I feel I ought to flag this quite shocking news up. The government wants to ban public bodies such as students’ unions boycotting Israeli imports. ”Under the plan all publicly funded institutions will lose the freedom to refuse to buy goods and services from companies involved in the arms trade, fossil fuels, tobacco products or Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.” They justify it by saying that such boycotts foster antisemitism, but that’s bull. This amounts to a gross infringement of civil rights: the Tories want to prevent us standing up for what we believe. Of course, the situation in Israel is very complex, and one must be careful not to stray into antisemitism; but in many ways what he Israeli government is doing amounts to the wholehearted persecution of Palestinians. It is no better than apartheid, and we must have the right to demonstrate our disapproval of it just as we did with the one in South Africa.