The Right Goes Wrong

From this, to this, to this, it is all falling apart on what seemed until very recently to be Britain’s insurgent Right. Daniel Thomas marched on the Daily Mail at the head of a band of men who were as fat as I was and, even behind the masks, clearly almost as old. Before the television cameras, he assured them that they would be paid, although they obviously had no jobs to go to. The whole thing was hilarious.

Still, “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” no more. At least, not from the Mail. But the Blackshirts can decide who got to dock at Dover, where they marched with the Police in a single formation to close the Port, and at Portsmouth, where they assaulted and injured the Police without a single arrest’s being made. On top of hating the King, they have declared war on the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

The restrictions that James Orr’s compound is alleged to breach would have been laughed out or met with bemusement even at Durham back in the day, never mind at Cambridge. No such strictures existed when most undergraduates were not possessed of the age of majority. How do Oxbridge authorities think that colleges originated? But Orr is finished in Britain, as Paul Knaggs writes:

The Metropolitan Police confirmed on Tuesday that Reform UK is now the subject of a criminal investigation over allegations it broke foreign funding law. Detectives said potential offences under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 are under scrutiny, and that the new material is being folded into an existing inquiry already being run by the force’s Special Enquiry Team.

The trigger was a Channel 4 News broadcast last Thursday. An undercover reporter, posing as the British son of a wealthy American, recorded senior Reform figures discussing how to get money into the party from abroad. UK electoral law only permits donations from a registered UK voter or a UK-registered company.

In the footage, Dan Jukes, then Nigel Farage’s chief of staff, can be heard suggesting a £500,000 donation from the reporter’s fictional father could simply be recorded in the son’s name. James Orr, Reform’s head of policy, separately proposed that the same donor pay for opinion polling to support a Reform campaign instead of donating outright. Farage was filmed at a lunch in Clacton where the arrangement was discussed with the fake donor. The £500,000 was never actually paid.

Both men left their posts within days. Jukes said he had “stepped back from politics in order to clear my name” while denying any wrongdoing. Orr told Sky News he would cooperate fully with Reform’s internal investigation. Farage dismissed his aide’s remarks as “loose pub talk” and said he had not been paying attention during the Clacton conversation.

This is not a standalone case. The Met is examining it alongside a pre-existing probe into donations from Fiona Cottrell, mother of long-standing Farage ally George Cottrell, and into a separate £1 million she paid in June 2024 to a company controlled by Reform deputy leader Richard Tice, half of which was then passed on to the party.

Reform said it “denies any wrongdoing and will fully cooperate with the investigation” and would not comment further while the case is live. Verbatim Investigations, the outfit behind the Channel 4 sting, said it would cooperate with police.

The political reaction was swift. Labour chair Bridget Phillipson said Farage “needs to wake up and realise the buck stops with him.” Liberal Democrat Cabinet Office spokeswoman Lisa Smart said “the stench of corruption around Reform’s inner circle was repellent” and called on every Reform MP to state whether their campaigns had benefited from foreign money. Green leader Zack Polanski said “Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson hoped they could pin all this on two senior advisers,” adding that Farage himself still had questions to answer over how much he knew.

Reform built its entire pitch on the claim that it answers to the ordinary voter and no one else. The Met now wants to know whose money has actually been paying for that promise.

Then again, is that all? Truly, this is still the land that answered the Russian Revolution with the Labour Party, the French Revolution with the Liberal Party, and the Reformation with the Church of England. From the cradle of the Reformation, Jörg Luyken writes:

For 13 years since its founding, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has been trying to present itself as a serious and viable choice for government. Its attempts to shed its association with neo-Nazis and overcome its “extremist” classification appear to have paid off following its victory in the Saxony-Anhalt elections. Now voters in the east German state will now be able to call upon a former Stasi agent, an alleged pagan worshipper and an ex-porn actor to represent their views in the state parliament. The colourful characters were among the 39 AfD deputies elected on Sunday, which left the party three seats short of a majority but in prime position to form the state government.

The AfD campaign was led by Ulrich Siegmund, its candidate for state governor, a smiling everyman who managed to captivate local voters with his meet-and-greet tactics. A former member of the centre-Right CDU, Mr Siegmund successfully pitched his party as an alternative for conservative voters who were fed up with the policies of Friedrich Merz’s stuttering federal government. But a number of unlikely politicians were among Mr Siegmund’s candidate list.

Frank-Ronald Bischoff, who won a constituency seat, has admitted to working as a senior Stasi officer. For 12 years, the 78-year-old worked covertly to subdue anti-communist protests in the dying days of the GDR and targeted citizens who applied to leave, according to local reports. When confronted about his role in the secret police in 2017, he told Bild: “I do not comment on questions regarding the Stasi. I faithfully and conscientiously fulfilled my duties according to the laws of the GDR.” Despite the AfD regularly accusing the CDU of enabling communism, Mr Bischoff comfortably won his constituency.

Two other candidates won their seats with majorities of over 40 per cent despite being under investigation by police for their alleged role in a banned racist sect. Simon Lansmann was victorious in the district of Salzwedel, where police previously prevented a pagan ritual from taking place at his dairy farm on the summer solstice. Attendees at the nocturnal event blew horns, carried torches and sang a Hitler Youth anthem, according to a report in Der Spiegel.

Police believe that the ritual was connected to Artgemeinschaft, a pagan sect that instructs its followers to breed only with members of the Germanic race. The sect was banned in 2023 over its similarities to Nazi ideology. In August, police raided Mr Lansmann’s home as part of searches of 15 properties across Germany. Investigators believe that the work of the sect has been continued in secret. Mr Lansmann has denied involvement and said that Nazi songs were not part of the “official programme” at the event. Sebastian Koch is also under investigation over the Artgemeinschaft meetings and was involved in a neo-Nazi fraternity when he was younger. The 39-year-old has described his previous links to the neo-Nazi scene as “a phase”, and has denied having any connection to the Artgemeinschaft sect.

Phillipp-Anders Rau, a convicted thief who was ejected from university for lying about the results of his school leaving exams, is also in the new cohort. He challenged the university’s decision by pleading that he was addicted to cocaine at the time of his application and was not in control of his actions. The 43-year-old was convicted of stealing 100 towels and large quantities of bed linen from a Munich hotel in 2009. Mr Rau, who attended Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago election party in 2024, has also admitted to involvement in porn films. Videos depict the politician engaged in sexual activities near a bank machine in the city of Magdeburg, and in a car on the autobahn. He has insisted he never made a financial profit from his pornographic activities.

When the party, as is likely, takes over the state interior ministry, it will also gain control of the intelligence agency that comes with it, and its classified information. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD was under surveillance by the intelligence services, allowing agents to recruit informants inside the party and tap its phone calls. Now the tables could be turned, with the AfD learning how it was targeted and the extent of Russian interference in Germany. State interior ministers are frantically discussing how they can cut Saxony-Anhalt off from classified information normally shared between states. “Placing control over security agencies in the hands of an anti-constitutional party with close ties to Russia poses a serious security risk,” said Andy Grote, an interior minister from Hamburg. Stephan Kramer, a Social Democrat who runs the state intelligence service in Thuringia, has demanded that Saxony-Anhalt only receives intelligence on a “need-to-know basis”.

Oh, well, when the alternative is this, or a breast-enhancing hypnotist, or the absolutely cake-icing fact that the ludicrous Socialism 2026 had broken a strike such that attendees had crossed a picket line, then we on the Left have only ourselves to blame. Thank goodness for the Proclaimers. And notice that everyone can define a woman when Mahant Swami Maharaj, Guru and President of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, insists that she be removed from her workplace so that he might visit the Eiffel Tower.

