They Are Telling Us What They Believe

"The only democracy in the Middle East" strikes again, as Michael Hauser Tov, Chen Maanit, Noa Shpigel and Jack Khoury write:

Israel's Central Elections Committee voted Wednesday to disqualify Mansour Abbas' United Arab List slate from running in the election, as well as the Joint List, which consists of the parties Hadash, Ta'al and Balad. The vote came after left-wing Knesset member Ofer Cassif of the Arab-Jewish Hadash party and Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh were banned earlier the same day. These decisions may be reversed by appeal to the High Court of Justice.

In its disqualification of the UAL – which was part of former prime ministers Naftali Bennett's and Yair Lapid's government – the committee said the party rejects Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, incites racism and expresses support for an armed struggle against the country. Last month, centrist politician and former Deputy Public Defense Minister Yoav Segalovitz joined the party as number two. Additionally, the committee disqualified the Joint List on the same grounds as the UAL. 18 voted in favor of the disqualification and five opposed. The ban on Cassif, on the grounds that he denies Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state, was objected to by Israel's attorney general. The committee also voted to disqualify Sami Abu Shehadeh, chairman of the Balad party, over an article he wrote the day after the October 7 attack, on the grounds that he supported an armed struggle or actions of a terror organization against Israel. Unusually, Central Elections Committee chairman Supreme Court Justice Noam Solberg also voted in favor of disqualifying Abu Shehadeh. 

Under Israel's Basic Law on the Knesset, a candidate or party may be barred from an election for rejecting Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state, inciting racism or supporting armed struggle against Israel by an enemy state or terrorist organization. Disqualifying a party or candidate from running in Knesset elections is a far-reaching step, intended to be used with maximum caution and restraint due to the fact that disqualification runs counter to the fundamental right to vote and be elected, and infringes on freedom of expression. The bid to disqualify Abu Shehadeh was filed by Itamar Ben-Gvir's far-right Otzma Yehudit party over the article, in which the leader described the Hamas attack as "an important historic event militarily, politically and strategically." Abu Shehadeh said he regretted writing the article at the center of the request to disqualify him. "I wrote it on October 7, and I didn't know the scale of the atrocities. If I had known, I would not have written it this way," he said. "I agree with the justified criticism of the article. I should not have written it, and I should have clearly condemned [the attack]." "My intention was for the military campaign to be halted and for the parties to move to a diplomatic track led by the Palestinian Authority and Arab states," he explained.

All Jewish-majority opposition parties have expressed support for Abu Shehadeh's ouster, including the center-left Democrats party chairman, Yair Golan. "There are no concessions for Abu Shehadeh and no concessions for Ben-Gvir – both should be disqualified," Golan said in a statement. According to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, the article might have constituted support for an armed struggle by a terrorist organization against Israel, which would be suitable grounds for disqualification. Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party went one step further than the other opposition parties, saying that it would vote for the disqualification of all majority-Arab parties running for the upcoming Knesset elections, not just Abu Shehadeh.

Discussing Likud's request to disqualify Cassif, attorney Ilan Bombach said Cassif had acted contrary to Israel's objectives as a Jewish and democratic state. "He wanted to repeal the Law of Return. He approached countries and said that we are committing 'genocide,' and called for the release of Marwan Barghouti, who was convicted in three terror attacks in which five people were killed," Bombach said. Cassif said that portraying his opposition to the government's policies as support for the enemy distorted reality. "The disqualification requests are intended to achieve the complete delegitimization of Arab society and Israeli-Arab partnership, and to perpetuate totalitarian rule and majority tyranny," he said. He added: "There is no contradiction between the absolute condemnation I have expressed of the Gaza massacre and the war crimes being committed by the Israeli government, and the absolute condemnation I have expressed of the October 7 massacre and Hamas' horrific crimes."

Cassif's attorney Hassan Jabareen responded: "Bombach complained that Cassif said there is genocide in Gaza. There are at least a million people in Israel who say it's genocide. Are they illegal? Is it a crime? Is a member of Knesset not allowed to say something that an ordinary citizen is allowed to say?" Jabareen added: "There is no case for disqualifying Cassif. Cassif has made no statement supporting armed struggle against Israel." During the election committee's session on Wednesday, left-wing activists protested outside the Likud's headquarters in Tel Aviv against the effort to ban the lists, saying that they "reject the racist campaign against the Arab public and the idea that democracy is only for Jews."

The Central Elections Committee's largely political composition, with most members stemming from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition, was expected to approve disqualification requests against majority-Arab parties, the United Arab List and the Joint List – and potentially against the center-left Democrats as well – while rejecting requests against right-wing parties. Later on Wednesday, the committee will also discuss the coalition's petitions to bar Mansour Abbas' United Arab List, which argue that the party supports Hamas' armed struggle against Israel and rejects Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state. The petition filed by Likud claims that although the UAL has integrated itself into Israel's parliamentary system, Abbas has acknowledged that he deliberately adapts his public statements to the legal restrictions governing participation in elections in order to avoid disqualification. The UAL said in response that the petitions include no evidence pointing to the party's alleged support for an armed struggle by a terrorist organization or an enemy state.

See also here:

Israel's Central Elections Committee voted Wednesday to bar two candidates from running in the October election, along with all the Arab parties, prompting appeals to the High Court and exposing divisions within the opposition over efforts to disqualify candidates and Arab-majority parties. The committee voted 31-4 to disqualify Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh over an article he wrote immediately after the October 7 attack, on the grounds that it constituted support for armed struggle or the actions of a terrorist organization against Israel. It voted 19-5, with two abstentions, to bar left-wing lawmaker Ofer Cassif of the Arab-Jewish Hadash party on the grounds that he rejects Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state. Both decisions can be challenged before the High Court, which will ultimately determine whether the candidates may run. Abu Shehadeh, the third candidate on the Joint List slate, said he would appeal the decision, accusing the committee of seeking to silence Arab voters and exclude them from the political system.

"The Elections Committee's decision today to disqualify my candidacy is not directed only against me, but seeks to disqualify the voice of an entire public, exclude it from the political arena and reduce voter turnout in Arab society," he said. "We will petition the High Court to defend our right and our public's right to representation and political participation," Abu Shehadeh added, saying he would continue his "consistent and nonviolent struggle for freedom, justice and equality for all citizens." Cassif called his disqualification "a predetermined decision with no legal basis," accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition and its allies of using the Elections Committee against government opponents. "I will continue to fight for the representation of my voters and for the values of peace, equality and genuine Jewish-Arab partnership in the next Knesset as well," Cassif said. 

The votes highlighted a divide among Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's opponents over the disqualification proceedings. Democrats chairman Yair Golan backed Abu Shehadeh's disqualification while saying his party would oppose efforts to ban the United Arab List and Joint List in their entirety. "We will resolutely defend the right of Israel's Arab citizens to vote, be elected and be partners in leading the country," Golan said, adding that his party would not allow "an entire public to be made illegitimate." Golan said, however, that Abu Shehadeh's remarks following October 7 crossed a line, while Democrats faction chair Efrat Rayten said his statements amounted to support for armed struggle. Both drew a parallel with far-right Otzma Yehudit chairman Itamar Ben-Gvir, with Golan saying, "There are no concessions for Abu Shehadeh and no concessions for Ben-Gvir – both should be disqualified."

The Democrats' position drew a sharp response from the Joint List. Its chairman, Yousef Jabareen, accused Golan of joining what he described as a "racist and anti-democratic" disqualification campaign led by Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu. "Anyone who seeks the votes of the Arab public cannot support denying its right to political representation," Jabareen said. "Democracy for Jews alone is not democracy." A senior Joint List official separately described the Democrats' support for Abu Shehadeh's disqualification as "bizarre" and "condescending," criticizing the party for joining a petition submitted by Otzma Yehudit. The Together party, headed by Naftali Bennett, also said it supported barring Abu Shehadeh, while Yisrael Beiteinu said it would support disqualifying both candidates as well as the United Arab List and Joint List.

Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid, by contrast, said his party would largely sit out the proceedings, describing Elections Committee disqualification hearings as "a show for the voters." "I voted in the past to disqualify Abu Shehadeh, just as I voted in the past to disqualify Ben-Gvir," Lapid told Army Radio. "The court always overturns it, so we decided that we'll simply stop participating in this game." Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara opposed Cassif's disqualification, saying the evidence did not establish grounds for barring him despite statements and actions she strongly opposed. Adalah, which represented Cassif, said it expected the High Court to overturn the decision. Baharav-Miara took a different position on Abu Shehadeh, saying his October 2023 article could constitute support for armed struggle by a terrorist organization and provide grounds for disqualification. Abu Shehadeh told the committee that he regretted the article and would not have written it as he did had he known the scale of the October 7 atrocities. He denied ever supporting terrorism or armed struggle against Israel.

Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, who chairs the Elections Committee, took the unusual step of voting for Abu Shehadeh's disqualification. Committee chairmen have generally refrained from voting in such cases for roughly two decades. Sohlberg said he had initially intended to follow that practice but found Abu Shehadeh's response to the allegations insufficient, saying the case was clear enough that he could not justify abstaining. Ben-Gvir, whose party filed the petition against Abu Shehadeh, said the evidence warranted his disqualification and argued that the committee should have voted unanimously to bar him. The committee is also considering petitions to bar the United Arab List and Joint List, as well as requests targeting Otzma Yehudit, Religious Zionism, Zehut and the Democrats.

Causing Joshua Leifer to write:

If their recent conduct is any indication, many in the anti-Netanyahu opposition would prefer to lose the upcoming election – allowing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to remain in power – than to accept the basic democratic principle that the votes of Palestinian citizens of Israel are equal to those of Israeli Jews. While polls show that the opposition has no path to a majority without support from at least one of the Arab-led parties, opposition leaders are vowing not to form a coalition with them – and are now joining in the attacks on their legitimacy.

Avigdor Lieberman, who heads the secular, right-wing populist Yisrael Beitenu party, announced on Wednesday his support for barring the Joint List, Hadash MK Ofer Cassif, Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh, and Mansour Abbas' United Arab List from running in the election. Yet it is not only Lieberman, long the more xenophobic pole of the anti-Netanyahu camp, who has taken aim at the Arab-led parties and their representatives. Haaretz reported earlier Wednesday that members of Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party have pushed him to declare that he will not form a government with Abbas' United Arab List – in which Yoav Segalovitz, a former deputy police commissioner and Zionist Israeli, occupies second place on the party roster. Eisenkot has repeatedly said that Abbas' UAL does not meet his minimum criteria for joining a potential coalition that he would lead. Even Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democrats, announced his support on Wednesday for barring Balad's Abu Shehadeh from running.

There is a great deal that distinguishes the leaders of the Arab parties and their ideologies. Abbas has turned his Islamist party into a platform for Arab-Jewish partnership and speaks in terms of peace, mutual recognition, and the common ground of shared citizenship. Abu Shehadeh, by contrast, wrote on October 8, as fighting still raged in Israel's south, that Israel's humiliation at the hands of Hamas might be a model for others – that "if small, besieged Gaza managed to do this at this level, then others can do it even more effectively and simply." Abu Shehadeh's comments in praise of the Hamas attacks are morally wrong. He has since apologized, and in a social media post on Wednesday, wrote that he opposes armed struggle. Yet in any democracy worth its name, the freedom to express beliefs that others find abhorrent is a fundamental freedom. Moreover, few legal experts believe his statements are sufficient evidence for disqualification, and there is no precedent for barring a candidate for expressing support for armed struggle against Israel.

The attempt to bar the Arab-led parties is one of Israel's perverse election-time rituals. Even when the election committee does bar parties, the decisions are often reversed by the Supreme Court. Only in very rare cases have bans on parties or their leaders been upheld. On Wednesday, the committee – whose composition reflects the composition of the current coalition – voted to bar both the United Arab List and Joint List from running, including Cassif and Abu Shehadeh. Absent a significant deviation from the Supreme Court's historically cautious record, these decisions will likely be reversed too. Still, the cumulative effect of the attacks on the Arab-led parties and their representatives is to reinforce the notion that Arab political participation is illegitimate writ large.

The process also reflects a racist double standard. Where Arab-led parties are closely scrutinized for their support, or lack thereof, for Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state," extremist Jewish parties are not. Their participation is taken as a given. It was not the supporters of the UAL, Hadash, or Balad who have, over the last few years, rioted outside military bases, besieged the homes of Supreme Court judges, and threatened the lives of institutional gatekeepers like the attorney general, but those of the right-wing and religious parties that comprise Netanyahu's outgoing coalition. Some may argue that the opposition is once again falling into Netanyahu's trap – getting pulled along in the perpetual moving-right show that is Israeli politics – by joining in the attacks on the legitimacy of the Arab-led parties. But that would be to let the leaders of the anti-Netanyahu opposition off the hook. They are telling us what they believe. Given the choice between Netanyahu's return to the prime minister's office and a government in which the Arab-led parties play a role, they appear to prefer the former.

Burnham Introduces the Ministry of Truth

Paul Knaggs writes:

In the seventh chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith arrives at the thought that sits at the centre of the whole book. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he reflects. “It was their final, most essential command.”

Orwell did not think tyranny began with the burning of books. He thought it began when ordinary people were persuaded that what they could see for themselves was not really there: the thin ration, the broken lift, the promise that had quietly become its opposite. The Party did not need everyone to love Big Brother. It needed them to doubt their own experience. 

On Tuesday night in New York, Prime Minister Andy Burnham stood before the United Nations General Assembly and told the world that “over the last decade we have given too much ground to those who want to run a negative, corrosive narrative about life in Britain, which bears no resemblance to reality.” Then he announced a new National Centre for Information Defence.

Before going any further, I want to be fair to him, because the threat he described is real.

THE ENEMY IS REAL. SO IS THE MIRROR.

Russia runs an information war against this country. Burnham listed the tools: bots, fake websites, falsified newspaper articles and the forged branding of 28 British organisations, including universities and the BBC. These are not harmless internet pranks. They are deliberate attempts to manufacture credibility, disguise the source of information and exploit existing divisions inside another country. That is information warfare, and Britain has every right to defend itself against it. Nothing that follows excuses Moscow. 

But we would be treating our readers as fools if we pretended Britain comes to this fight with clean hands. Britain did not learn information warfare from the Kremlin. In a good many respects, it was the teacher.

In 1948, Clement Attlee’s Labour government set up the Information Research Department inside the Foreign Office to counter Soviet propaganda. It was not an MI5 outfit or some shadowy Conservative plot. It was ours, created by the most radical government this country has ever had. And it was secret. It operated for nearly three decades before it was wound up in 1977.

What began as counter-propaganda did not stay there. In 2021, The Observer revealed that during the Indonesian massacres of 1965, the IRD had produced pamphlets posing as the work of Indonesian patriots and urging them to eliminate the communist party. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Declassified files later studied by the historian Rory Cormac showed the department forging statements in the names of Soviet bodies: at least eleven fake statements from the Soviet news agency Novosti between 1965 and 1972. In 1963 it forged a statement from a Soviet front organisation denouncing Africans as “primitive” and morally weak, then watched it spread through the African press.

Set that beside the charge Burnham laid against Russia at the United Nations: forging the branding of other people’s institutions to deceive a foreign public. Britain did it first. In Indonesia, it did it while people were being slaughtered.

Nor was the BBC’s overseas broadcasting ever as detached from the state as its reputation suggests. In August 1953, as MI6 and the CIA moved against Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, the BBC Persian service is reported to have altered its routine midnight time announcement as a pre-arranged signal to the plotters. The World Service’s credibility abroad has always been an asset of British foreign policy, which is precisely why the state has valued it.

The pattern did not end with the Cold War. In 2011, the public was told that bombing Libya was necessary to protect the people of Benghazi. Five years later the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that the threat to civilians had been overstated, and that the mission had “drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change.” Libya collapsed into civil war. The claims that took Britain into that war did not come from St Petersburg.

Then, in 2018, came the case that should hang over every word Burnham said on Tuesday. The Integrity Initiative, a Foreign Office-funded project set up to counter Russian disinformation, was found to have shared articles on its Twitter account calling the Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, a “useful idiot” who “helped the Kremlin cause”. Money voted by Parliament to defend democracy from Moscow had been spent, in part, amplifying attacks on the Labour Party. Richard Burgon put it plainly at the time: the government “shouldn’t be using public funds or the state to undermine or attack the official opposition.” The Initiative’s founder later apologised to Corbyn.

