Daily Archives: June 22, 2022

The Soviet Union is commonly described in the West as the Soviet empireor even Russian empireand in key respects this was indeed the case. During the Cold War, Moscow occupied and controlled a collection of states along its periphery, and the historical record of Russias expansion through conquest and colonization is abundantly clear. But in neither journalism nor academia has this led to what should have been a logical conclusion when it comes to understanding conflicts in the former Soviet space: Namely, to place these conflicts into the wider context of what happens when empires fall.

This lack of interest seems odd, given the Western liberal intelligentsias deep concern with imperialism and its critiques. When I covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath as a journalist for the Times of London, my prism was shaped by years spent working in South Asiafirst as a student of imperial history and then as a journalist. It was therefore natural for me to see the disintegration of the Soviet space as a post-imperial process. This was perhaps the greatest difference between my perspective and that of most of my Western colleagues.

The Soviet Union was, of course, a very special case among empires. But that, to a greater or lesser extent, might be said about all of them. Huge differences existed between the British, French, and Spanish empires, let alone the Ottomans or the Chinese. A fundamental dividing line, however, cuts across them all: that between land and seaborne empires. Russia was a land empireand in some respects remains one, in both its composition and its politics. This has had critical consequences during and after the Soviet collapse, continuing until today.

The Soviet Union is commonly described in the West as the Soviet empireor even Russian empireand in key respects this was indeed the case. During the Cold War, Moscow occupied and controlled a collection of states along its periphery, and the historical record of Russias expansion through conquest and colonization is abundantly clear. But in neither journalism nor academia has this led to what should have been a logical conclusion when it comes to understanding conflicts in the former Soviet space: Namely, to place these conflicts into the wider context of what happens when empires fall.

This lack of interest seems odd, given the Western liberal intelligentsias deep concern with imperialism and its critiques. When I covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath as a journalist for the Times of London, my prism was shaped by years spent working in South Asiafirst as a student of imperial history and then as a journalist. It was therefore natural for me to see the disintegration of the Soviet space as a post-imperial process. This was perhaps the greatest difference between my perspective and that of most of my Western colleagues.

The Soviet Union was, of course, a very special case among empires. But that, to a greater or lesser extent, might be said about all of them. Huge differences existed between the British, French, and Spanish empires, let alone the Ottomans or the Chinese. A fundamental dividing line, however, cuts across them all: that between land and seaborne empires. Russia was a land empireand in some respects remains one, in both its composition and its politics. This has had critical consequences during and after the Soviet collapse, continuing until today.

Notwithstanding the brutal ongoing war in Ukraine and the similarly brutal suppression of the Chechen rebellion, the conflicts and disputes that followed the Soviet collapse have been far from the worst in the history of empires, including relatively recent ones. In every case without exception, the end of empire has led to massive violence. In some cases, this occurred during and immediately after the imperial collapse. In others, the violence occurred after several decades had passed. In Ireland, the Middle East, South Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, the consequences of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and British empiresand of the nature of their dissolutionare still working themselves out today, generations later.

The relationship between empire and local conflicts has been a thoroughly ambiguous one, summed up most famously in Tacituss epithet about imperial Rome, which the Roman historian placed in the mouth of a British chieftain: Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellantthey make a desert and call it peace. The creation of empires involves massive violence, sometimes on a genocidal scale. Thereafter, however, the imperial powers economic and political interests require the maintenance of peace across its territories. The claim to have ended conflict and brought peacewhether under a Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, or Pax Americanais also fundamental to its legitimacy and sense of imperial mission.

Yet empires notoriously also freeze, generate, and incubate conflicts. Sometimes this is because imperial rule suspends previous conflicts, as between Hindus and Muslims in British India or Armenians and Azeris under the tsars and Soviets. Sometimes the source of conflict is the empires creation of completely new states or states with new borderssuch as Iraq in the Middle Eastthat lump together different ethnicities that had never previously lived in the same polity, divide a people among neighboring states, or force ancient enemies under one roof, as in the former Yugoslavia and many African nations. This leads not only to civil conflicts but sometimes to wars between successor statesas in Kashmir, the former Yugoslavia, and Ukraineas successor states fight to redraw borders in accordance with their version of ethnic or ethno-religious legitimacy.

Sometimes bitter resentment is the result of mass migration set off by imperial economic development or targeted colonization: English and Scots to Ireland, Chinese to the East Indies, Indians to Fiji and the West Indies, Tamils to what is now Sri Lanka, Georgians to Abkhazia, Russians to the Baltic republics and parts of Ukraine. Nowhere have the results been free of serious tension.

Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is formal or informal arrangements such as those in Malaysia and the Baltic states, whereby the indigenous populations monopolize control over government and the security forces, while the descendants of Chinese and Russian immigrants, respectively, dominate much or part of the economy. The worst outcomes are dreadful massacres such as the killings of Chinese that accompanied the Indonesian coup of 1965 or violent spasms such as the Georgian-Abkhaz War of 1992-93 that began with Georgian armed pogroms against Abkhaz and ended with the ethnic cleansing of most of the Georgian population by the Abkhaz victors.

Neither international law nor democracy provides clear-cut answers to any of these disputes. It was the theory of ethnic self-determination in the name of democracy, as adopted by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at the conclusion of World War I, that provided an ostensibly liberal rationale for violent separation and cleansing across the vast ethnic tapestry of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. As in Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Crimea, the principles of international law and democracy often work against each other, with the result that states pick and choose between them depending on their own advantage. Majoritarian democracy is a notoriously dangerous principle in ethnically divided societies with different national allegiances, as the history of Northern Ireland from the 1920s to the 1990s so vividly demonstrates.

Finally, it is hardly reasonable to expect local people and their leaders to be automatically obedient to international laws they never made or agreed to. When the British, Ottoman, Habsburg, and Soviet empires collapsed and Yugoslavia disintegrated, it was very natural for Northern Irish Catholics, Kurds, Sudeten Germans, Kosovar Albanians, Kashmiri Muslims, Bangladeshis, Biafrans, Serbs, Croats, Pashtuns, Chechens, South Ossetians, Karabakh Armenians, and Crimean Russians to seek or support independence and/or union with co-ethnics in a neighboring state. Sometimes, as in Ireland, South Asia, and Sudan, the result (after much violence) has been internationally accepted partition. In a majority of cases, things have been decided by some combination of pragmatism and superior force.