The Better Answer To Suffering Is To Care Better

Patrick Hurley MP writes:

When the new assisted dying bill is brought before the House of Commons on Friday, MPs will again be asked to vote on a policy issue charged with immense emotional sensitivity.

Since I was elected, I have listened to constituents describe the agony of watching someone they love approach the end of life. I have experienced that agony myself. When cancer claimed my wife, I witnessed the fear and helplessness that serious illness can bring in its final stages. I know what it means to wish you could do something – anything – to ease the suffering of a loved one.

But having weighed the evidence, heard the experts and watched Parliament grapple with this legislation, I am firmly convinced this bill is the wrong way to achieve it. Legislation should not be built simply around one’s own individual experience – laws must be fair and safe for all, and account for the vulnerabilities of every person who would be impacted. The evidence is now clear that this bill does not adequately account for it.

The government’s own new equality impact assessment on the bill highlights these concerns by acknowledging that, in jurisdictions where assisted dying operates, older people, who are often dependent on others for care, are the main recipients. It also records concerns that older and disabled people may experience subtle or overt pressure to end their lives prematurely. Disabled people are twice as likely to be victims of domestic abuse.

We have spent years assuring disabled people that dependence does not diminish their worth. We should think very carefully before now creating a system in which someone who is old, disabled or dependent and approaching the end of their life might conclude that the most dignified thing they can do for their family is to die.

The equality impact assessment finds ethnic minorities are also particularly vulnerable under this legislation. People from ethnic minority backgrounds are more likely to face structural pressures such as high rates of poverty, poorer healthcare access, lower quality care, and disproportionate levels of domestic abuse committed against Black and Asian women. Where age, disability and race inequalities intersect, the most vulnerable members of society could face enormous pressure to opt for a premature death that they may have otherwise not agreed to.

If we vote through the assisted dying bill this week, we will not be affirming an abstract principle about bodily autonomy, but choosing to accept the status quo that some members of vulnerable groups will almost certainly fall through the net. That danger is fundamentally incongruous with Labour’s entire philosophy.

It deeply troubles me that the government's own impact assessment projects savings of up to £84.8m a year from earlier deaths under assisted dying, treating the death of someone who requires costly care as a fiscal saving for the state.

As legislators, we know that individual “choices” rarely take place in a vacuum. A woman facing domestic abuse or a disabled person navigating social pressure may be legally free to decide, yet not truly free of coercion, so why should that understanding vanish when the decision is whether to die?

And what alternatives are we offering? Access to palliative care is notoriously uneven and subject to a “postcode lottery”.

The better answer to suffering is to care better. Invest in hospices and palliative medicine, support unpaid carers, improve social care, tackle loneliness and protect older and disabled people from abuse. Above all, ensure that nobody approaching the end of life feels that their family would be better off without them.

Andy Burnham’s instincts were right when, at the very start of his premiership, he argued that fixing the broken care system is vital before entertaining further discussion on assisted dying. Our legacy in government should be this: we cared so much about uplifting the vulnerable that we concentrated our efforts on improving current conditions – not introducing a new and questionable assisted dying system that could endanger disadvantaged communities.

Return of the Working Class?

Ewan Gibbs writes:

Andy Burnham’s new premiership was launched with the bold declaration that ‘this country does not work for working-class communities like the city of my birth’. The northerner casts himself as a champion of former industrial communities which have suffered the worst effects of manufacturing and mining job losses as well as diminishing union power. He has committed to overturning ‘four decades of neoliberalism’, defined by a series of entwined disasters: ‘political power was centralised, economic power privatised, the country deindustrialised, austerity followed, hollowing out councils and depriving them of the agency to act to reverse any of this.’ 

This rhetorical radicalism is all the more notable in that it comes from someone who was once a thoroughly conventional New Labour politician. Burnham became a special advisor in the Blair government at a young age before getting elected as an MP and serving as Health Secretary under Gordon Brown. His 2015 leadership campaign tried to replay the optimism of 1997. Initially the frontrunner, he crashed and burned after he abstained on the Cameron government’s punitive Welfare Reform bill. His apparent political conversion has been told as the story of a politician who left Westminster to become the mayor of Greater Manchester. Yet it is more helpful to view it as a reflection of shifts in British society.

Class has now returned to politics after being pronounced dead in the closing decades of the twentieth century. One powerful indication was the brief but intense popularity enjoyed by Mick Lynch, the General Secretary of the National Union of Rail and Maritime Transport Workers, during the ‘strike wave’ of 2022–23, which saw annual days lost to walkouts by workers reach levels not seen since the 1980s. Lynch declared at the time that ‘the working class is back’. He gave a broader political outlook to a series of disputes involving railway and postal workers and teachers, along with strikes by other workers in the private sector ranging from North Sea oil platforms to Amazon warehouses. His arguments raised public support for the strikers and helped advance an argument that working people shouldn’t pay for economic crises not of their making. Yet any such appeal to ‘the working class’ in the 2020s raises at least as many questions as it answers: Who are the working class? How do they mobilise? Who represents them politically?

My new book, An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class, explores how the return of class in this decade maps onto the disappearance of its once powerful predecessor. Unlike today, the decades after WWII did not leave much room for ambiguity about who the working class is, how it organises or what its political affiliations are. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, most manual workers voted Labour at general elections, and they were likely to be members of Labour-affiliated trade unions. Council housing tenancies created strong bonds between municipal authorities and working-class constituencies, along with moments of conflict and mobilisation. In Scotland, most workers and their families were council tenants in the early 1980s, before the introduction of Right to Buy. By the late 1970s, council housing was the most common tenancy form for English and Welsh workers classified as unskilled and semi-skilled.

Affiliations between occupation, place and class consciousness acted as a foundation for solidarities which reverberated from localities to the national level. This was the working class of the NHS, the National Coal Board and the British Energy Authority. Whilst regional and national distinctions were important, political identity overwhelmingly meant a unitary Britishness. It was also a working class which was central to new forms of modernising national culture such as television — from dramatic Coronation Street storylines to Morecambe and Wise’s variety act — even as the tenements, miners’ rows and Working Men’s Clubs were increasingly giving way to more privatised forms of living.

New appeals to class are by no means confined to the Labour Party or even the broadly defined political left. Following the crushing defeats suffered by organised labour and by other redoubts of collectivist politics in the 1980s, such as the left in municipal government, class has become increasingly unmoored from its Labourist traditions. In part this is a result of a prolonged period where class politics was actively reviled and rejected by the institutions which had formerly claimed to speak for the working class. Most stridently, this was the case under New Labour in the 1990s and 2000s. In his first term as Prime Minister, Tony Blair went as far as to declare that ‘the class war is over’ when he addressed the Labour Party conference in 1999. New Labour ideologues argued that socialism belonged among the embarrassing residues of the past during a period where history had ended and Britain could restore a progressive liberal tradition which rejected class conflict.

It was in fact these certainties which proved to be work of hackneyed ideologues. In the aftermath of Brexit, the claim to speak for ‘the left behind’ regions of England and Wales who had strongly supported leaving the European Union became politically potent. Given the prominent role of Thatcherism in the marginalisation and defeat of the left and the labour movement, it is notable that the next prime minister who would boldly claim to speak for the working class was in fact another Conservative. In 2016, Theresa May announced that she would champion ‘ordinary, working-class families’ who had been failed by her predecessors, Labour and Tory alike. May’s attempt at a populist appeal was founded on rejecting the mores of polite society: ‘a lot of people don’t like to admit it’, the prime minister told the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, but to, ‘someone who finds themselves out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration, life simply doesn’t seem fair’.

