Arrows In Our Eyes

Of course Sir Sadiq Khan does not have a 24-year-old Micra. But having fallen foul of the scandalous Single Justice Procedure, Lord Khan of Tooting should now make it his parliamentary business to champion all such victims, of whom there are a very great many.

In view of his past life providing the legal representation to which everyone was of course entitled, Khan might also look into the fact that in the 25 years since what I suppose that we are just going to have to call 9/11, half of all terrorist charges in this country had been brought in the last 12 months, due to the proscription of Palestine Action. Declare any and everything to be terrorism, and you will find that you had an awful lot more terrorists. See also the new power of judges to classify absolutely anything as terrorism for sentencing purposes, and that without having had to forewarn either the jury or the Defence.

All for a foreign state whose Prime Minister has not disowned the strong support of his son and close adviser for the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands, a claim that that state materially supported when it was last pressed by force of arms. The United States, which has only ever recognised de facto British administration of the Falklands rather than de jure British sovereignty over them, is also poised to come down once and for all on the side of Donald Trump's close ally, Javier Milei.

From here to Diego Garcia, the American bases on British soil are vital to Trump's war on Iran, while the British sovereign bases on Cyprus are crucial both to that and to the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon. Brian Mast, who wore the IDF uniform on the floor of the House of Representatives, is among those being mentioned as the next United States Secretary of the Army, while Section 219 of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act and Section 224 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027 back up each other in "integrating" and "fusing" the American and Israeli military-industrial complexes, so that there will now officially be Israeli spywar all over the American bases on our territory, feeding back to Buenos Aires.

England's NHS is one of the myriad branches of the British State that are being "integrated" and "fused" with ICE and the IDF via the Palantir of Peter Thiel, who was naturally given sight of the Bayeux Tapestry before even the King by the British Museum of George Osborne, that close friend of Peter Mandelson, himself the "best pal" of Jeffrey Epstein. We no more voted for this than we voted to spend three per cent of GDP on "defence". Not that there is a difference.

Raise Our Voices Above The Throng

Russia cannot launch a drone attack on a commercial plane at a civilian airport in peaceful Germany, and the old East Germany at that, but its troops will be marching up your street and mine any day now unless we blah blah blah? Get a grip. Tara McCormack has:

Another fortnight, another British Prime Minister, but there is one firm point of continuity: Ukraine. Keir Starmer’s last day in office was spent in Kyiv, where as a parting gift he announced another £255 million of funding, reaffirming his ‘unwavering’ support for the war effort. Just seven days after Andy Burnham took office, he hosted President Zelensky as his first international visitor, intoning that Britain was still ‘one hundred percent’ behind him. The signal to the Euro-Atlantic establishment was clear. Whichever fraction of the British political class happens to be in government — Johnson or Sunak, Starmer or Burnham — they will continue this endless proxy war.

These incantations are becoming increasingly absurd as the conflict drags on inconclusively. John Healey, now pulling the nation’s purse strings, has said that the defence of Britain begins in Ukraine. The House of Commons Library estimated that Britain’s financial assistance to the country as of February of this year was £21.8 billion, with £13.06 billion in military financing. This includes offensive military equipment and long range strike capabilities. In 2024 Starmer allowed Ukraine to use British-French Storm Shadow missiles to strike deep into Russia, in what amounted to a significant escalation. NATO weapons and intelligence are used by the Ukrainians to strike energy facilities, warehouses and other targets on Russian territory.

The ever-pliant British media feeds us a steady stream of propaganda to deny the bleak reality of this forever war. Ukraine is always ‘turning the tide’ with high visibility tactics (such as its current campaign against Wildberry warehouses) or its eastern counteroffensives. Each new weapons system sent by NATO is hailed as the ‘game changer.’ Meanwhile, Russia is always on the verge of collapse. We are told that its soldiers eat each other when they are not fighting among themselves with shovels. Now their life-span on the front line has supposedly shortened to a mere twenty minutes.

