Many thanks to all of you who supported my nomination in the Amnesty Media Awards People’s Choice category.

The awards ceremony was held last night. I didn’t win. That honour went to Owen Jones. Congratulations to him for his work exposing Israel and the media’s lies through the past 20 months of genocide.

I took with me to the ceremony the investigative journalist Asa Winstanley.

Had I won and had the chance to make an acceptance speech, I wanted to highlight his case. He, along with other independent journalists, has been targeted for persecution by the police, doubtless under political direction, for his work on Gaza.

The police have been using the most expansive interpretation possible of the UK's draconian terrorism laws. Last month the courts ruled that the police had illegally seized his electronic devices.

Incredibly, no media outlet in the UK has thought it worth reporting either the drawn raid on his home last year, or the court’s subsequent finding of law-breaking by the police in seizing the electronic devices of an accredited journalist.

Asa still has a police investigation hanging over him, with a potential jail sentence of 14 years for doing journalism.

There are obvious parallels with the media’s failure to report, or protest, the incarceration for many years of Julian Assange in a London high-security prison for doing journalism that embarrassed the British and US national security states by bringing to light their war crimes.

Sadly, there has been little solidarity shown by other journalists towards those, like Asa, who do not have the institutional backing they often enjoy.

We sabotage our own work as journalists if we focus exclusively on the all-too-obvious assault on human rights far away in Gaza but refuse to consider the more veiled assault on human rights on our own doorstep. The two are connected.

I call on fellow journalists – and most especially the prominent journalists who were nominated for the People’s Choice award – to use their platforms to protest this concerted attack on our profession, on our ability to hold power to account.

Journalism should never be treated as a club, least of all by journalists. And yet all too often it is. We are here to defend a principle: that the centres of power in our societies must be scrutinised and held to account. That is our job.

That principle is far bigger than any single journalist, any single ego. Time for us to show proper solidarity with fellow journalists – and journalism.