By Theo Russell, NewWoorker (NCP).

Tens of thousands of people across England, Wales and Scotland took to the streets last Saturday, 19^th October, in support of the demands to Stop the Genocide, Hands Off Lebanon and Don’t Attack Iran.

Over 30,000 people packed London’s Trafalgar Square, carrying Palestinian and Lebanese flags. One of the speakers from the plinth beneath Nelson’s Column pointed out that current opinion polls show that only five per cent of British citizens are opposed to an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, highlighting the huge gulf between the British people and the government – or to be specific, between the British people, the Labour and Conservative parties and the Unionist parties in the north of Ireland. All the other parties with members of the UK’s four parliaments have been calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire for many months now.

This is how Britain’s ruling class blatantly defies the overwhelming will of the British people and makes a mockery of Britain’s much vaunted ‘democracy’.

People in Britain and around the world find it incredible that Israel has committed crimes under the Geneva Conventions – the indiscriminate targeting and collective punishment of civilians – for over a year with impunity. Now we see Israel killing thousands of civilians throughout Lebanon, a country not able to defend itself, and issuing diktats to residents ordering them to move or be bombed, with no condemnation from the leading Western countries.

More and more people are seeing the contradictions between Western outrage against actions by the Russian military in Ukraine and the free pass given to Israel to murder and starve civilians and bomb any country in the Middle East with no international mandate whatsoever.

And of course no politician or mainstream Western journalists is ever allowed to say a word about the Banderite Ukrainian junta’s military deliberately targeting civilians with missile attacks.