There is, however, one great difference in this regard between the aftermath of sea and land empires: Sea powers can go home across hundreds or thousands of miles of water and separate themselves (albeit often only after dreadful independence wars, as in Indochina, Algeria, and Kenya) from the conflicts they leave behind. In former land empires, the old core imperial nation remains on the borders of its former imperial possessions, and its own majority and minority populations often extend across those borders.

This has been true of Turkey, which includes a huge Kurdish population that overlaps with the Kurdish minorities of Syria, Iraq, and Iran and naturally has aspirations to join with them in one Kurdish state. Turkey would have faced similar problems with its large Armenian and Greek minorities had it not murdered or expelled virtually all of them. Germany in the 1920s and 30s, as the successor state to the German empire and bordering many of the lands of the former Austrian one, faced this issue in the opposite direction: large ethnically German minorities in neighboring states that desired reunification with Germany. The countries of the former Soviet Union contain both of these features.

In one case, a sea empire (Britain) also controlled a colony on its immediate border (Ireland), with the result that those belonging to the imperial settler minority (whose descendants are the Irish Protestants) remain citizens of the former imperial state. A consequence has been that to this day Britain rules part of Ireland and, until the 1990s, was involved in what amounted to a postcolonial war. Saying this is not to blame the British politicians of recent generations. They were not around in the time of Queen Elizabeth Is and Oliver Cromwells bloody conquests, nor were they responsible for confiscating Irish land and settling English and Scots on it. In any case, try, if you can, to navigate the modern issues of Irish independence and partition according to any clear-cut versions of either democracy or international law.

None of this is to excuse the Russian invasion of Ukraine, any more than it excuses the frequently horrendous behavior of other imperial and post-imperial states. What it does suggest is two things: First, that Russian wars in Ukraine and the Caucasus are not part of some wider plan for aggression against the West. The Russian war in Ukraine is about Ukraine. We can therefore seek a pragmatic solution to the war without fearing that this will embolden Russia to threaten NATO and the European Union, with the possible exception of the Baltic statesand then only if the Balts were to take some recklessly aggressive action against Russia (for example, by cutting communications to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad).

Contrary to much Western reporting, there has been little evidence of any concrete Russian intentions to invade the Baltic states, let alone Finland or Poland. As a Russian official once told me, We ruled Poland for almost 200 years, and all it brought us was endless trouble. Why on earth would we want to swallow that hedgehog again? From the point of view of vital Western interests, it is therefore unnecessary to seek permanently to disable Russia.

Secondly, we should approach the search for a settlement in Ukraine in a spirit of ethical realism, aimed at a lasting peace that will secure Ukraines independence and potential path toward joining the EU, rather than in a mood of hyper-legalism and hyper-moralism that is all too likely to make peace impossible and which our own history does not justify. In the other post-imperial cases I have mentioned, only very rarely has absolute victory for one side or the other been possibleand then only at the cost of prolonged war and huge suffering. In the majority of cases where some sort of peace, however flawed, has been achieved, it has been through some form of pragmatic compromise. That is the best we can and should work for in the case of Russia and Ukraine.

One funny aspect of contemporary Western liberals is that even as they have publicly beaten their own breasts with contrition and shame for the past sins of Western colonialism, they go on to claim moral superiority over other countries that have inherited some of the same problems and committed some of the same sins. This sort of behavior has a prominent place in the history of religion but is neither moral nor practically helpful.

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What the Fall of Empires Tells Us About the Ukraine War - Foreign Policy

Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. Jeffrey Ann Goudie is a Topeka-based freelance writer and book critic.

Last fall, eating out with friends, my pal Marcia asked us sister expats how we felt when we first moved to Kansas. Except for me, all expressed negative reactions, although each has made her peace with her adopted state. I had moved from Texas.

I felt like I took a step up, I said.

What did you like about Kansas? my friend Harriet asked.

My easy answer: Deciduous trees.

I was an expat but connected to Kansas through my late maternal grandmother. I loved the trees that shed their leaves, along with the green rolling hills around my grandmothers farmhouse. Mind you, my grandma was not a landowner. She rented the bottom floor of a farmhouse off what is now the thoroughfare of a Johnson County suburb.

My love of northeast Kansas is braided with my affection for my spunky grandmother.

At that time, Hollie worked at the old Rexall Drug in the Mission Shopping Center. In a crisp waitress uniform, my 5-foot grandmother presided as assistant manager of the lunch counter, alongside her young friend Ronnie, the soda jerk. Hollie dyed her hair henna under the influence of her best friend at the drugstore, Willie, the beauty and make-up department manager.

My mother took us to see her mother on summer trips from our West Texas home of Midland, where my father worked as a geologist. Midland saw sparse rainfall, and although my Kansas City, Missouri, native father planted fir trees and a water-hungry willow in our yard, Midland was flat, dry, and dusty, scraped by tumbleweeds. In The Land of the High Sky, few trees interrupted the wide view.

For many folks who live on the coasts, Kansas and Texas appear much the same: retrogressive politically and uninteresting geographically. But residents know our states at the granular level.

Southwest from the oil capital of Midland is Marfa, the hip artist mecca. Texas has the exurban sprawl of Dallas and Houston, but also the more striking vastness of Big Bend National Park. The state capitol in Austin is overseen by one of the most hellbent conservative governors in the United States. But Austin and Houston are among the most racially diverse, politically liberal populations in the nation.

Kansas also defies stereotyping. The state is not uniformly flat. Gentle hills surround Topeka, where I live, and steeper hills surround and intersect Lawrence. West of Topeka, the Flint Hills contain the countrys largest remaining tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Our Smoky Hills sport rugged sandstone and limestone bluffs. Spare, beautiful chalk formations rise up in Western Kansas, remnants of an inland sea.

Nor is Kansas bland. Lawrence, Topeka, Kansas City and Wichita have storied traditions in barbecue and Mexican food. Garden City and other southwestern Kansas towns are enriched by immigrants working in the meatpacking and service industries. Thirty-five languages are spoken in Garden City public schools. Topeka is home to the national park celebrating the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregated schools. As for racial diversity, both my widely spaced children attended Topeka High School, which has a majority minority population.

