The World Turned Upside Down

Political Comment on the Modern U.K.

[hjohn3]

Comment on unprecedented political times from a left of centre perspective.

[hjohn3]

After Starmergeddon…

Whatever Happens, It’s Time Up For The Labour Right

Source: The Guardian

By Honest John

THERE IS something tragic about the increasingly undignified end to the Keir Starmer premiership. On a personal level, there is sympathy at the sight of someone those who know him describe as “a decent man” in denial, refusing to accept that, despite his best efforts, he has failed and that no one now wants him to be Prime Minister, least of all the electorate, that harshest of judges, who very deliberately delivered their verdict on Starmer at the English local , Welsh Senedd and Scottish Parliamentary elections so emphatically last Thursday. Starmer may also have cause to curse the Labour Party, Labour voters and even the non-Labour electorate who ousted the Tories so dramatically less than two years ago for ingratitude. After all, in a single term, Starmer had led Labour to its second largest majority ever and put an end to a ruinous fourteen year period of Conservative rule, virtually consigning the Tories to electoral oblivion in the process. Starmer may have a justified sense of grievance that, having achieved all this for the centre left, he has not even been permitted to serve two years in the post he had coveted and worked towards for so long - and by his own party too.

But here lies the nub of the whole issue. Starmer’s downfall has been almost entirely self-inflicted. He is not being brought down by the right wing media, by British corporate interests, the bond markets or by shadowy agents of British intelligence: there has been no plot. Sir Keir’s staggering levels of unpopularity have been brought about by his own political miscalculations, his astoundingly poor headline policy choices and a deep sectarianism as he disastrously attached himself to the Labour Right and became their pliant instrument through which it sought to secure control of the Labour Party and, ultimately, government. The real tragedy for Labour perhaps is that the catastrophic errors and wrong-headed policy direction of the Labour Right faction, effectively in charge of government since the election, but utterly dominant after the Cabinet reshuffle last autumn, could well bring the Labour Party down with them.

In a truth now widely acknowledged, summarised in breezy airport paperback style by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund of the machinations of the Labour Right to use Starmer to crush the Corbynite Left in their book Get In, and in a more forensically detailed account, including alleged financial impropriety, in Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, the Starmer “project” was based on falsehood from the start. Identified as early as 2019 by Labour Together, the innocuous sounding think tank that Morgan McSweeny and Peter Reid had decided would be their counter-revolutionary vehicle with which to purge Labour of its Left, Starmer was plucked from his unhappy role as a shadow Cabinet Remainer in the age of Brexit, to become their man to do it. But all was secret. When Starmer ran for the Labour leadership in the wake of Corbyn's crushing General Election defeat that year, he posed as a "respectable" left winger, an electable Corbynite, persuading the Party membership with left populist "pledges" that he could retain the ideals, energy and optimism of Corbynism while ruthlessly taking down the Tories in a way that was clearly beyond Corbyn himself. Starmer won, but he never meant a word of it.

The pledges were forgotten almost as soon as the leadership contest was over, and by the time the Boris Johnson government began to implode, Starmer, with Morgan McSweeney at his side, began to remove policy after policy from Labour’s ambitious social democratic programme that Starmer himself had announced so enthusiastically as recently as the 2022 Party Conference. The following year was characterised by row backs, “ditching” and watering down of the most eye catching and transformative survivals from the Corbyn era. By the time of the 2024 General Election, there was little of significance left and what there was was bounded by masochistic fiscal rules and absurd commitments not to tax or to borrow, a self-imposed fiscal restraint gleefully paraded by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, drunk on Treasury orthodoxy, for the benefit of the bond markets. Despite promising the voters “Change”, the fiscal position adopted by Starmer and Reeves meant that Labour could do little to effect that change thanks to the economic choices they had made.

Once in office, the errors continued. A brutal sectarian war commenced by McSweeney and his Labour Together allies, had removed left wing candidates during the election campaign itself; left wing affiliated groups had been proscribed and members driven out, often with charges of antisemitism, until the former masters of the Labour Party were entirely neutered. McSweeney carried on, ensuring even soft left Cabinet members were briefed against or edged out, with the Labour Right takeover culminating in the September 2025 reshuffle which left only Ed Miliband as a dissenting voice to the brand of neo-Blairite economics and legal authoritarianism that had come to comprise Starmerism.

The problem however was that the Labour Right had no ideas. They constantly looked to the Blair years for inspiration (which was how Peter Mandelson was fatally able to make his malign reappearance) and under McSweeney’s influence, pursued more and more virulent anti-migrant rhetoric, culminating in Shabana Mahmood’s disgraceful “rules changes” in a hapless attempt to attract back long gone Reform voters while driving appalled Labour voters into the arms of the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. The opinion polls illustrating this were ignored, because according to the Mandelson-influenced Labour Right, Labour voters had “nowhere else to go”.

Perhaps the most fatal aspect of Starmer’s premiership, itself reflective of the enormous gap where principle and ideology should lie, was the catastrophic messaging the Starmer operation put out almost immediately, which goes a long way to explain the Prime Minister’s visceral personal unpopularity with the voters. Labour was elected conditionally in 2024, but with hope too - hope that after having indicated for nearly a decade that the public wanted an end to austerity and the rebuilding of public services, they may at last get it. Starmer and Reeves promptly told voters that this was impossible due to the mess left by the Tories. Perhaps the government thought it was being clever - after all traducing your predecessor for the economic mess had served David Cameron well. But voters were in no mood to listen to this. They had finally demolished the Conservatives to secure the change Labour promised, only, it seemed, to be denied yet again. The sense of disappointment with Labour’s constant message of economic gloom was palpable. When this was followed up by seemingly never ending Ministerial freebies scandals, involving Starmer himself, and then a Budget which means- teased pensioners' Winter Fuel Payments, then voters could indeed be forgiven for thinking in the words of Pete Townsend, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." The Winter Fuel decision, stubbornly held onto for twelve months, stigmatised Starmer’s Labour forever in the eyes of many voters.

But of course it didn’t stop there, having given non-committed voters buyers’ remorse almost immediately, the triumphant Labour Right then set about infuriating its own voter base. Having decided to deny herself any means of raising revenue, Reeves then, with Thatcherite predictability, sought large scale public spending cuts to bridge an alleged “black hole” in the public finances. But it wasn’t just any budgets that were targeted, it was cost of living support to disabled people, the so-called PIPs (Personal Independence Payments) she sought to cut, almost calculated to affront and dismay Labour voters. And so the outraged defections from Labour to left alternatives continued.

Perhaps the most puzzling disastrous political choice, in terms of damage to Labour’s voting coalition, was the clear pro-Zionism of so much of the Cabinet at a time when Israel was inflicting genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza. Any criticism of Israel was muted, logistic support to the IDF continued to be provided by the RAF and in a bizarre exercise in legal vindictiveness, the government attempted to categorise pro-Palestinian agitprop students and loud-mouthed pop singers as terrorists, enacting troubling illiberal legal precedent along the way. Arguably morally wrong actions anyway, the pro-Israel stance of Starmer himself and his Ministers (notably David Lammy, Yvette Cooper and Lisa Nandy) drove Labour-voting liberal leftists and Muslims not only to despair but overwhelmingly in the direction of the Greens. The tin ear Starmer displayed to an issue of passionate concern to many Labour supporters remains politically baffling.

And so we here we are: the local elections have almost crippled Labour’s local presence in England and driven it out of power, possibly forever, in Wales. Accepting that there can never be a direct read across from local results to future General Elections, particularly given the low turnouts last week, nonetheless, if the same voting pattern was replicated in three years time at a General Election, at the very least, the U.K. will have a Reform-led government.

So, Keir Starmer - look on his works. Through mendacity, factionalism, outdated economic solutions and the lack of any sort of vision, Starmer has brought the country and his party to this pass, to the absurd situation of Britain very probably having its seventh Prime Minister in ten years. British politics is arguably broken, particularly its First Past The Post electoral system, unable adequately to reflect a multi party landscape, but the failure of successive governments to grasp the issues of inequality, lack of investment, poor economic growth, shrinking living standards, failing public services and lack of personal security, is what has led voters to the non-answers of the far right and the ill-formed utopianism of the Greens. In 2024, Labour had an opportunity that comes but rarely to the centre left - a stonking majority that gave it almost untrammelled power and the opportunity to truly transform society to the benefit of those voters so consistently let down by their political leaders. But Starmer has blown it, attaching himself to a busted flush of a political faction with all the wrong ideas, and continuing the dishonesty through which he won the Labour leadership into government.

The true tragedy is not that of Keir Starmer’s Shakespearean travails, nor the possible electoral demise of the Labour Party, but that once again, the British public have been led up the garden path, testing their faith in Parliamentary democracy to change anything to the limit. Whatever and whoever follows the disastrous tenure of the Labour Right will have to address these issues and attempt to deliver rapid and visible change in the remaining three years of this Parliament. It may indeed be Labour’s last chance.

12th May 2026

[hjohn3]

Keir Starmer’s reaction to the local election losses in England earlier today.

8th May 2026

Source for photo The Guardian; captions mine.

[hjohn3]

Reform Rumbled

Is It All Going Wrong For Farage’s Populists?

