Tower Hamlets Green Party and the local branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign organised a vigil in support of the Palestine Action prisoners and hunger strikers on Friday evening. This is more or less what I said.

Friends, comrades,

I am the only person here tonight to have stood beside the open coffin of someone who died after 73 days on hunger strike.

Kieran Doherty was 25 years old when he died in 1981 and his family home was a short distance from where we lived. I walked behind his coffin and those of several of the other hunger strikers whom the British government let die, not because I agreed with their organisations or their methods, but because it was obvious that they were political prisoners, working class people who in a normal society would never have seen the inside of a prison.

That is why we are here in solidarity with the comrades of Palestine Action.

Heba, Kamran and Lewie are in a long tradition of activists and political prisoners who use their body as a form of protest. Stalin’s opponents in Siberian camps, Gandhi, Suffragettes and the husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

The poet WB Yeats wrote a play about a hunger strike in which he explains the moral power of this form of struggle.

“If a man is wronged,

Or thinks that he is wronged, and will lie down

Upon another’s threshold until he dies,

The common people for all time to come

Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold”

Heba, Kamran and Lewie are young, they don’t want to die but history and their own high personal morality have put them in this situation.

We need to say that Labour’s treatment of the hunger strikers and the other Palestine Action prisoners, whom we refuse to consider terrorists,  is worse than Thatcher’s of the Republican prisoners. Her government was in dialogue with intermediaries from the Catholic Church, the Irish government and business people. Their relatives had frequent visits especially during the final stages. Labour is refusing to even provide adequate medical updates to the families.

Starmer, Lammy, Rushanara Ali and all the other MPs who voted to proscribe Palestine Action bear a personal moral and political responsibility for what is happening to these heroic young people.

Labour has prioritised links with IDF while using the legal process to punish opponents of genocide. Labour is actively supporting the IDF’s terrorist genocide and Trump’s gangster imperialism.

None of this is new. Lammy, Starmer, Ali are also in a long tradition. Shortly before Bobby Sands died, Labour sent a man whose name is so loathsome I won’t even mention it to say that his party was backing Thatcher and was willing to let the hunger strikers die. They did that on May Day, the day of international working-class solidarity.

In his play, Yeates has the king say:

“I cannot give way

Because I am King, because if I give way

My nobles would call me a weakling, and it may be

The very throne be shaken;”

We say that Starmer and Lammy are weaklings, cowards and enablers of genocide.

We will shake their throne.

Release the political prisoners!