 It gives me great pride and pleasure to introduce Mr. Andrew Feinstein, former ANCMP who served under Nelson Mandela, author of The Shadow World Inside the Global Arms Trade and is likely to stand against Kia Stammer in Holborn and St. Pankras. Mr. Feinstein, thank you. Thank you very much and first of all, thank you to the organisers for the invitation. It's an enormous honour to be here with all of you, to speak after Selma, after Craig, after George and to see so many absolutely brilliant independent candidates at a time of great difficulty. It is these sorts of meetings, it is the resolve of so many people to show the courage that Selma was talking about to take on our corrupt, mendacious, mediocre politicians both in the local and the forthcoming general election that gives me hope. I must at the outset apologise for the fact that I haven't been here the whole day. I was supposed to last night be participating in the Solidarity Conference with Palestine in Berlin. I was supposed to be speaking on a panel with Dr. Ghassan Abusita. Dr. Ghassan is a British-Palestinian doctor. He is involved with health workers for Palestine. He has been in and out of Gaza over the last six months to attempt to help those who are suffering. He was invited to Berlin by the conference organisers to give a first-hand account of the genocide the Germany, the United States, Britain and many other Western European countries are complicit in. He was arrested at the airport in Berlin and interrogated for three hours. He was then deported and sent back to Britain. Now let's just think for a moment. Germany is a country that has committed two genocides in its history. For those of you who don't know, the indigenous people of Namibia were the victims of a genocide by the German state. My own mother lost dozens of her family in Germany's second genocide, the Holocaust. These people were gassed in Auschwitz where I've had the honour of lecturing on genocide prevention. This is a country that is now providing not just political and diplomatic cover for the state of Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza, but is providing a significant number of the weapons that are being used to commit that genocide just as is the case with the United Kingdom. Yesterday at the conference in solidarity with the people of Gaza, first of all the police arrested a German Jew standing outside the conference venue with a placard that identified himself as a Jew against genocide. They then would not allow people to go into the conference venue. Then they stopped Dr. Gassan for even turning up for the panel that he and I were supposed to speak on. But an hour and a half before that panel was due to take place, the German police stormed the venue, cut off the electricity and the power, and brought the conference to a halt. Now I don't know about you, but from the little bits of history I've picked up in my life, that sort of behavior is what we know as fascism. Germany is prepared to destroy its own democracy, its own freedom of speech, its own right to protest, to defend the indefensible, to defend the genocide being perpetrated against the people of Gaza. Germany is the last country on the planet that should be displaying such fascist behavior. And as a Jew, as a Jew, as the son of a Holocaust survivor, as someone who served with Nelson Mandela and introduced the first ever motion on the Holocaust in the entire history of the South African Parliament, I am disgusted and appalled by the behavior of the German government. But let me tell you something, and this is not going to come as a shock to you. The British government is not very far behind. The behavior towards the massive marches that have been taking place, not just in London, but across the country, week after week, as the vast majority of British people say and have been saying for six months, we demand an immediate ceasefire. The attitude of our government and our so-called opposition describing those marches as hate marches, claiming that they undermine democracy because they call to account our politicians who are benefiting from this genocide. This is corroding our democracy. This is obliterating our right to speak. Our right to speak what we want, where we want, about whom we want. And it cannot continue. And the only way we are going to stop it is by hurting these people, as Selma said, where they hurt most, at the ballot box and in their pockets. And let me explain to you why I talk about the corruption of our politicians and our political processes, why we have to talk about Gaza in the same breath, that we talk about the tough local issues that face our constituents every single day, because they are inextricably linked together. And it is really important that as candidates, we make these links every day across the country in as many localities as we can. The global trade in weapons, which I've been investigating for 23 years now, is the most corrupt of all trades. It accounts for 40% of all corruption in all global trade. That is a truly terrifying number in my own country, South Africa, just four years into our democracy, BAE Systems and Tony Blair turned out to bribe our newly elected politicians in order for BAE Systems to win an arms contract that they were not even shortlisted for. They paid £115 million of bribes to cabinet ministers, to senior officials, to the head of the Defence