May went on to attack employers who chose to hire foreign workers over British ones. In drawing her dividing line between the loyal ‘citizens of somewhere’ and the globally oriented ‘citizens of nowhere’ she was attempting to redraw dominant understandings of the throughlines between class, region and party politics firmly to the right. Boris Johnson, May’s ouster, appeared to have even greater success in pursuing the same broad agenda. He claimed to speak for the overlooked ‘red wall’ of traditionally-Labour voting constituencies in former manufacturing and mining areas of England and Wales. The politics of class interest behind this were always tenuous to put it lightly. They rested on assuming the owners of JCB and the workers at its Staffordshire factories had more in common than they did with liberal minded students or service workers of the larger cities. Nonetheless, along with a promise of realising sovereignty through ‘getting Brexit done’ and ‘levelling up’ struggling regions of the north of England, Johnson formed a briefly powerful electoral coalition. As the Tories have atrophied, the rise of Reform on the far-right has been animated by claims to speak for a disenfranchised ‘white working class’ shut out from a society enthralled to multiculturalism and immigration. Thomas Kerr, a Reform Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Glasgow Region, routinely refers to ‘forgotten working-class communities’ left to rot by smug middle-class liberals who have imposed ills ranging from asylum seekers to a public health approach to drugs on right-thinking men and women.

Lee Anderson, the MP for Ashfield, is another key exponent of straight-talking far-right politics. Anderson became Reform’s first MP when he defected after having the Tory whip withdrawn for claiming Labour leader Keir Starmer and London’s Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan, were ‘controlled by Islamists’. Anderson boasts of his credentials as a former miner and proudly stood with Nigel Farage at the unveiling of a memorial to Silverhill colliery in North Nottinghamshire, which was funded by a local Reform supporter. As Sacha Hilhorst explores, Farage dubiously spoke of local miners having lost their jobs after British coal was replaced by Polish competition. He conveniently overlooked the role of privatisation of both electricity production and coal mining as well as the legislative changes the Thatcher government enacted to encourage coal imports to defeat unionised mineworkers. This was not an isolated incident. Farage called for the nationalisation of Scunthorpe steelworks in April 2025 when it was threatened with closure, before Starmer’s government acted. The former City metals trader also donned a boilersuit on a visit to the Grangemouth petrochemicals complex in Scotland this year. Farage declared his solidarity with workers following the refinery closure in 2025 but laid the blame at the feet of the Labour government and green activists rather than the refinery owner, Petroineos, or its unionbusting boss, Jim Ratcliffe.

Conversely, an appeal to a different reading of class animated the surge in support visible for the Greens in English cities at local elections and the Gorton byelection in late 2025. The Green candidate at Gorton, Hannah Spencer, was styled as ‘Hannah the plumber’, which immediately provoked online controversy over the extent to which she was or was not an authentic skilled trades worker. More interestingly, Spencer also profiled herself as a small business owner. This was viewed as a badge of authenticity rather than a marker of difference between employers and employees. As economist James Meadway has highlighted, under left-wing leader Zack Polanski, the English Greens have been keen to profile themselves as a party that speaks for hairdressers and put-upon small local firms. In these terms, the Green voter base and class vision has some approximation to Dan Evans’ perspective on the power of what he terms the old petty bourgeois of small business owners, and the new one made up of downwardly mobile graduates. There is a coalitional logic here which any serious approach to class must take seriously. It poses questions over the extent to which the working class ought to be allied with the professional middle-class as well as small business owners, but is also arguably part of a trend to reduce unions to one of many interested groups. In turn, this risks downplaying the fundamental role of wage labour and workplace organisation in restoring working-class power.

This chaotic landscape is further complicated by constitutional questions which have eroded the coherent sense that there is a British working class to speak for. My book opens with reflections from Jimmy Hood, a Lanarkshire mining engineer who moved to Ollerton in Nottinghamshire in 1968 aged twenty before becoming he later moved back up the road to become the Labour MP for Clydesdale in South Lanarkshire in 1987. Hood was highly involved in both the national coal strikes of the 1970s before becoming a leader of the striking minority of Nottinghamshire miners in 1984–5. I recorded Hood’s reflections in his constituency office in 2014, a few months before the referendum on Scottish independence demonstrated pivotal divides among the voters which had supported Labour in large numbers as recently as 2010. Hood lost his seat a year later as his constituents were convinced the Scottish National Party better represented social democratic politics than a Labour Party tied to London. The refrain that voters hadn’t left Labour, but Labour had left them, was a motif of the 2015 general election. In Wales a similar pattern is now evolving, with Plaid Cymru displacing Labour in the Valleys constituencies to form the first nationalist-led government this spring.

As much as the national framing is integral to the politics of class, the bigger overriding contingency is the material realities of conflicts of interests in workplaces, over housing and public spending. Burnham’s rhetorical commitments to class and even overturning neoliberalism are matched by only meagre commitments when it comes to economic or social change. He has already seemingly retreated from ambitions to take English water into public ownership despite the vast environmental and financial damage incurred under privatisation. Labour’s newfound politics of class appear defensive and motivated by the incoherence of the centrist denouncement of collectivism as inspired by any coherent programme. A viable politics of class can only be made through evidence that collective mobilisation centred on exercising the power of workers, tenants and communities as well as at the ballot box can deliver sustained material improvements. In contrast with the pronounced political death of class in the 1990s and 2000s, the working class is now frequently invoked by a variegated set of political trends who claim to speak for labour. If a working-class politics is to be remade, it must be based on forms of economic and political power that are organised and wielded by workers themselves.

Rival Bids

Under cover of the announcement about the West Bank, though not unconnected to it, yesterday was used to sneak out that we were going to be issued with digital ID after all. Something about child protection. Of course. And who will be providing it? The IDF and ICE. Of course. Or, as they are otherwise known, Palantir, whose relationship with what purports to be His Majesty’s Government is as cosy as this:

Britain’s state-owned electricity system operator has awarded Palantir a £21mn contract without inviting rival bids, arguing critical grid processes are too reliant on its technology to run a competitive procurement process. The National Energy System Operator (Neso) agreed the new contract with the US tech giant last month, extending a previous agreement with the company that started in March 2023 but had not been previously formally disclosed. One of the areas covered by the contract is getting users connected to the electricity grid, where Neso’s performance was described as “materially below expectations” in a report from a panel of independent experts published last week.

Neso said it could not invite rival bids for “technical reasons”, citing a legal exemption that removes the requirement to consider other suppliers if existing dependencies leave no reasonable alternative to using a particular company. The agency said it would open up the areas covered by the contract to competition at a later point. The new contract between Neso and Palantir will last for between 10 and 22 months, depending on how long it takes to run a competitive procurement process and transition to another supplier if one is selected.

The announcement is likely to fuel concerns about the British state’s reliance on Palantir after the Ministry of Defence also awarded the company a follow-on three-year contract worth £240.6mn without a competitive tender process. The FT revealed on Sunday that more than a quarter of police forces in England and Wales are involved in pilot programmes with Palantir of the same type that resulted in the London mayor blocking the Metropolitan Police from proceeding with a long-term contract. Palantir, whose software is widely used by US defence and intelligence agencies, is facing growing scrutiny as the UK government re-evaluates its dependence on US technology.