Source: Byline Times

By Honest John

SO, HAVE the wheels begun to come off the Reform bandwagon at last? Is Nigel Farage’s seemingly mystical ability to talk to and for large sections of a disaffected electorate finally losing its sheen? Well, something has certainly happened since Reform’s high point in the opinion polls last summer and autumn when some pollsters had Farage’s vehicle on as much as 33%, sometimes 15 points ahead of its nearest rival, and on course to form the next U.K. government. However now, according to Politico’s poll of polls as at 2nd April 2026, Reform sit at 25%, still leading the pack, but just six points ahead of (interestingly enough) the Greens. Electorally, Reform also no longer sweep the board: just under a year ago, Reform won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election from Labour ushering in a highly successful set of subsequent local election results, but this year has seen the party fall well short in the Caerphilly Senned by election and the Gorton and Denton Westminster by election, losing to Plaid Cmyru and the Greens respectively, in seats it fully expected to win. So something is definitely up and at the very least, one can say Reform’s momentum has slowed.

With this has come a rather different level of media attention - more critical, more enquiring and altogether less admiring. Farage, with his undoubted eloquence and charm, has been used to treating the mainstream media as a cross between courtiers and an outpost of his party’s comms operation. Suddenly faced with an altogether more sceptical level of scrutiny, Farage now sounds irritable, thin skinned and not a little cranky. What is behind this shift in Reform’s standing, and is it permanent?

Reform have always been light on specific policies and this didn’t matter too much when they were trading in vibes, slogans and Tik-Tok video shorts and not much else, but now they are being treated as a party of potential government and voters can be forgiven for wondering what exactly a Reform administration would bring. Faced with the need to at least sound governmental, the pressure group turned electoral front runner has turned fairly exclusively to the playbook of Donald Trump. This has led to a series of “policy” announcements that have little directly to do with the priorities of the British public (living standards, inflation, the health service etc), but instead have focused on stunts such establishing an ICE style migration police force to aid deportations of tens of thousands of alleged illegal migrants; the banning of migration from African and Caribbean countries demanding reparations from the U.K. for slavery; swingeing DOGE-style welfare cuts to fund retention of the triple lock, and the scrapping of “Net Zero” greenhouse gas emissions targets . Even Reform’s immigration policy is vague to the point of meaninglessness, promising a “one in one out” approach presumably intending to match (unspecified) essential immigration numbers with the deportation of “illegals”. The whole package sounds increasingly eccentric, obsessive and racist and may play well to its core vote but is repellent or irrelevant to the additional voters the party needs to win and retain, particularly from Labour, if Reform is to make a serious stab at power.

It was to address this absence of serious policy and politicians, that Farage has so assiduously recruited right-wing Tories to his party, hoping the experience of former Conservatives such as Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and Nadhim Zahawi would increase the heft of his team and enable Reform to move away from the accusation that it is a one-man band. Unfortunately this arrival of refugees from a party handed its worst electoral defeat since 1832 less than two years ago, has meant that this so called insurgent force looks increasingly like the government ejected so comprehensively in 2024. And sure enough, Jenrick’s first official announcements in Reform colours was to promise yet more fiscal austerity - precisely what the British people have been voting against arguably since the EU referendum. The majority of voters - and this includes many of the people Reform need to win over - want to see an expanded protective state, increased public spending and the restitution of public services brought to their knees by fourteen years of Tory rule. With the new arrivals, Reform is driving itself into an electoral cul-de-sac, coming over as little more than immigration-obsessed Thatcherites, not a party of renewal and change.

Linked to the above is a peculiar and rather sudden loss of strategic acumen on the part of Farage himself. Twelve months ago, with Reform building up ever greater momentum in the polls, Farage flirted with a “left” approach to economics while retaining Reform’s traditional right wing cultural identity. He opined about scrapping the two child benefits cap (since abolished by Labour), nationalising the water industry and supporting more state intervention in the management of the economy to protect it from increasing global trade turbulence. This was shrewd - creating an offer attractive to working class voters while the government continued to espouse unpopular continuity centrism. However this foray into what might have been classic fascism did not last, with Farage quickly returning to his Thatcherite comfort zone. More recent eye-catching announcements concerning mass deportations or leaving the ECHR have seemed both nasty and lacking in credibility, or irrelevant to people’s day-to-day concerns. Farage’s instinctive pro-Trumpism has also been thrown into disarray by US aggressive use of tariffs and its catastrophic assault on Iran and its economic consequences. The former political genius now looks uncertain, and more often than not on the wrong side of public opinion.

A more fundamental problem for Farage is the dropping off of public concern about immigration which has again fallen below the cost of living and the state of the economy as the top political concern of the British public. This could be because levels of immigration are clearly falling and population growth driven by immigration is projected to drop to below zero within two years and because of a significant fall in the number of “illegal” arrivals in small boats over the winter (down two thirds on this time last year). Reform could fly high when people felt immigration was out of control, but it is now deflating as government action to reduce migration appears to be taking effect. Anxious to find another set of race-coded issues, Reform has moved rapidly to stigmatise Islam in the U.K., portraying the religion itself and specifically South Asian Muslims as representing an existential threat to British culture and white British ethnic identity. Racism masquerading as concerns about Islamic cultural practices is certainly on the rise in Britain, but it has none of the widespread emotional salience of immigration. Whereas apparently uncontrolled migration can appear threatening to people seeking jobs, housing and access to healthcare, attacks on British Asian communities that have been established in the country for sixty years seem both paranoid and irrelevant to those same people. Again, Farage seems to be doubling down on his base and giving up on securing fresh converts.

This phenomenon may simply be common sense. Many pollsters now speculate that 25% of the vote is Reform’s natural level of political support, and working to secure that percentage in an increasingly volatile electoral market is sound strategy. The problem for Reform however is that achieving a majority government at the next election on those numbers is impossible; even a minority administration in coalition with the Tories seems unlikely while the two parties remain locked in their visceral feud.

The other phenomenon that is really keeping Farage and his increasingly bedraggled crew awake at night is that of tactical voting. On clear display at recent by-elections, the “anyone but” tendency has emerged as a major aspect of British electoral politics. It is this factor that did so dramatically for the Tories in 2024 and which is driving Labour’s political support to subterranean levels currently. It is likely be very apparent at the forthcoming English local and Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, where Labour are predicted to lose to everyone, everywhere at the same time and Reform are likely once again to perform well. If however at the next general election, this practice instead targets Reform, and anti-Farage voters gravitate to the non-Reform party most likely to win, tactical voting could prevent the party from winning dozens of seats its position in the polls would project it to win. This is Farage's nightmare and it is a scenario that is looking increasingly likely.

It would be very unwise to write of off either Reform or Nigel Farage, however. Farage’s outfit is still by far the most popular political party in the country and it retains a clear opinion poll lead, albeit diminished. Reform’s fortunes could be transformed by another summer of high small boat crossings and the Iran war fallout scuppering the UK’s slow but sure economic recovery. However, there is no question that the populist bandwagon has stalled and the cynical political wizard driving it seems, for now at least, to have lost his touch. More worrying for the Right is that it may be that the public have rumbled Reform altogether and sees its collection of triggering announcements, posturing, social media sloganeering and faux outrage for what it is - racialised authoritarianism with little, if any, relevance to enhanced living standards, improved public services or economic growth.

Little wonder then that Farage, whose personal approval ratings currently sit at minus 20, now appears to be as at sea as Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch - at the mercy of events, surrounded by political rivals on his own side, and unable to make his messages land with the public any longer: the very essence, in fact, of the unpopular populist.

11th April 2026

[hjohn3]

Messages From Gorton and Denton

What This Seismic By Election Result Means For British Politics

Source: BBC

By Honest John

THESE ARE some immediate reflections on the astounding result in the Gorton and Denton by election, two days after the contest. Many may not stand up to scrutiny twelve months from now, but in my view this by election was truly seismic and has provided major challenges to every political party in England and possibly the wider U.K. So here goes.

1. Let’s start with the winners. The Greens basically swept the board, their candidate Hannah Spencer, securing 40.7% of the vote on a respectable by election turn out of 47.5%, smashing Labour’s 13,000 2024 majority and leaving Reform wheezing in her wake, while demoting the governing party to an embarrassing third place. This is the Greens’ first ever by election victory, at last translating opinion poll support into a truly impressive electoral victory and apparently confirming the party’s status as a credible party of the left, seemingly with the potential to displace Labour as the UK’s main social democratic force and, in the process , transforming British politics.

One can forgive Zac Polanski’s post-victory proclamations that he is now hopeful of at least 100 Green MPs after the next election and the prospect, sooner rather than later, of a Green-led government. Well, maybe. Fundamentally, in my view, the Gorton and Denton result was a (highly welcome) tactical vote to keep out Reform, not a ringing endorsement of a Green policy programme that is engagingly cranky at best and completely naive and impractical at worst. In a comparison the Greens will not welcome, the party is surfing a tide of vibes and projection from an electorate sick to the back teeth of the so-called main parties’ lack of ideas and conviction, disconcertingly similar to their alter-ego Reform. Over-reliant on the statements and musings of a charismatic leader, the Greens, rather like the Liberal Democrats before them and Reform now, will be whatever you imagine them to be. Polanski’s challenge over the next couple of years is to thoroughly review the Green policy offer, which reflects its pressure group origins, and, if he is serious about being a significant player in a future left bloc government, to turn this mish-mash of environmentalism, hippy idealism and impractical slogans into something voters can envisage as a governing programme. Otherwise the Greens will remain the repository of protest and anti-fascist votes which at times may be important, but will ultimately mean the party’s fortunes will ebb and flow with tides generated by other players.