And yet the game never changes. Russia continues to slowly extend its territorial gains, capturing just over a thousand square miles in the past year. Ukraine continues to suffer heavy losses. Small villages change hands in bloody battles whose ultimate purpose is increasingly obscure. We are told that the citizens of Ukraine are still standing strong against the aggressors and need our backing. But the truth is that the majority of Ukrainians now want to see an end to the war. Hundreds of thousands of conscript-age men have fled the country while others are being dragged off the streets and forced to serve in the army. ‘Busification’ is the name for this policy of forced mobilisation for a war-weary population. It goes without saying that the children of the wealthy and connected rarely have to suffer it.

As the media tries to convince us that Russia will inevitably lose to its much smaller neighbour, it also tells us that Russia is somehow an existential threat to Britain. Pity poor Lord Alan West, who has been tasked with justifying the new surge in weapons spending by spinning all kinds of lurid tales about the coming invasion. Welfare is unimportant, he said at the start of July, compared to the need to keep Putin’s storm troopers from crossing the Channel. A month later he replayed the same motif, asking why we would bother to spend more on school breakfast clubs in the UK if the well-fed children will emerge happily from their meal only to be shot by bloodthirsty Russians stomping down our streets.

The British political-media class have worked hard to establish a consensus behind this maximally belligerent posture. Those who depart from it are vilified in the same time-honoured way, as with the attacks on Diane Abbott this week after she mentioned the obvious fact of a ‘NATO campaign against Russia’, while those who urge the government to arm itself to the teeth are spared the same scrutiny. When the CEO of BAE systems, Europe’s largest weapons manufacturer, claimed that Britain is ‘complacent’ about the threat of war, how many journalists pointed out the conflict of interest?

Nor can one find mainstream discussion of the dangers posed by the intense proxy war we are waging. Were Russia providing long-range weaponry to a third country striking energy facilities and cities within Britain, we would of course be at war by now. What happens if Russia decides to end its policy of containing the conflict to Ukraine and to strike at NATO weapons depositories in Poland and Romania? We already know the answer. Armies start wars and citizens finish them. It may be in the interests of the British political class to pursue a policy of escalating conflict with a nuclear-armed Great Power — if only to please Washington — but it is not in ours.

That’s why peace advocates should be pushing for an end to the proxy war with Russia as soon as possible. While we will get little hearing in Parliament or in the mainstream press, that makes it all the more necessary to raise our voices above the throng of reckless jingoists. A foreign policy rooted in the interests of the British people would support a negotiated end to the conflict and an immediate halt on weapons and funding to Ukraine. For the past four and a half years, those committed to this unwinnable war have been on the moral high ground. It’s about time that we dislodged them.

To Erase The Word

"Anyone claiming the Falkland Islands are not sovereign British territory should be considered hostile to the interests of the British people," tweets Zia Yusuf. That'll be Israel, then. And a member or supporter of the Labour Party is a member or supporter of the same party as the man of whom David Hearst writes:

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was recently sent by Donald Trump's Board of Peace to ask the Palestinian Authority (PA) to replace any mention of the word "Palestine" in schoolbooks with the Jewish designation of "Samaria" [of all places; what Bible do they read?], Middle East Eye has heard.

Jeremy Greenstock, who was Britain's ambassador to the UN between 1998 and 2003, told MEE that Blair attempted to exert pressure on the PA and said that if it was serious about being seen by the Board of Peace as capable of reaching an agreement with Israel to end the war on Gaza, then the word "Palestine" should be erased from textbooks. In a wide-ranging interview on the David Hearst Podcast, Greenstock said the demand was rejected by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Greenstock also said that his former boss was experiencing "difficulties" in his new role overseeing the postwar management of Gaza for the board. "He recently, I understand, was asked by the Board of Peace to go to Ramallah and ask to remove from the Palestinian curriculum any mention of the word Palestine if they were to be treated by the Board of Peace as capable of coming to an agreement with Israel to end the current conflict that had stemmed from 7 October onwards," Greenstock said, adding that he received this information from a ministerial level source.

