Growing Up

For a decade, I have been telling you that we all knew what colour a snowflake was, and that “cancel culture” was only given a name at all when it started happening to the people who had been practising it since time immemorial. As Kenan Malik now writes:

For many on the right, “cancel culture” is a terrible thing – unless it becomes necessary to cancel views they deem unfit for public consumption. Step forward Macklemore, the US rapper brusquely evicted from Ed Sheeran’s US tour.

Macklemore is well known for his political songs. In 2012, his hit Same Love celebrated gay marriage and took aim at hip-hop’s homophobia. Two years ago, he released Hind’s Hall, in support of Columbia University students who organised pro-Palestinian protests and renamed the hall they occupied in honour of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces in distressing circumstances.

The opening act for Sheeran at New Jersey’s MetLife stadium, Macklemore introduced Hind’s Hall with a two-minute speech demanding a “Free Palestine”. It was greeted with applause in the stadium but generated outrage outside. Robert Kraft, owner of the Gillette stadium near Boston, where Sheeran and Macklemore were due to play, and a close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, fronted a campaign for venues to cancel the rapper.

The Israeli American Council organised a petition insisting that “Macklemore has the right to hold political views” but “the line should be drawn when an opening act uses a global concert platform to advance a one-sided political agenda”. The idea that Macklemore has the right to express his views to a small audience but not to a large one, and only if he carefully delineates all sides of a debate, is, frankly, absurd. The right to free speech is predicated neither on the size of one’s audience nor on the nuance of one’s take.

Interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme, IAC’s chief executive Elan Carr claimed the phrase “Free Palestine” was a call “for the extermination of the state of Israel and the Jewish people”. There are certainly antisemites within the pro-Palestinian movement, and some who would like to exterminate Jews. What Carr is seeking to do, though, in common with many supporters of Israel, is delegitimise any call for Palestinian freedom or a Palestinian state, or even for full rights for Palestinians in an Israeli state whose Basic Law reserves the “right of self-determination” solely for Jews.

Carr claimed also that Macklemore had “hijacked” the stage. Macklemore and Sheeran are friends, the two having collaborated on Growing Up, a song about the rapper’s newborn daughter. Macklemore’s views and repertoire would have been well known to Sheeran and to promoters. He was not engaged to sing My Favourite Things.

Others argue that the issue is not what Macklemore said on stage but his previous antisemitism. This refers largely to a performance in 2014 in which Macklemore sported a black wig, beard and a huge fake hooked nose – the classic antisemitic caricature of a Jew. The Anti-Defamation League accepted his subsequent apology and his claim that the costume was not intentionally antisemitic, a claim which, in truth, was not very convincing.

Many have pointed out that Macklemore’s outfit was no more acceptable than if he had worn a blackface costume, which is true. Yet, celebrities from David Baddiel to Jimmy Fallon have worn blackface and not been cancelled. We should not ignore Macklemore’s grotesquely antisemitic costume, or what it might say about his views, but neither should we wield it as reason for cancellation, especially a decade later.

At least two stadia that have banned Macklemore – the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and the Raymond James stadium in Tampa, Florida – have been willing to host Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, who last year released a song called Heil Hitler, promoting it with $20 T-shirts emblazoned with a black swastika. The objection to Macklemore seems less about antisemitism than about his criticism of Israel.

Critics point out also that owners of stadia (like publishers of books) have the legal right to exclude people they don’t wish to platform. Few would deny that. The issue, rather, is that such cancelling has become today a major means of policing speech – as the Macklemore case reveals.

Spectator columnist Stephen Daisley mocked the left for being “suddenly, and unusually, vocal about freedom of speech” in the wake of Macklemore’s cancellation. Equally, though, many on the right have been unusually silent about it (Daisley himself, to be fair, opposed Macklemore’s ousting).

The Free Speech Union, normally thunderously supportive of free expression, could not bring itself to oppose Macklemore’s cancellation, but only feebly ask how far owners or promoters should “dictate what an artist can or cannot say on stage?” It was, however, “alarmed” by the “cancellation” of Sheeran for not holding “the ‘correct’ opinions strongly enough”. Gad Saad, a Canadian academic popular on the reactionary right for his acerbic hostility to immigrants and Muslims, and who coined the term “suicidal empathy”, defended Ye’s right “to be an idiot” but appeared to endorse Macklemore’s cancellation. Some have even likened Macklemore’s performance to a “neo-Nuremberg rally”.

Rightwing cancel culture is not new. Two decades ago, the country band Dixie Chicks faced a furious backlash for opposing the Iraq War and telling an audience, “We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” Thousands of radio stations banned them and DJs were suspended for playing their songs. For conservatives, this was not censorship but patriotism. The policing of speech always comes armed with its own excuses.

Cancel culture is usually seen as the product of “woke” activists wielding power in the culture industries. What the Macklemore case exposes is that those with economic power are even more able to police speech. They should be fiercely resisted.

A Wise Litmus Test

Frances Ryan writes:

Disabled people are being barred from leaving the country. This isn’t the first line of a dystopian novel but a scandal quietly happening across swathes of England. For the past six months, myself and my colleague Patrick Butler have spoken to disabled people who have effectively been blocked from going abroad on a holiday or to a work event by their local care provider. 

There’s 38-year-old Lucy from Oxfordshire who needs to travel internationally as the president of the European Spinal Cord Injury Federation. And Chelsea from Lancashire, a 25-year-old with cerebral palsy who dreams of swimming in Spain again. Then there’s 40-year-old Joel, whose name has been changed, who has a muscle weakness, and who works for a global marketing brand but hasn’t been able to leave the UK for nine years.

Some have live-in personal assistants (PAs) via NHS continuing healthcare, the non-means-tested home support for people with high needs. Others have 24/7 social care through their local authority. But when they try to leave the country, all hit the same wall: they are told they are not allowed to use their care package abroad, sometimes even if they pay any extra costs themselves.

