Meeting held on Wednesday 18th June 2025.
11 were present. Two gave apologies.
Despite Israel’s continued offensive in Gaza, our government is still selling arms to Israel. We struggled to understand why. Was Starmer trying to please USA in order to secure a trade deal?
The situation in US is becoming even more divided, with massive demonstrations in Los Angeles in support of immigrants who are being arrested by Trumps ICE. Under the slogan “NO KING” people are protesting against the destruction of democracy by Trump and his abuse of international norms. This is a pattern repeated across many countries (Hungary, Russia, Israel) all moving towards increasing authoritarianism.
Underlying this shift to the right, in UK, we were increasingly concerned by the rapid rise in inequality, a concern which does not appear to be reflected in either of the main political parties. Like the Tories, Labour is committed to the Treasury economic model, which inevitably increases inequality in wealth. It was suggested that the difficulties lay in attempting to raise more taxes from the rich. But this is a convenient explanation which protects the wealthy, who use their massive wealth to buy political power. So perhaps the issue here is not simply the economic question of redistribution of income or wealth, but the cultural/political question of redistributing power so that we can all play an equal role in our democracy.
With this in mind we considered different approaches to funding political parties in UK.
Regarding immigration we also found that the Labour government, like the Tories, perpetuated a discourse which views immigrants as ‘the problem’, and views those who take the great risk of getting to UK on boats, as representing immigration in general whereas they are, in fact, a tiny minority of immigrants, many of whom are escaping terrible circumstances. We wondered whether the hostile views of immigrants reflected a much wider racism in our society and contributed to the rise of Farage.
In a final discussion we considered whether religion, and religious education, provided some ethical basic for democracy?
The next meeting will be on July 16th.