2. As for Reform, the result, in which the anti-immigrant so-called patriotic party secured just 28.7 % of the vote in a seat it fully expected to win, continues a slow deflation in its support and credibility since its extraordinary high points last summer. The whole approach Reform took to the by election reveals the essential weaknesses at the heart of the Farage project. Demonstrating its southern and right wing Tory origins, Reform seemed to believe this urban Manchester constituency was a mere version of the post-industrial towns of the north of England, seemingly oblivious to the liberal voting population of Burnage and Levenshulme and a working class population in Gorton, Longsight and, to a lesser extent, Tameside’s Denton, that was relatively at ease with multi cultural and multi ethnic neighbourhoods. As a result they chose a southern academic ethno-nationalist as their candidate who, quite literally, set much of the population’s teeth on edge. Matt Goodwin was about as terrible a candidate as could have been chosen by the party.

More significantly, the result throws a huge challenge Reform’s way. The party may indeed do well in relatively inconsequential, low turnout out council elections, but when it comes to Parliamentary elections, whether in South Wales or East Manchester, the decent majority will ignore their historic voting allegiances and will go for whichever party can stop the right wing populists. Farage’s hope is that Reform can benefit from the First Past The Post system in order to win large numbers of seats at the next election, but voters, aided by tactical voting sites, will, it would seem, coalesce around the party best placed to defeat them. There are very few constituencies where Reform can command 40% or more of the vote. The lesson of Gorton and Denton is that tactical voting could cripple Reform’s so-called insurgency, regardless of its lead in national opinion polls.

3. For Labour, the result simply confirms the party’s grim collapse as a result of an entirely wrong-headed political strategy, a catastrophic communications operation and a clueless, incompetent and, as revelations mount up, clearly corrupt, leadership. Labour’s hopes of winning in Gorton and Denton were probably doomed the minute Keir Starmer personally and enthusiastically led the NEC vote to block Andy Burnham from standing as Labour’s candidate in a naked display of factionalism and self-preservation. The subsequent Mandelson scandal simply confirmed Labour’s unfitness in the eyes of thousands of voters who moved decisively to the Greens and Reform, both of whom were viewed as honest and sincere, whatever differences individual voters may have had with their politics. The lesson for Labour barely needs stating: Starmer, probably the worst Labour Prime Minister ever, has to go, and the entire existing policy programme requires complete revision. With well over three years before the next election, Labour’s ultimate fate remains in its own hands. If it can drop its allegiances to the bond markets, the right wing media, Reform voters and Zionism, replacing them with the priorities voters elected them to deliver just eighteen months ago, the government could yet save both itself and its reputation. If it continues on its current sub-neoliberal path, it may be destroyed as a credible party of government at the next election.

4. No one talks very much about the Conservative Party anymore, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that a year and a half ago it was in government, having ruled for 14 years; it remains His Majesty’s opposition, for all Farage’s bombastic conceit. However, Gorton and Denton, in which just 766 voters cast their ballot for the Tory candidate, was the worst Conservative by election result in the party’s history. Of course this part of Manchester and Tameside has never been exactly fertile electoral ground for the Tories, but to collapse to voting numbers one might normally associate with attendances at a decent garden fete is a new low. And yet Kemi Badenoch seems determined to fight Reform every inch of the way for the far right of British political opinion (probably about 20% of the electorate). The Tory political strategy is as baffling as that of Labour - faced with polling and results that tell the Conservatives that Thatcherite economics and culture war politics are really not, proportionately, that popular in the U.K., the Tories continue to run to the populist cliff edge, ignoring their near-death experience in 2024, in order to fight, not the Liberal Democrats, sitting on over 70 seats won mostly from the Conservatives, but Nigel Farage and his eight MPs (including three Tory defector refugees), when any sober analysis would tell them to move back to the centre right. If Reform and the Greens are policy-light reflections of each other, what are the Tories and Labour, but dark mirror images too, chasing a “true England” of decent hard-working, anti-immigrant, and common sense families, that don’t actually exist. In this death dance both of the so-called “main parties” may actually doom themselves.

5. Perhaps the biggest curiosity of the lot are the aforesaid Liberal Democrats. The third largest party in the House of Commons and with its largest number of seats since the days of Lloyd George, and once the kingpins of by elections, the Lib Dems secured precisely 553 votes in an electoral performance more akin to the Monster Raving Loony Party than that of a party that was in coalition government as recently as 2015. In what might prove to be an existential struggle for identity, Ed Davey’s party that historically was the beneficiary of disengagement with the Conservatives and Labour, has to grapple with the arrival of the Greens as a credible, and less slippery, left alternative, while seeing its crank vote drift away to Reform. If the Liberals can no longer pose as the voice of moral clarity and common sense because that - always somewhat spurious - role has been usurped, then, in all honesty, what is the point of them?

For all parties who contested this pivotal by election, the decisions they now make as to policy, presentation and identity will be crucial. Any and all of them could have effectively faded from the electoral scene by the time of the next General Election. It is therefore unlikely it will be the Gorton and Denton by election itself that will be seen to be significant to the future political direction of this country, but what the various players do in response to its extraordinary result.

28th February 2026

[hjohn3]

Defying Gravity

Starmer, McSweeney and the Collapse of the Labour Right

Source: DepositPhotos

By Honest John

IN THE context of the Peter Mandelson scandal, the overdue ejection of the toxic Morgan McSweeney from Downing Street and the image of a Prime Minister clinging onto office by promising his MPs that he really will change priorities and culture this time, it has been common for commentators to opine about the “death of Blairism” within Labour. The argument goes that the disgrace of the quintessentially New Labour figure of Mandelson, who bafflingly maintained extraordinary sway as to the direction of the Starmer project, and the fall of his protégé, McSweeney, denotes a collapse of a persistent belief within Labour that the Third Way championed by Tony Blair in the 1990s and 2000s, still has lessons as to policy and politics for the current Labour administration. It is a compelling narrative and not one without credibility, particularly when one takes into account the soap operatic, even sinister, ease with which New Labour figures moved within the ranks of the hyper-wealthy and the political corruption that accompanied the Blair approach - echoes of which can be found regularly within the Starmer regime’s shenanigans, whether this be the acceptance of freebies by Ministers from wealthy donors, the cynical blocking of Andy Burnham from standing as an MP to prevent his assumed leadership challenge or the careless appointment of a corrupt associate of an international paedophile to the most important diplomatic posting the U.K. has to offer, despite him having no formal diplomatic experience.

Certainly the political behaviour of Starmer and much of his Cabinet does appear to lean into the contested example of Blairism, but the problem with this analysis is that it emphasises the influence of individuals, factions and superficial playground power plays, so beloved of the likes of McSweeney and Mandelson, and fails to assess what Blairism meant as a political programme. The truth is, as any meaningful guide as to how the United Kingdom should be governed in 2026, the approach championed by Blair, and to a large extent by Gordon Brown, ceased to have applicability long ago. It is the fact that the current Labour Right possesses so little conviction and new ideas that leads it to look nostalgicallly at the three extraordinary successive election victories won by Blair and to cling to the belief that surely Blairism must still have something to offer a Labour government apparently devoid of consistent direction.

Born into a world of free trade, cheap money and a neoliberal economic orthodoxy, Blairism was never the comprehensive ideology its founders in their more messianic moments, claimed it to be. Its combination of Thatcherite economics, exemplified by an uncritical belief in free markets, deregulation and market discipline in public services, combined with high public spending on social programmes, funded by cheap borrowing and protected by the shared risk intrinsic to EU membership, “Blairism” was always an opportunistic and unoriginal model. At base, it was conceived by Blair and Brown as an electoral device after Labour had suffered four successive defeats at the hands of a right-wing Conservative Party and the slow demolition of public belief in the social democracy that characterised postwar U.K. politics. It retained this shallow, slippery quality throughout its existence and its success was entirely contingent on three major factors that are simply no longer in place.

The financial crash of 2008 signalled the end of the bonanza of cheap borrowing that had enabled New Labour to grow the economy, tackle certain social injustices and fund public services to an unprecedented level, but without increasing taxation or addressing social inequality. The fourteen years of Tory rule that followed Gordon Brown’s defeat in 2010, were characterised by an austerity that claimed to be an essential remedy to the profligacy of the New Labour governments that had led to the crash (a blatant lie unchallenged by Labour in opposition) and became a self-fulfilling prophecy as a chastened financial system applied ever higher interest rates to borrowing. A fundamental strut of the Blairite approach had been removed, never to return.