Here’s the plot twist. Some areas of the country are permitting care users to go on holiday or travel for work – while disabled people just a few miles down the road can be stopped. Others are told they can travel but have to pay any extra expenses – effectively still barring them financially from going – while some care boards offer to cover the cost. As there is limited to no national guidance on the issue, disabled people’s right to travel depends on a postcode lottery, with local care officials inspecting their plans for a trip away and having the power to rule “go” or “stay”.

This week, MPs and peers called for national guidelines to end this injustice. Figures such as the work and pensions select committee chair, Debbie Abrahams, the crossbench peer Jane Campbell and the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told The Guardian that the government must guarantee the rights of disabled people to travel and ensure they have the support they need to do so.

You can practically hear the right preparing to oppose the move with a cry of “Free holidays on the NHS!” But care users going abroad doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything extra in care bills. Disabled people who need 24/7 support for everyday activities already have care funding in place, and in many cases use their own money to pay PAs’ travel expenses, such as accommodation and plane tickets (on top of the already extortionate price of accessible travel). When Lucy was told by her care board she couldn’t take her PAs to a spinal cord conference in Germany this spring, her employer had already offered to pay any additional costs.

The question, then, is why would authorities want to stop disabled people going abroad? If it’s not just about tight budgets, why should it matter to them how an adult chooses to use their care package? You could say that it’s about practicalities: it’s easier not to worry about insurance or visas (disabled people largely sort this themselves for their PAs anyway). But it seems naive not to think there’s some prejudice lurking under the bureaucracy. Blocking disabled people from going on holiday or working abroad goes to the heart of cultural assumptions about disability: that we don’t have careers or families or friends like other, “normal” people.

Sixty years after disabled people left institutions and were able to live independently, alongside the vast gains, the stain of paternalistic control still lurks in disability services. It’s the social worker who suggests you get a commode next to your sofa because it’s cheaper than an accessible bathroom. It’s the care worker who speaks very slowly to you and picks your clothes out on your behalf. It’s the occupational therapist who suggests you get a hospital-style bed that your husband can’t fit in (and is visibly surprised you have a husband).

We’re not supposed to talk about this stuff. There’s an unwritten rule that says disabled people should be just grateful for what they’re given by the state, lest we appear to be scroungers or burdens. I say “unwritten”. It’s written in some newspapers most weeks.

It is uncomfortable, I suppose, in part because it is so ordinary. This isn’t the sort of prejudice that comes with an ableist slur or a violent push. It is the gentle, everyday belief that certain kinds of lives – certain kinds of people – come with low expectations.

Just look at the way much of the political and media class discuss social care. In the rare instances that younger disabled people are mentioned alongside elderly people, social care is still solely spoken about in terms of personal care – say, help to wash or prepare a meal. As Andy Burnham has put reform of the care sector on the agenda in recent months, it’s notable there has been little talk of its role in supporting a disabled person’s family role or career: whether that’s help to drop the kids off at school on the way to the office or to get to the pub to celebrate a friend’s birthday.

That’s understandable. Under the current system, as many as 1.5 million disabled people in England are left without access to even the most basic help. If you are suffering the indignity of sitting in soiled clothes because a care worker hasn’t arrived to assist you to the bathroom, it can feel pointless – delusional, even – to mention you’ve not seen the sea in years.

But to settle for this state of affairs forces disabled people to accept a half-life, to be relieved to at least be clean and fed, and to try to forget the colour that defines being human. It diminishes not only our humanity but the principle that disability campaigners fought for decades for and underpins the modern care system: for disabled people to have choice and independence over our lives, just like everyone else.

When I recently spoke to Campbell, who has 24/7 PAs herself, about the care abroad scandal, she said something telling: “It’s as if those controlling [these decisions] believe disabled people don’t deserve the same experiences they enjoy.” 

As pressure for national guidelines mounts, I can’t help but think that is a wise litmus test. Would you expect a non-disabled person to live like this? And if not, why do you think it’s OK for disabled people?

The Real Numbers

Paul Knaggs writes:

Donald Tusk did not set out to tell us anything. He stood up in the Sejm on 17 September to warn Poles about drones and a hard winter, and in passing he gave the world a figure Kyiv has spent four years keeping to itself. Ukraine, he said, has recently been losing 27,000 killed and wounded each month, a record for this war. He said it came from Ukrainian officials.

Now do the sum Kyiv would rather you didn’t. In July, Zelensky told Fox News that Ukraine has about 50,000 dead and about 400,000 wounded, with a significant number missing on top. That is roughly 450,000 casualties over some fifty months, or about 8,500 a month. Tusk’s figure is more than three times that. In February, Zelensky said the officially confirmed dead were at least 55,000. By July it was about 50,000. Either the figures are loose, or someone is rounding in the wrong direction.

Independent estimates say what you would expect. CSIS puts Ukrainian dead at between 125,000 and 150,000, and total casualties at 525,000 to 625,000, from February 2022 to June 2026. That is two to three times Kyiv’s figure for the dead.

There is a second number. Zelensky told The Economist in February 2025 that Ukraine mobilised 30,000 people a month in 2024, and its commander-in-chief has since said that is the figure to stick to. Put Tusk’s 27,000 beside Kyiv’s 30,000 and you have one figure seen from both ends: a country conscripting as many men as it is losing. That is my inference, but it is hard to read it any other way.

Ukraine’s defenders will say Russia is bleeding faster. CSIS’s work suggests Russian casualties of 30,000 to 34,000 a month in 2026, probably more than Moscow can recruit (same summary). I don’t doubt it. That is not comfort. It is what attrition means.

Kyiv has its reasons for silence. It does not want to hand Moscow a picture of its strength or shake morale at home. Fair enough. But the secrecy covers more than the enemy. It covers the people paying for the war.

Britain has committed £25 billion to Ukraine since 2022, £16 billion of it military, some of it guarantees and loans rather than cash. The aid budget is being cut from 0.5 per cent of national income to 0.3, while BAE Systems reports a record order backlog of £84 billion. We are told this is about standing with Ukraine. We are not told what standing with Ukraine costs Ukrainians.