Force, to executives in our state arms corporation. And at the same time they were doing that in South Africa, they were paying over £1 billion of bribes in seven other countries around the world, destroying those countries' democracies, making those countries poorer, but also undermining the rule of law in Britain itself and corrupting our politics here, because these massive bribes that are paid on each and every arms deal around the world don't only go to the buying country, some of those bribes come back to the senior executives at our defence companies, to our political parties. The defence companies have been the biggest donors to political parties in the western world since the Second World War, and some of that money go to our politicians as well, sometimes even when they're in office. So on the El Yamamar deal with Saudi Arabia, Mark Thatcher, the son of the then Prime Minister, was paid £12 million in bribes. Tony Blair, since he has left office, has made, at a conservative estimate, over £110 million personally from the decision to invade Iraq and from his association with British and American arms companies. But how do they do this? How do these bribes continue to oil the wheels of our political systems by ever increasing defence budgets? In 2023, Britain spent £53 billion on defence. That excludes what they are spending to renew our nuclear weapons, a renewal that will ultimately cost you and me, the taxpayer, £172 billion. So we need to have these ridiculously high defence budgets so that the bribes can be paid, so that the political parties can be funded, so that our politicians can be rich. And that is why my constituency MP, Keir Starmer, knows that even if he only occupies Downing Street for the length of time that Liz trusted, do any of you remember her? She was the one who was the resident there for all of 49 days, 49 days that cost you and me £74 billion. Because of her incompetence, Starmer knows that if he makes the right decisions, even if he was only there for 49 days, he would be a multi-multi-millionaire for the rest of his life. And this is what is profoundly wrong with our politics. And it is why in this country we have the best democracy that money can buy. And it is also why Keir Starmer has pledged to increase British defence spending from two to two and a half percent of GDP by tens of billions of pounds, and why he said he is 100% committed to renewing our nuclear weapons. These tens of billions of pounds are money that should be coming into our communities, that should be helping us who are struggling with the cost of living crisis, that should be improving the NHS, not denuding it of money, that should be improving our education system, that should be ensuring people are paid a living wage for the work that they do and receive benefits that enable them to live a decent life. But our country and the economics of our country and the politics of our country have been destroyed and atrophied by neoliberalism. And Keir Starmer is only the latest cheerleader for that neoliberalism. And let us not forget, while he is talking about being an unqualified supporter of modernising our nuclear weapons, what was one of the first things he said after he was elected leader of the Labour Party, a supposedly democratic socialist party, he said, I am an unqualified Zionist. And because of the fact that he is received, amongst others, four and a half million pounds, the biggest individual donation in the history of the Labour Party from a South African billionaire called Gary Lubner, whose only political interest is ensuring there is no criticism of Israel, Keir Starmer, who claims to have been a human rights lawyer, has yet to pass comment on the interim ruling of the International Court of Justice in the case brought by my country, South Africa, against the State of Israel. This is a human rights lawyer who has lost all humanity. We cannot, we cannot allow this man to simply walk into Downing Street with a huge majority to do the damage he wants to do to this country. So as we hurtle towards the local elections, as we think about the general election that will be held sometime this year, let us remind ourselves that when we say no ceasefire, no vote, when we demand that British arms sales to Israel, which are in terms of British law, illegal, let alone international law, when we say this, and when we demand an end to brutal illegal occupation, an end to apartheid, and I cannot believe that I'm having to stand here in 2024, still demanding an end to apartheid in this world, when we say all these things and when we make these demands, we must do so in the memory of the tens of thousands who have been slaughtered in cold blood in Gaza, using our weapons made by companies who are subsidised with our tax pounds. We must do so as part of our struggle to help those in Gaza trying every single day just to stay alive. We must join them in their struggle on the campaign trail. And we must join them in their struggle for liberation and freedom. And finally, let us also do so to honour the memory of my former boss, perhaps the greatest anti-racist the world has known. For when Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in an apartheid prison, his first words on his release weren't, I'm free, let's have a party. Instead, he said, our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinian people. Thank you.