Secondly, the withdrawal from the EU in 2020, ended free trade for the U.K. with its most important and proximate markets. Blairism depended on frictionless access to European markets to keep goods inflation low, provide a wide lucrative market for the UK’s significant financial service sector, and the tax hike that went with that, and the freedom of movement within the EU that kept workforce costs relatively low and trade unionism weak. EU membership also protected the U.K. economy from global trade turbulence, providing a guaranteed supply of relatively inexpensive essential goods and services despite the increasingly individualistic behaviour of major powers such as the USA and China. The franchising out of sovereignty and national economic self-management that EU membership entailed, was essential to the globalist worldview of Blairism. Outside the EU, the Third Way simply could not function.

Therefore by the time Keir Starmer came to power in 2024, Blairism as a realistic means by which to run the economy was a dead duck. As a final malign afterplay, the Liz Truss attempt to revive Chicago Economics has made the costs of UK borrowing particularly prohibitive - a national economy worth £3trn now sits on a debt interest repayment figure of … £3trn. Borrowing to get out of trouble is impossible. To compound a transformed economic context to the world of 1997-2010, the introduction of tariffs as a weapon in international relations, wielded most aggressively by the Trump regime, demonstrates graphically that globalisation, once admiringly described by Blair as a force of nature impossible to oppose, is finished, and with it, the very worldview that framed Blair’s complacent and naive approach. Therefore Blairism, whether as ideology, political programme or just faith, has simply run out of road.

Unfortunately for this government, the key figures who fashioned Starmer into the flailing premier he is today - McSweeney, Rachel Reeves, Pat McFadden, Wes Streeting, Mandelson - who saw revanchist Blairism as the magic formula that would transform Labour, following the electoral catastrophe of Corbynism, into the vote-harvesting machine of 1997, was powered by no more than belief. The inconvenient facts that should have ruled out the New Labour model entirely, were ignored, leading to the serial dropping of all remaining radical Labour policies in opposition, the self-imposed torture of the fiscal rules, a willingness to cut public spending and, most egregiously of all (and to be fair, not particularly Blairite), the hapless pandering to Reform and framing immigration and asylum seeking in entirely negative terms. The dominance of the Labour Right, which has characterised the Starmer regime throughout has brought Labour to the brink of electoral ruin and almost destroyed the premiership of the man it chose to lead its wrong-headed, self-defeating and fantasy-fuelled charge. Now however, very suddenly, the Labour Right itself appears to have collapsed.

The Starmer “project”, if indeed it can be termed such a thing, led by the arch-manipulator McSweeney, has never had anything very much in the way of ideas, or intellectual curiosity, much less an ideology. It was animated entirely by a visceral and vicious hatred of Corbynism and a sectarianism that was as destructive as it was ultimately pointless. The merciless pursuit of any Labour Party figures who could even remotely be identified as on “the left”, resulting in purges, exclusions, proscriptions and blockings, has resulted in a sadly diminished party with few ideas as to how to govern or even what its priorities should be. The result is a halving of the number of Labour's 2024 voters, a full two thirds of whom have apparently shifted their voting intentions to parties on Labour's left. The Mandelson affair may have been the tipping point, but the objective failure of the Labour Right to achieve any form of success for the government, electoral or otherwise, put the skids under the faction long ago. The ejection of the thoroughly malign McSweeney may be the most symbolic part of what will surely be a changing of the guard, but most of the other high profile members of Starmer's Right-dominated cabinet are similarly compromised: Streeting, tainted by association with the Dark Lord; Reeves haplessly incapable of securing the growth her fiscal rules were supposed to guarantee; Cooper forever damned by her quixotic attempt to imprison agitprop pro-Palestine students as terrorists, and Mahmood cosplaying Reform to the horror of large swathes if the PLP and Labour's voting base. With the eminence grise of Blairism disgraced in perpetuity, and his familiar at last gone, any pretence at a political programme for the Starmer regime has departed with them.

I summarised the essentials for the Labour government’s recovery and survival in my previous blog. In essence, the fiscal rules must go, and growth generated by full implementation of the Green Prosperity Plan, in tandem with government backed inward investment, comprising a comprehensive stimulus package to generate jobs, and improve living standards. In addition there needs to be an honest conversation with the electorate about tax to enable public services and local government to be re-funded and reverse the damage done by years of austerity. Such a package would not be without electoral risk, but it would give Labour the “story” so cripplingly absent from the Starmer regime and would provide that elusive ingredient yearned for by a disappointed and sour electorate - the government could yet provide hope.

Labour in power would need wholesale change to deliver anything resembling the above - the so-called “grown ups” would need to be cleared out and replaced by clear-eyed ideas people with passion, ideals and administrative skill who want to take the generational opportunity of a Labour government to improve the lot of ordinary people, and not squander the chance with playground politics, dreary outdated solutions, and doom and gloom narratives which have been the hallmarks of Starmerism. All this surely means Keir Starmer himself must quit the stage as soon as possible, right?

And yet he remains, defying gravity, the party unable to depose him because his would-be replacements are too compromised, distant or unwilling. The thought of an eighth Prime Minister in sixteen years is indeed a horrifying indictment of U.K. politics, and this may also have led the PLP to rally behind their wounded leader, at least for now. Starmer without McSweeney is indeed a tantalising prospect. Little seems to motivate Starmer beyond personal advancement and his very political emptiness may yet serve him well as the illusions of the Labour Right to which he so unwisely hitched his wagon, are exposed for what they always were. It would be ironic indeed if after so much talk of leadership change, Starmer tacks left in a desperate attempt to survive and his party accepts it, simply because credible alternatives to him do not currently exist. Keir Starmer may yet indulge in yet another piece of successful political shape shifting. However, whether that will be sufficient to save the government Starmer himself has done so much to undermine, is impossible to say.

21st February 2026

[hjohn3]

Robert Jenrick - A Man For All Seasons, none of them good.

[hjohn3]

Nails it.

[hjohn3]

The Way Back?

It’s Not All Over For Labour, But It Is For Starmer

Source: Metro

By Honest John

NOW, BY common consent, it is no longer if, but when, will Keir Starmer be replaced as Leader of the Labour Party and therefore Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It seems everyone - from sympathetic journalists and the once-loyal Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) to, most importantly, the voters themselves - has had enough. His missteps have been well-chronicled: the doomster rhetoric concerning the public finances on being elected; the catastrophic in, then out, means-testing of the Winter Fuel Allowance; the ill-advised and equally disastrous attempt to cut disability benefits masquerading as welfare reform; the bizarre continual service to the state of Israel from the government’s muted criticism of the genocide in Gaza to proscribing anti-Zionist student activists as terrorists; the verbal contortions of trying not to criticise international criminal Donald Trump over his imperialistic coup in Venezuela and threatened seizure of Greenland from a NATO ally; the hapless and hopeless aping of Reform's racism and migrant-baiting and last but not least, maintaining entirely self-imposed "fiscal rules" that prevent his government from carrying out radical reform of the economy in favour of the voters who gave Starmer his titanic Parliamentary victory just eighteen months ago. Add to this a Cabinet reshuffle that shut out any and all voices opposed to the disastrous political and economic strategy championed by the spectacularly useless Morgan McSweeney and Rachel Reeves, and you come to this: Starmer must go and within months.

In some respects, this is unfair - Labour have delivered, or are delivering, a series of recognisably social democratic policies and initiatives: Best Start Family Hubs; breakfast clubs and free school meals, financial support for nursery fees and the provision of school-based nurseries, workers’ rights, renters’ rights, an ambitious house building programme, some increased taxation of high value properties, increased funding for the NHS and Education, more police officers, increased Minimum Wage and public sector pay, rail nationalisation and the introduction of Great British Energy as a publicly owned entrant to the energy market. It is hard to see any of the above being introduced by the government’s Tory predecessors and harder still to see many of them surviving a Reform/Tory coalition if that is what replaces Labour in 2029.

However, it is this very programme that leads directly to the other damning critique of Starmer - his inability to articulate what any of these measures are for and how they help build the sort of of country he wishes to see. When combined with rhetoric and policy on immigration, civil liberties and international affairs that seem designed to demoralise and drive away Labour’s core vote (Labour, currently at 16% in Politico’s poll of polls, have lost over half of the voters that supported it in July 2024 - principally to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats), it is scarcely surprising that Labour MPs and supporters have been driven to despair. The transformation and reprioritisation of the British economy, which is obvious to so many voters, seems to elude the Starmer government whose dunderheaded fiscal rules prevent it from increasing government revenue or assertively directing the economy in any meaningful sense. This is why so many of the progressive measures the government have taken forward seem so piecemeal and unambitious. A government that cannot decide whether it wishes to be Wilsonian social democrat or Blairite neoliberal becomes convincingly neither and with no ideological project behind it, it ends up being battered from pillar to post, unable to react to populist narratives, spurious assertions by the rich and powerful, or even just events.

It seems finally to have dawned on the PLP and the sympathetic media class that Starmer’s extraordinary unpopularity (he now shares the status of least popular premier ever with Liz Truss), is irreversible and, more importantly, Starmer himself cannot change because he lacks the ideas, the vision and confidence to operate independently of the Labour Right cabal of McSweeney, Reeves and Pat McFadden that surrounds and apparently (disastrously) directs him. Backed now by a cabinet of placemen and women, seemingly equally incapable of independent thought, what has been clear to many of us for a very long time, is that this trajectory will not be turned around under the current leadership and Labour are on course, just like Sunak’s government before it, to lose everywhere to everyone at the same time at the next election, possibly reducing its current seat total of 404 by three quarters and plunging the party into near political irrelevance. It is clear therefore, that some time in 2026, a leadership contest will be triggered.