Tusk says this winter could be catastrophic. If he is right, Ukrainian conscripts will find out first, and the rest of us will be asked to pay for more of it. Neither group has been shown the real numbers.

Obvious Litmus Tests

The Morning Star editorialises:

Palantir’s hire of former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson raises familiar questions about how this sinister company buys influence and secures contracts. Back in April an investigation by The Nerve revealed that dozens of ex-government officials and former ministers had joined Palantir, including top mandarins in the NHS and Ministry of Defence (MoD), which have both agreed contracts worth hundreds of millions with the CIA-linked firm. The stench of corruption went higher still, with the £240 million contract signed by the MoD following a personal meeting between then prime minister Keir Starmer and Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp in Washington, organised by then ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson, of whose lobbying firm Global Counsel Palantir was a paying client.

Pressure to block future contracts with Palantir and cancel those already agreed has grown, both because these exposés suggest they were not fairly acquired and because of the company’s unsavoury nature — its far-right founder and “post-democracy” advocate of untrammelled corporate rule Peter Thiel, its development of technology used in human rights abuses by the US Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agency under Donald Trump and in war crimes by the Israel Defence Forces. London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s decision to block a Palantir contract with the Metropolitan Police shows the firm is becoming toxic. Watson’s appointment is designed to counter that pressure. It is clearly based on the hope that the Labour peer — best known on the left for his serial sabotage of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership from 2015 to 2020 — continues to exercise influence within the party.

And that leads to a much bigger question — what is Andy Burnham’s Labour Party? What are its politics and who does it represent? Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband made a rare positive reference to the power of protest recently when discussing the government’s new tougher line on Israel: “Gaza mobilised a whole generation of people, and those people were right, not wrong.” But as the Morning Star has pointed out, this has not been matched by a reversal of the ban on Palestine Action or the other repressive measures taken against the Palestine movement.

Rhetorically, Burnham often echoes another movement that mobilised a generation, the Corbyn movement which saw Labour grow to be the biggest party in western Europe, energising hundreds of thousands of activists in the cause of change. Like Burnham, Corbyn talked of Britain having been on the wrong track since Thatcherism. Like Burnham, he denounced the privatisation of economic power and demanded it be reversed. Like Burnham, he was accused of threatening to take the country back to the 1970s. Unlike Burnham, he was treated as a mortal threat by the parliamentary party and the British Establishment more widely. The most obvious explanation is that they thought he meant it and do not think Burnham does. 

These are obvious litmus tests for a Labour Party that hounded Corbyn and many of his supporters from its ranks, and whose parliamentary seats are largely occupied by new MPs carefully vetted by the ferociously anti-socialist faction around aforementioned Palantir pal Mandelson. If they support Burnham’s stated programme, do they admit that Corbyn was right too? Do they want to win those driven away from Labour back, or would they meet socialist activists with the same hostility as before?

Pretending Corbynism never happened isn’t good enough — sleaze-ridden, warmongering and corporate-lackey Starmer-Labour was the party machine’s reaction to Corbyn, and Burnham has so far only rejected it in rhetoric, not in policy or personnel. Which way he jumps on Palantir will be an indicator. If Burnham is the breath of fresh air most trade unions say he is, Watson’s lobbying will cut no ice with this government and its contracts will be revisited.

Life, Expectancy

No, the state pension was not just supposed to top up private provision, as if occupational and private pensions had been the norm in 1908 or in 1946. Life expectancy in 1946 is irrelevant to the present debate, since what were then the recent figures had been warped by the Second World War. £13,000 per annum is a pitiful pension by international standards, we already pay it later than many other countries, and you will soon have to wait until beyond average male life expectancy. Why is dignity in retirement unaffordable only here? But the triple lock puts money in the pockets of the people who spent it, thereby injecting it into the consumer economy, and thus employing the young. Yet if it took you over the income tax threshold, then you should have to pay tax on it until that threshold had been increased for everyone.

Speaking of tax thresholds, abolishing inheritance tax, or at least massively raising the threshold, is the perennial Conservative crowd-pleaser to rally the activist base. Labour’s used to be VAT on school fees, but it has now done that, so what will it promise the next time that it needed some easy applause? Kemi Badenoch and Andrew Griffith need to think on. And speaking of 1946, there has been a trade union leader on the Court of Directors of the Bank of England for 80 years. As one of nine non-executive directors, Paul Nowak succeeds Frances O’Grady, who succeeded Dave Prentis, who succeeded Brendan Barber, who succeeded Bill Morris, who succeeded Gavin Laird, who was appointed in 1986, under Margaret Thatcher. On back it goes, for another 40 years. For all the difference that it has made, but even so. O’Grady was appointed when Robert Jenrick was a Treasury Minister.

Over half of the unions affiliated to the TUC have never been affiliated to the Labour Party, and membership of the TUC General Council has always been a bar to membership of Labour’s National Executive Committee. Add to that the decidedly blue collar character of the affiliated unions and the decidedly non-blue collar character of the Labour electorate, with the latter reflected in the Parliamentary Labour Party. The relationship is not what most people think that it is. On Tuesday, in his second go at being Business Secretary, the fake solicitor Jonathan Reynolds said that, “I would like the steel industry to be in private hands. That is my preference.” On the Today programme, he refused to assure Sharon Graham that publicly funded infrastructure projects would be required to buy British steel. Trade union money is the only financial contribution to a British political party that buys absolutely nothing at best, and worse than nothing a lot of time.

In any case, the Court of Directors is not the Monetary Policy Committee. Without a manifesto commitment, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown immediately surrendered democratic political control of monetary policy. The Liberal Democrats forced the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility. The Conservatives created the short-lived Economic Advisory Council out of thin air, and Rachel Reeves reconstituted a Council of Economic Advisers with at least one of the same people on it. Yet on none of those occasions have the salaries of the First Lord of the Treasury, of all other Treasury Ministers, and of all senior Treasury civil servants been halved, as they should have been.