"President Mahmoud Abbas said he would do no such thing," he said. "But the very fact that the Board of Peace could ask for that to be done in the Palestinian educational curriculum makes me wonder what principles the Board of Peace is working on, and what understanding they have of justice, of the sense of fairness, of the history of all of this," he added.

A spokesperson for Blair denied that the former UK prime minister made the request, and said "this is not true and a complete fabrication." Blair is known to have travelled to Israel in mid-August with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and high representative for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov. The trio held crunch talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rejected the roadmap for Gaza, and then travelled to Cairo where they held meetings with a Palestinian technocratic group which is supposed to assume control of Gaza, as well as members of Hamas. 

During the interview, Greenstock defended Blair's role in the Iraq War and credited him with persuading then-US President George W Bush to seek a mandate from the UN before the invasion, but was trenchant about Blair's current role in the Board of Peace, the body established by the US president to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. Greenstock said he didn't believe Blair was in a position to negotiate with both sides with equal respect. "Because of his record on Iraq and on Palestine since he left government, he will be seen as prejudiced. So I think he will have, and is having, difficulties."

Greenstock, who left government service in March 2004, called the Board of Peace an "abstract and arbitrary committee" whose composition would not have any real effect on the ground with either Israel or the Arab side to the question of Palestine. "I don't think the Board of Peace is a strong enough construct to bear the weight of the difficult decisions that are going to have to be made about the future of the Palestinian territories."

The so-called Board of Peace was established by US President Donald Trump after Washington brokered a ceasefire in October last year to end Israel’s war on Gaza. Hamas and other Palestinian factions agreed to a plan for their disarmament, but Israel has refused to withdraw until the process is complete. Since the ceasefire went into effect, Israel has repeatedly carried out air strikes and drone attacks across the enclave, with at least 1,300 Palestinians killed and more than 4,000 others wounded. On Tuesday, at least seven airstrikes hit an area west of Gaza City within a 10-minute period before quadcopter drones surrounded the area and opened fire and dropped explosives at anyone moving.

Erasing Palestine

As part of a global campaign, Israel and its supporters have been intensifying efforts to erase the word Palestine from history books and museums. On Tuesday, Israeli authorities began imposing their curriculum on more than 45,000 Palestinian students in state-run schools in East Jerusalem, as part of a wider crackdown on education in the occupied area of the city. MEE understands that a revised curriculum is said to be in private circulation for consultation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Earlier this year, UNRWA Lebanon, which has been banned by Israel, also faced a concerted campaign over its curriculum. UNRWA Lebanon replaced the word "Palestine" with "West Bank" and the "Gaza Strip" on certain maps in its sixth-grade regional geography materials, a move that sparked strikes and protests.

This came despite an Independent Review Group led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna finding no evidence to back Israeli accusations that UNRWA staff participated in terrorist organisations, although it did issue 50 recommendations "to strengthen the UN organisation's neutrality." Meanwhile, in Britain, a cross-party group of MPs has demanded an investigation into the British Museum's erasure of the words "Palestine", "Palestinian" and "Israelite occupation" from displays.

A MEE investigation revealed that the museum's decisions to remove the terms came in direct response to lobbying by pro-Israel activists between October and December 2024. In the interview, Greenstock, who was among a group of ambassadors calling for a ban on all goods from illegal Israeli settlements, gave a clear warning to the new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham about the need to stand up to Israel.

"Unless the Burnham government stands up for principles of a basic kind, how can it act on principles anywhere else?" Greenstock said. "How can Andy Burnham go to Kyiv and support President Zelensky because the Russians invaded Ukraine illegally against United Nations principles, to be condemned around the world for going against the United Nations Charter, and not stand up for justice in the Middle East in the Arab-Israel question?"

Greenstock said that the UK needed to look "very carefully" at the weapons it was supplying Israel, and said that if Netanyahu or former defence minister Yoav Gallant arrived in Britain, they should be arrested. Both of them are the subject of arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court. "We're under an obligation through our treaty position in the UN and through our support for the statute of the ICC. I think as far as the ICC is concerned, and if anybody who had been indicted by the judges of the ICC, they should be arrested."

