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https://twitter.com/mrbensellers/status/1854811760722575726

https://twitter.com/middleeasteye/status/1854726431269700016

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Ben Sellers

@MrBenSellers

Oct 7

🧵From October 7th 2023, Israel has been telling the world that the only possible reaction to the carnage of that day was vengeance, collective punishment, civilian bodies upon bodies. Of course, it’s not true. There were a hundred other courses that could have been taken. (1/8)

41,870 Palestinians killed in 365 days (one in 55 of the population of Gaza). 16, 756 of them children. 11,346 of them women. And that doesn’t include the missing, the buried & those killed in the West Bank. A collective punishment beyond comprehension. (2/8)

Added to the deaths, the number of injured. At least 97,166 Palestinians injured in 365 days (one out of every 23 people in Gaza). Again, the vast majority non-combatants & so many children. In July, UNICEF said that at least 1000 children had lost one or both legs in Gaza. (3/8)

Read 8 tweets

Ben Sellers

@MrBenSellers

Sep 29

🧵 For me, the biggest lesson that there is for the left coming out of the Corbyn years is the inability to defend our own activists & the movement. Not enough care or thought has ever been given to this, but it was the cancer at the heart of our project. (1/7)

It started almost as soon as @jeremycorbyn won the leadership in Sept 2015 & the development of Momentum. Those who felt that they should control the politics decided there were people who were expendable. Key activists were manoeuvred against & others thrown under the bus. (2/7)

It focused around the weaponised antisemitism allegations, but really what it was about was control. Many people in positions of power & influence within the movement were happy to see grassroots democracy be sidelined in favour of a controlled, top down space. (3/7)

Read 7 tweets

Ben Sellers

@MrBenSellers

Sep 10

🧵 My objection to @keir_starmer getting any applause is endless, but let’s just talk about today: once again, he used the whip to openly bully MPs. Not to hold them to collective responsibility as Shadow Cabinet members, note, but as *backbenchers*. This is unprecedented. (1/4)

Starmer & his team are using the Parliamentary whip in a way that it hasn’t been before - even under Blair. Parliamentary democracy is hardly perfect but one of the things that is sacrosanct is that backbench MPs should be able to vote as their conscience dictates. (2/4)

This isn’t about MPs being free spirits & ignoring party policy altogether, but it’s an important principle - how do you represent your constituents if you have no independence to oppose the party line without losing the whip? What Starmer is doing is a danger to democracy. (3/4)

Read 4 tweets

Ben Sellers

@MrBenSellers

Aug 3

🧵 Just to recap, because events move so fast, it’s hard to make sense of them: firstly, a group of far right politicians, social media ‘names’ & organised fascists jumped on a tragedy to claim that the person responsible for the carnage in Southport was a Muslim / refugee. 1/13

The exploitation of the tragedy by the right began the moment people like Farage, Grimes & Robinson started to ‘cast doubt’, talking about a cover up & how the country had had enough. The logic being, if it was a Muslim, that crime would justify the tarring of all Muslims. 2/13

There was absolutely no proof for any of this, not that it mattered to these far right ‘leaders’. Police information on the suspect was leaked in an attempt to quell the rumours, declaring that he was born in Cardiff & had Rwandan parents. But the die had been cast. 3/13

Read 14 tweets

Ben Sellers

@MrBenSellers

Jul 27

🧵 Clearly, one of the reasons there is such a vicious backlash against Muslims in Britain right now is the fact that they have been more visibly active in politics over the last year or two, especially within the protest movement over the genocide in #Gaza. (1/10)

This, after a long period of being ignored & excluded from any voice in British politics. The reasons for that marginalisation are complex but real. They include the stigmatisation of Muslims, but also the wider British Asian population, over the ‘war on terror’ & Prevent. (2/10)

But there was also the idea that the British Asian communities had nowhere else to go politically - that they would always vote Labour no matter what. That meant that the Tories mostly ignored them as a vote lost (apart from the super rich) & Labour took them for granted. (3/10)

Read 10 tweets

Ben Sellers

@MrBenSellers

Jul 24

🧵 I don’t think many of the media or people on platforms like this understand quite what @Keir_Starmer has done. Parliamentary democracy is designed to have a number of safeguards to stop party leaders behaving as despots: one of those is limits of the use of the whip. (1/9)

Of course, Parliament is not perfect & in some ways very undemocratic in the way it works, but there are some elements that are important in terms of preserving the independence of constituency MPs, who are not just a tool of a party leadership. (2/9)

If the party, or more precisely, the party leadership, could dictate to their MPs, every time there was a vote in Parliament, why would we bother with a MPs or Parliament at all? Why not just elect an executive to make decisions, as if it was a corporation, with a CEO? (3/9)

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