The NUT, Britain's largest teachers' union, votes to oppose an attack on Iran and any western military intervention in the Arab region and confirms its support for Stop the War Coalition.

It says something about the comatose nature of British politics that an effective critic of these failed wars like Mr Galloway is savaged as a self-serving demagogue.

The Olympics will militarise London, with surface-to-air missiles, a Royal Navy battleship and 13,500 military personnel, 4,000 more than are currently based in Afghanistan.

The continuing support of all three old parties for war and occupation abroad, has created a chasm between the political class and so many working people.

Britain's deferential role in riding shotgun provides a multilateral veneer for selling American military adventures such as the Iraq war to the American public.

The warmongers rely on the absence of official opposition in Parliament and the subservience of a media dominated by phone hackers and bribers of public officials.

If you're trying to figure out why you can't remember hearing anything about Maya Evans, that's because, as far as most of the media is concerned, there is no story.

If you were David Cameron and choosing between ending the war in Afghanistan, which costs over £5 billion a year, or cutting up to 50% of living allowances for people with disabilities, what would you do?

Britain is out of Iraq and desperate to get out of Afghanistan. So why gird ourselves for a fight with Iran, a proud country of 75 million people with whom we cannot go to war without taking leave of our senses?

When David Cameron visited Tahrir Square in February 2011 -- to support the democracy movement, he claimed -- did he tell the protesters they would soon face British-made tear gas.

While the war budgets are sacrosanct, government cuts are increasing the impoverishment of the old, the poor, the sick and the young with a stark rapidity. 

Westerners are taught to believe "civilised" governments do not commit torture; that it's always barbaric "them" in faraway places and never "us".

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are pointless, say army veterans joining the Occupy London protest. "It felt we were basically pawns doing the work of corporations and big business."

The institutions that scream the most that we must respect our fallen soldiers through poppies and Remembrance Day are the same ones that are most keen to have a new bunch of wars to create a new generation of dead soldiers to remember.

As Gaddafi's forces were being destroyed in battles that pitted British weapons against other British weapons, more of the same were being sold to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

There is everything right about remembering the dead who die in futile wars. There is everything wrong about using the past dead to justify current wars.