PENSIONERS MUST SACRIFICE THEMSELVES FOR PALESTINE.
A woman stands in front of a camera in Birmingham and says it is a historic day.
She has a scarf around her neck in the colours of the Palestinian flag. So do the people standing next to her. She says Birmingham City Council is the largest council in Europe, that her group put forward a motion to pull the city's money out of anything where there is credible evidence of crimes against humanity, and that it passed 54 to 19. She says it is a day the citizens should be proud of. She says it is a step closer to the right choices for the people of Birmingham, and for people further away, and for the people of Palestine.
Inside the chamber behind her, when the number came up, they shouted Free, free Palestine. People stood up. Someone raised a fist.
Now let us look at it together, calmly, because it actually is historic. Just not in the way she thinks.
First, what was passed. It is not a law, and it is not a policy. The council writes it itself, the same evening: this binds no one, not even the council. It is a request that the city and the West Midlands Pension Fund spend six months reviewing their investments and consider whether to engage, exclude or divest, "where there is credible evidence of crimes against humanity".
So far, so broad.
There are, after all, quite a few crimes against humanity in the world. China has a million Uyghurs in camps. Sudan has a famine made on purpose. Iran hangs women for showing their hair. Qatar built a football tournament on corpses. Russia abducts children.
Try counting how many countries are named in the text.
One.
And that is what makes it historic. Not that a city council has an opinion about foreign policy. City councils have always had opinions about all sorts of things. More of them impossible than possible. Look at Copenhagen's, which is busy wrecking the capital from the inside. Much of it driven by the same idiocy.
What is historic is that Britain's largest council has now enlisted its own pensioners in a cause four thousand kilometres away… and that the only name anyone could come up with, when it came to finding out where evil lives in the world, was the same name Europe has been able to come up with for two thousand years.
It is called BDS. Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. It is an international campaign started in 2005 with the declared aim of isolating Israel economically, culturally and academically until the state gives in to the demands the campaign makes. And what happened in Birmingham on Tuesday evening is that the campaign was handed the keys to the largest municipal pension fund in Europe.
Not because it won a debate.
Because it got… 54 votes.
"Where money goes, responsibility follows", says the woman who proposed it. It is a beautiful sentence. So let us follow the money.
Birmingham City Council went bankrupt in September 2023. Not figuratively. It issued what in England is called a Section 114 notice, which means the city can no longer pay its bills and may not spend money on anything but what the law requires.
The cause was a claim running into the billions for unequal pay to the city's own employees, and an IT system that cost many times what it was supposed to.
Sounds familiar, by the way.
Oh well. Probably a coincidence.
Council tax went up by almost ten percent two years running. In 2025 the bin men were on strike for months, rubbish lay in the streets in the neighbourhoods where people have the least, and the rats became national news. The city has only just come out of bankruptcy.
That is the city. That is the council. Those are the coffers that are now to spend six months finding out how clean they are with respect to… Gaza.
And now notice the thing that is the actual matter.
The motion was put forward by a group called "Better Birmingham". It consists of seven independent councillors, gathered around one cause, and the cause is… Palestine.
The proposer was elected in Alum Rock, a neighbourhood in east Birmingham where a large majority of voters are Muslim. She sits in the city's leadership with responsibility for health and social care, because the seven are part of the coalition that runs the city.
And now pay attention, because this is where most people get it wrong.
It is not strange that Muslim voters in Alum Rock vote according to their convictions and elect people who carry their cause. Social Democrats do it. Conservatives do it. So do farmers, drivers, teachers and everybody else. That is how democracy works. That the cause happens to lie on another continent and concern the Islamic world's oldest enemy is not strange either. It is just honest.
They say what they want, and they vote for it.
But seven people only have seven votes. There were 54 cast.
So who were the other 47?
The Greens voted for. Nineteen of them. The same party that at its conference in October resolved that "Zionism is a form of racism", and if anyone imagines it is a coincidence that they now want to find out whether Birmingham's pensioners own anything in Israel, it is probably time to stop believing in coincidences. Just a bit of good advice from over here.
The Liberal Democrats, who hold the Lord Mayor's chair, voted for. The Labour group voted for and explains that it was, after all, an amended motion about "a broader approach to ethical investment". Among those who voted for sits an adviser to Britain's Home Secretary. The only ones who stood up and said no that evening were the Conservatives.
And when it had passed, it was not seven people shouting.
It was the chamber.
So here we are. Because that is the real picture from Birmingham, and it is not the picture of her with the scarf around her neck. It is the picture of all the others. The Greens, the Liberals, Labour. People with English names from English families who have sat on that council for generations, and who now stand up and applaud while a council that cannot collect its own rubbish declares foreign policy against the only Jewish state in the world.
People often say the conflict is imported. I have said it myself. But look at the number again. 54 to 19. That is not import. Import is when someone brings something you did not ask for. This is reception. This is a city that took in the hatred that was carried in with both hands, and sang while it did.
Why?
Because it costs nothing.
And because - it gives something.
It is the same here at home.
A city that has gone bankrupt cannot give its citizens clean streets. It cannot give them lower taxes. It cannot give them that sense of being a community on its way somewhere, which a city once could.
But it can give them something else. The same thing you also saw in the American midterms the other day.
It can give them purity. It can let them go through their coffers for six months to find the one impurity that has to go, and then they can stand up and sing, and in that moment they are no longer a city with rats in the streets.
They are a city "on the right side".
It is the oldest ritual there is. The community is sick, and it finds the one that has to go, so that it can be clean itself. That is called a scapegoat, and in Europe that scapegoat has had the same name since Rome. I do not need to say any more about it. You can count the names in the text yourself. There is one.
Birmingham's Jewish organisations warned before the vote of exactly that - that campaigns like this normalise hostility towards Jews in the city, and that the council is legally obliged to weigh that before it votes. The council voted anyway. And what the city's Jews now know is not that a law is coming against them. No law is coming. What they know is that when their city had to work out what evil is called, the chamber stood up and sang, and it was no longer only strangers who sang the loudest.
That is what is going on.
Not that someone has taken the square.
The square was empty. And those who owned it gave it away and applauded when it was taken.
Everything a city was supposed to hold, it did not hold. The one thing it was not supposed to touch, it touched.
What you do not believe in yourself, you cannot defend.
And what you cannot defend, you give away.
With song.
❤️🔥🪽
Well. Happy Friday, friends ☀️