This is easily said, but much less easily done. Labour, unlike the Conservatives, is not good at changing its leaders, lacking both the ruthlessness and determination to cling to power that, at least until the 2020s, characterised Tory administrations. It is also true that the public have a particular aversion to unpopular political parties choosing their Prime Ministers for them. Indeed it often ends badly for those PMs who succeed a predecessor without a general election to legitimise them (just ask Alec Douglas-Home, Jim Callaghan, Gordon Brown, Teresa May, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak). The difficulty that Labour has is not just who might succeed Starmer, but why? If we look at successful intra-government changes of premier, then one sees distinct changes in, if not ideology, certainly in a style and approach that indicated to the public that fundamental change was underway. Harold Macmillan offered a Toryism comfortable with a mixed economy and de-colonisation, as opposed to the imperialism and right wing economics of his predecessors; John Major appeared to represent a sharp break with the divisiveness and hard edge of Thatcherism (it was his ultimate continuity of Thatcherite policies that probably did for him at the following election); Boris Johnson seemed to offer, briefly, a genuinely new type of expansionist and egalitarian Toryism, using Brexit to galvanise the economy. Whoever succeeds Starmer will need to be able to convincingly demonstrate a similar break with a failed and deeply unpopular political project associated with his or her predecessor.

Under this criterion, the field narrows quite quickly. Shabana Mahmood, allegedly McSweeney’s “pick” for Home Secretary at the reshuffle (an acknowledgment of the reality that goes to the heart of this government’s problems), is anathema to the soft left which dominate the PLP, the unions and the membership alike. Her Reform-friendly posturing and headlines rule her out almost from the off. Wes Streeting, because of his supposedly confident media presence, probably has more chance but his stewardship of the NHS is little short of disastrous and he seems to possess no discernible talent other than for self-promotion. As a Blairite believer in a world of Brexit, tariffs, geopolitical discord and domestic and international fascism, I think it is safe to say any Streeting prescriptions would probably fail more dramatically than those of Starmer. Fundamentally unlovable, Streeting is also unlikely to make the cut with the party or the membership. What of Angela Rayner, the authentic voice of the people? Rayner certainly has name recognition, a degree of public support and showed commendable tenacity in both fighting off Cabinet and civil service attempts to water down the workers’ rights bill and to persuade the unions to swallow those changes that were forced through. But she remains ideologically opaque and is a marmite figure that would probably appeal in an election to the working class north but perhaps nowhere else. Would Rayner Labour even secure the 34% of the vote the party achieved last time? It may also be too soon: Rayner probably needs to run one of the more substantial offices of state in order to beef up her experience, and there is evidence she senses this herself.

This brings us to the King in the North, Andy Burnham. In many ways, he is the perfect choice - he is genuinely popular, having been re-elected as Mayor of Greater Manchester with over 60% of the vote twice. He has vast experience in actually running and achieving things (he has transformed and effectively renationalised public transport in Greater Manchester and was co-designer of the National Care Service, now officially government policy, if typically deferred to 2028, while in Gordon Brown’s cabinet). Burnham, who has positioned himself on the economically interventionist left now has a coherent policy programme, in sharp contrast to Starmer himself, and is a genuine heavyweight. He also makes no secret of his wish to lead both party and country. Burnham could indeed transform Labour’s fortunes. His problem however is that he is not an MP. Even if he was able to overcome the inevitable machinations of McSweeney to prevent his candidature, Burnham would still have to be accepted by a winnable constituency with a vacancy, within the next few months and then to actually win the following by election - with no guarantee of success with Labour currently languishing third in the polls, two points behind the hated Tories. If successful, he would need to trigger a leadership contest from the backbenches almost as soon as he arrived in the Commons - not a good look. Starmer’s crisis year has come to soon for King Andy. His day may come, but not yet.

So, who then is there? Who has experience of government, clear economic plans to reindustrialise the economy through comprehensive investment in Green energy, who would seek to re-nationalise the utilities, and who has collated a vast array of new and practical left of centre ideas covering housing, energy, inward investment, youth training and education, devolution of power to the regions, criminal justice reform and support of trade unions, and who has fostered networks and connections with innovative progressive thinkers across the world? * Who was it who was credited with the high point of optimism about a future Labour government in 2022, when the Green Prosperity Plan was the wellspring of Labour’s plan for growth in its policy programme launched at that year’s Party Conference before he was marginalised a year or so later by the Reeves/McSweeney/McFadden faction and saw his expansionist policies diluted to the point of extinction? Who could hit the ground running with a genuinely popular policy programme, have the courage to jettison not just the absurd fiscal rules and Reform-chasing rhetoric , but also clear out the existing incompetent sectarian gang, import genuine talent to his cabinet and honestly offer a new optimistic Labour discourse to a disaffected, but still basically hopeful, electorate? Hell, he could even pull in Andy Burnham…

Step forward then, Ed Miliband.

11th January 2026

*Go Big by Ed Miliband (Penguin Random House UK, 2021)

[theonion]

[hjohn3]

So true…

[hjohn3]

Journalistic Hypocrisy is Getting Harder to Hide – What Happened to Gabriele Nunziati?

On the 27th of October, Agenzia Nova terminated their ‘collaboration’ with the Italian journalist Gabriele Nunziati. This decision was made

This is worth a read. The continued unthinking free pass given by so much of the so-called centrist liberal establishment to the actions of the state of Israel and the associated seeming denial of the humanity of Palestinians, continues to be utterly mystifying. The article describes yet another small, but telling, example of this.

[hjohn3]

Road To Nowhere

Labour’s Lack Of Political Sense Will Destroy This Government

Source: Integrity Institute

By Honest John

HOW HAS it come to this? The first Labour government in fourteen years elected with an astonishing majority just sixteen months ago is now seriously contemplating electoral defeat at a General Election still well over three years away, that would, if the opinion polls are correct, usher in the first far right government in Britain’s history. How can a government which had - and still has - untrammelled electoral power, have shed so much of its polling support (a staggering loss of 17% of the vote when compared to July 2024 according to Politico) and seen an extraordinary collapse of its vote at the Caerphilly Senned by election in a constituency the party has held since it was created (Labour secured a derisory 11%)? Of course much of this can be explained by an unrelentingly hostile media and online landscape from which it is assailed by both right and left, and a fickle and impatient electorate looking for instant gratification and retaining little political loyalty to the party it last voted for. However, this is the modern political world and does not alone explain the intense vulnerability of a government transformed from a determined agent of change 16 months ago into its current crouching shadow of its former self, lacking confidence, narrative, charisma, or it increasingly seems, any governing purpose whatsoever.

As is often the case when governments fail, the source of its woes are usually self-inflicted. The previous Tory regime wrecked itself on the folly of Brexit, the idiocy of Boris Johnson, the madness of Truss and the general haplessness of Rishi Sunak, but it took many years before its serial errors became utterly self-destructive. The Starmer’s regime’s level of political stupidity to get to this place in little over a year, is therefore truly impressive. It commenced on almost day one. Instead of recognising a public mood that had, perhaps for all time, reduced the strongest political party the UK has seen to a broken remnant no one even notices anymore, and which was now seeking the change and the hope Starmer had promised, were instead greeted by relentless messaging about a “£22bn black hole”, the “ironclad” nature of the government’s fiscal rules and the need for “unpopular decisions”, thus sucking out any optimism about a change of administration that a sceptical electorate may have had. A bemused public could be forgiven for thinking they had changed governments to see positive change, not to be told there was no money, that nothing could be done and that it was all the previous lot’s fault. This relentlessly negative messaging, full of references to “broken” public services and unsustainable debt, was then contradicted by the sheer hypocrisy of Starmer and fellow Ministers indulging in a seeming orgy of “freebies” donated by wealthy donors and corporate interests, ranging from concert tickets to spectacles. It was pointed out that the scale of this “scandal” was tiny when compared to the grotesque corruption of the Tory years, but nonetheless, the contrast of Ministers’ personal behaviour with Labour’s dystopian account of its inheritance was jarring and fuelled the already present sentiment that “they’re all the same.”

This was followed by perhaps Labour’s defining moment of shooting itself in the foot when, in the October 2024 budget, Rachel Reeves insisted on means testing the Winter Fuel Allowance in order to contribute £1.1bn of savings to the fiscal black hole, while at the same time raising £40bn in taxes. Even in fiscal terms, by definition, the assault on Winter Fuel was therefore not necessary, and yet the government allowed the narrative to be set that Labour hated pensioners and were presiding over continuity austerity. Labour succeeded in getting brickbats for both cutting spending and raising taxes, which is impressive enough, but the sense of absurdity was only heightened by the later decision to reverse the measure after enduring a winter of being continually criticised for “Winter Fuel” and the policy being cited by vox pop voters as the reason they "will never vote Labour again". It was too late: the damage was done and appears to be permanent.