The geographies of my native state and my adopted state influence our politics. The sheer size of Texas spawns a bigger-and-better swagger. Kansas, a rectangle in the center of the country, radiates a common-sense, level-headed attitude.

A month after the expat dinner I asked a Topeka friend who grew up in the Dallas area what she saw as the difference between Texas and Kansas.

I used to think Kansas was progressive, said Marion. Now, not so much.

I understand her sentiment. Just as Kansas is subtly beautiful, its politics have historically been nuanced. Founded by abolitionists, Kansas has mostly resisted the fringes of the extreme far right. In line with a progressive tradition of women in politics, Laura Kelly is our third female governor. Kansas boasts a history of leadership in public health (think Dr. Samuel J. Crumbine of Dont Spit on the Sidewalk fame) and mental health (the Menninger Clinic was founded in Topeka). The Kansas Supreme Court in 2019 ruledthat the states constitution protected womens right to abortion.

But if Kansas has historically been complicated, subtle and nuanced, it is now caught in the maw of fearmongering legislators who want to turn back the clock, ignoring science, diversity and womens right to reproductive autonomy.

I can let Texas be Texas bigger, badder. But I dont want Kansas to become a cruder, more simplistic state, shaped by punitive, restrictive laws. Let Kansas be Kansas in all its vaunted practicality.

Step up, Kansas, so I can still feel like I stepped up when I moved here.

Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. For information, including how to submit your own commentary, clickhere.

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Let Kansas be Kansas, in all its beauty and nuance - Kansas Reflector

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida showed support for budget austerityat the launch of a council on June 19 tasked with proposing to the government sustainable public finance and social welfare systems.

Six political party leaders attended the launch event for the Reiwa Council of People (dubbed Reiwa Rincho) in Tokyo, where theyspoke about their policies.

The post-COVID-19 era cannot help but be restricted by the rapid decline in population and the budget deficit, which amounts to 200 percent of Japans GDP, said membersof Reiwa Rincho at the event.

Kishida mentioned in-fighting in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party over fiscal policy and how he supports fiscal consolidation.

Public finance is the basis of confidence in a country, he said. "There are various arguments within the Liberal Democratic Party, but its the markets and the international communitythat assess the public finance, not us (politicians).

"The crucial point is whether Japan can maintain confidence.

Analysts said the comment can be interpreted as Kishidakeeping in check those who advocate expansionary fiscal policies ahead of the Upper House election on July 10 including opposition parties and some within the LDP, such as former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Kishida showed understanding to the concerns expressed by Reiwa Rincho members.

That fiscal consolidation needs economic growth first is another idea that I want to place importance on, he said.

However, We need to continue arguing for fiscal consolidation, he added.

He also spoke about the sustainability of the social welfare system.

The crucial point is how quickly we can shift to all-generational social welfare services, in which how much people contribute to the system is determined not by their ages, but by their ability to pay, Kishida said.

Political leaders attending included Kishida, leader of the LDP, and Kenta Izumi, head of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan.

Reiwa Rincho aims to make proposals just like previous Rincho councils, which have historically called for significant changes in Japanese government and politics.

Political party leaders talked about their policies on public finance and social welfare--issues Reiwa Rincho described as what the public needs to ask about now.

For the CDP, Izumi said, A Japan that doesnt change and cannot change leads to problems, such as the stagnant economy and declining population.

We need to shift toan economy that prioritizes human rights and the environment in the new era, he said.

Leaders of other parties who meet the requirements to submit a bill to the Upper House also attended the event.

They were Natsuo Yamaguchi of Komeito, the LDPs junior coalition partner; Nobuyuki Baba of Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party); Kazuo Shii of the Japanese Communist Party; and Yuichiro Tamaki of the Democratic Party for the People.

The councilis made upof representatives from the private sector.

Yuzaburo Mogi, honorary CEO of Kikkoman Corp., Takeshi Sasaki, former president of the University of Tokyo, and others became co-heads of Reiwa Rincho.

Japanese society and democracy could plunge into a dangerous state unless we tackle our issues now,Mogi said.

Around 100 members of Reiwa Rincho, who are from businesses, labor unions, and academia, also attended the event.

They will exchange opinions with Diet members, governors and mayors as members of the council.

The council will have three working groups on the government systems, public finance and social welfare, and the use of land, respectively.

The groups will then put together a proposal to the government by the end of this year.

The councils term is three years.

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Kishida leaning toward budget austerity ahead of election | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis -

Palestinians taking part in the Great March of Return. (Photo: Abdallah Aljamal, The Palestine Chronicle)

By Benay Blend

For the past few weeks there have been several articles by and about liberal Zionists who are attempting to create an image of a kinder, gentler Israeli state. On June 8, for example, Mitchell Plitnick published an article covering J Streets efforts to wrest the ear of Congress away from AIPAC. He sees this as a step towards breaking the cone of silence regarding criticism of U.S. policy, thereby opening a space for Palestinians to be heard.

If, as Miko Peled states, Zionism is incompatible with peace, then J Streets attempt to come across as a more liberal version of AIPAC is merely one more attempt to whitewash a venture (Zionism) whose very premise, writes Peled, is flawed.

Rabbi Gerald Serottas piece outlining a Jewish-Zionist plan for a binational/federated state further illustrates the fallacies inherent in such solutions. In his case for what he calls a two-state plus resolution, Serotta relates that he feels a weighty obligation to relieve the mutual suffering of both people.

While he admits the asymmetry of the situation, Serotta points out the sorrow that he says degrades the Israeli Jewish people on a moral level on a daily basis. There are several issues with this statement, the most important, perhaps, the problem that pervades his thinking, is that he not once alludes to Palestinian agency to liberate themselves.

Moreover, he compares the daily indignities, and often daily deaths, suffered by the Palestinian people with the guilt presumably felt by the perpetrators of that strife, while also suggesting that somehow the Palestinians are responsible for assuaging the culpability of their oppressors.

