its task is to distract the public with an endless diet of smaller crises that can be blamed on “enemies”, nature or chance, but never on the corporations themselves. Public energies are invested in worrying about – and arguing over – the threat from Eurasia and Eastasia, the dangers of terrorism, the menace posed by immigrants, the narcotics epidemic, health emergencies, unexpected “weather” events, the AI apocalypse, the hazards of free speech, and so on. And while the public worries about these things, the corporations suck more money out of the economy, claiming it is needed to protect everyone from Eastasia today and Eurasia tomorrow. That new technologies must be developed to root out terrorism and to stop the boats. That a sophisticated war is being fought at home and abroad against the drugs barons. That a brave new world of medical breakthroughs is being engineered. That vital “green” technologies are being invested in and will save the day. That AI safeguards are being created. That more responsible ways to police speech are being devised. All of this is a dark vision of one potential future. Most likely, it will not come to pass. Our societies are too robust, our freedoms too secure, the corporations too contained for this bleak world ever to emerge.

It appears we have convincing evidence that… a) Tory MPs used their positions to allow friends and family to access Covid funds, and b) that misappropriation of that money has cost (and continues to cost) lives One question: Where are the investigations and prosecutions?

Artist @LesMonaghan’s brilliant “Voice of the People” exhibition is now installed at: Conisbrough Community Library, and Woodlands Community Library in #doncaster. It will tour Doncaster libraries till next Summer then move around the country, always in free public spaces. Was a privilege to get to work on this with people’s stories (I’m the typographer!) It's about the things that really matter. It's about offering some hope. a reminder that it doesn't have to be like this. We can change it all. It's our world! None of this is inevitable. People can be housed, safe, fed, looked after, made whole again. Thanks to some of the lovely people of #doncaster, #rotherham, #hull and #sheffield for taking part and giving their voices. Supported by @DoncasterLib @unitecommhumber @unitetheunion @neu_doncaster @who.is.your.neighbour

When I worked at the Guardian, the foreign editor – now a major columnist – once told me that he did not like his correspondents to spend more than a few years in difficult posts like the Jerusalem bureau because, given time, they were likely to “go native”. At the time I did not understand what he meant. But I learnt soon enough. I moved to cover the Israel-Palestine beat as a freelance journalist in 2001. I had no editors breathing down my neck. I based myself in Nazareth, a Palestinian community inside Israel, thinking that taking a different approach – my colleagues were in Jewish areas of Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv – would make my journalism distinctive and interesting to editors back home. In fact, my different perspective made me far less interesting to them. Indeed, as quickly became clear, it made them extremely nervous of me. But the point is this: despite my unique circumstances, it took me years to fully “deprogramme” and emerge the other side relatively whole. I first had to unravel the conditioning and training – both ideological and professional – that had encouraged me to assume Israelis were the Good Guys and Palestinians … well, they must be something less than the Good Guys. And then I had to rebuild my ideological and professional worldview from scratch – like a child, trying to make sense of all the new information I was absorbing. Although I hid it at the time, the truth is it was a slow, frightening and painful awakening. Everything I believed in and trusted had crumbled to dust. Is it any surprise that the vast majority of journalists never make such a transition. They are highly unlikely to have the opportunity to immerse themselves deeply in the lives of those “natives”. They are rarely allowed the time to step off the journalism treadmill to develop a bigger perspective. They are surrounded by family, friends, colleagues and bosses, who constantly reinforce received wisdom or enforce “professional” standards that shore up the existing consensus. They are disincentivised from straying off the path, when they have a salary to earn, a career to develop, bills to pay, a family to feed. And ultimately, of course, there is the prospect of a terrifying journey ahead, down a dark tunnel to a destination unknown. This is an extract from my latest article Breaking free of media group-think is a scary, lonely journey. I know. I was forced to do it. Find a link to the rest in the reply below ⬇️

My ten cents worth on ten years of fuckery with Robbie Gibb from my time as editor of @Channel4News to trying to get @BBCNews to broadcast our film on Gaza, through No 10, Brexit and Israel the self appointed defender of impartiality, who has utterly destroyed it.

In arresting an Israeli Jewish professor, Haim Bresheeth, for supposedly supporting a "proscribed organisation" (Hamas), the Met have exposed their hand. There is a video of the speech given by Prof Bresheeth at an anti-genocide rally last week. We can all hear for ourselves that nothing he said contravened the draconian Terrorism Act. Instead, he noted – quite correctly – that Israel cannot defeat Hamas or any of the other resistance movements opposed to its genocide in Gaza. As so many others have observed, and history serves as our guide here, you cannot defeat an organisation created to struggle against your violence by engaging in more violence. Israel's genocide is the best recruiting sergeant Hamas could wish for. Israel's strategy – assuming that it is actually trying to defeat Hamas – is entirely self-sabotaging. Pointing this out is not support for a proscribed organisation. It is simple historical analysis – something we all ought to be free to do. But arresting academics for doing it has a very dark pedigree indeed. That is where we have arrived in Sir Keir Starmer's Britain. Israel has smashed into oblivion the constraints of international law through the endless repetition of war crimes. Targeting children, babies, shelters, hospitals, universities, bakeries has been entirely normalised. Now Israel's patrons such as the UK are tearing apart the rules of civil society – to normalise the arrest and persecution of anti-genocide protesters, journalists and academics. Britain is a full partner with Israel, not only by arming and supporting a genocide of the Palestinian people, but by criminalising the right to protest against it, to speak out, to think for ourselves. The Palestinians are in a fight for their very existence. We are in a parallel fight to stop the last vestiges of our freedoms being taken from us. Watch Prof Bresheeth's speech here: skwawkbox.org/2024/11/03/exc…

"You Have a Mother" open.substack.com/pub/chrishedge…

"They came straight to this building and targeted and hit the nitrogen tanks that kept the embryos alive.” theguardian.com/world/2025/nov…