Today, Britain works openly inside other countries’ information environments. Burnham told the Assembly that “we have already supported Moldova to protect its elections from Russian interference.” Perhaps that support was entirely benign. But Moscow describes its own operations in the language of protection too. The only thing that separates a democracy’s information work from an autocracy’s is accountability: open rules, independent oversight, and a firm wall between foreign threats and domestic argument. That wall is exactly what Britain has failed to build at home.

Orwell understood all of this from the inside. He spent the war at the BBC, producing broadcasts for India, and drew on its grim offices for the Ministry of Truth. In 1949, gravely ill, he handed the IRD a list of writers he considered unreliable as anti-Stalinist propagandists. His critics have spent decades calling that hypocrisy. They misread him. Orwell believed Stalinist lies had to be fought, and believed just as fiercely that any state entrusted with that fight would be tempted to turn its weapons on its own people. He saw no contradiction in holding both convictions. Neither should we.

So if the new centre does only what the Prime Minister’s own words say it will do, “to detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks”, few of us would object. The trouble is that the speech does not stay there.

HOW THE TARGET MOVED 

Read the passage as Burnham delivered it, in sequence, and watch the enemy change shape.

It begins with the Kremlin: its bots, its forgeries, its roughly £1.3 billion a year. It then describes what that money buys, “an insidious campaign that reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community”, which is “creating a narrative of decline, stoking division and sowing despair.” 

Then comes the sentence that should have stopped every civil libertarian in the country at breakfast. “We have given too much ground to those who want to run a negative, corrosive narrative about life in Britain, which bears no resemblance to reality.” 

Those. Not “the Kremlin”, not “hostile states”, but a word left open. Perhaps he meant Moscow alone; several broadcasters reported it that way. But a head of government choosing his words for the world’s largest diplomatic stage knows the difference between naming an enemy and describing a mood. He described a mood. 

He then told the Assembly who is most at risk from that mood. “If you’re struggling with the cost of living and your life is not improving”, he said, or if you are young and “not in employment, education or training”, then “you are going to be much more vulnerable to this kind of influence.” 

So in the space of a few paragraphs we travel from a foreign intelligence operation, to a feeling of national decline, to the people who are poorest and the young who have been left without work. The sense that things are getting worse is presented as something done to Britain from outside. The people most likely to feel it are presented as the weak point in the nation’s defences. 

This is the part Orwell would have recognised. The danger is not that a government fights Russian propaganda. The danger is that a government comes to treat discontent itself as a security threat, and then builds an institution to manage it. 

WE HAVE SEEN THIS MACHINE BEFORE 

The Integrity Initiative was an outsourced project, and ministers could plead ignorance of what it did. The state’s own in-house machine tells the same story, and here there is no one else to blame. 

In 2019 the government set up the Counter Disinformation Unit, supposedly to tackle false information spread by foreign states. During the pandemic its remit spread outwards. Investigations by the civil-liberties group Big Brother Watch found that it had been logging the online speech of MPs, academics, journalists and campaigners who disagreed with government policy. Posts by senior Conservative, Labour and Green politicians that criticised government policy, and contained no factual errors, were among those flagged to social media companies. 

When the story broke, the government did not close the unit. It renamed it. In November 2023 the Counter Disinformation Unit became the National Security Online Information Team, and ministers began to stress its security role. Big Brother Watch then obtained the team’s internal policy, which it said contained almost no references to national security and described the unit’s function as building “a picture of mis/disinformation threats”, with a remit that also covers “public safety”. 

Parliament has tried twice to bring the team under proper scrutiny. In March 2024 the Culture, Media and Sport Committee called for an independent review of its activities. After the 2024 election, the new Labour government ruled that out and said ministerial oversight was sufficient. In July 2025 the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee went further, recommending that the government “place NSOIT on a statutory footing and bring it under the remit of the Intelligence and Security Committee.” The government’s reply that October pointed to privacy notices, Freedom of Information requests and ministerial oversight. It did not accept the recommendation. 

When a Liberal Democrat peer asked in early 2024 why the team escaped the Intelligence and Security Committee, the minister, Viscount Camrose, told the Lords that the government had “a strong preference for not allowing it openly to share national security information”. The logic runs in a circle. The unit is called a security body, so it cannot be scrutinised; it cannot be scrutinised, so nobody can check whether it deserves to be called a security body. 

Against that record, the morning after the speech, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting went on GB News to reassure the country. “We’re not interested in policing domestic political dissent,” he said.

He may mean it sincerely. But assurances from ministers are exactly what we were given last time. No one has yet told Parliament whether the new centre will absorb NSOIT, stand alongside it or replace it. No one has said what law it will operate under, which committee will oversee it, or what it may refer to the platforms it will work with. A Prime Minister who was serious about the difference between foreign attack and domestic argument would have answered those questions in the same breath as the announcement. He did not.

WHO VERIFIES THE VERIFIERS? 

There is a further, quieter problem, and Burnham handed it to us himself by naming the BBC as a victim of Russian forgery. 

The BBC is a victim of that forgery. It is also, at home as well as abroad, an institution that gets things wrong. In November 2025 its Director-General, Tim Davie, and the head of BBC News, Deborah Turness, resigned after a Panorama programme was found to have spliced together separate passages of a Donald Trump speech, so that viewers heard him say something he had not said in that form. 

None of this makes the BBC a Russian asset, and none of it makes Moscow’s lies harmless. Foreign propaganda does not become innocent because domestic broadcasters make mistakes. But domestic institutions do not become the custodians of truth simply because foreign propaganda exists. Every body that will sit around the new centre’s table (government departments, the security services, the platforms, the trusted broadcasters) has its own interests, its own blind spots and its own record of error.

Then there is the Prime Minister’s own number. The Kremlin, he said, spends “around £1.3 billion each year on manipulating information.” It is a striking figure, and it may be right. But no methodology was published with it, and UN News rendered it in dollars without any source either. Figures of that size that have circulated in the past referred to the entire budget of Russian state media, rather than covert disinformation. In a speech about the dangers of unsourced claims, the most quotable statistic arrived unsourced. It is a small thing. Small things are how trust is lost.

DECLINE IS NOT A NARRATIVE IN THE HEARTLANDS 

Here is what troubles me most, and it is not really about Russia at all. 

For much of the past decade, Andy Burnham was the most prominent politician in England making a simple argument: that the North had been failed. As Mayor of Greater Manchester he stood on the steps of the Town Hall in 2020 and fought Downing Street over support for workers during lockdown. He built a political identity out of telling Westminster that people in towns like Wigan, Oldham and Bolton were not imagining their decline. They were living it. 

In the places this newspaper writes for, decline is not a story someone planted. It is the bus route that stopped running, the high street of charity shops and vapes, the GP appointment three weeks away, and the young man with no work, no training and nowhere to go. No bot farm in St Petersburg closed the pits or sold off the buses. Russia exploits these wounds; it did not inflict them. And the people who feel them are not a vulnerability in the national information system. They are witnesses. 

Burnham half-knows this, and to his credit he said so at the UN. “Part of the challenge is to lift our people up and create the opportunities they need,” he told the Assembly. “When inequalities grow too wide, our societies are at greater risk.” That is the right diagnosis. But notice the order of events. The security chiefs were tasked with building the information centre “today”. The 10-year Plan for Britain, which is meant to address the conditions that make people angry, will be brought forward “later in the year”.

The contradiction deepens further on. Near the close of the speech, Burnham described the statue of Abraham Lincoln outside his new No10 North office in Manchester, which commemorates the mill workers who refused to handle slave-picked cotton during the American Civil War. He praised them as people “with little power” who used it for others, and called theirs “bottom-up change led by people.” He is right to honour them. But those workers were not repeating an approved narrative about life in Britain in 1862. They were hungry, they were angry and they were right, and the respectable opinion of their day told them otherwise. 

WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW

If the government means what it says about defending democracy, it can prove it before the new centre opens its doors. 

The National Centre for Information Defence should be established in statute, with a remit written into law that is confined to hostile state activity and expressly excludes lawful speech by people in this country, however gloomy, angry or wrong. It should come under the oversight of the Intelligence and Security Committee, as Parliament’s own Science Committee has already recommended for NSOIT. It should publish an annual report listing every request it makes to a social media platform to remove or restrict content, with the reasons. It should carry a sunset clause, so that Parliament must actively vote to renew it. And ministers should tell the country now whether NSOIT is being folded into it, and what becomes of that unit’s files. 