Presumably, the most efficient path to assuaging national guilt is for the nation to stop doing what caused the guilt in the first place, but that does not seem to be happening. According to political activist Haneen Zoabi, 73% of Israelis support the politics of the Israeli far-right (In Pursuit of the Normal: Palestinian Citizenship Within the Zionist Colonial Framework, in Ramzy Baroud and Ilan Papp, Editors, Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out, 2022, p. 362), leading to the conclusion that, left to their own devices, Israelis will not willingly be changing their society any time too soon.

That central fact Serotta does not admit, perhaps because he continues to hold on to all of the core beliefs of Zionism. In that scenario, Israeli Jews are connected to the land through family, history, and lived experience, which is true for those Jewish people who have lived in Arab lands for generations but not for those who immigrated from around the world.

Because he feels that the fears of both people must be met, he suggests rituals such as the joint Nakba/Holocaust memorial held yearly at the first of May. There are many problems with this event that promotes normalization of the apartheid state. Perhaps most relevant here is the asymmetry of both events; while the Holocaust has resulted in generational trauma, the experience itself is over, but the Nakba, by virtue of ethnic cleansing, is ongoing.

What is missing from Serottas concept is the presence of Palestinians. Aside from calling attention to what he feels is their deep division, they exist in his analysis only as victims or as victims reacting violently to their victimhood. Otherwise, they have no agency in his analysis, no ability of their own to imagine a future that is different from what the Zionists plan to do.

In response to this cleansing of Palestinians not only from the land but also from envisioning a future of their own, Baroud and Papp brought together various perspectives into Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders & Intellectuals Speak Out (Clarity Press). In answer to interviewer Mark Seddons question as to what inspired him to put the book together, Baroud replied that it was a sense that while there is a lot of information about the oppression, about the brutality of the Israeli policy, whether analyzing it in the past or understanding it in the present, there was a sense that the Palestinian agency in this is sometimes forgotten.

Moreover, he wanted to go beyond the view that Palestinians are divided, a perspective that Zionists like Serotta highlight. We thought that the first mission was to show, Baroud continued,

first of all, how this resilience, resistance, sometimes very personal, not as part of an organization, sometimes as part of a larger movement is a daily occurrence which gives us a lot of hope that there is still a Palestinian liberation movement, even if, from an institutional point of view, it seems sometimes that it does not exist.

If one message besides liberation comes through in the book, it is solidarity, both on an internal level as in the Unity Intifada of 2021, but also on an international level with certain qualifications. As Baroud explains:

Solidarity is not when you take my place, solidarity is when you stand by my side and try to create networks, support me, help me to communicate my message, but not to replace me. I think that becomes quite clear throughout the book.

This form if solidarity appears lacking in recent moves by liberal Zionists to make their voices heard, perhaps because Zionism is an ideology that continues to figuratively and literally cleanse Palestinians from the land. If, as Ilan Pappnotes, since 1967 Israelis have constructed a benign image of a small [state] that became, through no fault by itself, a mini-empire and an occupier, where is there any room in that delusion of Palestinians legitimately wanting much less being able to bring about liberation?

Papp concludes, however, that perhaps this fabricated narrative might expose the real nature of liberal Zionism, such as the examples given here, and also put an end to all sorts of peace camps, along with believers in the two states solution, thereby challenging anyone who claims that Palestine is lost.

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No Peace without Justice: On Determining the Future of Palestine - Palestine Chronicle

The Ontario governments proposed Highway 413 would cut through not just one but three parcels of land set aside for conservation, according to an internal report obtained by The Narwhal.

Much of the backlash to Highway 413 in recent months has centred on the Nashville Conservation Reserve north of Toronto, which is owned by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. The highway would pave part of the reserve, which is in the protected Greenbelt. But the document obtained by The Narwhal shows that the contentious project will cut through two additional properties owned by the conservation authority.

The 413 is more destructive than we thought, said Gideon Forman, a climate change and transportation policy analyst at the David Suzuki Foundation.

He and other environmentalists say its important to protect southern Ontarios few remaining greenspaces, which naturally store carbon, mitigate floods and provide habitat for endangered species. Conservation authorities are mandated to oversee watersheds, and the land they hold is particularly crucial, often encompassing sensitive ecosystems. The highway project, if built, would disrupt protected wetlands, endangered species habitat, prime farmland and the Greenbelt. It would also worsen existing problems, including air pollution from fossil-fuel burning vehicles, which contributes to climate change, and waterway contamination from wintertime road salt runoff.

The report obtained by The Narwhal is a draft of a document called an initial project description, which Ontarios Ministry of Transportation must submit to the federal government as part of the impact assessment process. Ontario hasnt yet filed a final version.

The document doesnt detail how Highway 413 will affect conservation land specifically. But generally, it says construction will involve direct wildlife habitat removals in wetlands, woodlands and meadows including confirmed significant wildlife habitat and habitat for migratory birds and endangered species along the route.

Ontarios Ministry of Transportation did not answer detailed questions from The Narwhal about where the conservation authority land is located or how many acres of it would be disrupted or destroyed by construction. But Dakota Brasier, a spokesperson for Ontario Transportation Minister Caroline Mulroney, said the province is moving full steam ahead with Highway 413, which it says will create thousands of jobs per year during construction.

Under Premier Fords leadership, the days of endless studies, debates and committees are over, Brasier said.

If built, Highway 413 would loop for 60 kilometres around the northwestern reaches of the Greater Toronto Area, connecting the Ontario suburbs of Vaughan and Milton. Also called the GTA West Corridor, the project was first sketched out decades ago. It was a major plank of the Tories re-election campaign in the 2022 Ontario election.

The previous Liberal government cancelled it after an independent panel concluded it would save drivers less than a minute. The Progressive Conservatives put Highway 413 back on the table in late 2018 after forming government, and now argue it would actually save drivers travelling the length of the route half an hour. (Studies have shown for decades that in the long term, new roads attract more traffic and dont solve congestion.)

Last year, an investigation by Torstar and National Observer sparked more backlash with its finding that eight powerful developers, many prolific Progressive Conservative donors, own significant land that would skyrocket in value if Highway 413 is built.

