It’s telling that the Daily Mail can cry crocodile tears for the working class when it suits them. Their latest screed about Labour’s supposed “job tax” a rise in employers’ national insurance contributions, performs a sleight of hand: conflating employer costs with worker losses, while ignoring the grotesque siphoning of wealth from public infrastructure to private equity that’s defined the past forty years. Employer NI is not a tax on jobs. It’s part of the social wage—the portion of collective wealth returned to the people as healthcare, education, pensions. But even the faintest signal that capital may be asked to give up a fraction more than before sends the press into hysteria. When the Mail squeals, it’s not because it cares about working people. It’s because the people who own the Mail are being asked to share.
Meanwhile, the American President is taking his sledgehammer to what’s left of the global trading system. Following his announcement of sweeping new tariffs, markets worldwide began to haemorrhage. Within minutes of opening, the FTSE 100 fell 5 per cent, with similar crashes across Europe and Asia. “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump said, as if the economic dislocation of millions could be administered like cough syrup. But when the medicine poisons everyone else, it’s not a cure, it’s a nationalist hallucination. His tariffs, like his carceral militarism, are aimed not at transformation but domination. There is no plan beyond the assertion of imperial muscle and the illusion of economic sovereignty. The working class—American, British, Palestinian—is left to take the hit.
Which brings us to Gaza. As the British right ties itself in knots over employer tax rates and fiscal discipline, a 240-page dossier has landed at the Met’s war crimes unit accusing ten British nationals including officer-level personnel of participating in the killing of civilians, attacks on hospitals, and the desecration of the dead. That the names are not yet public speaks to the British state’s instinct to shield its own. But there’s no ambiguity in the charges. Corpses bulldozed in hospital courtyards. Aid workers gunned down by snipers. Historic sites obliterated. These are not aberrations but the logical conclusion of a military campaign designed to extinguish Palestinian life—and one in which Britons have actively participated.
Kemi Badenoch, who’s quick to posture as a defender of British sovereignty when it comes to Brussels, has no issue supporting the Israeli state’s decision to bar British MPs from entering Gaza on humanitarian grounds. “They are our allies,” she says. Not the allies I would want. Not the allies who uphold international law. Not the allies who see civilians as human beings.
For decades, the British establishment has sold the fantasy of neutrality, of moral authority, of being the adult in the room. But here is the truth laid bare: British citizens, wearing Israeli uniforms, are implicated in war crimes. And yet the British press is more concerned about a fractional rise in employer tax. The same government that shrugs at a collapsed NHS and an unaffordable housing market will fight tooth and nail to protect the financial interests of firms paying minimum wage, and offer silence, or worse, complicity, when evidence of British involvement in atrocity is placed before it.
These are not separate stories. The rage at modest redistributive reform, the gleeful destruction of global markets in the name of nationalist pride, the impunity for war criminals, all stem from the same ideological foundation: the sanctity of capital, the disposability of life, and the belief that the powerful should never be held to account.
When capital squeals, we should listen, not to what it says, but to what it reveals. It’s not jobs they care about. It’s power. And it’s long past time that power was confronted.
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