None of this weakens the fight against Russia. A centre that exposes Kremlin forgeries in public, with its methods open to scrutiny, is more credible and therefore more effective than one that works in the dark. Britain’s own history shows what happens when information work is left to operate in secret: it drifts from the enemy abroad to the awkward voice at home. Secrecy is not strength. It is simply the condition under which mission creep goes unnoticed. 

Orwell’s Party asked people to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. A democratic government should ask the opposite: to look hard, to report honestly and to keep asking awkward questions, above all about the government itself. 

Russia did not close the pits, sell the buses or empty the high street. A government that cannot tell the difference between a foreign lie and a domestic grievance will end up policing the grievance.

Joined Forces

Inside Time reports:

Parliamentarians, trade union leaders and rank-and-file police officers have joined forces to call on the Government to order a Royal Commission on Prisons and the Justice System.

A joint letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for the move was signed by the officers of the Parliamentary Justice Union All Party Parliamentary Group: Liz Saville Roberts MP (Plaid Cymru), Lord Balfe (Conservative), Richard Burgon MP (Labour) and Lord Woodley (Labour).

They were supporting an approach from Steve Gillan, General Secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association; Jo Grady, General Secretary of the University and College Union; Fran Heathcote, General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union; Ian Lawrence, General Secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers; Nicola Ranger, General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing; and Mel Warnes, acting National Secretary of the Police Federation of England and Wales.

In a joint statement, the unions said: “Rehabilitation is simply impossible in violent, squalid and overcrowded jails. Sticking-plaster solutions such as early release schemes are doomed to fail unless probation is made fit for purpose, while plans to restrict jury trials are a dangerous and wrong-headed response to case backlogs caused mainly by cuts and mass court closures under the last Government.”

The union chiefs said that despite early warnings by the Labour government that it had inherited a “ticking time-bomb” in prisons and that failure to act would mean “the prospect of a total breakdown of law and order”, the response by ministers since had been piecemeal, timid and contradictory. The unions said that narrow reviews into sentencing, courts and prisons had barely scratched the surface of what is needed. They also criticised privatisation within the justice system and last year’s cuts to prison education provision.

The Parliamentarians, in their supporting letter, added: “The current prison overcrowding crisis is just the tip of the iceberg, and it is important to recognise that it is interconnected with other problems – from squalid and violent prison conditions, with ineffective education and rehabilitation programmes, to excessive probation workloads, severe courts backlogs and intolerable pressures facing staff throughout the criminal justice system.

“As the statement (from the Unions) makes clear, the scale and interconnected nature of the problems demand holistic, end-to-end reform, rather than the current piecemeal approach of narrow reviews. We ask you to give serious consideration to this proposal and to engage directly with the unions, whose members experience the consequences of these pressures every day. We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you and relevant ministerial colleagues to discuss the case for a Royal Commission.”

Added to these calls, Nick Smart, president of the Police Superintendents’ Association, also called for a Royal Commission whilst speaking at his organisation’s annual general meeting, which was attended by Policing Minister Sarah Jones. Mr Smart said this had been promised by the then-Conservative government in 2019 but not delivered, and would be the first such examination of the criminal justice system in more than 60 years.

Further Fuel

Jess Barnard is an elected member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, and she writes:

Last night, Andy Burnham announced that the UK will provide ‘defensive air to air refuelling’ support to Saudi Arabia’s military, plunging Britain into another disastrous conflict in the Middle East. Amid a worsening humanitarian situation in Yemen, the latest Saudi attacks risk more civilian deaths and an acute refugee crisis, with thousands already displaced.

Burnham’s arrival in office seemed to suggest the possibility of a break from Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and collusion with the war on Iran — two shameful stains on Labour’s legacy. But with this new announcement, history seems to be repeating itself.

The conflict with the Houthis began in 2015 when a Saudi-led coalition, backed by the US and UK, intervened in Yemen’s civil war. Their goals were to dislodge the Houthis and to prop up the government headed by Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who would keep the country in favour with Saudi Arabia. The campaign killed nearly 9,000 civilians, with many more dying from the effects of the war, from collapsed services to starvation to epidemics.

Britain supplied spare parts, ammunition and maintenance to the aggressors along with unconditional political support. The then foreign secretary Philip Hammond declared that the UK would assist the Saudi military ‘in every practical way short of engaging in combat’, which included sending military advisers.

London thus gave the Saudi coalition a free hand to commit a litany of war crimes. As early as 2016, a UN panel found that it had engaged in ‘widespread and systematic’ attacks on civilian targets. In 2018, a Saudi airstrike hit a school bus, killing 29 children. Cluster bombing targeted medical facilities and ancient heritage sites. Yet the onslaught ultimately failed. The Saudis were forced to sign a truce in 2022, but by that time it was too late: Yemen had already been shattered.

The fragile peace was broken after the recent bombing of Sana’a airport by Saudi Arabia. The subsequent Houthi offensive has seen them gain control of Yemen’s western coast and, with it, the chokepoint of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, an area crucial to Saudi Arabian oil transportation.

The UK responded by providing refueling support for US operations against Yemen last year. While Starmer tried to justify these actions as ‘defensive’, the Pentagon itself reported that they had ‘more likely than not’ resulted in the killing of 281 civilians. Human Rights Watch warned that Britain’s involvement in the operation ‘may make them complicit in war crimes’. On 29 April 2025, Starmer took British involvement up a notch, becoming the tenth British Prime Minister to directly bomb Yemen, as RAF Typhoons carried out a joint UK-US strike south of Sana’a.

This was yet another futile operation. Less than a week later, Trump was forced to sign a peace agreement with the Houthis. But the humanitarian impact of this forever war could not be clearer. Around 47 percent of the Yemeni population are currently experiencing crisis levels of acute food insecurity while nearly half of children under five are acutely malnourished, according to the UN. The World Health Organisation observes that the country is already facing ‘multiple concurrent health risks’, including cholera, measles, dengue, diphtheria and trauma. More than 112,00 people have already been internally displaced, with UN agencies warning that they lack the resources needed to support those forced from their homes.

Now, Burnham has agreed that Britain will help to refuel the Saudis’ killer jets — visiting yet more destruction and misery on the poorest country in the region. Outlandishly, he tried to frame this decision as an attempt to alleviate the UK’s cost-of-living crisis, as if deepening civilian suffering in Yemen would somehow offer respite to communities in Britain. If anything, more bombing will only exacerbate the inflationary pressures triggered by Trump’s war on Iran, which are pushing up prices for working-class people worldwide.

When the war on Yemen started in 2015, Labour opposed Britain’s involvement and committed to both suspending arm sales to Saudi Arabia and presenting a resolution at the UN to end the conflict. History now looks kindly on this position.

Burnham should follow this example and break from years of failed international policy. His government could rebuild the international aid programmes that Starmer brutally cut, and provide safe passage to refugees fleeing the war, rather than pouring further fuel into the region.

While Malise Ruthven writes:

In February 1940, my godmother, Freya Stark, arrived in Sana’a carrying a forbidden cinematograph projector. Her mission was to loosen Fascist Italy’s influence over Imam Yahya, the formidable ruler of Yemen’s Zaidi imamate. Fortunately for Stark and the British, scratchy Ministry of Information footage of Royal Navy ships in Portsmouth made what she called a tremendous impression, with Yahya and his court unable to resist this display of naval might. The Italian legation was furious, and talked of importing a projector of its own. But it was too late. Within a fortnight, Stark believed, Italian influence in Sana’a had been broken.

Some 86 years later, Britain is back Arabia, wooing a very different set of rulers. The Government has agreed to send an RAF Voyager tanker from its base in Cyprus to provide in-flight refuelling for Saudi aircraft defending the kingdom against Houthi missiles and drones. Unlike Britain’s earlier direct strikes on the Houthis, in which RAF Typhoons took part, the present commitment is described as limited, time-bound and defensive. British support is not, officials insist, intended for Saudi strikes inside Yemen. Yet aerial refuelling is never just symbolic. It enables aircraft to remain airborne longer, carrying Britain a little further into a war from which Saudi Arabia has spent years trying to extricate itself.