As well as sovereignty concerns and unease over Palantir’s political ties, MPs have warned about the structural risk of dependence on a single supplier. “Having critical national infrastructure like our electricity grid dependent on just one US-based supplier raises major concerns about our national security and our resilience,” said Labour MP Chi Onwurah. “The government should be able to diversify its suppliers and safeguard against debilitating dependencies on a small number of companies like Palantir,” she added. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, which is chaired by Onwurah, has called Palantir’s presence in the UK public sector an “unacceptable point of weakness” and urged ministers to exercise the 2027 break clause in its contentious £330mn NHS contract.

Neso used to be part of FTSE 100 group National Grid but was nationalised and given a wider role in October 2024, shortly after Labour won the general election, under a process put in train while the Conservatives were in power. Neso is currently under investigation over its management of the electricity grid during a heatwave in late June. The announcement by Neso of the new contract reveals its reliance on Palantir’s technology for two critical processes — connections to the electricity grid and “skip rates”, which refer to how often it picks a more expensive power station to run when a less expensive option is available.

Neso has faced criticism in recent years from battery developers who said it was underusing their technology because of its ageing computer systems and outdated electricity network. The situation has improved since the FT reported these concerns in 2024, but in its report last week Neso’s performance panel recommended it “dedicate additional resources” to make further improvements. Neso said it was “engaging constructively” with the regulator and performance panel on areas for improvement, noting that the performance panel said Neso had met expectations overall. Connections reform was one of the “largest and most complex” changes facing the energy sector and Neso had reduced the size of the queue, it added. Skip rates were a “complex operational issue” where it had made progress but was going further, it continued. Neso said the original Palantir contract was not formally disclosed because it was not a public body at the time the deal was agreed. Palantir said: “We’re proud to be supporting Neso’s efforts to improve energy efficiency, drive down costs and transition to net zero.”

Britain’s alleged security relationship with Israel, usefully forbidden to be discussed, would seem to be as lucrative as ever, more’s the pity. Or are 12 states at imminent risk of all manner of attack due to having sanctioned the West Bank settlements? If such appeared to happen, then forgive us if we were a tad sceptical. Thanks to Peter Mandelson’s Global Counsel, Wes Streeting has left Palantir all over England’s NHS, so watch out for a convenient cyberattack there. But it could be almost anywhere, in this or any of 11 other countries. By the way, one of those countries is Iceland, which has rejected even discussion of joining the EU. Needily banging on the door of that is instead Serbia, with its lavish mourning of a genocidaire, albeit one who fought only against other genocidaires. But then, a lot of people have extremely parochial outlooks. There are those who imagine that the governments of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden were all interested in the British Labour Party Conference or in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. North and West London are the world to those purportedly metropolitan and cosmopolitan sophisticates, looking out in petrified horror at all of the rest of their own country and most of the rest of the world.

If these sanctions will have practically no impact, then how and why will they be bad for those Palestinians who were employed by settlers? If it is anti-Semitic to conflate British Jews with Israel, then how and why does action against Israel endanger British Jews? Sir Ephraim Mirvis is the Chief Rabbi of about 30 per cent of those British Jews who retained any synagogue affiliation, or perhaps about 20 per cent of British Jews as a whole, themselves half of one per cent of the population, the same percentage as professed a gender identity different from its biological sex. Other Jews may agree with Mirvis, but he does not speak for them. I agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury about assisted suicide, but she does not speak for me. The difference is that she does not pretend to, nor does anyone treat her as if she did.

The MPs who have been awarded the badge of honour that is a ban from Israel will no doubt survive, not least in view of Jeremy Corbyn’s tidy little profit on the sale of his house. But whatever happened to the “million pound mansion” in which we were all told that he was living while he was Leader of the Labour Party? In those days, Laura Kuenssberg manufactured her own news by bringing in Stephen Doughty to resign from the frontbench live on air; he would have dropped his trousers if ordered to do so. Yet last night, he pretty much told Victoria Derbyshire on Newsnight that Benjamin Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot in the United Kingdom. Even now, though, Doughty swats away calls for end the arming of Israel, the aiding and abetting of the crimes for which Netanyahu would be apprehended, by wittering on about anti-Semitism under Corbyn.

While Luciana Berger is now an important opponent of assisted suicide, time was when she used Joshua Bonehill-Paine as an example of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, of which he had never been a member, although it all seems to have been forgiven now. Those were the days. The most basic of checks would have confirmed that the mural, and the wreath, and the “not understanding English irony”, and the “friends from Hamas and Hezbollah”, and all the rest of those, were complete dross, as everyone who did bother to check did find out. The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases of anti-Semitism in its entire report into the Labour Party, neither of them involved Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of that party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.” Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed until Keir Starmer expelled more Jews than under all previous Leaders put together, for the protected characteristic of anti-Zionism.

Scarcely a Conservative MP turned up to listen to Tom Tugendhat, whose cover back in the day was that he was a schoolie. We need to hear from anyone who had had the pleasure of being taught by him. There has rightly been praise for the contribution of Sir Edward Leigh, but at least as important and impressive were the words of Kit Malthouse, “As part of the accountability that [Ed Miliband] has talked about, can we please have a UK-led investigation into the murder of our own citizens who worked for the World Central Kitchen? The Israeli Government have declined to conduct a criminal investigation, and officers of the IDF who were involved in that operation have been out in the media boasting that they would do it again.”

And at least one Israeli spokeswoman on the BBC yesterday was broadcasting directly from Buenos Aires. A rewriting is underway, according to which Israel has come to support the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands in retaliation for the British sanctions. In reality, Israel infamously armed Argentina as anti-British revenge in 1982, and figures close to Netanyahu have been openly supporting that claim for weeks, while Donald Trump has also been dropping very broad hints. Israel has never made any bones about regarding Britain as having been no better than the other side during the Second World War, when its founding heroes committed stomach-turning atrocities against our forces and officials, and in fact it was with the other side that those terrorists attempted to do a deal. Their successors have returned to the perennial Zionist theme of Britain as one of the two bad guys, and if anything the worse. That is their view of our finest hour.

Around the axis of Trump and Netanyahu spin the likes of Javier Milei, who was until recently the chainsaw-wielding darling of a British Right that always needed a Fatherland somewhere away from the National Health Service. The supporters of Milei, of the unequivocally pro-Argentine Netanyahu, and of the ambivalent Trump, form a fifth column in this country, to be identified and treated as such. The commonest telltale sign is the suggestion that Trump might have a point that Britain had been insufficiently supportive of his war with Iran. There are many more, including opposition to the new sanctions.

Recommit To This Urgent Work

Dame Sarah Mullally writes:

As a nurse I sat in cancer wards with patients as they came to terms with a terminal diagnosis, and I was often there in their last moments too. Moving from nursing into ordained ministry means much of my life has been spent at bedsides alongside people as they cope with suffering and death. These experiences, underpinned and informed by my Christian faith, are the reasons I am against changing the law to allow assisted suicide. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill returning to the Commons this Friday is not only damaging to our shared understanding of the value of life, but it also places vulnerable people at risk.

Throughout my nursing career I was conscious of inequalities in healthcare. While the NHS was designed to eliminate these, they persist nonetheless. During the pandemic there were higher rates of illness and death in some communities than others; black women are more than twice as likely to die in or after childbirth than white women; and 25 per cent of deaths of people with learning disabilities could have been avoided through timely and effective healthcare. As many pointed out during debates on the last Bill, and as the evidence from overseas warns, we must not get to a place where the more you experience health inequalities, frailty or disability, the more likely you are to choose an assisted death or deem it better than being a burden.

