Standing Strong?

As I await the twelfth Prime Minister of my lifetime, and probably the second to be younger than me, I have been unable to confirm the story about a member of Zack Polanski’s family. But never having been a spokesman for the British Red Cross, and never having been a full member of the National Council for Hypnotherapy, Polanski also turns out never to have worked for the Ministry of Justice, much less for its “justice assessment committee”, which has never existed.

Meanwhile, Reform UK needs to explain how it secured the signatures of subsequently successful council candidates who were either dead or had never been alive, but there is nothing new about councillors who thought that they were MPs or even Cabinet Ministers, even if I had never previously heard of one who had stood down within hours of election because of the shocking discovery that that was not literally the case. As for quitting immediately because the position had turned out to be unpaid, there is a basic annual allowance of £13,300 here, with extra for additional responsibilities, or no one would do it.

Alongside Kemi Badenoch, Richard Tice addressed the Standing Strong: Extinguish Antisemitism rally hours after he had refused to condemn Reform’s Councillor Glenn Gibbins of Sunderland, who has called for Nigerians to be melted down and used to fill in potholes, and whom the party has still not suspended. Badenoch did not call Tice out on that, and nor did anyone on Reform’s Councillor Jay Cooper of Bootle, who has branded the Holocaust a hoax on the grounds that there were not six million Jews in Europe at the time. Again, I can find no record of Councillor Cooper’s suspension from Reform.

The Norwich Canary?

402 Labour MPs are not Keir Starmer, yet none of those is considered capable of replacing him and then winning a General Election, so Clive Lewis is said to be preparing to resign his seat in favour of the man whose name was on everyone’s lips, Andy Burnham. In 2024, Lewis’s majority over the Greens was 13,239. But that was then, this is now, and Norwich is by every measure a long way from Manchester.

On Thursday, the Green Party took overall control of Norwich City Council, as it did of Hastings Borough Council. It has had overall control of Mid Suffolk District Council since 2023. Norwich, Hastings and Mid Suffolk are noted for the prevalence of Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali at the farmers’ markets, and Norwich is famous for its Sharia-compliant paucity both of churches and of pubs. It was in Bradford that the Greens experienced a net loss of one seat, while Reform UK went from no councillors to 29, making it the largest Group on the council.

Rightly or wrongly, the Stafford Hospital scandal has never stuck to Burnham. Similarly, the Conservatives never mentioned Gordon Brown and the gold until the 2010 General Election, 11 years and two Labour victories after the event, and by which time Brown had already been Prime Minister for nearly three years. They failed to win an overall majority against him. Before that, they had banged on about Brown’s “raid on pensions” for a decade, throughout which Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and at the end of which he became First Lord of the Treasury. Nearly 20 years later again, Brown’s own generation of pensioners does not appear to be doing too shabbily.

The huge 2024 intake’s umbrage at the clamour for Burnham, and at the resuscitation of Brown and of Harriet Harman, has coalesced with Catherine West’s stalking horse for Wes Streeting, who could not win a General Election and indeed will probably lose his own seat, but who could spend the rest of this Parliament implementing all the unfinished business of Peter Mandelson, Josh Simons and Morgan McSweeney, who have been made even more vengeful by the Greens’ having become the largest party on the Labour Together flagship of Lambeth. They will not stand for Nigel Farage, of all people, as the Prime Minister who completed the Blair Government’s signature domestic policy of privatising England’s NHS, so that has to be done in this Parliament.

The idea of NHS privatisation existed only on the fringes of the thinktank circuit until Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan took office in 1997. Since then, it has been the policy of all three parties except under Jeremy Corbyn, and of most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers continuously. Only Burnham has ever privatised an NHS hospital, but in September 2009 he modestly proposed that the NHS should be its own preferred provider. Mandelson’s and thus Jeffrey Epstein’s Progress wrote to Burnham to protest that he was “restricting the use of the private sector in the NHS”, and using its eponymous magazine to opine, not only that “With an election approaching, Labour has regrettably adopted anti-market rhetoric on health”, but that, “The pro-market principles espoused by Andrew Lansley are the right ones.” When were the expulsions and the proscription?