Britain supposedly withdrew from “east of Suez” more than half a century ago. In practice, though, it never entirely left, retaining close military relations with Jordan and Oman; a naval presence in Bahrain and the Gulf; and a defence industry tied intimately to the Saudi armed forces. As Sir William Patey, the former British ambassador to Riyadh, recently told the BBC, Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest defence export market, while Britain is its leading supplier of advanced fighter aircraft. The relationship includes British-supplied Typhoons and air- defence systems, as well as continuing support for Saudi air operations under existing contracts. When Iran attacked Saudi Arabia, Patey added, Britain helped with the kingdom’s air defences. The flags came down with the “winds of change”, then, but the infrastructure of influence survived.

The Voyager’s mission may not be the return of former imperial power so much as the exposure of a continuing relationship normally hidden behind contracts, advisers and joint exercises. The Saudis, having been turned down by the United States, asked Britain to demonstrate that it remained a reliable partner. Andy Burnham then put the national-interest case more directly. “I go back to the point I made about cost-of-living pressures and acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region,” he said, “because of course Saudi Arabia has been experiencing attacks, is looking at potential further disruption, and we need to keep those pathways open.” The Houthis have seized the port of Mocha, and strategic Red Sea islands, tightening their grip on the approaches to the Bab al-Mandab, through which roughly a tenth of global trade normally passes. Their missiles have also reached Saudi territory, while attacks on energy infrastructure threaten pipelines designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Altogether, that creates the possibility of a pincer squeeze on the world economy. What happens in the Gulf and Red Sea enters British and European politics through petrol prices, inflation and the cost of borrowing.

The crisis represents not simply the return of Mohammed bin Salman’s disastrous Yemeni war, but also the re-emergence in revolutionary form of Yemen’s ancient Zaidi political tradition. To treat the Houthis merely as an Iranian appendage threatening Western commerce is to misunderstand why bombing has repeatedly failed to subdue them. Iranian technology, components, training and revolutionary language have increased their power, and tied them to the so-called “axis of resistance”. Yet Tehran did not invent the movement and probably does not issue its daily orders. Its strength rests on the religious memory and political dispossession of Yemen’s northern highlands.

Zaidism differs significantly from the Twelver Shi’ism of Iran. Its name derives from Zayd ibn Ali, who died in revolt against the Umayyads in 740. In classical Zaidi doctrine, an imam did not inherit office automatically through an unbroken, divinely designated line. Rather, he had to be a qualified descendant of the Prophet through Hasan or Husayn, as well as learned, just, and also courageous enough to “come forth” against unlawful rule. The choice was elective only within this restricted sacred lineage. Armed resistance was not an accidental feature of legitimacy; it helped constitute it.

Zaidi imams ruled varying portions of the Yemeni highlands from the 9th century. Imam Yahya, who fought the Ottomans and consolidated an independent kingdom after 1918, was the last truly formidable representative of his order. His state was isolated and administratively thin, but he balanced tribes, including the Sunnis of the Tihama lowlands, dynastic claims, and foreign powers with considerable skill, including flirtation with Mussolini in the Horn of Africa. Italian connections alarmed the British in Aden, hence Freya Stark’s films and her appeal to the aristocratic pride of Yahya’s court. She contrasted Yemen’s hereditary religious hierarchy with a rampant appeal to dynastic snobbery, explaining that Hitler had been a paperhanger and that Mussolini’s father had been a blacksmith. Such details, she told her husband, “carry unexpected weight”. 

The monarchy survived Yahya’s assassination in 1948, but not the republican coup of September 1962. Nasser sent an Egyptian army to defend the new republic. In one of the region’s more instructive confessional paradoxes, Saudi Arabia supported the Zaidi royalists. Wahhabi hostility to Shia belief mattered less than fear of revolutionary Arab nationalism. Britain also played a characteristically deniable role. Colonel David Smiley, an SOE veteran who had commanded the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces, advised Imam al-Badr’s royalists, and from 1964 directed a band of foreign soldiers that included former SAS men.

Britain is thus again assisting Saudi Arabia in a Yemeni war: but this time against Zaidi power rather than in its defence. The republic abolished the imamate but not the society that had sustained it. Zaidi scholars and descendents of Muhammad lost authority; Saudi-backed Salafi teaching expanded into the northern province of Saada; central government brought neglect, manipulation and intermittent repression. The “Believing Youth” movement began as a cultural and educational revival. Under the eponymous Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, however, it acquired a fiercely political theology and the now notorious slogan against America, Israel and the Jews. When President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to crush it, Hussein was killed, and six wars followed between 2004 and 2010. Saleh, the master tactician who boasted of dancing on the heads of snakes, later allied with the enemies he had persecuted. Forces loyal to him helped the Houthis seize Sana’a in 2014. When, in 2017, he changed sides again, and sought an accommodation with the Saudis, they killed him. The movement had swallowed the snake-charmer.

Saudi Arabia intervened in 2015 expecting a short campaign. Years of air strikes devastated Yemen — without dislodging the Houthis. Yet it would be their attacks on Red Sea shipping following the Gaza war that brought a local movement and international stage. Sympathy for Palestinians is genuine and consistent with Houthi ideology. It is also politically useful. Palestine lets the movement mobilise a war-weary population, humiliate Arab governments and claim a stature beyond Yemen’s borders. A missile need not hit its target to work. The credible threat alone diverts ships, raises insurance costs, and turns a sectarian militia into an actor capable of taxing the global economy.

Britain therefore confronts a genuine danger. But it also risks repeating an old error: mistaking superior machinery for political control. Freya Stark’s projector succeeded because it formed part of diplomacy. It flattered, persuaded and communicated. The Saudi air campaign, by contrast, showed the limits of firepower, especially when there is no plausible Yemeni order waiting to replace the people being bombed. As the Yemen specialist Elisabeth Kendall has warned, air strikes may degrade Houthi capabilities while increasing their popularity. Britain can help intercept drones; it cannot refuel its way to a legitimate government in Sana’a. Nor is the alternative to the Houthis a single coherent state. The internationally recognised camp contains Saudi clients, former Saleh loyalists, Islamists, southern separatists and competing tribal and regional forces. The UAE has sponsored secessionist allies, especially in the south, while Saudi Arabia has generally insisted on formal unity. The regions of Hadhramaut and al-Mahrah have their own identities and patrons. Oman, with its long experience of discreet mediation and its own British military history, fears disorder on its frontier.

In short, an east-of-Suez strategy built on royal relationships may preserve regimes more readily than it creates states. The Government’s distinction between refuelling defensive Saudi missions and enabling offensive operations is therefore crucial but fragile. Patey assumed that Riyadh had not asked Britain to join direct strikes on the Houthis. Saudi oil and civilian installations were being attacked, he argued, and helping the kingdom defend them was legitimate. That is persuasive as far as it goes. But tankers do not decide the purposes for which an alliance is used; ministers do. The record of the earlier Saudi campaign gives little cause for confidence. Jeremy Hunt, then foreign secretary, spoke of his “frank conversations” with Saudi counterparts about human rights, while the Government defended British arms sales by citing the “extensive British training” given to Saudi pilots and the programmers of its “smart bombs” to limit civilian casualties. RAF liaison officers worked in the Saudi air operations centre, ostensibly to help the kingdom comply with international humanitarian law. A former British official who had worked with the Saudis dismissed that claim in a single word: “bollocks.”

Britain now needs transparent rules, parliamentary scrutiny and an answer to the obvious question of what happens if the aircraft sustained by the RAF Voyager move from intercepting missiles to striking targets inside Yemen. Humanitarian law cannot be outsourced to the adjective “defensive”. In 1940, British power appeared in Sana’a as flickering images; today it arrives as invisible fuel. All the while, the Houthis warn that east of Suez, history never stays offshore for long.

Starmerism: An Autopsy

Neal Lawson can do it when he wants to:

The king is dead, long live the king. In the end, Labour switched effortlessly from Keir Starmer to Andy Burnham, little more than two years after the former’s landslide election victory. Burnham’s ascendancy always looked inevitable to me, despite those who mocked him and blocked him. He had the semblance of a plan – based on ‘Manchesterism’ – the personality and therefore the popularity to replace Starmer. But it wouldn’t have happened if Starmer was any good as a political leader. He had to be terrible to be replaced so quickly, not least because Labour is essentially a loyalist party and all the power in the party is vested in the leader and their office. For this to have happened so soon after such a big electoral victory tells us much about the quality of both that ‘victory’ and Starmer’s leadership skills.