Over the last two years in Parliament, the closer we have looked at these issues, the more faults have been exposed in this proposed change to the law. It is striking that there is no disabled person’s organisation or professional medical body that publicly supports the Bill before MPs this week. Many experts have criticised the absence of safeguards, and have raised serious concerns over the impact on the elderly, disabled, prisoners, and victims of domestic abuse.

Instead, we must turn to the urgent challenges before us: the resourcing of palliative and end-of-life care, reforming adult social care, reducing waiting lists and tackling health inequalities. Our job in the House of Lords is to improve Bills passed to us by the Commons, and sometimes to ask MPs to think again. The Lords is not simply a rubber stamp, and this is not just about making a bad law better. It is about what kind of society we want to be. Do we really want a society that involves healthcare professionals in the deliberate ending of lives, which offers death as though it were medical treatment? Are we creating a truly compassionate society if we endorse the view that some lives carry less value than others?

Christians and those from other faith groups see this debate as important because we believe in creating a society that reflects the best of us, based on the principles we derive from scripture, which affords equal dignity to all human lives. We have lived experience with those nearing death or on the margins of society, and, above all, we carry a belief that it is hope, not fear, that should guide us. As the debate continues in Parliament, my hope is that we spend as much time thinking about the “why” as we do the “what” and “how” of assisted suicide. Beyond a simple appeal for choice, what is driving the desire to see death as a state-provided cure for suffering?

We have a deeply embedded cultural commitment to suicide prevention, which must also apply to those who are terminally ill. For those individuals requesting assistance with suicide, what are the driving factors? If the answer is that the care that they need is unavailable, or that they feel like a burden, or that they fear pain, then we must ask more pressing questions about how we shape a society and build an NHS that rises to these challenges. As a nurse I saw the transformative effect of specialised care on pain at the end of life. There is hope for improvement if we extend access to this care to the one in three people who do not currently receive it. We can prioritise this – and we must – for the day that the state opts to provide death instead of supporting life to its very end is a tragedy indeed.

We must be mindful that to change the law is to change society. If passed, the Bill will signal that we are a society that believes that some lives are not worth living. That would become our state-endorsed position, and the NHS would be active in its delivery. To care or to be cared for is not always easy, but it is to be human. We are all dependent on and responsible for one another – families, friends, communities and citizens. I pray that we would recommit to this urgent work of truly caring for one another and say no to this Bill.

A Cold Light, A Dark Omen

Juan David Rojas writes:

It was an episode straight out of a hit narconovela (the subgenre of Latin-American telenovelas that feature gangland violence in addition to the usual raunchy romance). Nadia, an expectant mother, leaves the comfort of her hotel in an unnamed South American country. Two hitmen approach her, shooting her three times at the behest of a powerful and psychotic lover. Miraculously, the victim not only survives the assassination attempt, but goes on to reveal untold corruption perpetrated by her lover and an international cabal of political elites. A montage ensues of the would-be killer’s interdiction while attempting to flee via the local airport. Cut to black, roll credits, thanks for tuning into the latest from El amor político — “Political Love.” 

Except, the episode was no soap opera. All this unfolded in real life: a set of convoluted events following the August 17 attempted assassination of Nadia Beller, a renowned lawyer and activist in the Andean nation of Bolivia. Her lover, now facing attempted murder charges for allegedly trying to have her killed? Fernando Cerimedo, 45, an Argentine political operative with close ties to some of the hemisphere’s most prominent Right-wing leaders — including Donald Trump. Since 2023, Right-wing parties and leaders have clinched 12 out of 15 elections in the Americas, with Cerimedo playing a decisive role in at least three of them.

The rise and spectacular fall of Cerimedo — dubbed “MAGA’s man in Latin America” and “the Steve Bannon of South America” — shed a cold light on the powerful networks driving the region’s “New Right.” Born in the Atlantic resort city of Mar del Plata, Argentina, Cerimedo’s biography reads much like that of other archetypical political grifters such as, say, George Santos. At various times, the now criminal defendant worked as a taxi driver, an insurance agent, and a high-school teacher. Less plausibly, he claims to have won a scholarship as a triathlete to attend Harvard, where he trained alongside Navy SEALs. And similarly, he’s claimed to have worked for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign after obtaining a degree in marketing from the University of Phoenix, making him perhaps the only person to have attended both Harvard and the online for-profit university.

In the event, after some time spent abroad, Cerimedo returned to Argentina and began working for the marketing firm McCann. In 2016, he was convicted of selling the same apartment in Mar del Plata to two separate buyers. Three years later, Cerimedo and the Spanish commentator Javier Negre founded the popular social-media account La Derecha Diario, or “The Daily Right,” which they transformed into a formal news publication of the same name in 2021. Much of La Derecha Diario’s content is poorly sourced, if not outright deceptive, resembling the rage-baiting disinfo mills that now dominate X (formerly Twitter). Likewise through his parallel firm Numen Publicidad, Cerimedo turned troll farms and political AI slop into an exportable product — one he marketed to Right-wing leaders in Brazil, Argentina, Honduras, and Bolivia.

By 2022, Cerimedo had joined the re-election campaign of former Right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose son Eduardo he claimed to have met at Harvard. His dissemination of false claims regarding Brazil’s voting machines helped mobilize mobs who stormed Brazil’s capital in January 2023 following Bolsonaro’s defeat at the hands of the Left’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula. Later that year, Cerimedo secured a role as communications chief for Argentine President Javier Milei’s successful 2023 campaign; the operative reportedly played a key role in landing Milei an interview with Tucker Carlson.

It was through this ecosystem that Cerimedo became connected with a Who’s Who of the hemispheric Right, which has now blended with MAGA and has its unofficial headquarters in Miami. There, Latin-American exiles from places like Cuba and Venezuela promote an omni-hawkish worldview that also encompasses escalating against Russia in Ukraine, efforts to weaken the pro-Palestinian government in Spain, and regime change in Iran. Cerimedo’s presence at the heart of these circles is now an embarrassment for the movement across the region, what with the alleged killer’s numerous photo-ops with the likes of the Bolsonaros, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the Miami Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart. But by far his most influential American patron was Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale.

Parscale and Cerimedo subsequently collaborated on Bolivia’s 2025 election, most notably in the successful campaign of President Rodrigo Paz. Parscale has recently come under fire for a $46.5 million Israeli-financed international communications operation aimed at shaping how AI systems frame responses about Israel via text messages to US citizens. Unsurprisingly, a core feature of the pair’s activities in Latin America has been to lobby in favor of closer relations with the governments of Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Later that year, Cerimedo reportedly helped conservative candidate Nasry Asfura secure a crucial endorsement from Trump in the Honduran presidential election. Asfura, from the right-wing National Party, narrowly won the presidency and Trump went on to pardon the new president’s close ally and convicted predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernandez — who’d been sentenced to 45 years in prison by a George W. Bush-nominated judge for funneling 500 tons of cocaine into the US homeland.

Cerimedo followed Rodrigo Paz into the Bolivian government, where he assumed the role of “chief adviser to the president” per his own business cards. It was during this period that the married Cerimedo began a relationship with Beller, the lawyer and political analyst from Santa Cruz, the country’s lowland metropolis. Ironically, Beller previously won election in 2019 as a lawmaker for the Left-wing Movement Towards Socialism but was prevented from assuming office due to a coup against then-President Evo Morales; at the time, Cerimedo celebrated the coup against Morales, whom he labeled a “narcodictator.”