Just a few months later, the sectarian government that Starmer leads then effectively launched an assault on its own voting coalition (which at 34% last July was not that big to begin with) through the catastrophic attempt to cut payments to disabled claimants under the guise of welfare “reform” when the motivation was clearly financial, leading even the PLP to revolt, forcing another policy withdrawal. Like Winter Fuel, it was too little too late, and disenchanted leftish voters began a slow drift to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. This was compounded by extraordinary actions last summer by front bench politicians seemingly seeking to carry out the wishes of the Israeli state at all costs - whether this was criminalising agitprop protestors as terrorists; persecuting mouthy pop stars or defending Israeli football hooligans in the supposed interests of combating anti-semitism. Labour’s casual dismissal of a pro-Palestinian cause so important to so much of its base is, in terms of electoral survival, inexplicable. But with the arrival of charismatic Jewish and anti-Zionist leftist Zack Polanski to lead the Greens, the trickle of left wing and Muslim voters to Polanski’s party has become a flood. As a result Labour now polls at 18% - three points ahead of the Greens and eleven behind Reform.

This litany of self-inflicted woes is set to continue. Starmer’s reshuffle largely credited to (guess who?) Morgan McSweeney, has created a cabinet of drones. No alternative voices now exist to challenge the defunct neo-Blairism Starmer appears to favour; no passionate advocates of an activist state to lead economic growth are at the centre of government to challenge the Treasury orthodoxies that Reeves so blindly follows; no radical imaginative thinkers to promote the multiple ways in which the government can raise revenue to repair public services and drive down the level of debt without having to increase income tax are present in Starmer’s cabinet, and no articulate and community-engaged ministers are working with the beleaguered Prime Minister to wrest his scripts from the hands of the phenomenonally useless McSweeney to try to breathe life into a non-existent government project. Instead, a cabinet created by factionalism will continue on its doomed road to nowhere, bragging proudly of the “unpopular decisions” it will have to make, promoting the orthodoxies it will pretend are immutable and the “missions” that no one understands.

The errors of this latter day political version of the Titanic are set to continue: Reeves has confirmed her absurd fiscal rules; Shabana Mahmood intends to enter the same failed territory as the Tories and attempt to “deter” asylum seekers; Wes Streeting, despite being in receipt of £29bn of additional funding presides over a cost-cutting regime in the NHS as brutal as anything perpetrated under Sunak; Steve Reed has already reduced the relatively small affordable housing quotas in the government’s new homes programme to stimulate private sector involvement and Blairite Pat McFadden, apparently learning nothing, wants to have another go at cutting the welfare bill. It is genuinely difficult to work out for whom this government thinks it is working - Labour voters seem to trail far behind the bond markets, private business, Reform voters and the state of Israel in Ministers’ list of priorities.

It is often said, with so many years before the next general election there is plenty of time for Labour to turn things around. There is indeed, but it is too late for either Starmer or Reeves to do so: not only due to their own chronic unpopularity which is likely now to be fixed, but because neither have the depth, intellectual curiosity or basic political competence to be able to do so. The chances of a leadership challenge in the next couple of years are remote and so Starmer’s ship of fools will likely remain on course for its ultimate rendezvous with the waiting iceberg and Starmer’s enduring legacy will be to have been - despite claiming to be precisely the opposite - the man who wrecked the Labour Party.

6th November 2025

[hjohn3]

Time To Take Them Seriously…

What Are The Prospects of a Reform Government and Can It be Stopped?

Source: Euronews.com

By Honest John

REFORM U.K. are, according to Politico’s poll of polls, currently scoring 31% in terms of voting intentions and enjoying an 11% lead over Labour, who have seen their own voting intention collapse by a staggering 13% since last year’s General Election and now sit unhappily at 20%, just three points ahead of the moribund Conservatives. Reform have had an excellent summer, watching with glee the protests outside so-called migrant hotels and focusing their efforts on constant references to the issue of “small boats” with Farage himself talking in dystopian terms about ‘societal collapse’ and public disorder if the “crisis” remains unresolved. Farage’s “solutions” include withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, and dark talk of mass deportations of, what sounds like, all asylum seekers, regardless of the veracity of their claims. Despite his arguments being almost entirely spurious, the silence from the government on the issues is deafening, with even some Labour figures joining the chorus for the U.K. to detach itself from the ECHR (notably Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Graham Stringer), while the Conservatives scrabble around desperately trying to claim they were there first. Despite Reform’s party conference often having a clownish aspect, the presence of serious corporate money at the event would indicate business is sensing the party may be on its way to power. In the face of the absence in any principled arguments against Reform’s authoritarian turn from the political establishment, therefore by implication, ceding the argument to the “insurgent” party, unsurprisingly, immigration has risen to second in the list of issues of concern to voters, according to YouGov, behind healthcare, but now above crime, the economy and tax. Reform therefore are not just dominating the opinion polls, but the political narrative and climate too. On current projections, Nigel Farage will be Britain’s next Prime Minister. Is it time to take Reform seriously.

If current trends continue, it is hard to see what will stop Reform continuing to make the political weather, and with it scooping ever more votes, all the way to the next General Election. A demoralised and impatient electorate seem more than ready to buy into a far right narrative that has spread far beyond its historical obsession with immigration and, driven by online activists, has evolved into a sour but aggressive ethno-nationalism, no longer concerned solely with migration, but seeking, in cultural terms, to redefine what it means to be British - a Britishness that is white and born here. A perverted form of nostalgia applies: a contention that all would be well with the country if only it could rid itself not only of asylum seekers and immigrants, but, by implication, everyone from a different cultural and ethnic background too. Reform may claim currently it is not racist, but the campaigns it encourages, from asylum protests to Raise The Colours, are ethnically driven and its willingness to threaten to dispense with individual and collective legal rights, means an authoritarian, anti-democratic impulse lies at the party's heart.

What could stop Reform’s seemingly effortless march to power? Actually, despite the over-exposure and political cover that Farage and his misfits receive from right wing and mainstream media, there are a number of pitfalls for the populists between now and the almost four years until the next election.

First and foremost is Reform’s absence of any realistic or practical policies; fundamentally it remains a party which exists on populist vibes onto which disaffected voters project whatever they wish. This will see them through local elections and by elections, but when it comes to national elections, voters will want to see what they get for their money and the party will need clarity in a range of policy areas beyond immigration - silence on the NHS, criminal justice, education and defence to name just a few will not do. As policy positions are firmed up, so voters will find much to disagree with. The party will also be subject to much closer scrutiny. If Richard Tice’s hapless recent interview with Nick Robinson on Reform’s tax and spend plans and Farage’s own thin-skinned responses to aggressive questioning when he addressed the US Congress, are anything to go by, their key spokesmen could fall apart under pressure.

Then there is the vulnerability of Farage himself - Reform remains fundamentally a vehicle for Farage’s personal obsessions. It it is not even a political party in any real sense, being a ramshackle mix of limited company, subscription group and Tik Tok channel. It is essentially non-serious, as evidenced by grotesques like Lee Anderson, lightweights like Sarah Pochin and Farage’s own delight in spectacle and camp. One also suspects scandals are waiting in the wings. Farage is, at heart, a grifter and like all grifters, there a whiff of personal gain about the man, exemplified by his liking for cryptocurrency, mysterious wealthy backers and his, shall we say, unusual house purchase arrangements. One suspects something will emerge over the next couple of years which will condemn Nigel to the category of “they’re all the same” in the eyes of his voters - which is a political graveyard very difficult to escape from (just ask Keir Starmer who has arguably never recovered from the freebies scandal).

Politically Reform are divisive. Far from representing the soul of the people of England “who have not spoken yet”, its appeal, according to polling, still remains overwhelmingly with voters who identify themselves as being on the political right or, at the very least, not on the left. Their demographic , while expanding, is still centred on middle aged and older white males and within the former industrial towns of the North, the Midlands and Wales. Their voting base in the English cities and Scotland remains patchy at best and there are real questions as to whether the party could win a single metropolitan party seat. Also, the more aggressive, discriminatory and unpleasant Reform’s narrative becomes, the higher the chances of non-ideological voters being repelled in the absence of any other defining policy platforms.

There is a chance that Labour’s significant legislative programme begins to deliver material benefits to voters, which is certainly Starmer’s hope. The policies on Best Start hubs, free childcare, NHS waiting list reduction, workers’ and renters’ rights, higher public sector pay and clean energy investment could all improve living standards and kick start economic growth. This is Farage’s fear: that if Labour pitch the next election as one between reactionary authoritarianism against incremental improvements to people’s lives - particularly if small boats arrivals have reduced and hotels are no longer used to house claimants, then this pitch could resonate.

Tactical voting to keep the far right out - a phenomenon common in Europe and effective to a remarkable extent, could also apply here. 30% of the vote is impressive under the current multi party environment, but remains insufficient to win a majority if voters coalesce in marginal seats to the benefit of the candidate most likely to beat Reform. The much despised First Past The Post system could yet come to Labour’s rescue and propel it to largest party status or even to a small majority at the next election.

