Glasgow University students block West End road amid protest
The protest, which began at around 11am, was in response to a University Court meeting scheduled for the same day at 1.45pm.
The students, alongside supporters from the Gaza Genocide Emergency Committee (GGEC), Glasgow University Celtic Supporters Club (GUCSC), and other pro-Palestinian organisations, are part of the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) campaign.
READ MORE: Manhunt launched after man stabbed in 'targeted' midday attack
The protestors called on the court members to vote for unconditional divestment from arms companies, which make more than 10% of their earnings from arms sales.
This demand followed the release of the court agenda on April 16, 2025, which made no mention of a vote on divestment, only a revision of the Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) policy.
The SRI policy does not include the requirement to divest from arms companies.
The roadblock is the latest in a series of actions on the university campus by GUJPS.
In March, the group increased their presence on campus through continued direct action.
Students took part in a 10-day hunger strike, established an encampment on Library Hill, and last month, more than 100 students blocked University Avenue.
READ MORE: Scottish TikTok in uproar after baby named this common Scots insult
GUJPS argue that the university's investments in arms companies make it complicit in war crimes and the genocide in Palestine.
The group are also protesting the university's increased crackdown on student activism, as one of their members, Neve Mclean, faces a ban from the university campus.
This is the second Glasgow University student to face these disciplinary measures for their involvement in student activism this year, following the ban of Hannah Taylor, which was recently revoked.
Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, Rector of Glasgow University, recently commented on the use of 'authoritarian' measures from the University management following the ban placed on youth demand activist Hannah Taylor.
In January 2024, a Demilitarise Education FOI request showed that there were 23 active grants totalling at least £60,343,849 at the University of Glasgow, which were in partnership with—or in a few cases, directly funded by—10 defence companies.
These grants covered research grants, studentships, and research centres, and were held across four schools at the University of Glasgow, including Engineering and Physics and Astronomy.
READ MORE: Do you know him? CCTV image released following assault at Old Firm
According to Glasgow University's Student Representative Council (SRC), they held an indicative referendum last month.
The motion was: "Should the University of Glasgow stop investing in companies that earn more than 10% of their revenue from the arms and defence industry?"
The motion passed with 83.9% of votes in favour.
An open letter was published by the SRC in the days following the vote, but there has been no response from university management.
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New Statesman
2 hours ago
- New Statesman
Should Labour copy the Danish Social Democrats on migration?
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. Photo by Omer Messinger / Getty Images Years before Keir Starmer's 'Nation of Strangers' speech I found myself on the doors at Labour's ill-fated Hartlepool By-Election campaign. A front row seat to the new leader's Labour Party and its floundering first steps in pro-Brexit Britain. Joining a slim team (made up entirely of Labour Party staff bussed in from the North West) I marched around the kind of council estates that were once reliable Labour strongholds. An inexplicably cold Spring afternoon with a colder welcome waiting behind each door. A series of hairdryer-strength rants about how the party had abandoned Hartlepudlians. Bafflement about taking the knee for Black Lives Matter. In an attempt to sell a changed Labour to one resident, a middle aged man in an England shirt. Whether he liked the new, patriotic flag-toting leaflets we were handing out. He mimed spitting on the floor in front of me, then spoke about how the Labour council had closed the local police station. The vacuity of Labour's new offer was palpable then, with Starmer still speaking mostly to Westminster press corps about how he wasn't Jeremy Corbyn. Little to say about the economic system that had left Hartlepool as one of Britain's child poverty hotspots. It was that teachable moment, encountering the pure disdain for Labour in one of Britain's most deprived neighbourhoods, that led me to wonder whether the left really was completely doomed, or whether another left wing party had turned the dire situation faced by Labour around. Enter Mette Fredriksen. In Denmark, Fredrikson's Social Democratic Party (SDP) was celebrated for leading her party back to government after beating the populist, hardcore anti-immigration Danish People's Party (DPP) – a rough analogue to Reform. By the mid 2010s, DPP were the second largest party in Denmark, largely drawing their support from rural, manual workers and pensioners. Stymying this flow of voters and returning them to the left is a miracle of European politics. A case for left-wing beatification. Denmark has become the laboratory for