Amid a rising tide of public concern in 2021, Ottawa stepped in and decided to subject Highway 413 to a federal impact assessment, potentially delaying the project for years. The federal Impact Assessment Agency, which oversees the process, pointed to concerns about how Highway 413 could harm habitat for three species at risk in particular: the western chorus frog, red-headed woodpecker and a type of dragonfly called a rapids clubtail.

The report The Narwhal reviewed is an October 2021 draft prepared for the province by engineering consulting firms WSP and AECOM, obtained through an access-to-information request to the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada.

The draft is incomplete, and notes that Ontarios Ministry of Transportation needs to do more fieldwork in summer 2022. It includes over 300 pages of research, including lists of endangered species living in the area and five nearby aquifers, along with 95 watercourses and 65 archaeological sites located on Highway 413s proposed route that could also be disturbed.

In feedback for the Ontario government contained in the access-to-information request, Impact Assessment Agency staff said the draft lacks details on specific environmental damage that could be caused by the highway, and how the province plans to avoid or lessen that damage.

In an email, the Impact Assessment Agency confirmed the draft is the most recent version it has seen but redirected questions to Ontarios Ministry of Transportation. The project cannot move into the next phase of the impact assessment process or get much closer to construction until Ontario submits a final version of the initial project description, and the agency confirms that final document meets its requirements.

Irene Ford, who lives in Vaughan and is part of the grassroots group Stop the 413, said she believes the Ministry of Transportation is releasing as little information as possible to the public about the new highway.

I do think the public is entitled to know, she said.

Brasier said in an email that Ontarians voted overwhelmingly in favour of Premier Fords plan to build critical infrastructure, including Highway 413, in the 2022 election. But that election, held just weeks ago, had the lowest voter turnout in Ontarios history, with just 43 per cent of those eligible heading to the polls. The Tories won 40.8 per cent of those votes, with the New Democrats and Liberals taking 23.7 per cent and 23.6 per cent, respectively.

The Nashville Conservation Reserve is an hours drive northwest of downtown Toronto, in Vaughan. Its home to the headwaters of the Humber River, which drains into Lake Ontario to the south, as well as lush, ecologically important forest.

In 2020, the Ontario government decided on a route for Highway 413 that would avoid a future development project and send the new road through the Nashville Conservation Reserve instead, the Toronto Star reported in April.

The reserve is especially important because its one of the few remaining places in the region with enough forest to support species that are deterred by nearby human development, said Tim Gray, executive director of the non-profit Environmental Defence.

A lot of birds wont live in forest that is too small or too fragmented, he said.

And of course, having major amounts of forest cover on both sides of the river means that you have water filtration potential there for rainstorms and runoff, to keep these rivers clean, that doesnt really exist [in] many other places in the watershed as it becomes urbanized.

The Ontario government report refers to the other two Toronto and Region Conservation Authority properties along Highway 413s route as Kirby Lands and Etobicoke Creek Headwaters, but doesnt say where theyre located.Brasier didnt answer when asked about the exact location of the properties.

Conservation authorities are watershed protection agencies, regulated by the province and mostly funded by municipalities. Some of the properties they own are open for public use, like the Nashville Conservation Area, which has hiking trails. But they can also hold other parcels to regenerate sensitive areas, or for flood control. The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority doesnt have any public parks called Kirby Lands or Etobicoke Creek Headwaters, and it doesnt maintain a public list of other land it owns, though it does say it holds some property near Etobicoke Creek, which is already under pressure from human development.

In response to questions from The Narwhal about the location and ecological value of the Kirby Lands and Etobicoke Creek properties, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority pointed to other public documents where it expressed concern about Highway 413s impact on the Nashville Conservation Reserve and two other pieces of land.

One property previously highlighted by the conservation authority is near a proposed interchange where Highway 413 would meet Highway 427. The other is a property near Heart Lake Conservation Area in Brampton, Ont., outside of Toronto it includes protected wetlands that are connected by streams to wetlands within the conservation area, which would be pavedfor an interchange with Highway 410.

But the conservation authority wouldnt confirm whether the two properties it had referred to before were the same as the ones listed in the provincial report.

At this time TRCA is not able to accurately understand land impacts on our holdings until further information is communicated from [the province], the conservation authority said in an email.

Theres not much conservation land left in southern Ontario, so those that remain are incredibly important, Forman said.

Even if these areas are not open to the public, they are crucial, crucial sanctuaries for wildlife, whether its migratory birds, whether its local wildlife that doesnt migrate, he said.

Southern Ontario has a lot of endangered species and not a lot of greenspace. So the idea that you would further compromise and pave our greenspace is just utterly irrational.

Photo: Shutterstock

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Highway 413 threatens more Ontario conservation lands than publicized - The Narwhal

The following is an edited version of a speech delivered by Palestinian analyst and scholar Tareq Baconi at a conference entitled Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right, hosted by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin in June 2022. The day after delivering the speech, two fellow speakers, Jan Grabowski and Konstanty Gebert, publicly read a joint statement that misrepresented Baconis talk and condemned his very presence at the conference. In the days that followed, Grabowski continued to denounce Baconi in the right-leaning German newspaper Die Welt.

* * *

Three years ago, U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a Hanukkah candle lighting at the Wailing Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. Turning to the assembled reporters, Netanyahu was pressed to address a breakthrough that Palestinians had been celebrating that day.

Hours earlier, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Fatou Bensouda, had announced that there were sufficient grounds to launch an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by all parties involved in the occupied territories, including by Israel. The decision, Netanyahu told the crowd, amounted to Antisemitic decrees of the International Court telling us, the Jews standing by this wall, by this mountain, in this city, in this land, that we have no right to live here, and that if we live here we commit war crimes. Blatant antisemitism.

Almost exactly a year prior, in November 2018, a gunman a white American male named Robert Gregory Bowers stormed into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 Jewish worshippers, wounding six others. It was described as the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Although President Donald Trump and Israeli leaders flew to Pittsburgh to offer their condolences, the Pittsburgh Rabbi, Jeffrey Myers, blamed Trump and other politicians directly. Mr. President, said Rabbi Myers, hate speech leads to hateful actions. Hate speech leads to what happened in my sanctuary.