Any and all of the above could derail the Reform bandwagon but, in my opinion, the best and most consequential antidote to the poison of Farageism is a bold and confident assertion of a counter-narrative, currently shamefully absent except, to a degree, on the part of the Liberal Democrats and the likely pitch of the Greens under Zack Polanski. A clear defence of immigration as essential to the functioning of the economy; a proud resssertion of Britain’s role as a country that welcomes refugees and honours its international commitments; a defence of the multiculturalism which has kept ethnic tensions remarkably low in this country for the last 40 years, along with a promotion of the active state and policy prescriptions that will safeguard civil liberties while stimulating social and regional equality. Clearly this narrative belongs to the Labour government which instead has chosen to distance itself from it in a doomed attempt to attract Reform voters while at the same time driving others to the Corbyn/Sultana party (when it forms) and the Greens, seemingly oblivious to the fact that in most voter categories, twice as many 2024 Labour defectors have moved to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, as opposed to Reform.

Whether Labour, with all the advantages of government and an unassailable majority, have the stomach for this narrative remains an open question. The current signs are not good, with Yvette Cooper indicating support for Raise The Colours, despite this blatant piece of trolling being originated by far right activists. Labour remain transfixed by Farage in an entirely unproductive way, despite the intense damage aping of the conman’s rhetoric and positioning is doing to its own voter coalition. Without a different analysis of Britain’s woes, however, the only certainty is a fatal split in the left vote at the next election and the beginning of a drift of the U.K. towards an English fascism from which it may not be possible to return.

8th September 2025

[hjohn3]

Say it loud, say it proud…

[hjohn3]

Israel releases video showing public humiliation of prominent Palestinian prisoner

Imprisoned since 2002 on murder charges and sentenced to five life sentences plus an additional 40 years for his role in the second intifada

I don’t care if I sound anti-semitic. These people are monsters: the modern Nazis. Unlike the 1930s and early 1940s when the physical destruction European Jewry happened - for many years- behind closed doors, this sadistic genocide is happening in plain sight enacted by the most dreadful far right regime the world has to offer. We are all complicit. In the name of self-defence, the Israeli state behaves with utter impunity because its backers refuse to take action to shut down this dreadful unapologetic racist entity that makes a mockery of its own pious statements about opposing anti-semitism.

The victims of the National Socialist camps would be ashamed. No atrocity justifies the cynical destruction of an entire people. Jewish voices - where are you? Western governments - why do you cower?

[hjohn3]

Left Turn

Could Your Party Be A Genuine Left Wing Political Alternative in the U.K.?

Source: Alamy Stock Photos

By Honest John

OF LATE, there has been much excitement (particularly within the left wing social media community) and not a little sneering (particularly on the part of Labour politicians and apparatchiks) about the drawn-out arrival of a new left wing political party spearheaded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. The 76-year old Corbyn’s latest foray into the political limelight has not been without characteristic chaos however. The initial “launch” of the new party was made unilaterally by former Labour MP Sultana last month, who seemed to have omitted letting Corbyn know of her intention, leading to an immediate retreat by Sultana following Corbyn’s protests. Eventually the new grouping was officially unveiled via a website and a posting on X by the pair, proclaiming the arrival of “Your Party” even though we were later told this is not the name of the new party, whose title will be decided by its members in the autumn. Even the latter aspect is not particularly clear - you can sign up online to “Your Party”, but as it does not yet exist as an organisation, the membership aspect will need to be decided, one assumes, at some future point in the year. So far, so Corbyn, but the confusion has not prevented a reputed 600,000 people from signing up to the new group, which if ever translated into actual membership, would make it far and away the largest political grouping in the U.K. One can giggle at the amateurishness of it all, but with initial polling suggesting that up to 10% of the electorate may vote for the new arrival, primarily at the expense of Labour (although Your Party would take votes from the Greens too), it has to be taken seriously in the multiparty environment that now characterises British democracy. Labour sneerers need to watch out.

The party’s website (https://www.yourparty.uk) is basically a supporter recruitment tool, and says little about what the party stands for, although Sultana (noticeably more forthcoming about the enterprise than Corbyn), has mentioned the following priorities in interviews:-

to tackle wealth maldistribution, probably via the introduction of a wealth tax;

support for nationalisation, although no specific industries have been mentioned;

to increase the scale and availability of social housing;

to oppose the privatisation of the NHS;

to end the sale of arms to Israel;

general, but non-specific, support of policies to combat climate change; and

(perhaps unsurprisingly given the roots of the putative party) to protect the right to protest.

At present, these are the only clues we have got as to the party’s direction, because all actual policy positions are to be deferred until an inaugural conference of the new grouping to be held in the autumn. Corbyn has stated his preference for Your Party to be a membership-led organisation, true to a Bennite tradition he personified when in the Labour Party, even hinting that he wants the member conference to not only decide the name of the party, and its policy programme, but also to select the leader, something Sultana is less keen on, appearing to favour a joint leadership comprising her and Corbyn in the recent manner of the Greens. And herein lies the problem: a membership-led organisation sounds desirable in principle, but the practice is fraught with pitfalls. Without a local or constituency representative structure below a clear leader or leadership team, it is hard to see how any coherent policy positions will be arrived at. Although the non-Labour left talks very confidently about itself and assumes that everyone knows who is part of it and what it stands for, this is not the case, even amongst the self-proclaimed “left” itself.

If we take Sultana’s sketchy summary as a guide, then one discerns contradictions almost immediately. Addressing societal wealth distribution belongs to a workerist socialist tendency, often strongly represented within the trade unions (all of whom have remained ominously silent about Your Party to date); nationalisation - in any case a means to an end not an end to itself - belongs to the state planning syndicalist tradition, long represented within the Labour Party in government, at least until Blair’s reversal of Labour policy in this respect; ending arms sales to Israel, itself a confused position as the U.K. directly sells very few armaments to Tel Aviv, is essentially an anti-Zionist liberal /Muslim cause, and a vague commitment to tackling climate change covers a multitude of sins, treading very directly onto the terrain of the Green Party, whose policies on housing, nuclear power and nationalisation may directly contradict the preferred agendas of the trade unions and the socialist planners. None of this is to say these different strands can’t be harmonised into an overall policy agenda, but throwing it open to members derived from vastly different left wing or progressive traditions is a recipe for chaos.

I suspect, therefore, the upcoming conference will not decide much in the way of detailed policy, which as governing parties soon discover, is a painstaking, lengthy process and filled with compromise. I think Your Party, or whatever it eventually calls itself, will retreat into the comfort zone of a hyper liberal “I’m Against It” leftist vibe, rather than get into the messy business of serious policy making that could influence the real policy platform of an actual government. This means the group will probably never get close to power, but this is not to say it will not be politically significant. Nigel Farage is currently leading a party with no discernible policy platform whatsoever and tops the opinion polls with apparently 31% of the electorate willing to vote for Reform. Given Labour’s extraordinary insouciance when it comes to throwing its own votes away through a series of unforced political positioning (self-denying fiscal rules; Winter Fuel; disability cuts; tolerance of Israel’s genocide in Gaza; removing the party whip from rebels; proscribing a direct action political protest group as “terrorist”), the party has succeeded in opening a large amount of political space on its left. Labour’s share of the vote is down 11% compared to the General Election according to Politico’s average polling. So far the beneficiaries of disaffected Labour votes have been the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, with relatively few leaking to Reform, despite the Starmer operation’s neuroticism about Farage. Your Party may take some of these Labour defectors away from the Greens in particular, but polling indicates the biggest loser to a leftist surge will be Labour. Targeted progressive and pro-Gaza campaigning by Corbyn and Sultana in urban and Muslim majority constituencies could decimate Labour seats with small majorities at the next election, with high profile Starmerites such as Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood in the new party’s sights. Despite Labour apparently not wanting to accept the polling evidence before its own eyes, if the party’s sole response to the new grouping is complacent dismissiveness, rather than a recognition of a political viewpoint it should heed, then Your Party could be crucial to ending Labour’s majority next time and, ironically, possibly facilitating a limited Tory recovery and/or a Reform seats breakthrough.

In a multi-party democracy straining against the leash of a First Past The Post electoral system no longer fit for purpose, the Corbyn/Sultana vehicle may well have an impact disproportionate to its size or vote share, but I doubt it will have any influence on the political direction of the U.K overall. By in likelihood presenting slogans rather than policies and performative rallies and safe zone speeches where the hard work of creating a genuinely new leftist politics should be, I suspect Your Party will have little in the way of staying power and will not succeed in attracting serious politicians, union backing or influential opinion-formers to its cause. I doubt it will win a single Parliamentary seat.

However, what the undeniable surge of interest in the idea of a left wing party that has greeted this stop-start launch demonstrates, is that there is a genuine political yearning for a new type of politics: not the oppositionist, single issue progressivism that has infected so much recent left wing discourse, but a politics focused on living standards, workers’ rights, job security, decent public services, civic regeneration and economic equality. The hammer blows of the crash, austerity, Brexit, Covid and Trussonomics have wrecked the old neoliberal order of cheap money, deregulation, low wage workforces and outsourced business and services, on which Blair, Brown and Cameron coasted. Starmer may wish it wasn’t so, but there is political space for a populist left wing party led by serious people, probably rooted in the trade union movement and the left wing economic thinking best represented by, for example, Yanis Varoufakis. Such a new movement I believe would need to grow out of the Labour Party, in the manner Labour itself grew out of the Liberals, initially at constituency level, and taking with it the mailing lists, the local organisation, the activist base and the affiliation of unions. Without this organic structure, no left wing party can be anything more than a large protest movement, very good at stating what it is against, and therefore actually accepting a narrative pre-set by the Right, and poor at describing what it is for.