Burnham’s position was called “profoundly worrying”, and its endorsement by Unite was branded “insulting and ignorant”, by the Deputy Chief Executive of the Association of Chief Executives. Don’t laugh. All right, do. But that person was Peter Kyle. The utterly ruthless determination to install Streeting is because those who set the line are only 99.9 per cent certain about Burnham on NHS privatisation, a 0.1 per cent deficiency that is enough to make them hate him to the marrow of their bones, whereas they have absolutely no doubt about Streeting. Nor should they have, as may be attested by that Mandelson client, Peter Thiel’s and thus Epstein’s Palantir, which has laid waste to Gaza, which is laying waste to Lebanon, which is permanently minutes away from laying waste to Iran, and which has perfected the art of tracking people via their health records for the benefit of ICE or of anything like it in, say, Britain, where Blair’s daughter-in-law would transfer oodles of our money to his Institute to deliver it.

Streeting Ahead?

Wes Streeting has let it be known that, while he would not challenge Keir Starmer, he would stand if Starmer were pushed out. Starmer would remain Labour Leader until a successor had been elected, but he would cease to be Prime Minister instantly, with the King undoubtedly appointing whoever the Cabinet wanted. Angela Rayner is not in the Cabinet. Catherine West, previously best known for calling Sir Geoffrey Cox “pompous” because she had never heard oratory before, is not in the Cabinet. Andy Burnham is not even in Parliament. But Streeting is a Secretary of State, and Labour kept control of Redbridge Council, shoring up both his position and that of the neighbouring slumlord.

Candidates for Leader of the Labour Party now need to be nominated by 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party, something that only Starmer managed last time, and he was not the Prime Minister then. The prospect of two candidates’ meeting that threshold would be effectively nil even if one of them were not already the most powerful man in the country, never mind if he were. Heaven help us, but only Ed Miliband now stands between England and having no NHS except to make all of our data available to ICE and the IDF via Palantir thanks to a Prime Minister who had learned an awful lot under Peter Mandelson.

The Epstein Class is closing ranks. On Enfield Council, the Greens, for whose party Noam Chomsky would vote, have agreed to support a Conservative minority administration. At Birmingham’s Glebe Farm and Tile Cross, two recounts have confirmed that Council Leader John Cotton and another Labour councillor had been unseated, although by one member of Reform UK, yet also by one of the Workers Party. So tomorrow, there is to be a third recount, the only one in the entire country. Dare they declare the victories, either of two members of Mandelson’s party, or of one of those, presumably Cotton, and one member of the party for which Peter Thiel would vote? If Birmingham is a Sharia-governed ghetto where English is no longer spoken, then why has it just elected certainly 22 and probably 23 Reform councillors, the largest bloc on the council? Such are the credible coalitions or otherwise that power on Europe’s most populous local authority hangs in the balance, and with it the existence of the right-wing Labour machine, which is the only Labour Party that still exists.

The Labour Right used to be unique in that, by almost or almost always controlling the great majority of the most populous municipalities in England and Wales, plus the Senedd, it had an independent fiscal base, and that was putting matters politely. It controlled Council Tax, business rates, pension schemes looking to invest, sweeteners and backhanders from property developers and others, the allocation of jobs with the council, the allocation of better council housing, and the allocation of any council housing. But under Starmer, its citadels have fallen as if under nuclear attack. Labour Party membership is not cheap. If not to secure access to those goodies, then why bother?

Radicalism, Energy, Immense Courage?

Writing as Josh Simons, Peter Mandelson announces that the always planned hour has come to replace Keir Starmer with Mandelson's schoolboy protégé, Wes Streeting.

Streeting is 43, Simons is 32, and the line is assured to sell the NHS to Mandelson's client Palantir of ICE and IDF infamy, a privatisation that will be among the very many things dependent on issuing us all with the Tony Blair Institute's digital ID, all to be overseen through Sovereign AI by Suzanne Ashman, Blair's daughter-in-law.

When Starmer sacked Mandelson, then we knew that that nexus would have its revenge. And here we are.