Thatcher must never have seen a banknote, since she thought that the State had no money of its own. Yet in reality, the issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control. The responsibility of the Government is to ensure the supply of goods and services to be purchased in that currency.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. If there were “no such thing as society”, and Thatcher really did say that, then there could be no such thing as the society that was the family, or the society that was the nation. But there is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has mostly issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even when those bonds were held by the big scary “bond markets”, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. Say it again that there is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

The money can always be found for wars. But taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Within and under that understanding, a tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could make up the abolition of the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain’s 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year’s tax take. And so on. With the Gulf looking a lot less attractive, the tiny numbers of people directly affected would not get a better deal anywhere that they might ever wish to live. Even the putative Iranian nuclear cloud has a silver lining.

For a quarter of a century, they have been telling us to wait for their war against Iran, and we have been telling them that Iran would win. Here we are. The great Representative Thomas Massie has filed eight articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth. They will not pass, but they are still correct. No angels though they are, the Houthis, who are not Iran’s proxies but its allies, are on the cusp of winning against the Saudi puppets in Yemen, or rather in Saudi Arabia while purporting to be the Government of Yemen. British Officers have been in the control room from which, over 12 years, Yemen has been turned into the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world. British bases and intelligence were crucial to the double-tapping of the girls’ school in Minab, which the UN has called a war crime, just as British arms and intelligence were crucial to the IDF’s killing of James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman while those British veterans were unarmed and delivering humanitarian aid, bombing them three times to make sure that they were dead, which Britain is too cowardly to call a war crime.

But the poorest Arabs are about to beat the richest, the nerve centre of Islamist terrorism all the way back to 9/11 and beyond. The Saudi alliance with Turkey and Pakistan has failed its first test, the allegation that Mecca and Medina were about to be bombed has been dismissed out of hand by an Islamic world that would have exploded if anyone had believed it, Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, Ansar Allah controls the Bab al-Mandab, and we either make peace with those facts, or we shiver and starve. This is called defeat, a common consequence of either backing the wrong side or interfering in matters that did not concern one. Never again let the trade unions or anyone else be accused of the latter when we involved ourselves in foreign policy. From the petrol pump to the pumping of blood, we pay the price.

There are mass protests about the price of fuel in Syria, which our lords and masters rejoiced to see handed over to an old second-in-command both of al-Qaeda and of the so-called Islamic State. That does give some perspective to the brouhaha around the Archbishop of Canterbury’s presentation of an award to a Pakistani Islamist, who must have been recommended for it by the Church of Pakistan (look it up), where Christians will suffer far more as a result of its withdrawal. And so what that his wife wears a niqab? I do not like the niqab, but banning it would trap in their homes the women who wore it, and who would not go over to dressing like the members of Katseye.

Donald Trump is preparing for war even in Outer Space, and Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris would have been doing the same. As to the ones already in progress, Boris Johnson has had another of his well-timed near-death experiences, this time in Ukraine, but this time few people noticed and nobody cared, while Israel is cultivating ties to the Austrian Freedom Party, on which happy Googling. Outfits like that are all ferociously pro-Israeli. What do they like so much about it? Their answers to that are perfectly frank. Maybe it’s you, Bibi? In fact, Bibi, it is you. You are Lale Andersen with worse politics.

Donald Tusk ought not to worry, since Radek Sikorski has said that Poland could defeat Russia from the air alone in five minutes flat. But the conviction of Illia Bilyk has brought up again the most peculiar matter of Keir Starmer’s Ukrainian arsonist rent boys on the streets of London, while the conviction and the 25-year sentence handed down to the 58-year-old Hashim Thaçi ought to be the death knell of the reputations of everyone who had ever so much as cheered on any war of liberal intervention from the 1990s onwards. As radio stations begin to ban Ed Sheeran, he should consider that there were radio stations that to this day refused to play the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks because of their opposition to the Iraq War.

Yet it is for the present and future wars that we have moved in half a decade from staying at home to protect our elders, to wishing them dead through what could logically be nothing less than the abolition of the state pension. How the world turns, that it was Thatcher who linked it to prices rather than to earnings on the assumption that that would always be far cheaper, while the pro-war Green Party wants only a double lock, with the 2.5 per cent rule abolished. On behalf of the whole country, as is always integral to any parliamentary election, Holborn and St Pancras should return George Galloway.

Impossible To Ignore

Jasmine Scarff writes:

The Green Party’s inability to find a serious strategy of cooperation with Your Party, the Workers Party, independent candidates and the smaller socialist organisations is becoming impossible to ignore. For all their talk of building a new political alternative, the party has repeatedly prioritised its own electoral expansion over the much harder task of building cooperation with the other forces on the left. The problem is not that the Greens stand candidates. That is their democratic right. The problem is that they have too often approached elections as an opportunity to maximise the Green vote rather than asking the more important strategic question: how can the forces of the left work together to maximise their collective representation? That failure is becoming increasingly visible, and the Holborn and St Pancras by-election is now providing a particularly vivid example of what happens when competing organisations attempt to mobilise overlapping electorates without a coherent agreement about cooperation.

The contradiction is particularly obvious given the Green Party’s “Stand Everywhere” ideology. The party makes it clear that it supports candidates for office all over the country, arguing that having Green candidates on the ballot is necessary to show that Green support is widespread. That may make sense if the objective is simply to build the Green Party as an independent electoral organisation. But it becomes much harder to defend when the same party presents itself as part of a wider progressive movement seeking fundamental political change. Put another candidate on the ballot in every constituency and hope that every other party, from Your Party and the Workers Party to smaller socialist groups and independents, will see the Greens as the best vehicle for change to start a movement. There must be a willingness to cooperate, negotiate, and, when necessary, stand aside at some point.