When both the ICC and armed white supremacists are seen as equally peddling antisemitism, definitions are perhaps needed to explain what antisemitism is and how it can be combatted. But what happens when those definitions themselves become co-opted?

Tareq Baconi, Palestinian analyst and writer, delivering his speech at the Hijacking Memory Conference in Berlin, June 2022. (Emily Hilton)

Since the years of the Trump administration, more countries have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, a definition initially assembled by experts to help monitor antisemitic incidents in Europe, and which was then expanded into a tool for addressing antisemitism globally.

The IHRA outlines 11 examples of what it views as constituting antisemitism; eight of those include criticisms of the State of Israel. As one defender of the definition said, where classical antisemitism would have barred the individual Jew from having an equal place within society, modern antisemitism [bars] the Jewish nation-state from an equal place among the nations.

In that nation-state, the State of Israel, the right-wing Netanyahu has been replaced by a politician even further to his right a man who once headed the Yesha Council, an umbrella organization representing the settlements of Judea and Samaria, in the occupied West Bank. And since that evening when Netanyahu was outraged that Israel would be accused of committing war crimes, the following has happened (and this is not an exhaustive list):

Israel has bombed and collapsed the buildings that housed the offices of the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera in the Gaza Strip during a military assault in which 243 Palestinians were killed, including 67 children, making 2021 the deadliest year for Palestinian children since 2014; Israel has assassinated the intrepid journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, one of more than 30 journalists who have been killed by Israeli fire since 2000; the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that it is legal to forcibly transfer more than 1,000 Palestinians from Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, in direct contravention of international law.

And in between these headline news in the daily, mundane grind of the occupation Israel continues to kill, detain, and brutalize Palestinians, including 13 children killed this year alone, and more than 400 detained, the majority of whom were taken from their beds in the middle of the night. Earlier this month, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians across the West Bank in the span of 24 hours, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed this year to 62.

Today, Israel is acting with renewed vigor, pursuing its colonization of Palestine with confident impunity, armed with strong diplomatic support, and strengthened by the regional alliances it has cultivated through the so-called Abraham Accords, Donald Trumps normalization agreements, which entailed outright bribery in the cases of Morocco and Sudan. But Palestinians, too, have stepped up our mobilization, pursuing the legal track at the ICC and expanding our Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. We, too, have achieved several pivotal milestones since that Hanukkah in Jerusalem in 2019.

Palestinian citizens of Israel confront Israeli police officers during a demonstration in solidarity with Gaza and Jerusalem, downtown Haifa, May 9, 2021. (Mati Milstein)

In 2021, after tireless Palestinian advocacy, Israeli and international human rights organizations finally accepted what Palestinians have been saying for decades: that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people in our historic homeland. BTselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all come out with highly detailed and well-researched reports making the legal case that Israel is guilty of committing crimes against humanity.

In May last year, Palestinians overcame the colonial fragmentation imposed on us by Israel and mobilized from the river to the sea, as a single people fighting a single regime of apartheid, in what weve come to call our Unity Intifada. This year as Israeli soldiers beat down the pallbearers carrying Shireen Abu Aklehs coffin, demonstrating to international media the vicious nature of its regime Palestinians saw another image: thousands of people from all walks of life flooding into the Old City, reclaiming Jerusalem to commemorate our fallen hero.

Israels response to expanding Palestinian mobilization, and to our hard-earned success in projecting our narrative onto the global stage, has been predictably intensive. Alongside a mass arrest campaign of individuals throughout Palestine following the Unity Intifada, Israel has also expanded its tactics of delegitimizing Palestinian resistance.

For example, six NGOs that form the bedrock of Palestinian mobilization today some of which are at the forefront of the ICC case have been declared terrorist organizations. This includes Defense for Children International-Palestine, which has been at the core of efforts to document Palestinian children killed and detained by Israeli forces. Despite having provided zero evidence to link any of the named organizations to terrorist activities, and despite European diplomats saying that the evidence submitted doesnt meet the required threshold of proof, the international community has failed to push back against Israels smear campaigns, and these organizations are currently struggling for funding and support.

But these are old tools: Israels hasbara tactics have expanded beyond solely linking Palestinians to terrorism, tools of the War on Terror years. Hasbara 2.0, or maybe 3.0, is now focused on deeming Palestinian resistance antisemitic and this has global reach. More than 30 U.S. states have passed laws specifically targeting the BDS movement for supposedly being antisemitic, as shown in the new Just Vision movie Boycott. More than 35 countries around the world have now embraced the IHRA definition, which has assumed legal form and legal legitimacy, as the scholar Rebecca Gould has argued.

A Palestinian woman walks by a grafitti sign calling to boycott Israel seen on a street in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on February 11, 2015. (Miriam Alster/Flash 90)

Israeli politicians have called the reports by HRW and Amnesty antisemitic. When the UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk, in his final report last March, also conceded that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid, Israeli leaders again responded with accusations of antisemitism. This report, Israels UN envoy in Geneva said, recycles baseless and outrageous libels previously published by NGOs that share the same goal as the author of this report: to delegitimize and criminalize the State of Israel for what it is: the nation-state of the Jewish People.

The politics of what Im outlining here are clear for everyone to see. The struggle for Palestinian rights using international law, the ICC, and the UN is antisemitic. It is a threat deserving of equal, if not greater, state intervention and combat as the shooting of worshippers in synagogues under the banner of white supremacy. This equalization is made even more sinister and insidious when noting that the overwhelming majority of actual antisemitic incidents can be traced back to white supremacist ideology. This misrepresentation is a product of the synergies between right-wing ideology and Zionism, synergies which are evident in the pairing of support for Israel with increasingly repressive tactics.

This trend is flourishing in both authoritarian regimes and in supposedly liberal and democratic states. In the United Kingdom, where I live, the government is pushing for the IHRA to be adopted by universities, and for anti-BDS legislation to be passed by city councils; in 2019, a bike ride for Gaza was denied a permit by Tower Hamlets Council, which stated there was a real risk that the event would be antisemitic by breaching the IHRA examples.