any left politician wondering how to win back the type of voter that used to be their most loyal. Frederikson's party has returned, aggressively, to the traditions of the social democratic covenant. In everything they do there's an emphasis that trust and integration are paramount; a prerequisite for any redistributive politics to exist. This pathos would be familiar to anyone who had knocked a voter's door in one of the post-industrial red wall towns, like Hartlepool, that have emerged as globalisation's marked losers in the winnowed field of British life. In these areas there is a longing for the sense of being knitted together by societal norms, values and friendships that has gone missing. In their place; a country where the state seems to exist as a mechanism to help someone else – someone that you feel little sense of shared endeavour with – first, if it ever gets around to helping you. Frederikson's gambit has been to restore the legitimacy of left politics through forced assimilation: either the population becomes more incontestably Danish or the social democratic tradition dies like an unwatered plant. In the front page of the SDP's 2018 strategy pamphlet Just and Realistic she appears above a quote reading 'You are not a bad person because you do not want to see your country fundamentally changed. And you are not naive because you want to help other people live a better life.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This last chance saloon mentality led to dramatic policy shifts – significantly more coercive than any in the recent Labour tradition – paired with a language of morality and a sense of self-belief that contrasts the more apologetic tone and secrecy of Starmer's Labour. The Danes do not try to debate immigration with their working class voters. They spend their political capital at elections on arguing successfully for traditional left policy – increasing public spending in a society where 88 percent of voters are happy paying some of the highest taxes in the world. Could Frederiksen's example help Labour's least popular Prime Minister in generations? Could it help him win again in those white majority, working class areas the party is currently projected to lose to Reform in 2029? Where Labour needs to be careful is not to re-enact the same decade-long mistake it made with the wholesale adoption of the identity politics of America – without checking its relevance to Britain. The Danish political debate on immigration and multiculturalism orbits around the 'Ghetto Package' of 2018. Introduced by the right, Frederiksen's winning coalition of 2019 continued the policy with few adjustments, save it being renamed the 'Parallel Society Act.' The Act empowers the government to designate areas 'vulnerable' where they exhibit a mix of factors related to a lack of education, low incomes and higher than average crime rates. People that might in a less PC-era have been referred to as 'the poor'. There's a further factor common to all the 'vulnerable' areas – most of their residents are officially designated as 'Non-Western'. This group includes migrants from South America, Asia and Africa and their children. A cynic might argue that 'South America' is included in the list in order to muddy the waters on whether the policy is ethnically-targeted and discriminatory, something the European Court of Justice will decide later this year. When an estate receives the 'vulnerable residential area' designation, sanctions are enacted. The owning housing association or municipality must reduce the number of social housing units in its stock to 40 percent. Participation in crime becomes collectively and more harshly punished, with an entire family liable to be evicted for a crime committed by a relative. Since the act came into effect thousands of social homes have been lost. While thousands were sold to private investment firms, multiples more have simply been demolished. Thousands of families have been evicted, 11,000 are expected to be moved on by the time of the programme's end in 2030. The effect on Denmark's overall stock of social housing is small and the 'ghetto laws' apply to a comparatively small amount of that population, less than 1 percent. However, it is hard not to see these punitive measures mostly as a means to make an example of communities based on their ethnic heritage. The accompanying, much-maligned policy of taking assets from refugees had only ever been applied in four recorded cases by 2022. These are policies designed to make an example in rhetoric more than they are designed to make progress with integration into Danish values. What could Labour learn from Frederiksen's success? Could the party create its own equivalent vision equivalent to 'Just and Realistic'? Not a 'Nation of Strangers' but a more positive and hopeful proposition, that showed a belief in Danish society's ability to absorb and overcome its issues, so long as everyone feels a sense of shared purpose? Any leader of the left today must be able to face up to the collapsing consensus of the liberal political era, acknowledge the difficult reality between the politically convenient myths, as Denmark did. Among those myths; most parties of the Left in the Western World are parties of the working class. They aren't. Most have spent a generation haemorrhaging