Furthermore, this is not some abstract argument. The 2024 general election exposed the consequences of fragmentation with extraordinary clarity. Gaza became a decisive issue for many voters, particularly in constituencies with substantial Muslim populations, and independent and Workers Party candidates succeeded in taking seats from Labour or coming remarkably close to doing so. Jeremy Corbyn won Islington North as an independent; Shockat Adam defeated Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South; Adnan Hussain defeated Labour in Blackburn; and Iqbal Mohamed won in Dewsbury and Batley. In Ilford North, Leanne Mohamad came within 528 votes of defeating Wes Streeting.

The Green candidate received 1,794, while she received 15,119 votes. If the Green candidate had withdrawn, no one should pretend that every Green voter in those constituencies would have voted for a pro-Palestinian independent. Elections do not work that mechanically. But that caveat should not become an excuse for avoiding the underlying political question. When an electorate moves away from Labour because of Gaza, austerity, foreign policy, or other issues, and that electorate then splits between Greens, independents, the Workers Party, Your Party, and other progressive candidates, the organisations involved have a responsibility to determine whether or not their electoral strategies are assisting in the development of a more comprehensive political alternative.

The issue became even more striking in Holborn and St Pancras itself. In 2024, Andrew Feinstein stood as an independent and received 7,312 votes, while the Green candidate received 4,030. With 18,884, Keir Starmer prevailed. Again, the combined votes cannot simply be treated as though they belonged to a single candidate, but the numbers demonstrate that a sizeable section of the electorate was looking beyond Labour while being represented by more than one challenger. The fact that the same constituency is now witnessing another contest between different forces on the left should surely prompt some serious soul-searching. Instead of developing a mechanism for deciding which organisation has the strongest local claim, the competing parties have once again entered the same electoral arena.

The May 2026 local elections have made this debate even more difficult for the Greens to avoid. There were examples of cooperation, including arrangements involving the Greens and local progressive groups, and those examples should be acknowledged. But they don’t change the bigger picture: on a national scale, the Green Party continued its expansive electoral strategy instead of withdrawing candidates in constituencies where another left-wing or progressive force was in a better position. Indeed, the internal argument surrounding the Makerfield by-election demonstrated that even within the Green movement there is now a serious dispute over whether the party should sometimes stand aside when doing so could prevent fragmentation. Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley were among those who argued for scaling back the Green campaign there, while other Green voices defended the party’s decision to contest the seat.

That dispute is significant because it demonstrates that this is not simply an argument invented by the Workers Party, Your Party or Labour supporters. The Greens themselves understand the danger of fragmentation. They understand that first-past-the-post can produce outcomes in which several parties collectively command substantial support but none of them wins because their votes are divided. What remains unresolved is whether that lesson should be applied consistently.

There is a particularly serious question here for the Green Party. If it believes that Reform must sometimes be stopped through electoral cooperation, why should cooperation suddenly become unacceptable when the other potential partner is Your Party, the Workers Party, an independent candidate or a smaller socialist organisation? If the principle is that progressive forces should coordinate to prevent a divided vote handing victory to an opposing political force, then that principle should not depend on whether the candidate being asked to stand aside happens to be Green.

The Greens cannot have it both ways. They cannot demand strategic cooperation from others when Reform threatens them while simultaneously insisting that they must contest every constituency in which they believe they can increase their vote. That is not a strategy for building a united left. It is a strategy for building a stronger Green Party. Those are not necessarily the same thing.

This is where the wider left needs to be honest about the political landscape. Along with the Greens, independent candidates, and the smaller socialist organisations, your party and the Workers Party are now important components of the emerging left electoral landscape. Each has its own interests, programme and political identity. None of these organisations is automatically entitled to dictate to the others. But if they all continue competing independently in every constituency, the result will inevitably be fragmentation. The choice is not between one organisation dominating the left and everyone else disappearing. The alternative is some form of negotiated cooperation in which organisations agree where they have the strongest local base and where a common candidate might have the greatest chance of winning.

This conversation ought to have become necessary at the time of the 2024 Gaza vote. Instead, the different strands of the left largely continued along separate organisational paths. This is especially disheartening because the election showed that there was a lot of interest in candidates who would challenge Labour’s stance on Gaza. In several constituencies, that challenge broke through dramatically. Candidates came close in other cases. Yet instead of transforming that political energy into a coordinated movement, the left remained divided between the Greens, Workers Party, Your Party, independent campaigns and smaller socialist organisations.

Holborn and St Pancras is now exposing that unresolved contradiction in real time. Zack Polanski is seeking to turn the Green Party’s growing national support into a parliamentary breakthrough, while George Galloway is contesting the same seat for the Workers Party. The dispute has already generated serious disagreement within the Workers Party itself, with Chris Williamson resigning as deputy leader after opposing Galloway’s decision to contest the constituency and arguing that the Workers Party should support Polanski.

It is not appropriate to dismiss that disagreement as an internal disagreement between personalities. It exposes the fundamental problem confronting the entire left. What does unity actually mean? Does it mean that everyone must unite behind the Greens because they have built a strong national organisation? Does it mean that everyone should unite behind the Workers Party because it has demonstrated an ability to mobilise voters around Gaza? Does it mean supporting Your Party where it has established a stronger local base? Does it mean supporting independents where they have built the strongest campaigns? Or does it mean developing a completely new mechanism through which these organisations can negotiate constituency by constituency?

Those are legitimate questions. What is no longer convincing is pretending that the problem does not exist. This is why the argument made by activists such as Habeeb that a Green defeat could force the party to rethink its approach to cooperation deserves to be part of the discussion, even if one does not accept the idea that voters should deliberately engineer such an outcome. The important point is not whether Polanski wins or loses. The important point is what the political organisations learn from the result. The Greens would have to face the possibility that their strategy of unilateral expansion has consequences for the movement as a whole if they were to lose a constituency where another left-wing candidate had a strong competitor. Equally, if Galloway’s candidacy failed, the Workers Party would have to confront its own responsibility for fragmentation.

