Heroes

Julian Assange
Free at last, the WikiLeaks founder should never have had to strike a plea bargain to be granted his liberty — and in the judiciary’s connivance at a blatantly political extradition bid, and determined blind eye towards outrages such as the US considering assassinating him on British soil, we learned almost as much about the way so-called British justice works as we did about the crimes of US and British imperialism from the invaluable revelations on war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.[[{"fid":"72658","view_mode":"inlineleft","fields":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Julian Assange","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Julian Assange"},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"2":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Julian Assange","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Julian Assange"}},"attributes":{"alt":"Julian Assange","title":"Julian Assange","class":"media-element file-inlineleft","data-delta":"2"}}]]

A happy new year to Julian and his family from us at the Morning Star — we won’t forget what you’ve taught us.

Gisele Pelicot
The case that shook France should shake all Europe. Pelicot’s husband found scores of willing accomplices to sexually abuse his drugged wife while he filmed. Many apparently happily married men and fathers of small children. The husband’s arrest, originally for filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket before police uncovered his grim video library, shows the importance of fully investigating all forms of sexual harassment; so many defendants’ defences revealed a patriarchal indifference to the notion of consent.

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“Shame must change sides,” Pelicot declared as she waived her right to anonymity to empower all victims of rape and domestic abuse. With our own government acknowledging violence against women and girls as a national emergency, we must learn the lessons of the Pelicot case in Britain too. As the banners outside the court read: Thank you, Gisele.

Diane Abbott
Subjected to racist, misogynistic abuse, including from a top Tory donor; suspended from Labour then held in limbo for over a year in its laughably unfair disciplinary processes; kept waiting till the last moment to learn if Labour’s first ever black woman MP might be permitted by the gracious Sir Keir to stand for the seat she has won with thumping majorities again and again for the party.

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She held firm, ignored attempts to bully or bribe her into retiring and is now Mother of the House of Commons and that rarity, a Labour MP who dares criticise the government. 

The anti-racist movement
Early August saw fascist violence spread across the country. Racist thugs smashed neighbourhoods, attacked mosques and tried to set alight hotels with refugee families inside. For some days the terror seemed to be spreading.

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Then communities stood up to racism. From the locals cleaning up Southport to the mass mobilisations of Newcastle, Brighton or Walthamstow, the fascists were told: you shall not pass. Such demos do not just happen: they depend on the organisers, the anti-racist campaigners of groups like Stand Up to Racism, and on community-based alliances we need to strengthen to defeat an ongoing far-right menace.

Dr Husam Abu Safia
A heroic man today symbolises a heroic people. Israel’s horrific destruction of the Kamal Adwan hospital at the weekend was its genocidal war on Gaza in microcosm: the deliberate targeting of a hospital, in this case the last in north Gaza, whose people are perishing from hunger, thirst and cold as well as Israeli bombs thanks to Tel Aviv’s demolition of basic infrastructure and chokehold on aid. The preposterous 15-minute window to evacuate hundreds of sick and wounded, when there is nowhere safe to go.

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And the courage and commitment of a Palestinian doctor, already bereaved by Israel’s killing of his son, now under arrest for refusing to abandon his patients. We join all those demanding Israel release him immediately — his case will spur us on to keep fighting for justice for Palestine.

VILLAINS

Nigel Farage
The welly-wearing, pint-swilling Reform UK leader poses as a jovial man of the people, but he has a vicious streak — periodically exposed, as in his jibe that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is a “taxi service for illegal immigrants” for presuming to save people from drowning. Farage is a familiar face in British politics, but he now heads a small cohort of MPs and a party gaining ground on Labour and the Tories by the day. Farage is a fraud: his party seeking Thatcherism on steroids, privatisation of public services and harbouring horrors like the Clacton activist who wanted to shoot refugees in small boats. Seeing off this threat is a priority for the left in 2025.

Elon Musk
It might be going too far to talk about monkeys and organ grinders, but Reform UK is much more a US-funded project than a British one, and Musk’s threatened $100 million donation underlines that.

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The Tesla and tech tycoon has been lined up for high office in the coming Trump administration, continues his battle to break Sweden’s IF Metall union (and in the process its whole collective bargaining model) and has joined Amazon in trying to have the National Labour Relations Board in the United States declared unconstitutional to smash trade unionism there. Elon “we will coup whoever we want” Musk is an enemy of democracy and labour rights everywhere, one actively directing his colossal wealth to shape a dystopian future of untrammelled corporate power. 

Paula Vennells
The Horizon scandal is a warning, both in the way technical malfunctions can ruin lives in an era of increasing dependence on computer and AI-driven decision-making and in the callous disregard for ordinary people shown by the elite managers of big institutions.

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Former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells may have had to hand back her CBE, but she stands for a whole cadre of lucratively rewarded chief execs who amass fortunes while trampling over their workforce and denying responsibility for their actions. 

The privatised water companies
Which takes us on to these crooks. The long-suffering public face steep hikes in water bills over the next few years — to pay for the infrastructure repairs and upgrades the water companies have neglected for decades while loading themselves with debt, siphoning tens of billions off in dividends and paying their do-nothing executives eye-watering sums to poison our rivers and seas. Nationalise the lot and start the prosecutions.

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Benjamin Netanyahu
And we have to end here, because the genocide being inflicted on the Palestinians is the most urgent crisis anywhere in the world today. Horrendous wars rage elsewhere, but no other conflict sees such systematic killing of children, medics, aid workers, journalists. Netanyahu and his fascist cabinet colleagues are bent on the erasure of the Palestinian people: openly mooting the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, unleashing terror on the West Bank, invading Lebanon and Syria, bombing and assassinating people in Yemen and Iran, and all with our government’s help. This has to end, and the warrant for his arrest implemented as he is dragged before the International Criminal Court.

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