Using anti-BDS legislation, that same government has now stated, broadly and without specificity, that public-sector pensions may not make investment decisions that conflict with the UKs foreign and defence policy. The government is now celebrating a plan to place migrants and asylum seekers on planes to Rwanda for processing. These anti-democratic policies are strikingly similar to past U.K. government efforts to limit boycotts of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Palestinians wearing a keffiyeh and commemorating the Nakba are taken in for questioning, losing their jobs, being vilified, and even being compared to Nazis all while the actual neo-Nazi AfD party not so long ago became one of the largest opposition parties in the Bundestag. In France, anti-Zionism is being equated with antisemitism as Emmanuel Macrons government increases efforts to crackdown on French Muslims, including through the passage of a bill giving the state power to monitor Muslim organizations.

Globally, Israel has actively embraced and cultivated bedfellows with regimes such as Viktor Orbans in Hungary, Jair Bolsanaros in Brazil, and Christian evangelicals in the United States, all of whom are simultaneously combining their vile antisemitism with a strongly Zionist vision, embracing Israel as their model, while claiming to safeguard the memory of the Holocaust. In the Middle East, having an apartheid regime cozy up to dictators in the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain is celebrated the world over as an example of agreements which embody peace, coexistence, and religious tolerance. In reality, these deals are nothing more than an affirmation that a counter-revolutionary, anti-democratic regional architecture of surveillance and oppression is in the making.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the UAE Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bahrain attend the Abraham Accords Signing Ceremony at the White House in Washington, USA, September 15, 2020. (Avi Ohayon/GPO)

I want to make three broad and interlinked points in relation to these troubling developments.

Firstly, it should be clear to everyone that this is not about antisemitism it is about geopolitics. Right-wing and conservative governments, frequently racist and demagogic, have been useful allies for Israel, a state which is equally resentful of the Western liberal order even as it tries to position itself firmly in that sphere.

Israel is an apartheid, colonial state that has simultaneously managed to maintain strong diplomatic, military, and economic ties with Western liberal democracies. Its ability to do so is an attractive model to illiberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, and the flourishing of these alliances in the region and beyond is both logical and an indication of where the international order is headed, as the legal norms established after World War II are being systematically eroded. The wrongful conflation around antisemitism has also proven to be a useful tool for Western governments seeking to fuel culture wars in the context of their own domestic politics.

Secondly, Israels attacks on Palestinian activism are in no way limited to Palestinians. They are attacks on free speech, and on the international legal order and norms. The anti-BDS legislation has created loopholes that are now becoming another tool in the arsenal of anti-gun control legislation, anti-green energy legislation, and anti-abortion legislation. This right-wing demagogic reality is one in which Israel can thrive and continue to enjoy its impunity. The widespread selling of Israels Pegasus software to authoritarian leaders globally, from Saudi Arabia to Rwanda, is not merely a commercial exercise, but a carefully crafted geostrategic one. It resembles precisely the kind of vast clandestine relations Israel cultivated with apartheid South Africa in the 1960s and 70s to buffer the regime against widening international isolation.

Thirdly, the collateral damage out of this effort to limit free speech, undermine movements struggling for freedom and equality, and allow for illiberal democracies and authoritarian regimes to flourish are in fact Jewish communities, who often end up being scapegoated in pursuit of these larger aims. Israeli claims about BDS being antisemitic, or the UN being a blood libelous organization, makes a mockery of efforts to combat actual antisemitism and other forms of racism which go hand in hand with hatred of Jews.

So what does this all mean for the Palestinians? The answer is simple: it doesnt matter. In this equation, in these calculations, Palestinians are nothing more than a backdrop, silent at best, a nuisance at worst. I sometimes find myself thinking that Palestinians are just the canvas against which Jewish psychodramas play themselves out.

Thousands of young Jewish boys wave Israeli flags as they celebrate Jerusalem Day, dancing and marching their way through Damascus Gate to the Western Wall, May 17, 2015. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

We Palestinians have been thrust into the position we inadvertently find ourselves in today simply because we are being colonized by a state which defines itself as Jewish. Let us be clear: if Palestinians were being colonized by a non-Jewish state, we would still be resisting our colonization. In that sense, this is a continuation of the historic Palestinian predicament.

The links between Western guilt following the Holocaust and support for the creation of Israel have been well-researched, as have the roots of Zionism, which was met with ferocious resistance by indigenous Palestinians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Palestinians are the indirect victims, the collateral damage, of European and Christian antisemitism. Viewed as inferior beings and irrelevant people who did not factor into the decision-making of empires and colonial minds, the Palestinian plight in the face of Zionism was a non-issue. There is no need to repeat the tropes of a land without a people for a people without a land.

Fast forward a century, and those same European powers including Germany, because of its own atrocious history are exporting not their antisemitism this time, but their quest for absolution, onto the Palestinians. And Palestinians still do not factor into it; they are unseen.

The demonized Jews those now enjoying full sovereign and national control in the form of a nuclear armed state have become the wonder children, the inhabitants of a state that can do no wrong. And in seeking absolution, states like Germany have once again accepted Palestinians as collateral; their oppression and colonization is a fair price to pay to allow Germany to atone for its past crimes. A blind eye must be turned when it comes to the continuation of Israeli apartheid and colonization, lest the state be aggrieved and old traumas reignited. To do so, all voices speaking about Palestinian liberation or celebrating Palestinian lives must be silenced, even if those voices are themselves Jewish.

This reality is not just about discourse, as the IHRA clarifies that the Palestinian narrative is ipso facto antisemitic. Rather, it is linked to the very material structure of Jewish domination and apartheid in colonized Palestine*, which extends itself to the practices of remembrance and memorialization of the Holocaust. In Jerusalem, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum is literally built on the grounds overlooking the ruins of the village of Deir Yassin, where a bloody massacre was perpetrated by Zionist forces during the 1948 Nakba to facilitate Palestinian expulsion and enable Zionist colonization.

For visitors who do not know this reality, they will walk through a museum curated to document the horrific crime of the Holocaust, onto a viewing deck at the end of the permanent exhibit which looks out onto green fields, without ever realizing that they are gazing at bloody grounds. This erasure of the Palestinian catastrophe in a space where the Holocaust is memorialized is a crude trivialization of the lessons of that genocide. It reflects an elision that Israeli leaders, abetted by Germany and other European powers, have helped to sustain.