But the speed and efficiency of the transfer of power will mean little in the absence of any deep analysis of exactly what Starmer got wrong and why and the nature of the 2024 election result. Yes, he was unpopular in the polls and a poor communicator, but it was the midterm – he had time and was sitting on that huge majority. To go so spectacularly wrong so quickly demands a deeper post-mortem, so that mistakes can be learnt from instead of being naively repeated.

And here is irony number one. Starmer famously claimed that he had never failed. Someone who thinks they have never failed can never really learn. As he ponders his future and his resignation honours list – which he swore blind he would never write, just as he u-turned on so many other issues and people – let’s get our eyes down and scrub up for the Starmer autopsy.

But wait. First some personal throat clearing, given the personal is always political. I’ve got more fingers on one hand than times I’ve met Keir Starmer. A few times in very small groups before he became leader, and we exchanged a couple of emails after, in which I advised him to go big on ideas and movements. What he needed, I said, was the countervailing forces of ideas, organisation and culture to provide the capacity to act in office against the forces that would resist him. He did not take any of my advice.

He was obviously uninterested in big ideas and even bigger movements. It felt to me he had a ruthless, calculating shark-like disdain for anything that wasn’t going to be of immediate personal interest and assistance to him. I was just someone worth being courted in the run up to the Labour leadership contest in 2020, not least because I gave him cover on Labour’s left flank. I didn’t back him. Later, his henchman tried to have me expelled from the Labour Party for supporting the kind of cross-party pluralism that Compass, the organisation I’m the director of, has been backing for a decade and a half. They failed. I remained a party member, but one certain in the knowledge that it would in fact be Starmer that would fail.

From these early suspicions of deep flaws to the dawning horror of how he behaved, first running the party and then the country, my concerns grew. Uninterrupted, his premiership would make a Farage premiership more, not less, likely.

But people I knew and really rated – people who knew the Starmer of old and talked of a kind, thoughtful and sincere person – found it hard to reconcile their memories with the man who now led Labour and the country. Undoubtedly, the differences between their views and the view that I had formed of him say something about the man and his ability to change or conceal his true intent. But it also says something about our political institutions and culture and what how they change and even deform people. I’ve seen this in every Labour leader going back to the 1980s. How much Starmer’s leadership failure was down to nature or nurture, we are unlikely to ever know. Lives, especially leading political ones, are always complicated, and Starmer like all of us has conflicting and paradoxical passions and potentials. But the mix in him became politically toxic.

Now that more personal stuff is out of the way, what was Starmerism, in which context did it arise, why did it go wrong, and even if he never wants to learn from anything ‘because he has never failed’, what can we learn from it?

Irony number two. Starmer said there will be no such thing as ‘Starmerism’. He was even wrong on this. Just because a leader has a loathing of ‘isms’, doesn’t mean they can escape defining one. Every leadership, however conscious or unconscious, has a culture, a style, a method. Indeed, the very rejection of an ‘ism’ is itself an ‘ism’. So, to understand Starmer’s ‘ism’ we must go back to the moment it was catalysed in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn was crowned leader of the party.

Because Starmerism was essentially anti-Corbynism, even if he didn’t quite know it. Because the other player key in this origin story is Morgan McSweeney, the designated hyper-factional fixer for the Labour Party right. By hyper-factional it is meant a desire not just for a tendency or faction to become dominant within a party, but to eradicate all other factions such that the future of the party becomes impossible to contest.

McSweeney was tasked with a sly, cynical Trojan horse operation to ‘rescue’ Labour from the clutches of the Corbynites. Critical to understanding this mission means getting into the minds of the Labour right, whose attitude is that the Labour Party is their party, and theirs alone. It’s not just that they think their path is the best route to a successful Labour government, but that any other voices and views are illegitimate. The right’s broad view is that Labour only wins when it persuades the City, the media and a few swing voters in a few swing seats that it is safe to back the party. It is a worldview that is broadly anti-intellectual and suspicious of both deeper democracy and wider party’s and movements and the commitment to pluralism they demand. Theirs is a paternalistic and ameliorative social democracy which might have worked in the absence of the global financial crash, growing disparities between citizens and the mounting threat of climate change. But there was no longer an absence of any of this.

From the Labour right’s perspective, everyone else is a ‘Trot’ who can be stomached if they stay in their place in the outer margins of the party, but preferably they would F-off and leave Labour to them, the ‘grown-ups’. This mental and organisational grip on the party was manically and mechanically maintained up until the moment in 2010 when Ed Miliband beat his brother David. This was not meant to happen. But, worse – much worse – was to come. Because of the vast economic, environmental and cultural changes sweeping the globe (not least the mass take-up of social media which meant old forms of politics, like the technocratic paternalism practised by the Labour right) left-wing ideas, policies, parties and leaders had started to challenge their old and tired social democratic orthodoxies. So instead of reverting to type after the loss of the 2015 election and swinging back to the right, the Labour membership voted to keep heading left and Corbyn stormed to victory. To Labour’s right, the threat was existential and deeply personal. Their birthright to run the party, to be the party, had to them been suddenly and violently snatched away. They would do anything, anything, to get it back. And not just get it back but ensure that the left, in its widest sense, could never ever again take from them what was rightfully theirs.

Here are the words of McSweeney’s co-architect of the undercover takeover of Labour Peter Mandelson when he said of Corbyn in 2017: “I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure.” He even gave examples of his efforts, “maybe an e-mail, a phone call, or a meeting I convene.” And I was the one they tried to expel, while Mandelson was given the US Ambassadorship. I repeat, they would do anything, anything to regain and maintain their grip on the party – take a dip into Paul Holden’s book The Fraud to understand more.

Meanwhile, and at least initially separate to the Orwellian named Labour Together project – whose real goal was to tear Labour apart – Starmer had bundled himself into the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St. Pancras for the 2015 general election defeat.

It’s hard to believe that Starmer gave up his successful career in law and the civil service to become an MP without a strong desire to become leader and potentially Prime Minister. Every move he made should be seen in the light of the pursuit of that goal: initially supporting Jeremy Corbyn, being in the shadow cabinet, manoeuvres around Brexit to build his profile rather than find a workable national solution, the company he was seen to keep (on the left) and didn’t keep (Tony Blair), the things he said and didn’t say were all part of an endeavour to become leader. To be fair, he is not the first or last to act in this way. But he is remarkable in being the least intellectually and culturally prepared of any Labour leader in its history.

This personal ambition, almost by accident but great serendipity, met McSweeney’s factional desire to destroy the left. McSweeney was looking for a glove puppet, or seemingly in his own words from the Get In book by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund – someone who thought they were driving the automated DLR train.

McSweeney happened upon Starmer relatively late in the day. At first, through Labour Together he cultivated a team of possible future leaders such as Steve Reed, Wes Streeting, Lisa Nandy, Bridget Phillipson, and Shabana Mahmood. None were to wear the crown. Not least because McSweeney rather brilliantly, if you like this kind of deceit, saw an organisational route through the crisis for the Labour right, but it had to be based on a massive lie. His deep polling of the Labour Party membership convinced him that only a candidate pretending to be a Corbynite could win. But a candidate so malleable, that they were prepared to say anything to win, and then immediately do the exact opposite once in a position of power. Someone who could pose as a Corbynite, call Corbyn a friend, to say his task was merely to professionalise the operation so that Corbynism without Corbyn could win an election, but then turn on the very people whose support they had just sought. That person was of course Keir Starmer.

But at this stage, the Labour Together project was only about gaining control of Labour, not changing the country. After the general election loss in 2019, the broad view was that it would take two elections to get Labour back in. But stage one of wresting back control of the party could only, by definition, be achieved by someone that McSweeney and his right-wing vanguard could never fully trust, because unlike them they had to have been tainted by proximity to Corbyn to win the leadership vote in a largely Corbyn friendly selectorate. This candidate would improve Labour’s position at the next election and then be ousted in favour of a true believer, who could win the subsequent election on sound Labour right-wing grounds. But of first order importance, it would let them regain control of their party.