She’s Had Her Oats

Ed Dutton will be pleased to know that Catherine West is a Quaker. She neither wants to be Prime Minister, nor will she be. But on 8 December 2021, she asked, “Will the Prime Minister tell the House whether there was a party in Downing Street on 13 November?” Boris Johnson replied, “No, but I am sure that whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times.” We know the rest. It is always the quiet ones that you have to watch.

No, the Cabinet cannot elect a Leader of the Labour Party. But it would nominate a Prime Minister if the incumbent resigned, or indeed died. And it would hardly be as if the King would say no to that name. Already in office as Prime Minister, that person would then go into a Labour Leadership Election in the extremely unlikely event that there might be one, a contest rendered even more improbable by the fact that the rules had been changed to make it as good as impossible for more than one candidate to be nominated for Leader of the Labour Party.

Fairweather Friends?

Peter Mandelson thought that he had installed a generational intake of Labour MPs, yet not only might a lot of them turn out to be one-termers, but when Keir Starmer needed to send for the cavalry, then he called in Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman, neither of whom most of the class of 2024 would ever have met, or probably ever will. Rachel Reeves is significantly reduced, while Jess Phillips, whose constituency now contains no Labour councillors, is effectively redundant.

Harman's whipped abstention on cuts to benefits for families with children make her a startling choice for Adviser on Women and Girls, although adherence to that whip did make it impossible for either Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham to become Leader of the Labour Party, clearing the way for Jeremy Corbyn. Despite the best efforts of some of us since before at least one Minister in this Government was born, the story about Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange has become background noise. But there is no story about Gordon Brown and the gold; perhaps you are thinking of the £500 billion that Margaret Thatcher lost the nation in oil rights, just for a start with her?

And if financial skulduggery is your thing, then other than Nigel Farage, did anyone in Reform UK take gigantic gifts from Christopher Harborne? Did Farage or anyone else take them from anyone other than Harborne? Daniel Devaney was a Reform candidate in the Clayton and Fairweather Green ward of Bradford City Council. Too late to be taken off the ballot paper, he announced that he did not want to be a councillor and that he was going on holiday. He topped the poll, so his resignation is no doubt winging its way from wherever he was holidaying. If that is not Skegness, then why not? We must not entertain the scurrilous suggestion that he might be at Great Yarmouth.

Saiqa Ali, theatrically arrested in revenge for Zack Polanski's questioning of the Police treatment of Essa Suleiman, was returned to Lambeth Council by the voters of Streatham St Leonard's. But at Birmingham's Glebe Farm and Tile Cross, where two recounts confirmed that Council Leader John Cotton and another Labour councillor had been unseated by one member of Reform and one of the Workers Party, there is to be a third recount, on Monday. Such are the credible coalitions or otherwise that power on Europe's largest local authority hangs in the balance, and with it the existence of the right-wing Labour machine, which is the only Labour Party that still exists.

The Labour Right used to be unique in that, by almost or almost always controlling the great majority of the most populous municipalities in England and Wales, plus the Senedd, it had an independent fiscal base, and that was putting matters politely. It controlled Council Tax, business rates, pension schemes looking to invest, sweeteners and backhanders from property developers and others, the allocation of jobs with the council, the allocation of better council housing, and the allocation of any council housing. But under Starmer, its citadels have fallen as if under nuclear attack. Labour Party membership is not cheap. If not to secure access to those goodies, then why bother?

Home To Roost

“We don’t do hostile takeovers in the Labour Party, it’s not what we’re about,” Lucy Powell told the Today programme this morning. At 1:01 pm on Sunday 26 June 2016, Powell resigned as Shadow Education Secretary, making her one of the first Shadow Ministers to resign hourly according to Peter Mandelson’s timetable that led up to a vote of no confidence by the Parliamentary Labour Party on Tuesday 28 June.

44 Shadow Ministers, including Keir Starmer, resigned in as many hours, and Jeremy Corbyn lost the vote of no confidence. He remained in place, and led the Labour Party to the 2017 near miss that would have been a victory if its own Epstein Class staff had not undermined the campaign. But Powell has at best changed her mind in 10 years.