working class support and members. Further, after a rate of migration outpacing the rate of housebuilding for a parliament, the majority of the public thinks immigration levels are too high. Especially so those in the left-behind areas that notionally left wing parties should feel a natural compassion and solidarity toward. Another myth is that a multicultural society leads to integration by default. We are beginning to see parallel societies in England – as evidenced by the exceptionally poor levels of English spoken in places like Leicester, a recipe for pariah status. Alongside this, the emergence of a form of politics that votes along ethnic, racial and religious lines more so than by ideology. It is difficult to imagine the kind of cultural chauvinism whereby Danes see their society as superior taking root in Britain, but it's exactly this that leads to both their approval of high taxation, high trust and to their unforgiving focus on integration. But just like we are not America, we are not Denmark. Danish ghettos are a result of the country's quietly unacknowledged, decades long, nativist approach to housing. In the supposedly liberal nordic countries, Asian and African migrants and asylum seekers have been pushed into conurbations of undesirable housing and became second-class citizens. The Danish Left has been more forthcoming than Britain about the effects of this ghettoisation, phlegmatic when it comes to publishing the racial details of criminality and working backwards from the numbers. But Britain, by contrast, has not developed a culture of sublimating morality to statistics and that is a strength – Britain loves a triumph over the odds, we give second chances. At no point in history was there a working class life that wouldn't be doomed by quick statistical contextual rundown. Britain has done significantly better, historically, in creating a country where migrants contribute and become part of the country's social fabric. Contrary to the dominant liberal left view of Britain as an avowedly racist country that has barely moved on from the 50s, the most diverse areas of Britain are the most socially mobile. Almost every ethnic group out-performs white working class children at school. We have fewer 'ghettos'. Our housing policies have largely mixed social tenants with private tenants in the same estates. It's almost certain that Britain would never tolerate a racialised idea of a person as 'non-western'. If applied as in Denmark, this label would encompass the former Prime Minister, celebrities like Mo Farah, Linford Christie, Idris Elba, Bernadine Evaristo and the Reform chairman Zia Yusuf. Most of all, it would be an enormous mistake to interpret the SDP's success as solely oriented around issues of immigration. By 2022 the issue had largely fallen away from Danish political debate, with only the rump of Danish Democrats (the DPP successor party) still citing it as one of their main political motivations. Frederiksen had succeeded in neutralising the issue, but she had won on a platform of reducing cuts to social welfare and maintaining taxes much higher than in Britain. Her voters in 2022 placed welfare as their highest priority. Labour, boxed in by fiscal rules and an unwillingness to make the case for taxation, is about to enact the biggest cuts to social security since the coalition. Where Frederiksen did truly excel was in leading her party openly and authentically into this new era. Starmer has so far chosen to hold this conversation in the back offices of Labour HQ, ignoring his party's members, winning consent to lead with a fake mandate. Now, trailing in the polls, time has run out for back room meddling. Labour needs its own reckoning. Related
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4 hours ago
- The National
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READ MORE: 'He should be in the Hague': Laura Kuenssberg slammed for Israeli president interview One reason why Palestine Action is facing such a harsh reprisal is the clear embarrassment the Brize Norton event has caused the British Government. By breaking into an RAF air base, Palestine Action has sharply highlighted the limits of British power and security, at a time where Keir Starmer's Government seems keen to impress a reactionary US administration and show support for Israeli aggression in Iran. Meanwhile, the tactics of Palestine Action,have proven to be highly effective. Targeting institutions complicit in the genocide of Palestinians – such as Israeli-based military contractor Elbit Systems UK – it has used highly visual forms of direct activism to great effect, with occupations, the scaling of public structures and the spray painting and daubing of buildings. Such activism has both disrupted the British military and British-based businesses profiting from war and genocide, and tapped into a widespread sense of disapproval and disgust across the public at UK Government for Israel, a country which has carried out mass killings. The use of counter-terrorism powers against Palestine Action may seem surprising, but it represents a long process by which successive UK governments have sought to clamp down on activism highlighting British hypocrisy on the international stage. For many years, counter-terror police have been conducting intelligence gathering on climate activists, to see if their activity could 'indicate a path towards terrorism'. Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have regularly faced harassment and threats of counter-terror action. The proscribing of Palestine Action not only forms part of an assault on activism, but also showcases how counter-terrorism has become increasingly anti-Palestinian in its orientation, with British authorities deliberately and systematically conflating support for Palestine with terrorism. Academics and human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, have long detailed experiences of harassment by counter-terror police, based on actual or perceived support of Palestinian rights. The UK Government Prevent programme has played a significant part in securitising Palestinian activism, with schools students as young as five being reported to authorities after expressing sentiments in support of Palestine. Since the start of massive Israeli violence in Gaza in October 2023, such reports have skyrocketed by 455%, with students told to remove badges, stickers and T-shirts that have 'free Palestine' on them, alleged retaliatory measures against college students for tweeting support or joining pickets for Palestine; and reports of university exclusions, suspensions and investigations, as well as the cancellations of pro-Palestinian events. This normalisation of targeting of pro-Palestinian activism has had severe legal impacts, leading to prosecutions based on anti-activist sentiment. These include the prosecution of three women who displayed images of paragliders during a protest and a man for wearing a green Saudi Arabian headband containing the basic statement of the Islamic faith 'shahada', on the charge of 'carrying or displaying an article in a public place in such a way as to arouse reasonable suspicion' that they were supporting Hamas. In addition to the long trend by successive UK governments of criminalising Palestinian activism, proscription now frames it as a terror threat – equating Palestinian activism with, for instance, the 2005 London bombings, the murder of 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, or the execution of 77 left-wing youth at Utøya, Norway. The use of such powers has frightening implications for Palestinian activism, not just because it will be framed as a security threat to the British state, but also because of how such legislation is constructed. The Act of Proscription, as detailed under Part II of the Terrorism Act 2000, not only makes it illegal to be a member of a banned group, but also criminalises a host of other actions that are, or can be perceived as, being linked to the aims or objectives of the group. It is not just a terror offence to belong, or profess to belong to, a proscribed organisation, in the UK or overseas – it is a terror offence to engage in acts that may be considered as supportive. Under Part II, Section 12 of the Act, supportive acts are defined as 'moral support or approval' of a proscribed organisation, expressing an opinion or belief supportive of a proscribed organisation, or encouraging support for the activities of such an organisation. The implementation of this law, when used against a non-violent Palestinian activist group, is the criminalisation of anyone who publicly expresses sentiment in support of Palestine Action's aims. Its website lists these as 'ending global participation in Israel's genocidal and apartheid regime' and seeking to 'make it impossible for … companies to profit from the oppression of Palestinians' Proscription also criminalises the wearing of clothing or carrying of signs that may 'arouse reasonable suspicion' that an individual supports a proscribed organisation, under Section 13 of the Act. This includes publishing images of such items online. Pro-Palestinian clothes, the Palestinian keffiyeh, Palestinian flags and signs are now very squarely in the crosshairs of counter-terror police, creating a vast array of possibility for prosecution of activists. The proscription of Palestine Action places people in Scotland and across Britain in very dangerous legal territory. Heavy-handed measures are increasingly being deployed by the British state to prosecute non-violent groups and activists as 'terrorists'. Successive UK governments have sought to roll back human and democratic rights under the guise of counter-terrorism, prevent activism critical of the British state, and to conflate Muslim communities and Middle Eastern issues with terrorism. The banning of Palestine Action represents an attempt to crush dissent that highlights British complicity in war crimes and embarrasses the UK Government. It also introduces a host of deeply worrying possibilities for the prosecution of activists, journalists, academics – indeed, anyone who speaks out in support of Palestinian rights, an end to the genocide and the use of public activism. Proscription shows the contempt the UK Government has for Palestinian freedom, and should be a loud alarm for those who value democracy and human rights, in times of genocide. Richard McNeil-Willson lectures in the Islamic and Middle Eastern studies department at the University of Edinburgh
NBC News
6 hours ago
- NBC News
Mahmoud Khalil addresses supporters after ICE release
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