And then the Tories imploded, first Johnson, then Truss and finally Sunak. Labour didn’t win in 2024; it was handed a slam dunk victory by default by a corrupt and inept Tory administration who the electorate desperately wanted to see the back of. Anyone else would do. And so McSweeney was saddled with Starmer, a Prime Minister he neither trusted nor rated. And Starmer had reached the political summit with little idea of what to do, why or how.

So, the whole Starmer Premiership was based on an accident and a lie. It wasn’t meant to happen and when it did, it pretended to be one thing, but was in truth the very opposite. Starmer, the accidental leader who feigned to be Corbynite but was viciously anti-Corbyn.

Defenders of Starmer in the Party and the press would argue that none of this mattered, all that did was destroying Corbyn and the wider left and therefore making Labour electable again. Well now, there are two big problems with this approach, as events since have shown. The first is that the deceptive position that McSweeney landed on to secure hyper-factional control of the Labour Party was broadly the right one for the country and its progressive majority. This is irony number three. Corbyn never had the skills nor the ambition to lead Labour, but the broadly social democratic policy platform of economic intervention set out in the 2017 manifesto was the kind of thing the country needed then and still does. Hence its popularity and how close Labour got to power then. But this wasn’t about what was right for the country, it was about the total control of Labour. By ditching the policies that were good for the country, the right was purposefully opening the door to all on the left-wing in Labour, inviting them to leave. Remember Starmer in a nationalised television address told them “You know where the door is”. This, combined with an industrial scale of expulsions for the most spurious reasons and the rigging of parliamentary selections, was the method to refashion Labour. Losing hundreds of thousands of members was to be welcomed. As ideas and policy were dropped, all that was left was a vacuous ‘stability equals change’ mantra.

And the left did leave, initially to the doomed Your Party and then to the Greens, who (irony number four) built pressure from the left on issues such as Gaza and immigration which culminated in Labour losing the Gorton and Denton byelection, sealing Starmer’s fate. You reap what you sow.

Second, and perhaps even more problematic for the McSweeney method, is the issue of political behaviour and culture. The Starmer experience begs the meta question, can you build a good politics and a good society based on bad behaviour? Can the means justify the ends, or do means always shape the ends? It is of course a matter of degree. Serious politics must be about compromise but without being compromised. But when your whole electoral pitch is probity and yet you inject the system with such naked cynicism, then people notice and feel it. The gap between the image Starmer wanted to portray of reliability and integrity, and what people saw could not be bridged – even via sticking plaster politics.

Eventually a lack of intellectual foundations, and in this case a profound anti-intellectualism, will always catch up and trip up any political project. Politics to Starmer was simply about his personal good judgement, both moral and practical. There was no wider intellectual project, and no method of implementation beyond his command. As such it was a profoundly unpolitical regime, imbued with a level of arrogance that meant despite the years they had to prepare for government, they refused to dig any foundations beyond what was needed to secure forever their control of the party. Failure was baked in.

Starmer’s vapid but rapid ascent and descent reveals much though, not least about what the party looks for in a leader. There is still a strong hankering within the party to return to what has been called ‘the long 90s’, the era in which Labour seemed to be able to govern in a managerial style because there were few distributional or global conflicts. Everyone and everything seemed largely to be OK. But they weren’t. Despite some successes, New Labour never challenged the underlying orthodoxies of Thatcherism. The left behind were still largely left behind. And that was before the global crash, Brexit, COVID, endless austerity, then a cost-of-living crisis and now Trump and the rise of authoritarian populism, climate change and the threats and opportunities of AI. More than anything, Starmer seemed to offer the route back for the ‘centrist dads’ who just wanted things to ‘go back to normal’. It was a forlorn hope.

At a deeper level, the whole Starmer episode revealed the rather dark heart of the party’s right and their old culture of ‘labourism’ that sustained it: a managerial, tribal and paternalistic approach to politics. I held out little hope for the Corbyn project, an energetic wave of ideas, groups and people shackled to a rather lacklustre surfer. But despite his big leadership win in 2015, his subsequent re-election in 2016 and the quite amazing electoral result in 2017 (I know he didn’t win but he came much closer to victory than anyone suspected), the legitimacy and validity of Corbyn’s leadership was never accepted by the party machine, a huge chunk of the PLP or the media. In the end they got their way, but the foundations of their project were rotten.

For a while at least, if you are cynical and ruthless enough, then you can fool and frighten enough of the people enough of the time through the bureaucratic manipulation of votes and selections, and by creating a toxic environment of fear in which members self-police their comments to avoid punishment. But you can’t fool or frighten all the people all the time, you certainly can’t rule a country by this method, let alone transform it.

So, despite Starmer claiming there would be no such thing as Starmerism, we can detect in its actions and behaviour what it was as a political project. Ultimately it was a crude and cynical attempt to reassert control over Labour, not just to beat the left but to eradicate it for good. To achieve these ends, any means could be justified.

Just like Corbyn, Starmer came, saw, won, lost and disappeared. Whether he leaves more of a trace remains to be seen. The likes of Darren Jones, Steve Reed, and McSweeney himself, will plough the furrow of right-wing nostrums about financial orthodoxy, immigration and law and order. They will seek to keep a grip on the deep state of the Labour machine, the PLP, NEC and the regional offices. It is, after all, ‘their party’. Only last week someone from their camp leaked a paper on their strategy for Starmer’s survival to embarrass his successor.

Meanwhile, the long tail of McSweeneyism hobbles Labour in terms of its culture of hyper-factionalism, the narrow talent pool it allowed to enter parliament and the restrictions, via the manifesto, it placed on the necessary ideas to transform our country. Not least the ability to raise sufficient taxes.

So, what is to be done as a consequence of this analysis? Broadly, the response to Starmerism should be to look at what it did and do the opposite. So don’t reject political vision, embrace it to galvanise direction, purpose and energy. What sort of lives and what sort of society do we deem to be good? The only real lodestar for Labour must be the creation of a much more equal society via a much deeper democracy. Below that needs to be a coherent sense of what kind of robust political economy is going to support this vision of a good society, which in turn demands a constructively critical relationship with capital in all its modern forms. All of this is obviously much easier said than done, but is an essential foundation for any successful Labour government.

And any notion of a transformative government, of the kind people are crying out for, demands a theory of change and the countervailing powers to overcome forces that will resist because they want a very different kind of society – one that continues to be much less equal, sustainable or democratic. This starts with the party itself, not seeing it as something to be massively diminished and the rump controlled, but the place in which prefigurative ideas for the kind of society you want to create are encouraged, not least via members developing their influence and voice nationally and locally. It means that in the fragmented party-political system, which Labour’s failure in office and hyper-factionalism helped create, Labour develops more constructive relationships with other progressive parties and develops that approach wider still into civil society. If Labour wants to transform the country, then it isn’t going to do it on its own from the parliamentary green benches or old offices in Whitehall. Finally, it needs a leader who can pull all this together and communicate a hopeful and compelling narrative of change. But that alone while necessary, is far from sufficient.

With Starmer gone, we are witnessing in real time whether Labour can put in place a project which learns from and breaks with Starmerism and isn’t just Starmerism 2.0.

The United Nations: A Useful Failure

Heather Penatzer writes:

Another year, another United Nations General Assembly that slows traffic to a crawl for ordinary New Yorkers. They (and many other Americans) ask: what’s the point, beyond global political theater?

For much of the 20th century, the answer was: a glimpse of humanity’s political future. Long before the body’s creation, H. G. Wells imagined the eventual emergence of a world state, arguing that technological interdependence and the destructiveness of modern war would ultimately make the old system of competing sovereign states untenable.

The advent of nuclear weapons made such predictions appear urgent. Albert Einstein became one of the most prominent postwar advocates of world government, warning that “there is no [other] possibility of control of the atomic bomb.” In his 1961 Inaugural Address, delivered a decade and a half after the United Nations was established, JFK described it as “our last best hope.” New Yorkers of a certain vintage will remember the UN flag flying next to Old Glory at their public schools.

The expectations made their way into midcentury popular culture: a powerful United Nations, with its own army, oversees interplanetary colonization in many of sci-fi master Philip K. Dick’s novels of the 1960s and ’70s; Star Trek likewise took it for granted that future politics would belong to a planetary federation.