That ought to be the standard that applies to everyone. But there is an even bigger reason why this debate cannot be postponed. A divided left could be extremely vulnerable in the upcoming general election. If Labour’s vote continues to decline in parts of the country while the Greens, Workers Party, Your Party, independents and smaller socialist parties all compete for portions of that electorate, there could be constituencies where a potentially substantial anti-establishment vote is divided between several candidates. Under first-past-the-post, that creates the possibility of parties such as Reform benefiting from a divided opposition. Despite the simplicity of the mechanism, nobody can accurately predict how many seats this could affect. A party does not need majority support to win a constituency; it needs more votes than each individual rival. If three or four parties divide an electorate, a candidate can win with a relatively small plurality. That is precisely why electoral strategy matters.

And this is why the Green Party needs to think beyond the immediate ambition of winning more seats. Winning Green MPs is obviously important to the Green Party. But if the broader objective is to construct a powerful political alternative to the established parties, then the Greens have to ask themselves whether simply expanding their own electoral footprint is sufficient. It could not be. Both Your Party and the Workers Party are subject to the same criticism. Neither can demand unity from the Greens while simultaneously contesting constituencies where another left candidate has a stronger organisation. Unity cannot mean “everyone unite behind us.” That is not unity; it is organisational competition disguised as unity.

Compromise would be a much more difficult requirement for genuine cooperation. The Greens would have to accept that they shouldn’t automatically run for office in every constituency. It would require the Workers Party and Your Party to accept the same principle. Independent candidates would need to understand that a strong personal campaign is not always better than a larger political strategy. It would require smaller socialist parties to consider whether standing everywhere advances their objectives or merely divides the electorate. Additionally, rather than discovering after the votes have been counted that they have collectively permitted an opposing candidate to win, it would require everyone to gather before elections. The Green Party’s supporters may understandably reject the suggestion that their candidates should routinely stand aside. But nobody is asking them to abandon their politics. The argument is that political independence and electoral cooperation are not mutually exclusive. A party can maintain its identity while entering agreements with other organisations where doing so serves a common objective.

The Greens have already shown that local cooperation is possible. The experience of Camden and other local arrangements demonstrates that the party is capable of working with groups outside its own organisational structure. The problem is that such cooperation has not yet become a sufficiently systematic national strategy. That needs to change. Holborn and St Pancras should be a wake-up call. The controversy surrounding the by-election is not merely about Zack Polanski, George Galloway or one parliamentary seat. It is about whether the British left has the political maturity to recognise that its greatest electoral weakness may be its inability to cooperate. If Polanski loses, it would be too simplistic to say that Galloway “caused” his defeat. If Galloway loses, it would be equally simplistic to claim that the Workers Party has therefore proved the case for its own strategy. The meaningful question will be whether either organisation learns anything from the experience. 

The British left cannot afford another 2024-style fragmentation at the next general election. It cannot afford to watch Labour voters move towards Greens, independents, the Workers Party and Your Party while those forces compete against one another and potentially open the door to Reform. Furthermore, it cannot claim that no one anticipated the danger. The Green Party needs to decide what it really wants to build. It needs to make it abundantly clear that its goal is to establish the Green Party and support it. If it wants to help build a broader left-wing political movement, then it must start acting like one of the components of that movement rather than behaving as though electoral expansion and political unity are automatically the same thing. 

The Greens may ultimately learn from Holborn and St. Pancras that a movement cannot be built through unilateralism, something they have been reluctant to accept up until this point. If the left is serious about changing British politics, then the time for every organisation simply fighting for its own patch is running out. The next general election demands something more ambitious than another collection of competing candidates. It demands a strategy for cooperation. The choice is ultimately not between the Green Party and the Workers Party, nor between Polanski and Galloway. The real strategic question facing the left is whether these organisations and the smaller socialist and independent forces can finally learn how to work together rather than continually dividing the same electorate.

And Jack Howley writes:

Chris Williamson’s resignation from the Workers Party of Britain, following its decision to stand Galloway against Polanski, appears to turn on precisely the question of “splitting the Left.” Earlier this year, Williamson defended the Workers Party’s withdrawal from a by-election on the same grounds. Despite having won more than 10 per cent in 2024, the party stood aside; and Hannah Spencer went on to defeat Reform’s Matthew Goodwin with 40.7 per cent of the vote. Now, in Starmer’s vacant seat, there will be no such accommodation. George Galloway and Zack Polanski are both standing. So the accusation is made: Why split the Left?

But contained inside that question is the entire argument. A vote can only be “split” if what is being divided belonged together in the first place. Before there can be a divided Left, there has to be some political whole called the Left whose constituent parts are sufficiently aligned so that electoral competition between them amounts to self-sabotage. And that is precisely what is in dispute. Britain’s international alignment with imperialism is the entire political structure our socialist movement must confront before it accepts bribes to sit still. The Workers Party and the Greens may overlap on distribution, but the real question is simpler: does an organisation challenge that structure of power, or remain subject to it? The Greens remain firmly situated within the institutional world of the EU, NATO and the wider Western alliance system. The Workers Party defines itself through rejection of that system and through solidarity with all peoples resisting it. More plainly, one camp materially sustains Israel and the wider military architecture behind its regional wars; the other camp backs governments that Israel and its allies seek to weaken or overthrow.

Lenin confronted a version of this problem during the First World War. Parties that had coexisted beneath the banner of social democracy were forced by war to reveal commitments previously concealed. His accusation of social-chauvinism was directed at socialists who retained socialist language while adapting their political practice to the interests of the imperial class: socialists in words, chauvinists in deeds. We could say then, socialists in words, Zionists in deeds. Everything else is secondary unless it alters that relation. The familiar left-right spectrum, and especially its tendency to outpace and browbeat the actual development of common consciousness, pushing ever further beyond prevailing social sensibilities and marginalising genuinely progressive politics, are expressions of that deeper subordination. What follows is a rainbow array of imperialist-sponsored cultural radicalism imposed from above, through which the Western Left is progressively estranged from the world’s anti-imperialist forces, forces it might otherwise recognise as allies were they not perpetually dismissed as too “backward” to qualify. 