Prior to the shooting, Beller had accused Cerimedo of domestic violence, publishing photographs of bruises and private messages apparently substantiating the alleged abuse. The day of her attempted murder, Beller claims, she was heading to meet with sources promising damaging information on former President Morales. The gunmen shot her three times at close range, though she survived, in her telling, by playing dead. Cerimedo was arrested hours later at Viru Viru airport, trying to board a flight to Buenos Aires. Four days later, a Bolivian judge charged him as the mastermind of an attempted “femicide” against Beller; his defense floated a theory of self-inflicted injury.

But the true-crime story has turned into a political earthquake. Speaking from her hospital bed, Beller has made a mix of credible and outlandish claims about her lover’s ties to the CIA; kickbacks from the Paz administration; and involvement in the Bolivian drug trade. That last claim tracks with two separate investigations against Cerimedo. Searches of two properties tied to Cerimedo in La Paz turned up cash stuffed into drawers, a satellite phone, a vehicle modified to resemble an official government car, and furniture built with concealed compartments. Bolivian prosecutors have since raided what the local media have described as a bot farm on another property linked to him. Adding fuel to the fire, Vice President Edmand Lara seized on the opportunity to fuel an ongoing feud with President Paz, claiming that Cerimedo was the most powerful person in the country after the president. 

Cerimedo has denied all accusations against him from his cell, and he should be entitled to a presumption of innocence unless and until he is proved guilty. It’s salutary that the dirt dished by his lover will be tested in court — and equally that some of his past, proven skulduggery is coming to light, to the great embarrassment of the hard Right in Latin America. It’s certainly poetic that the operative who made his career trafficking in the scandals and hypocrisy of his Left-wing opponents now faces life behind bars for the attempted murder of his extramarital partner. 

In an official statement, La Derecha Diario announced that the publication was severing ties with its disgraced cofounder and denied involvement in Beller’s attempted killing. Will all this foreshadow the end, and perhaps the reversal, of the region’s shift to the Right in recent years? The answer remains to be seen. Certainly, it’s a dark omen for Milei & co, and the real-life narconovela is far from over.

Changing Times

From The Times of Israel:

Some 10 days before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was personally warned by the leader of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive move against Israel, but did not update Israeli security leaders and did nothing with the information, according to a report on Tuesday. An Emirati source familiar with the conversation confirmed the Haaretz newspaper’s report to The Times of Israel later Tuesday, and said the warning came during a phone call between the two leaders.

The UAE itself declined to confirm or deny the report, issuing a statement that noted “open lines of communication” with Israel through which “all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated.” Netanyahu’s office issued a statement Tuesday evening saying that “the press reports are false. No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates before October 7. If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.”

The Haaretz report cited a new book, “Kidnapped: 843 Days of Abandonment,” by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, based on interviews with dozens of sources including senior officials in Israel and around the world. It said three senior foreign officials were updated on the contents of the 45-minute phone call at the end of September, and it cited a Palestinian adviser to Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed who emigrated from Gaza to the UAE and had direct knowledge of the conversation.

It said Mohammed bin Zayed (known as MBZ) warned Netanyahu that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning major action against Israel that would lead to bloodshed, unsettle the region and potentially harm the Abraham Accords. The report said MBZ was surprised by Netanyahu’s response in the 45-minute phone call, which was sanguine, with the Israeli premier telling him Jerusalem was on top of things in Gaza, that any Hamas action was likely to come in the West Bank, and that Israel was prepared for any scenario. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorists launched a cross-border, multipronged assault, brutally massacring 1,200 people in southern communities, mostly civilians, taking 251 hostages to Gaza, and sparking years of conflict that spread across the Middle East.

The Haaretz report said MBZ’s awareness of a Hamas threat had come from Sinwar himself, who in mid-2023 was frustrated by the lack of progress in negotiations for a Palestinian prisoner release deal with Israel. The contacts for a potential agreement began in 2023. A senior Fatah interlocutor referred to as “Coal Eyes” would exchange messages with Sinwar representative Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas politburo member fluent in Hebrew, so that it would seem that there was no direct contact between Israel and the terror group, Haaretz said.

In reality, conversations, focused on easing the blockade on Gaza and improving conditions in the Strip, were “virtually direct.” Hamad and Coal Eyes would sit in a former Palestinian Authority official’s home in Gaza, with a Shin Bet official phoning in. Hamas at the time held Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who had wandered into Gaza of their own accord, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers, Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul.

According to Haaretz, a deal was on the verge of completion by the summer of 2023. After backing away from a demand that 500 prisoners be released in exchange for hostages, Sinwar was willing to accept the release of 50, while the Shin Bet was leaning toward accepting the release of 30, 20 of them serving life sentences, which Netanyahu approved. The report said a Hamas official involved in the talks said Coal Eyes would emerge optimistically from meetings.

However, the prime minister repeatedly delayed convening the ministerial committee for hostages and missing persons, which needed to approve the release of prisoners, according to an Israeli security source. Haaretz suggested Netanyahu’s hesitancy could have come from fear of reaching a deal with the terror group and backlash from the hardline members of his government, while Shin Bet officials managing the talks said the prime minister would express fear of leaks to the media.

Amid the breakdown in progress, Sinwar cut off contact with negotiators in early September 2023. A senior Shin Bet official told Haaretz that the terror leader “vanished from our radar, evaporated.” But Sinwar held two private meetings with Coal Eyes, in which he told the Fatah official to warn the Israelis of the consequences if they did not move forward on a deal. “Tell the Israelis if they don’t advance, I’m preparing a huge surprise for them,” Sinwar was quoted as saying in a conversation with Coal Eyes. “Tell them to expect a zilzal, an earthquake.”

Coal Eyes was “agitated” after the meeting, MBZ’s Palestinian adviser said, according to the book. “It was clear to him that the operation Sinwar was talking about could affect the entire Middle East, but he was afraid to report the information directly to the Shin Bet. On the other hand, he was even more terrified that if he didn’t update the Shin Bet, the Israelis might accuse him of collaborating with Sinwar. He genuinely feared for his life. Therefore, he decided to convey the message to Bin Zayed,” the authors said.

The adviser told bin Zayed of Coal Eyes’ meeting with Sinwar, whereupon the Emirati president questioned what the Hamas leader meant by zilzal. “If he says zilzal, he means war,” the adviser reportedly told the Emirati ruler, saying it was his own and Coal Eyes’ interpretation of the comment.  “If we are not sure, we will not convey any warning to the Israelis for now. We will investigate the matter thoroughly until we are certain,” MBZ decided. In a second meeting in mid-September, Sinwar told Coal Eyes he was preparing “a formidable operation.”

After Coal Eyes told Sinwar he had not informed the Israelis of what he had said at their previous meeting, the terror leader demanded that Coal Eyes send a message that he was readying “the mother of all surprises. A terrifying operation. Something extraordinary,” again reportedly using the word zilzal. The Fatah official again informed MBZ’s adviser of the details of the meeting, and MBZ took the warning to mean Hamas was intending to launch a war. Haaretz said the Fatah official and the adviser did eventually convey the warning directly to the Shin Bet in mid-September. Israeli security officials held deliberations about the warning in the following days, but did not understand it as a threat of an assault from Gaza, and no concrete decisions were reached.