Whether utopia or nightmare, world government seemed inevitable, and the United Nations looked like its beginning. How things change. Today, the United Nations looks very different from the 20th century’s imagined world state. The annual General Assembly still draws world leaders, but midcentury-style “world government” seems like a distant dream.

But that’s not such a bad thing. When the United Nations tries to reach deep inside how individual sovereign states are governed — what’s implied by true “world government,” as imagined by barmy midcentury visionaries — resistance to its authority waxes, and the real-world outcomes are often disastrous. The better path is for the United Nations to embrace its current, more limited role as a symbolic forum for sovereign states.

The theater, in short, is precisely the point. While many once saw within the UN Charter an opportunity to transcend the nation-state, the body produces its best results when affirming the sovereignty of its member states, not superseding them.

For years, the United Nations has been the subject of critiques from both ends of the political spectrum. On the Left, the core critique is that the organization is nothing more than a veil for American imperialism. As Noam Chomsky says, “the UN is considered favorably to the extent that it follows US orders.” From the Right, the United Nations is disparaged for being either all-powerful or politically impotent. After serving as Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, writing for the Heritage Foundation, claimed that the UN was “too bureaucratic, too remote, and too difficult to hold accountable, too involved in issues unrelated to our interests.”

More recently, a February 2025 executive order from President Trump claimed that UN agencies have been “infiltrated by members of groups long designated … as foreign terrorist organizations,” and that UN employees “were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel,” building upon a 2024 Israeli accusation (for which scant evidence has been provided).

So does the organization have a purpose in the year 2026, or should it be sent to join its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations, in the graveyard of failed international projects? 

Like the league, founded in the wake of the Great War, the United Nations was born from the devastation of a world war. The original wartime conception of the United Nations enshrined the four great Allied powers of World War II — Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China — as permanent members of what would become the UN Security Council, with France added postwar. With these five states holding veto power over the council’s resolutions, the United Nations was constrained by the rivalry of the Cold War. 

As historian Mark Mazower notes, the United Nations did not emerge “like Aphrodite … from the Second World War, pure and uncontaminated by any significant association with that prewar failure, the League of Nations.” Those responsible for creating the body were not only heavily influenced by the league’s structure and mission, but also carried forward many of its institutional practices. The league’s mandates system, for example, provided an important precedent for the UN trusteeship system, which assumed responsibility for territories transferred from the defeated German and Ottoman empires. Indeed, many of the institutional arrangements through which the league had sought to manage and legitimize empire survived into the United Nations.

These imperial links create an interesting duality around these institutions. The United Nations was initially designed in ways that accommodated, and often protected, the interests of the existing colonial powers. Over the following decades, however, the same institutional machinery became an important vehicle through which anticolonial states challenged imperial rule and advanced the principle of national self-determination. The history of the UN trusteeship system thus illustrates a broader paradox: an organization built in significant part upon the institutional inheritance of empire became, over time, an important instrument in dismantling it.

Particularly striking is that the United Nations’ first armed peacekeeping force was created in an effort to uphold national sovereignty, not undermine it. After Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in 1956, Israel invaded Egypt, and Britain and France quickly followed the Jewish state. The British government was the Canal Company’s largest single shareholder, while French investors held most of the remaining shares. Both governments regarded Nasser’s nationalization as a direct challenge to their economic and strategic position in the region. Their objectives went considerably beyond restoring access to the canal: British and French leaders hoped that military intervention would also bring about Nasser’s downfall.

Soviet supreme leader Nikolai Bulganin quickly threatened to join the fray on the side of Egypt, warning that the Soviets were “full of determination to crush the aggressor and re-establish peace in the East by using force,” while also making a pointed comment about Britain’s inability to defend itself from “modern weapons.” The Americans also objected to the invasion. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon later summarized the contradiction facing Washington: “We couldn’t, on one hand, complain about the Soviets intervening in Hungary and, on the other hand, approve of the British and the French picking that particular time to intervene against Nasser.” 

London and Paris both vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding that Israel withdraw its military on Oct. 30, then joined the invasion the following day. An emergency session of the General Assembly quickly convened and established the UN Emergency Force, composed of soldiers from countries outside the permanent members of the Security Council, which deployed to the Sinai with Egypt’s consent.

Britain and France agreed to withdraw within weeks, while Israel took longer. The danger that Soviet intervention might transform the crisis into a much wider war was averted, and Egypt’s sovereignty over its territory was restored. When Nasser demanded the departure of UN forces in 1967, they left — as the consent-based character of the mission required. The episode was ultimately consistent with the principle articulated in Article 2 of the UN Charter: that the organization rested upon the “sovereign equality” of its members and that it wasn’t authorized to intervene in matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

In the following decades, however, something shifted. Rather than treating state sovereignty simply as a foundational principle of international order to be defended, the United Nations increasingly developed institutions and practices that allowed international authority to reach inside states. Sovereignty became conditional: only states who met the standards of “good government,” as enumerated by the United Nations, could expect territorial exclusivity.

Governments that failed to meet emerging international standards of governance, human rights, or civilian protection could find their domestic authority challenged by international intervention. UN personnel were no longer just establishing ceasefires between states, but also administered elections, supervised police, rewrote institutions, governed territory, and used military force within states’ sovereign bounds. Steadily, the United Nations began to assume those functions that earlier advocates of supranational government had imagined would eventually migrate upward from states to international institutions.

Such interventions have led to a wide range of adverse outcomes, the costs of which have largely been borne by local populations rather than by the United Nations itself. The 1992-1993 UN Transitional Administration in Cambodia, which endowed its high commissioner with the extreme status of “final arbiter of Cambodian law,” has been linked to the spread of HIV in the wartorn country through peacekeepers’ exploitation of Cambodian women and the enormous expansion of the local sex industry that accompanied their arrival. Similarly, the United Nations has admitted its role in the 2010 outbreak of cholera in Haiti, introduced by peacekeepers and ultimately responsible for the deaths of thousands of Haitians and the infection of hundreds of thousands more.

When critics, Left and Right, assail the United Nations, it’s these “global-governance” failures — and many others of the kind — that they have in mind. There is another side of the United Nations, however, that is easy to dismiss because it can look unserious: its role as a stage. This seemingly superficial side is precisely where the institution shines.

Some of the most famous moments in the organization’s history are acts of political theater. Khrushchev banging the desk at the General Assembly and, according to the famous account, brandishing his shoe; Adlai Stevenson confronting Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the like. While such episodes may provoke a chuckle, the spectacle is itself part of diplomacy. The General Assembly and Security Council give states a forum in which to make claims, present evidence, denounce adversaries, rally coalitions, and communicate before a global audience.

Stevenson’s confrontation with Zorin didn’t resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it did give Washington a venue in which to publicly establish its case against the Kremlin, while the actual resolution of the crisis remained a matter of negotiation between sovereign governments. What looks like the United Nations’ weakness — its dependence on argument, rather than enforcement — is also one of the things it was built to provide.

The United Nations is at its best when acting as a forum for states, rather than as a higher authority over them. Some of its most consequential achievements have come not from governing states, but from helping them negotiate rules governing their relations with one another. Nuclear nonproliferation provides an especially important example. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created an international framework in which nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states accepted reciprocal obligations concerning proliferation, peaceful nuclear technology, and disarmament. The International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile, provided a mechanism through which states could submit to inspections and demonstrate compliance with safeguards. These arrangements didn’t eliminate sovereignty or place nuclear policy under a world government. They instead allowed sovereign states to make bargains that would have been considerably harder to sustain without common rules, monitoring, and institutions.

This more modest role is less dramatic than the world government imagined by Wells or Einstein. However, an institution needn’t govern the world to serve a purpose within it. The United Nations provides states with a place to negotiate, to establish common rules, to monitor agreements, to publicize violations, and to take appeals to the world public. Suez demonstrated what the organization could accomplish when international action reinforced, rather than supplanted, sovereign authority. Arms-control and nonproliferation agreements demonstrate the value of institutions that help states make and monitor bargains without pretending to replace them.

The United Nations may not be the beginning of the world state that Wells and Einstein and Dick imagined. Its more durable achievement may be precisely the opposite: making a world of sovereign states somewhat more capable of living with itself.