Traditionally Labour has been able to reinvent itself and lean into the relevant zeitgeist and eventually obtain or regain power even when all seemed hopeless. Its ability to provide a home for a variety of left wing traditions, and from that argumentative, disputatious environment, put together governing programmes that have often worked, has been its enduring strength. If however the current oddly sectarian leadership continues in place, then many leftish Labour people will look at a despairing electorate and the shadow of the populist Right, and decide the time has come to reinvent Labour’s historical misssion, but outside a Labour Party that appear narrow, hostile and without a governing narrative. In this sense it may be no bad thing some of the most consequential Labour figures are its Mayors and outside the intolerant reach of the anti-left leadership of the PLP.

Perhaps the enduring legacy of Corbyn and Sultana will not be one of creating a shift in the political dynamic of the U.K. in a leftwards direction, but in creating a precedent for others, within the Labour movement, to follow and potentially go on to really transform British politics more radically than at any time since 1945.

10th August 2025

[hjohn3]

How Did We Get Here?

When Did the Political and Media Establishment Lose Its Moral Compass on Israel?

Sources: Josep Goded account on Bluesky; Alamy

By Honest John

Looking at the two pictures above, which is the greater scandal? The dropping a 500lb bomb by one of the best-equipped air forces in the world on an undefended cafe filled with civilians, killing up to 36 of them outright and injuring dozens more, or an, until recently, fairly obscure punk/rap artist leading a chant calling for the “death” of the IDF at Glastonbury? Which is more heinous, the routine shooting by soldiers of non-combatant refugees who are making their way to find food and supplies from aid depots designated by that same military, or the defacing of planes with red paint by a protest group who had illegally entered an RAF base to highlight ongoing support by the British armed forces for Israel’s “war” in Gaza?

In any sane world, the use of a bomb by the IDF air force designed to take out enemy troop formations, military vehicles and fortified buildings, to destroy a seaside cafe would be considered a war crime; the deaths of nearly 40 civilians doing no more than eating, drinking and socialising would be viewed as a wartime atrocity. In the same sane world, a provocative festival chant by a rap artist would be viewed for what it is - a performative piece of agitprop for the benefit of an audience of festival-goers at best, or a tasteless bit of glory-hunting by a band seeking publicity at worst. If the political and media establishment appeared not have lost all sense of critical reasoning when it comes to the Gaza conflict, then the IDF and its American-supplied “aid contractors” would be condemned for terror tactics that have inflicted deadly combat injuries on unarmed families seeking to avoid starvation; if reason prevailed, the piece of political theatre by Palestine Action would be viewed as legitimate consciousness-raising by an activist group at best, and as something resembling a university Rag Week prank at worst.

But in the upsidedown moral universe inhabited by the political and media establishment of the U.K., no sense of proportion or reckoning with facts any longer applies. The rap artist Bobby Vylan is traduced as an antisemite for unseriously wishing harm on a genocidal military force - not a race; not an ethnic group; not a country; not even the British Army, but a foreign military force, armed to the teeth, and “fighting” 2,500 miles away. However ill-advised Vylan’s antics were, the furore of condemnation, faux outage, social ostracism, bookings cancellations and accusations of racism that have followed, are utterly and completely disproportionate and absurd. In the meantime in the period since the US and Israel chose to boycott the UN and NGOs providing aid on the ground in Gaza in favour of a privatised and militarised alternative (the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation), according to the UN, over 400 Palestinian civilians have died trying to reach the new aid sites designated by the GHF and “guarded” by the IDF and the GHF’s own mercenaries. According to witnesses (including anonymous IDF soldiers themselves) the shooting is almost sport - a very real, but lethal, mockery of defenceless people trying to survive. This is not war; this is not even “colatteral damage”, this is murder and cruelty. Yet the criticisms of this obscenity, certainly from our political establishment, are negligible; the majority of media outlets, who remain bafflingly pro-Israel even now, are similarly mute.

Where the British state did leap into furious action was to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, making it illegal not only to join the group but also to support it publicly and then to charge its members with terrorism offences. This is a group that entered RAF Brize Norton, armed not with the semi-automatic weapons of Hamas, nor the bombs of the Provisional IRA, nor the handheld rocket launchers of Hezbollah, or the Novichok of the Russian secret service: they were armed with paint. The activists did not disable British planes involved in an existential struggle with an enemy of the U.K.; they defaced planes that the group suspected were going to provide air mission intelligence support to the IDF. The group were guilty of trespass and criminal damage at best - offences that would attract in most cases less than twelve months in prison. Instead, Starmer’s government has charged them with being terrorist supporters and promoters in perhaps one of the more surreal moments in this troubled regime’s history, facing up to 14 years in prison. Palestine Action do have a long history of these sort of political stunts - but this makes them irritants, not threats to life and limb; it certainly does not make them terrorists when compared to the cynical actions of the IDF - happy to wipe out tens of people in order to reach one Hamas commander - an organisation, by the way, that has been incapable of inflicting harm on Israel for the best part of 18 months.

So where does this apparent blindness to facts on the part of most of our governing and media class come from? How did we get here? Its root, I suspect, is an unwillingness to see Israel - despite the Netanyahu regime taking Zionism into ever greater realms of violence, unrestrained vengeance, expansionism and ethnic cleansing - for what it is. The main political parties and most of the media continue to view Israel as basically a civilised western-style democracy, simply exercising its right of self-defence following the atrocity perpetrated by Hamas nearly two years ago. Israel is often described as an “ally” whom Europe and the United States must support, but it is hard to see how this so-called alliance, forged in the days of the Cold War, is relevant any more to modern geopolitics and even if it was, what the U.K. gains from it to merit such fawning acceptance of whatever Israel chooses to do.

Without doubt a factor in this almost-uncompromising support for Israel is the deep fear the establishment has of being accused of being antisemitic, and it is not only Britain, the former ruler of Mandated Palestine, that feels this keenly - Germany is almost neurotic about the charge for understandable historical reasons. But this in itself is curious. The state of Israel arguably ever since its foundation, and certainly since the occupation of the West Bank after 1967, has sought to present Zionism and Judaism as indistinguishable and therefore anyone opposed to Zionist excesses must also be at least implicitly antisemitic. However for years this contention was vigorously challenged - not just by left wing and liberal critics of Israeli policy and behaviour, but also by Western governments frustrated as the Likud led administrations in Tel Aviv made it clear they had no real interest in the “two state solution”, who often challenged Zionist assertions that to be opposed to Israel (regardless of what they were doing ) was to be an implicit Jew-hater.

But all this has changed and changed utterly. The Western powers who have sustained Israel morally and militarily almost from the point of its creation, have now bought wholesale into Netanyahu’s narrative that to criticise Israel’s oppressive and settler policies is to be antisemitic; to oppose Israel’s extension of war into four sovereign states, is to get in the way of Israel’s right to self-defence and to side with the Palestinians themselves is to side with genocidal terrorists. Only this explains the routine ignoring, under-reporting and complicit silence every time the IDF launches another unprovoked attack on refugees and civilians; only this can explain the extraordinary legal and censorious over-reaction to music acts such Vylan and Kneecap and protest movements like Palestine Action; only this can explain the complete loss of a moral compass on the part of our elites when the existence of illegal, amoral, even evil, political and military behaviour is there for all to see.

However, I believe the ultimate explanation for this retreat by our leaders from standing for the values of international justice and human rights that they proclaim when it suits them, is the sheer horror of the attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas on 7th October 2023. The violence on that bloody day was visceral, cruel and ethnically-charged: it was as close to an actual pogrom as anything since the Holocaust. And in a microcosm of the compensatory support and enablement of a Jewish homeland by the guilty European powers in the late 1940s, so Hamas’ act of self-destructive insanity has condemned all Gazans in the minds of pro-Israel politicians, commentators and journalists as psychotic Jew-hating terrorists. It is the Gazans’ Original Sin. Nothing therefore Israel does to “punish”, not just the perpetrators of the Hamas attack, but the very men, women and children from whose communities those perpetrators emerged, is too severe, too dreadful, too genocidal. One could argue that no one in any position of power either regionally or globally, has ever cared very much about the fate of the Palestinians, but it seems the Gazans who voted Hamas into power nearly 20 years ago are now cast as pariahs, deserving of everything the IDF can throw at them. Even if all Gazans still support Hamas’ rule and tactics (which is hard to believe, given its consequences), they must still be punished, apparently, for their thought-crimes.

When the dust finally settles and the smoke clears on what I fear will be Israel’s imperial settlement, not only of the Palestine/Israel “conflict”, but probably of the wider eastern Mediterranean as well, History will perhaps conclude that among others, the U.K. establishment lost not only its moral compass, but also its moral authority when it excused and enabled the great war crime of our times - the destruction of the people of Gaza.

8th July 2025