“Why did Sinwar send us a warning?” a senior intelligence official rhetorically asked after the fact, according to the report. “Either it was because he grew tired of Israel’s foot-dragging, wanting to pressure us into an arrangement and not so eager to start a war. Or, as we prefer to think, it was part of his ‘Great Deception’ plan, and he wanted to test the IDF’s readiness,” he added. MBZ himself was so concerned by the lack of reaction that he then held a direct phone conversation with Netanyahu, who was apparently dismissive of the threat. “The emir explained that, in his assessment, Sinwar was preparing for a major event,” the adviser, who was present, said, according to Haaretz. “He told Netanyahu that Israel should be ready. Concurrently, he recommended trying to find an economic solution for the Strip and calming the West Bank to prevent escalation.”

The report said MBZ also shared his warning with CIA Director William J. Burns, and said that he had tried to convince Netanyahu that “something there is about to explode.” The report said that the emir hoped that despite his apparently calm response, Netanyahu would take the warning seriously and act upon it. Haaretz noted the phone call was similar to another conversation held between Netanyahu and Egyptian spy chief Abbas Kamel, who also spoke to Netanyahu only 10 days before the massive attack, that Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation.” The conversation, reported by the Ynet news site days after the massacre, was denied by the premier.

Haaretz noted that on October 1, then-Shin Bet head Ronen Bar once again proposed proactive action against Hamas, including the assassination of top officials, but that Netanyahu made no decision on the matter, saying only that the agency should present its proposals and he would consider them. He made no mention of his talk with MBZ, the report said. “If we had known about the warnings, there’s a chance it would have given much greater weight to the initial message that reached us from Sinwar,” a senior Shin Bet official told the paper. “Perhaps it would have also clarified what was behind his sudden withdrawal from the de-escalation talks in early September. It’s possible we would have put two and two together and reached a completely different conclusion from the one we arrived at, one that might have altered our entire intelligence picture.” 

Meanwhile, senior Israeli officials who participated in security discussions ahead of the attack told Channel 12 that they might have reached different conclusions and taken different action had Netanyahu informed them of the reported warning. “If we had known about Netanyahu’s conversations with the Emiratis, and apparently also with the Egyptians, there is a considerable likelihood that we would have reached different conclusions,” one senior official told the network, calling the warning a “critical” piece of information. “Had we known, we would at the very least have examined the matter more deeply,” another official said. Channel 12 also reported that, days after the onslaught, former Fatah official Mohammed Dahlan told a close associate in frustration: “We passed warnings on to the Israelis. They did nothing with them.”

Netanyahu’s office: Claim he was warned is a ‘total lie’

In a response to the Haaretz report, the Prime Minister’s Office called the report “a total lie! Prime Minister Netanyahu did not speak with the president of the United Arab Emirates during the period in question and received no warning from him.” Later, his office said: “The press reports are false. No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates before October 7,” adding: “If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.”

Bar and then-IDF chief of staff Halevi told Haaretz they had not been informed of MBZ’s warning. The Emirati ruler did not personally comment. The UAE Foreign Ministry issued a statement that did not directly address the alleged warning, saying it “does not comment on media stories or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders.” It did say: “UAE and Israeli government entities have maintained open and direct lines of communication since the inception of the relationship more than five years ago. When necessary, all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated between the relevant parties.”

Bennett: ‘The report is true’

In a post on X, former prime minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the B’Yachad party, said he knew the Haaretz report was correct. “The report published this morning that Netanyahu was warned 10 days before the October 7 massacre about Sinwar’s intentions is true,” Bennett said. “Netanyahu bears personal and direct responsibility for the failure that led to the deaths of thousands of Israelis on his watch.” Bennett did not say how he knew the report to be true. He said Netanyahu’s “disregard for the warnings amounts to criminal negligence, which is why he is doing everything he can to prevent the establishment of a state commission of inquiry that would expose the truth.”

He added: “He did not go down to the field. He did not alert the heads of the security establishment. He did not prepare Israel for an attack. And he did not convene the cabinet. What did he do in those days? He kept Hamas well supplied to stop the demonstrations it was allowing along the border fence, transferred additional funds to buy a little quiet, promised additional work permits for Palestinian workers in response to Hamas threats, and, as usual, dismissed all the warnings from the heads of the security establishment.” 

In response to the report, Netanyahu’s main challenger in the election, former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, wrote on X: “More and more signs point to the same conclusion: Netanyahu led Israel blindly into the October 7 disaster.” “Who failed to wake whom?” the Yashar party leader wondered, referring to the premier’s claims about the morning of October 7. “Those around him are echoing the pathetic conspiracy theory about betrayal, inventing the most ridiculous line a leader could possibly cling to — ‘I wasn’t woken up’ — for two reasons: He knows the truth; he is terrified of it and is trying to evade responsibility.

“Netanyahu received dozens of warnings about October 7 and ignored them all. He is unfit for office. As soon as the next government is formed, we will establish a state commission of inquiry that will investigate the previous decade, clarify what Netanyahu knew and did not know, get to the truth, and prevent the next disaster,” Eisenkot wrote. In a video statement released later Tuesday, Eisenkot said that “if the publication is true, it represents a serious breach of public trust, extraordinary negligence by a prime minister, and a disregard for critical information that was given to him personally.” This was “information that could have changed the course of an entire country, saving thousands of murdered and thousands of people wounded, in body and soul.”

Eisenkot said it was deeply troubling that three years after the massacre, there were still so many open questions about what happened. “There is no question about one thing: Netanyahu is no longer fit to be prime minister of Israel,” he said, adding that in ignoring this and other warnings, Netanyahu had again “shown his standard operating procedure — closing his eyes and shirking responsibility at the moment of truth.” The Democrats leader Yair Golan, who rescued multiple people on October 7, wrote on X that “Netanyahu is unfit and illegitimate. His place is in prison for his crimes against the State of Israel.” “The stories about ‘I wasn’t woken up’ are over. He knew. He was warned,” Golan said. 

Earlier this week, Netanyahu denounced Israel’s security chiefs for purportedly choosing not to wake him in the hours before the attack when, he said, “all the signs were there” that Hamas was about to invade, and claimed he would have immediately mobilized the IDF and taken other steps necessary to ensure that October 7 “would not have taken place.” However, according to a Channel 12 report on Friday, Netanyahu took at least two hours to leave his Caesarea home and head to the IDF’s Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv after being told immediately that Hamas-led terrorists were attacking Israel at 6:29 on the morning of October 7, 2023. He did not contact the heads of the IDF and Shin Bet in that time, or en route to the Kirya, the TV report further said, asserting an inexplicably sluggish and limited initial response by Netanyahu to the Hamas onslaught. According to his own published schedule, the prime minister only ordered the Gaza border closed and a full IDF mobilization at 9:55 a.m.

To The Times of India:

Did Benjamin Netanyahu ignore a warning that could have changed the course of history? A shocking Haaretz report claims UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) personally warned Netanyahu about a possible major Hamas operation just days before the October 7, 2023, attack. The report, based on a new book by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, alleges the Israeli prime minister dismissed the warning and failed to brief Israel's security chiefs.In this video, we break down the timeline, the reported intelligence chain involving Yahya Sinwar, the Shin Bet's response, and Netanyahu's denial. We also examine what is confirmed, what remains disputed, and why these allegations have reignited debate over one of Israel's biggest intelligence and political failures.