Visitors seen at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum in Jerusalem on April 26, 2022, ahead of Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

To break with this cycle of Palestinians being viewed as passive agents, as the recipients either of German antisemitism or guilt, I want to end by shifting the center of gravity away from this European and colonial gaze and place it squarely onto the Palestinians, who have always had agency and our own voice.

I want to salute all the Palestinians in Germany, and our allies, who are on the front lines of this repressive trend in Europe. And I want to say that we, as Palestinians, refuse to be singled out to defend against accusations of antisemitism. There is no reason for me to be here, on this stage, in this conference, as a Palestinian. Yet at the same time, we are not voiceless victims, nor mere recipients of European racism and neo-colonialism. And so I want to inject, for clarity and for the sake of moral and political defiance, our own narrative directly into this space.

For over a century, we Palestinians have been struggling against Zionism, a racist settler colonial movement intent on our elimination. In 1948, the Zionist movement declared the creation of the State of Israel, and constituted itself as a regime of apartheid, committed to maintaining Jewish domination in Palestine. Since then, Israel has expanded its persistent colonization of Palestinian land and relentless dispossession of the Palestinian people, a dual process of land consolidation and demographic engineering. Today, Israel is an apartheid state with full sovereign control over all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, persecuting the Palestinian people at home and in their exile. Every Palestinian carries these simple truths in their heart and bears witness to them on a daily basis.

At this crucial juncture in time, Western democracies seem intent on undermining their own loftily declared commitments to liberal values, deploying McCarthyite tactics to assuage their guilt, to allow Israel to flourish, and to further their own increasingly authoritarian agendas. As they expand diplomatic and military relations with Israel, the task set forth for Palestinians is clear. In our struggle for freedom, we have become the protectors of international law, human rights, and accountability. Although this is a burden and a privilege we have not chosen, we will nonetheless continue to struggle both for our emancipation, for a free Palestine, and for a world where justice, freedom, and equality can be enjoyed by all.

*Clarification, June 22, 2022: This point is important and merits a clarification on the choice of wording. Israeli apartheid is a system of Jewish domination in Palestine, not of Israeli domination. For one, Palestinians who are Israeli citizens are also subjugated victims Israeli citizenship does not protect the individual from this system. For another, Israeli apartheid offers privileges to Jews who are non-Israeli, through the Law of Return. As BTselem has noted, this is a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea. To avoid innocent misunderstandings, we have added a clarification that this assertion is geographically limited to colonized Palestine, as the title of the talk suggests.

Here is the original post:

A colonized Palestine isn't the answer to the world's guilt - +972 Magazine

Faced with a faltering economy and soaring energy prices, the Chancellor has come before the nation and announced a battery of new tax measures. Mr Sunak claims these measures will get us back on track, but is digging into ordinary peoples pockets really the answer?

Families across the country are in the grip of a catastrophic cost of living crisis. The governments response to this emergency has demonstrated a lack of any clear strategic vision. With one hand, Boris Johnson has handed households an eye-watering tax bill, while with the other he has offered a half-hearted rebate that is dwarfed by rising prices.

Even after the Chancellors support measures, the rise in National Insurance, the freeze on income tax thresholds, and increased energy bills will leave households 800 poorer this year. In just two months, the governments policies have already cost families an average of 180 all while 1,370 children are expected to fall into poverty each day, according to Resolution Foundation estimates.

Not content with raising the cost of living, Treasury Minister Simon Clarke recently asked workers to show collective society-wide responsibility and agree to low pay increases that will leave them poorer in real terms. Effectively, the government has asked working people to simply accept the damage caused to their budgets by rising inflation.

This refusal to increase wages in line with inflation paves the way for further economic disaster. By decreasing households spending power, Boris Johnson will reduce demand across the economy, starving struggling high streets of business, and driving the UK further towards a recession. Furthermore, it is clear, that not one member of the government has any real understanding of the pressure workers are under.

While families are being asked to both pay more in tax and accept pay cuts, the Prime Minister and Chancellor have worked exceptionally hard to protect the interests of big business.

In June of last year, the UK government pushed President Biden to drop the proposed global minimum corporation tax from 21 to 15 per cent, costing the taxpayer 6.8 billion a year. In the autumn, the Chancellor went on to hand big banks a tax cut that will cost the taxpayer 7 billion over the next four years. Last but not least, the government delayed the windfall tax on oil and gas producers. Had this been brought in just a few months earlier, the Treasury would have received almost an extra 3 billion in revenue.

This litany of cuts and delays demonstrates what many people have already come to realise. Protecting the profits of big banks, fossil fuel companies, and large multinationals is more important to this government than supporting the people facing the most severe cost-of-living crisis in 70 years.

When the government needs to raise revenue, the first port of call should not be families and high street businesses. I, and my Liberal Democrat colleagues in Parliament are calling for tax cuts that will lessen the burden on every household struggling to keep its head above water.

We need to reduce VAT from 20 to 17.5 per cent and put an average of 600 back in the pockets of every household in the UK. This would give a critical boost to local high-streets and help safeguard small businesses across the retail and hospitality sectors.

This boost is something local high streets sorely need. The government has done nothing to help businesses with their energy bills and this lack of support could prove to be the final nail in the coffin for many high streets that are still recovering from the pandemic. Rising employment costs due to the hike in National Insurance, and unfair business rates that make it harder to reinvest profits must be challenged if we are to keep shops, pubs and restaurants from closing.

And thats why we need real reforms rather than empty slogans. I have lobbied for the Treasury to scrap business rates and replace them with a Commercial Landowner Levy that only captures the value of the land occupied by commercial sites, rather than taxing buildings, machinery, and other productive capital that powers business. Simply put, the savings this would produce would allow businesses to reinvest their profits, boosting productivity and wages in struggling industries, and helping revive our high streets.

Ultimately, the government has chosen to saddle households and small employers with higher taxes, whilst protecting its friends, and kicking vital reforms into the long grass. The current crisis is showing us all that the Conservatives can no longer claim to be defending either small businesses, working families, or the squeezed middle. It is time for this government to get its priorities right, cut taxes, and stop taking people and businesses for granted.

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Families urgently need a tax cut to tackle rising living costs - Politics.co.uk