Greenstock said he was convinced that Netanyahu's ambition was to deliver the promise he made to his father, Benzion Netanyahu, a scholar of Judaic history, to return the West Bank to Israeli sovereignty. "I'm convinced personally there needs to be final evidence of this, perhaps because it's not yet totally clear, but I'm convinced personally that Netanyahu has the ambition to deliver for his father the return of Judea and Samaria to Israeli sovereignty, and that he saw an opportunity in the 7 October attacks in 2023."

He said that while the UK may be a huge admirer of what Israel had achieved as a democracy and technocratic society, he went on to add: "But if what it's doing in Palestine and in its region is against international law, is unacceptable to the majority of the public opinion in the UK, and is going much further than we ever thought Israel would go to try and kill every enemy they've got through assassination or military action rather than looking for a political settlement for all these problems, is this an Israel we can continue to trade with?"

A warning 

Greenstock also had this warning for Israeli citizens. "If I was an Israeli citizen, I would worry that my country was losing soft power appeal around the world. It matters in the long term, and it matters for peace and security in the Middle East that there should be some sense of compromise, some compromise agreement on security with the Arab nations, with Iran when this fighting is over. There's got to be a settlement somewhere. We can't invade Iran on the ground with soldiers and replace the regime, and then leave and expect Iran to be a totally different nation. That will not happen. And to invade a country of 90 million-plus people with a few hundred thousand soldiers, it's just not realistic."

Greenstock noted that neither Britain nor the US had won a war since Kosovo. He said the fundamental reason for serial failure in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria and now Iran was America’s overreliance on hard power, and that the legitimacy of using weapons to force your will had become much diminished. "We are in a world now where power has been diffused in all sorts of ways. And soft power has become more important. The capacity to persuade rather than compel has become extremely important as the world has got freer, as there have become many more decision-makers than just the governments out there. The legitimacy of using weaponry to force your will has become diminished in world opinion."

Greenstock had first-hand experience of dealing with the Bush administration over the Iraq War and serving with Paul Bremer as viceroy in Iraq, as leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Reflecting on this, he said: "I think the UK did have an influence. Tony Blair persuaded, the British team persuaded the American team, and Colin Powell here was quite influential, to go through the UN in the autumn of 2002. That was the Brits at work. But when it came to the timing of the military operation in Iraq in March 2003, Tony Blair's wish to postpone that and wait for longer until the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was clear, was dismissed as being too much of a foot-dragging exercise."

He said that as far as Iraq was concerned, Britain's influence on America when it came to the hard decisions was "second class, not first class". "George W Bush's two principal advisers were his Vice President Dick Cheney and the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. And the wisdom from the State Department expressed through Secretary Colin Powell never really entered the argument about all the nuances of what they were getting into. They were relying on hard power, and when those discussions take place and the British are involved, their influence on the hardest decisions is second class, not first class."

Iran war and the Mecca Agreement

Greenstock said Trump misunderstood the nature of Iran from the very start of this war. "I didn't see any evidence that Washington game-played the possibilities that might result from an attack on Iran. The capacity of Iran to strike the other side of the Gulf, the capacity of Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, which they perhaps looked at as a matter of mining and then demining. They hadn't calculated the asymmetric force of drone warfare, not only as a physical attack on various attributes of your hard power, but also as a deterrent to commercial shipping, to oil traffic, to normal trade at sea, of the possibility that ships might be struck by drones on top of the seeding of mines in the Strait. None of that seemed to me to have been game-played in Washington before that decision was taken." He said the timing of the war was not conditioned by Israeli intelligence alone.

Greenstock said it was not coincidental that the strikes on Iran were launched when speculation about the Jeffrey Epstein files and legal cases against the Trump administration were at their height. "It's not an accident that the timing of that attack on Iran might have been affected by things that were happening domestically." Greenstock said the Mecca Agreement signed between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in Riyadh recently was a reaction to a loss of confidence in US power. "The Mecca Agreement is a very clear statement of interest in self-sufficiency, but it doesn't provide in that Mecca Agreement every aspect of self-sufficiency. More has got to be done and more will be done."