Any non-dogmatic socialist organisation in Britain will make use of elections, reforms, institutions and partial demands. The more important question is what those reforms are politically for. Do they build forces increasingly independent of the existing political order, rearranging loyalties and creating new capacities for power? The Green and Workers Party manifestos alone cannot answer that question. Political dependence is harder to disguise, which brings us to the real constituency at stake, besides the Holborn and St Pancras seat. The defeat of Corbynism produced a substantial politically homeless bloc. Corbynism 1.0 mobilised enormous political energy, but failed to build an organisation capable of surviving independently of Labour. The Workers Party quickly revealed the existence of a constituency beyond Labour, winning hundreds of thousands of votes despite contesting only a fraction of available seats. Five years of Corbynite hesitation later, Your Party triggered another eruption of enthusiasm, with almost a million signatures registering interest. 

The recurring fact is that a significant bloc has moved beyond Labour without yet finding a durable political home. Whatever one thinks of Zarah Sultana, she gave that break a possible political content through her faction of Your Party: socialist, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and outside NATO, a distinction she consistently made from the Greens. With Corbyn’s faction now dominant, Sultana becomes the convenient culprit for Your Party’s increasingly farcical paralysis: its failure to act, its reluctance to contest elections, and the resulting drift of precisely that constituency towards the Greens. The effect is a pincer move: the Left that tried to break with Corbynist inertia of 2019 is, by 2026, marginalised on one side, while well-meaning socialists are absorbed on the other into the pro-NATO Greens. It is this apparent “insurgency” within the Greens that gives Williamson his ideological return ticket. 

The return ticket is the preserved possibility of political re-entry into the establishment after a substantial movement away. Former comrades like Williamson may have travelled far, but the political world they leave remains the place to which judgement ultimately returns when the alternative becomes too difficult. Meanwhile, the anti-imperialists must continually qualify for solidarity. Their rhetoric is inspected. Their personalities are inspected. Their alliances, mistakes, aesthetics, manners and moral character are inspected from the warm embrace of the status quo alignment with imperialism. It’s as if they are saying: “You need to convince me personally.” But the demand is structurally unequal, and always exists like a recurring threat: “Don’t make me do it. Do not make solidarity socially expensive, or I will return.”  The formulation gives the game away. One can only threaten to return somewhere that remains politically available. What appears subjectively as the withdrawal of support from an anti-imperialist organisation is, structurally, a return to the very institutions and political categories from which that organisation constituted a break.

This is why the by-election reaches far beyond the immediate contest and cuts straight through the unresolved fault line of the post-Corbyn Left. It brings into confrontation two leaders whose political orientations emerge from opposing international camps: one situated within the institutions of the imperialist Western alliance, the other defined by absolute opposition to those institutions. Polanski’s rise has coincided with an attempt to make the Greens the institutional home of those mobilised by Corbynism, absorbing that energy and rendering it politically ineffective against imperialism. And this is where the history starts to bite. The contest is taking place in Keir Starmer’s former seat, the man who drove Labour towards the second-referendum position that fractured Corbyn’s electoral coalition with the Brexit-voting Labour heartlands. Polanski was himself among those who used the issues of the EU and ‘antisemitism’ to bring down Corbyn before his rebrand from a Lib Dem into a Green with the help of Novara Media, Owen Jones, PoliticsJOE et al. 

Call it the meta-People’s Vote tendency. The original People’s Vote sought to reverse one rupture, Brexit, through cross-party mobilisation around European integration. The “meta” version names a broader political function. When political energy breaks its banks and begins to flow beyond the established imperial order, it is blocked from running its own course towards independent organisation. It is dammed, diverted and channelled into a new organisational riverbed of the same quality, one whose appearance may change while its political horizon remains safely contained within the institutions of that same order. The socialist subject returns to the same political totality through a different organisation, for the most part without common intent. And so the circle can close by itself: a Farage-Polanski contest could even reproduce Brexit versus Rejoin in a new costume, repeating the historical tragedy of Corbynism as the farce of Polanskism.

Here “unity” becomes the vocabulary through which rupture can be postponed indefinitely, all in the name of bribing the socialist movement with ‘redistribution’ and military Keynesianism. At what point do we simply call this Fascism? The Ukrainian regime that Polanski supports does not hide its neo-Nazism, and Hitler, after all, was a vegetarian environmentalist who wanted to see Russia destroyed. The Greens have also still not decided whether they think Zionism is racism, perhaps forever pending with a statement on the plume of methane bubbling from the Nord Stream attack. This all leaves Sultana in an awkward position. She has already been pushed towards the margins, and without an independent organisation behind her, her own parliamentary position is precarious. That is what makes Holborn and St Pancras such a test. Galloway is on the ballot for the Workers Party, representing the independent socialist, anti-imperialist force she fought for.

If it was meant sincerely, I’m sure the Workers Party would welcome her, as this by-election provides concretely what that distinction from Labour and the Greens actually means. It means there is no return ticket. Ask Galloway what this looks like. Your face is circulated by the Israeli Foreign Ministry inside a target circle and associated with Hamas, a blank cheque for your murder. Your bank account is closed without explanation after thirty-nine years. You return to your own country with your spouse and are detained under counter-terror powers, your devices seized. There is no guarantee of safe passage back. The old political world sneers and scoffs at your repression under the iron fist of the imperial regime, and you may have to campaign without your physical presence there. 

There is a savage historical irony for Chris Williamson. He knows perfectly well what happened the last time he inhabited the political world of social-Zionism. Under Corbyn’s Labour he was suspended amid the antisemitism scam, yet now he wishes to support the same Polanski who invoked his Jewish identity to help make him an exile in the first place. Let us wish him well on his return, but let’s also be clear: there is no split. The contradiction has simply been forced into the open because Galloway has done what Corbyn and Sultana did not: built an independent socialist organisation prepared to stand an explicitly anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist candidate, and anybody who calls themselves a socialist should and will support Galloway’s Workers Party in this election.