To The Times of London:

Binyamin Netanyahu has instructed his lawyers to sue an Israeli newspaper over a report claiming he had been warned of a major Hamas attack by the leader of the United Arab Emirates ten days before the massacres of October 7, 2023. The Israeli prime minister’s lawsuit will be brought against the liberal Haaretz paper as well as the journalist who wrote the story, Shlomi Eldar, accusing them of fabrication. In response to the threat of legal action, Haaretz said on Wednesday that it stood by its reporting. Opposition politicians issued a joint statement calling for Netanyahu’s resignation after the report was published on Tuesday

According to the report, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE president, initiated an “unusual” and long call directly with Netanyahu from the presidential palace in Abu Dhabi in which he warned that the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a “major operation” against Israel that could “destabilise the entire region”. However, the prime minister’s office issued a strong denial, calling it an “absolute lie”, adding that there was no such call with Bin Zayed and that the Israeli prime minister received “no warning from him”. “A thorough examination not only of the prime minister’s call log but also of the records of entries into the prime minister’s office during this period does not show any entry of the Emirati representative into the prime minister’s office,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement, instead warning of a “sinister plot with clear political timing” before next month’s elections on October 27.

The Haaretz report was based on the book Kidnapped: 843 Days of Abandonment by Eldar and Ruth Yuval, another journalist. It was said to be based on interviews with diplomatic sources and cites an adviser to Bin Zayed who had direct knowledge of the conversation. In a statement, the UAE foreign ministry did not directly address whether Bin Zayed had made the call or warned Netanyahu, but said that since October 7 it “was consistently directed toward de-escalation, regional stability and preventing violence”. “[The] UAE and Israeli government entities have maintained open and direct lines of communication since the inception of the relationship more than five years ago. When necessary, all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated between the relevant entities.”

The Biden administration, in office at the time of the attacks, said it was not aware of any UAE warnings, according to a report in The Jerusalem Post. The book is being published before Israel’s general election in October, the first since the 2023 massacre in which 1,200 people died and more than 250 were kidnapped and taken to Gaza. The ensuing war has cost more than 73,000 lives, according to the Palestinian territory’s Hamas-linked health ministry. Netanyahu has been releasing new information surrounding the attack in recent weeks, including statements and timelines that diminish his responsibility for the mass security failure. Last week he claimed that security officials had failed to wake him up early enough on the morning of October 7, and that the attacks may have been more contained had they done so. However, he has refused to initiate a state commission of inquiry into the massacres despite the resignation of the majority of generals and intelligence officials, including the then army chief and the head of intelligence.

The book disclosing the call cites senior officials, recordings, internal documents and correspondence, including a close adviser to bin Zayed, who was reportedly present as the two leaders spoke. Haaretz reported that Sinwar, who was later found and killed by Israel in Gaza, had warned a former Palestinian official that the militants were preparing “a terrifying operation”, which he described as an “earthquake”. The former Palestinian official relayed the message to an Emirati adviser, who passed it on to the Emirati president, who then called Netanyahu, according to the newspaper. The adviser, a Palestinian who emigrated from Gaza to Abu Dhabi, said Netanyahu responded to the warning with “relative calm” — and did not pass it on to Israeli security services.

The report of a prior warning from an Arab ally echoes the 1973 surprise attack on Israel, when Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian-Israeli agent known as “the Angel”, warned Golda Meir, the then prime minister, that a war was about to break out. Meir later resigned over the military unpreparedness for the war. The heads of the main Israeli opposition parties running in the upcoming election issued a joint statement on Tuesday accusing Netanyahu of displaying “arrogance and a betrayal of the trust that Israeli citizens placed in him” by ostensibly ignoring the warning, and say his behaviour was “an extreme dereliction of duty”. They wrote: “The Israeli public has a right to know: what did Netanyahu know, when did he know it, why did he fail to inform the security establishment, and why did he fail to act to protect the citizens of Israel?”

Gadi Eisenkot, a former military commander who has emerged as Netanyahu’s top rival in the upcoming elections, accused the long-serving prime minister on September 8 of evading responsibility for security lapses and resorting to “pathetic” excuses, such as saying he was not woken up soon enough on the morning of the attack. “Netanyahu received dozens of warnings for October 7 and ignored them all. He is unfit,” Eisenkot wrote on X. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister also standing in the election, said Netanyahu “bears personal and direct responsibility” for the casualties on October 7, the deadliest attack in Israeli history. “Netanyahu cannot continue to serve in his position for even one more minute,” Bennett said.

To The New York Times:

Israeli opposition politicians said on Tuesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “unfit” for office after a newspaper reported he had been warned by the president of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major operation weeks before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack but did not alert security officials. The report in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, which The New York Times could not confirm [but is printing anyway], said that Mr. Netanyahu had a 45-minute phone call with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the Emirati president, in late September 2023, and was told about a plan by Hamas to attack Israel and destabilize the region. Mr. Netanyahu’s office has denied the report.

Mr. Netanyahu was said to have been unfazed by the revelations, responding that Israel was prepared for any scenario, according to the report. In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said that he had not been personally warned by the Emirati president. “No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates,” it said. “If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.” The Emirati foreign ministry said in a statement that it did not comment on “media stories or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders.” It added that the Emirati and Israeli governments had “open and direct lines of communication” and that “all relevant intelligence” was transmitted between them.

The report that Mr. Netanyahu may not have been responsive to warnings about the attacks landed at a particularly sensitive time for him and Israel. National elections are planned for late October, and Mr. Netanyahu’s chances of being re-elected are not assured. The questions about what the Israeli prime minister had been told, by whom and when in the period leading to the Hamas-led assault have become hot-button election issues in a deeply polarized country. Mr. Netanyahu has sought to present himself as the only politician positioned to ensure Israel’s security. And he has seemed to shift blame onto others for the Oct. 7 assault, the single deadliest day in Israel’s history, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 others taken hostage to Gaza.

Recently, Mr. Netanyahu asserted that Israeli security officials had chosen not to wake him up in the early hours of Oct. 7, despite worrying signs from Gaza, because they had feared he would respond aggressively and set off a war with Hamas. “If they had woken me up, everything would have looked different,” he said in a campaign video clip last month. But when Mr. Netanyahu’s office released a schedule of his actions immediately after he was awakened at 6:29 a.m. that day, when the Hamas assault began, it appeared that he had not ordered an immediate counterattack and that hours had passed before he spoke to the military chief of staff. Ultimately, the Israeli military response in Gaza destroyed much of the enclave, led to widespread privation and displacement of Palestinians and killed more than 70,000 people, including tens of thousands of civilians, Gazan officials said.

Mr. Netanyahu’s political challengers have characterized his far-right government and its policies as risks to Israel’s future, pointing to the country’s international isolation since the war in Gaza and the increased chaos in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where violence by extremist settlers has become rampant. These challengers cited the report on Tuesday as evidence that Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, had become a liability. The leaders of four Israeli opposition political parties called in a joint statement on Tuesday for an independent commission to investigate the 2023 attack after the elections. “The public in Israel deserves to know what happened before, during and after the Oct. 7 massacre,” they wrote.

Many Israelis had long called for an independent commission to investigate official failures that might have led to the attack, but Mr. Netanyahu had resisted. When he finally agreed early this year to an investigating commission, he proposed a process that deviated from Israeli law for independent inquiries. The opposition politicians cited a “series” of revelations about Mr. Netanyahu’s actions and what they described as failures to act leading up to the attacks that have undermined faith in his leadership and government, and his claims that he is the key to Israel’s security. “Netanyahu and his partners in the Oct. 7 government are unfit to continue in office,” the opposition leaders wrote. “We will work in coordination and with the required responsibility to prevent them from leading to another disaster.” Mr. Netanyahu is trailing in the polls, and his primary rival, Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief of staff, leads him in polling when respondents are asked how much they trust each candidate on security matters. Mr. Eisenkot, who heads a relatively new party, has accused Mr. Netanyahu of prioritizing his political survival over the interests of Israel.