Greenstock said there were two fundamental reasons for the loss of faith in the US in the Middle East. "One is that the hard power superiority of the United States is clearly not going to be translated into a reformation of Middle East politics as the Arab countries wanted, or what they would even compromise over and settle on. So American hard power is not doing what it claims to be able to do. And at the same time, America is transparently, both rhetorically and in practice, putting its own Make America Great Again interests before any allied interests or compromise over those interests. So both the tone and the substance in real life of what America stands for in the eyes of its Arab allies has been diminished by the trend of events."

Greenstock said we were in a different era today. "We've moved into an era where moral principles in foreign policy are being gradually displaced. These are the norms and principles of the United Nations Charter and all the conventions under the United Nations family of organisations. We are moving into much more deliberate and to some extent destructive pursuit of national interest. This is a different picture from the one when I left government service in 2003. In 23 years now, the world has changed very markedly, and nowhere has that been affected, has that had an effect on regional politics, than in the Middle East.

"There isn't a set of principles to follow in the Middle East. The Arab nations, who are by far the more numerous peoples in the Middle East, have not got together to set down perhaps some kind of formula that we constructed in Europe under the Committee for Security and Cooperation in Europe."

Far From Unprecedented

Branko Marcetic writes:

In Michigan, where progressive Abdul El-Sayed is facing off for the must–win Senate seat against Donald Trump–backed Mike Rogers, Democrats have a problem. How to reconcile their distaste for their own party’s nominee with the imperative to care about winning?

Attorney General Dana Nessel modeled a way out of the bind with a comically backhanded endorsement. Tasked with trying to convince Jewish Democrats that they should vote for El-Sayed despite the blizzard of smears charging he’s a dangerous antisemite, Attorney General Dana Nessel offered the most unappetizing of unappetizing pitches. Referencing the biblical story of Queen Esther, who chose to put her life on the line to save many others, she implored those in the room to do the same. “It is perhaps up to us now to follow in her path and sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity,” she told them.

It’s hard to think of a more counterproductive call to action than this. In fact, it might even make you think that the speaker didn’t even want her audience to vote for the endorsed candidate, greater good be damned. You’d be in good company. Bernie Sanders, the country’s most prominent Jewish politician, recently told Politico he believed that some Democratic officials actively want El-Sayed to lose the race to the Republican Rogers. These Democrats, Sanders said, viewed progressive candidates like El-Sayed as “a threat” to continued “oligarchy,” to “neverending wars,” and to “continued support for the extremist [Benjamin] Netanyahu government in Israel,” and so figure, “maybe we should let them lose.” “You’re talking about a small number of people who are at the head of the Democratic Party. You’re talking about the donor class,” Sanders said. If, like Sanders, you’re also getting the sneaking suspicion that centrist Democrats are trying to throw the Michigan Senate race, you’re not crazy. Some of them are actually outright admitting it.

No Bones About It

Last week, a group of Michigan Democrats began circulating a letter announcing they would be voting for Rogers in November, because, in their words, “if El-Sayed were to win the general election in this important swing state, we fear the far left and anti-Jewish elements in the Democratic Party would become dominant, including in the imminent 2028 presidential race.” That letter has 412 signatures as of the time of writing. 

Another pro-Israel Michigander who usually votes Democrat, Ann Arbor Rabbi Asher Lopatin, put it even more starkly in an op-ed for Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Some will argue, as I personally do, that the best thing for the Democrats and the progressive cause, in the long run, is to show that anti-Israel candidates like El-Sayed can’t win, thus bringing the Democratic Party back to its more traditional and pro-Israel stance,” he wrote. “A loss for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in November could save the Democratic Party from a hostile takeover ahead of the 2028 presidential election.”