The Faith of Dovie Eisner

My own phenomenally clever and well-read godson died in his early forties two years ago. A son of the Baptist manse, baptised and confirmed as a Catholic while he was reading Theology at Durham. It is a very particular sort of grief, articulated beautifully here by Sohrab Ahmari:

“I didn’t like what you wrote about….” That’s how Dov Paul Eisner greeted me nearly every time we met up. It grated the first few times. Here I was, having arranged a dinner or drinks, bringing together other “mutuals” in addition to dispatching a specialty rideshare to carry his motorized wheelchair from his place in deep Brooklyn to Midtown, where I live. And Dovie (as we called him) opened by rebuking my recent work. It took me a little while to figure it out. More than just a way to establish closeness, Dovie’s intellectual ribbing shattered the pitying mentality and saccharine tone — the false piety — that can sometimes characterize the way we relate to people with severe disabilities. It was as if to say: here I am, no different from you — unable to walk or to breathe unassisted, yes, but capable of disagreeing and being disagreed with. Have at me.

Dovie, who died last week while in a coma at age 35, spent his last conscious days railing against the assisted-suicide and euthanasia laws sweeping the democratic West. When New York state lawmakers took up an assisted-suicide bill last year, he published a viral essay in UnHerd urging Gov. Kathy Hochul to veto it. “As a young man with disabilities,” he wrote, “I fear what this state should become if suicide-by-doctor becomes law.” He worried that with doctors authorized to prescribe death, people like him would be nudged to choose suicide by health systems and public attitudes that view some lives as too difficult and too painful to be worth continuing. He saw this culture of death menacing his own existence.

Dovie’s life was difficult and painful in many ways. He was born with a genetic disorder called nemaline myopathy. It basically meant that he had catastrophically low muscle tone, leaving him unable to walk. Speaking was only possible in between drags on an air tube, and then in a voice that barely rose above a thin rasp. Yet his life — his indefatigable, irrepressible drive to partake of all that it means to be human — bore witness against the culture of death. I first met him through a mutual friend — Professor Robert George, the great Princeton ethicist — after an event on the rise of anti-Semitism, held at New York’s Center for Jewish History in 2017. As I would soon learn, he had very little patience for small talk and pleasantries. That first time, he cut to the chase. “We’ll never have a proper discussion about anything,” he began, “until we learn that rational people may have perfectly rational reasons for believing things we find horrible.” OK, but what are you talking about? “Gun control and abortion,” he shot back. “According to one side of these debates” — a deep drag on the air tube — “I have blood on my hands for supporting the Second Amendment” — another drag — “and I’m only motivated by the Bible to oppose abortion.”

Dovie debated vigorously, on first principles — rare among our cohort but natural for one reared on traditional Jewish learning. In those days, both of us still adhered to the tenets of traditional Reaganite conservatism. In the decade that followed, he stayed there, more or less, only becoming slightly more Trump-friendly. Whereas I gradually shifted to a more heterodox position that embraced labor unions and thicker welfare nets — conservative social democracy or blue Labour are probably the best labels for it. Dovie would have none of it. “Unions?” he scoffed. “That’ll just mean the people who care for me will cost more and work less!” And he wouldn’t relent in such discussions, no matter the social context. It’s what made his company equal parts maddening and enjoyable. Dovie offered no deference to social rank or politesse, and he expected none for his disability. He would have been disappointed in me if I backed away from my pro-labor position on account of his needs. And so we argued, by phone and in person, almost to the end.

Dovie befriended with no less vigor. Typical for a Millennial and one with his physical limitations, many of his friendships took shape online. But as much as possible, he tried to drag them into the real world: to force his e-friends see the man behind the tweets. He unburdened himself with relative ease — “Am I likable? Like, do you grit your teeth around me?” Yes, you are — and invited similar openness. He drank life fully, somehow, and strong bourbon, too. Dovie fell in love. Attending conservative galas, he’d often come accompanied by young women who were all too happy to assist him. Sometimes, though, he wanted more than assistance. He wondered out loud to me if he had a shot with some of them. “I need to get married, dude,” he’d say. His romantic side attested to Aristotle’s observation that man’s domestic impulse is even stronger and more foundational than his political impulse. But in Dovie’s case, that impulse would remain frustrated, as far as I know. I could help him get published, but I couldn’t help him there. Here, I may have succumbed to that pity I knew he hated.

And Dovie believed. Though born to an Orthodox rabbinic family, he began exhibiting a strong attraction to the Christian faith in the late 2010s. At first, it was merely a civilizational draw. “I do not know whether or not there is a God,” he wrote to me. “I am inclined to think so. Yet I think that atheism is an absolutely untenable philosophy for society even if it is the truth.” But as is often the case, his “I am inclined to think so” led him to “mere Christianity.” He had himself baptized as an Episcopalian, but I could sense he was heading Rome-ward. “I HAVE CATHOLIC QUESTIONS,” he texted me in 2018. Dovie, I think, was one of those people for whom the Catholic Church is its own proof: the sheer fact of an institution that has persisted for two millennia, teaching the same thing — not least when it comes to the value of life, all life.

When he was ready to be received in the Church, I served as his confirmation sponsor at a Mass celebrated in Latin at a church in Brooklyn on April 17, 2022 — Easter. As the years wore on, it was hard to avoid the impression that his condition was worsening. When we’d go out to dinner, he could only manage soup, having once relished grilled chicken. Later, just the bourbon. Eventually, not even that. Then, in late May 2025, days after his UnHerd essay appeared and was adapted into a New York Post column, he had an apparent mishap with his breathing device. I visited him at the Brooklyn hospital where he was initially treated, said several decades of the Rosary, held his hands. Early on, there were little signs of movement under the eyelids, but these apparently proved illusory. Dovie stayed in a coma, lovingly cared for by his family at multiple facilities, for more than a year. My final text to him — “Hey, dude, still basking in the afterglow of publication?” — went unanswered. Then again, at his confirmation Mass, the words of the Introit reassured both of us: Resurréxi, et adhuc tecum sum, alleluia.