Another lifelong Democrat in the state, Detroit journalist Stacy Gittleman, made a similar declaration. “I will NOT be voting for Abdul, because he poses to me and many others as an extremist who, if he gets into office as a US senator, will spend all his time not pursuing ‘Medicare for all’ but bashing Israel and pursuing every energy to sever the alliance between the United States and Israel,” she wrote last week. (Gittleman recently complained to Fox News about all the Palestinian flags she saw at a party convention in April.) Meanwhile, former backers of El-Sayed’s centrist primary rival have reportedly appeared on a donor call with Rogers and his pollster, while three Democratic bundlers have hosted a fundraiser for the pro-Israel Rogers. 

It’s refreshing, in many ways, that these Democrats are just coming out and saying it: Yes, we would prefer that Democrats lose this key race so that our side stays in control of the party and maintains the party’s lockstep support for Israel, and we are actively working to make that happen. Given that this stance is totally contrary to the interests of Democrats’ own voters, who overwhelmingly share El-Sayed’s criticisms of Israeli policy and see their biggest priority as constraining Trump and the GOP, most centrist Democrats are not openly making these kinds of claims. But one gets the sense that some of them, like Nessel, are quietly on board.

Before making her anti-pitch to the state’s Jewish Democrats, Nessel — maybe best known for trying to charge a group of antiwar student protesters with felonies last year before crying “antisemitism” when she faced pushback — had not exactly been helpful to her party’s candidate’s campaign. Last week, Nessel sat down for a conversation with former Iraq War propagandist David Frum, in which she paid lip service to the need to win the race against Rogers, but then spent the bulk of the interview attacking El-Sayed. Among other things, she charged that his criticism of Israel was “turning up the anti-Semitism,” and that he was “making excuses” for terrorism. In that same interview, she implied she might one day leave the party over its growing criticism of Israel.

Similarly eyebrow-raising has been a host of centrist Democrats’ orientation toward Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, whom they allege to be a dangerous radical allied with El-Sayed. Over the past few weeks, Piker has been at the center of a somehow-still-ongoing news cycle that has entirely consumed coverage of the race — in turn driving up El-Sayed’s negatives, and benefiting his Republican opponent, who has avoided any similar scrutiny over a host of antisemitic and other unsavory associations and serious scandals, not least the fact that he actually did advocacy for an officially designated terrorist group while taking donations from its supporters.

All of this is, to say the least, extremely unusual. Typically, when a party’s candidate comes under attack, members of that party will try their best to avoid the inciting issue and pivot to something else, like criticizing their opponent. Consider Rep. Debbie Dingell’s response to questions about Piker, whom she has said is irrelevant to the election and has declared she will refuse to answer questions about. When challenged on this during a CNN appearance, Dingell immediately pivoted to talking about affordability and to Trump and the GOP’s cuts to health care and food stamps before calling the Piker obsession a Republican attempt to distract and divide voters. This is the standard behavior of a politician who wants their candidate to win.

By contrast, in Michigan, centrist Democrats and those aligned with them have seemed determined to do as much as they can to keep Piker front and center in the race, while appearing totally uninterested in training any fire on their rival party’s candidate. Just look at the ratio of tweets about Piker compared to tweets about Rogers from some of the Democrats most hostile to the Left. For Rep. Josh Gottheimer — the centrist Democrat aligned with the Wall Street–funded group Third Way who, following El-Sayed’s primary win, launched a campaign explicitly about attacking him and progressives like him — it’s a five-to-zero ratio. For Hillary Scholten, the Michigan Democrat refusing to back Piker after trying to sink him with accusations of misogyny in the primary, it’s two-to-zero. For Brad Sherman, cochair of the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus, it’s three-to-zero.

But none of them hold a candle to Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden, who has notched up a four-to-one ratio of Piker-to-Rogers tweets since the primary, while also tweeting by far the most about him than any of these other figures. Bear in mind that this is a conservative count: it doesn’t include any of Tanden’s many replies to her own tweets and to others’. Additionally, none of the tweets about Rogers are actually criticisms of the candidate — two are about how El-Sayed’s defeated centrist opponent polled better against him, while the other is an attack on the Left. Tweets are not by any means a scientific measure of someone’s thoughts or public utterances. But these numbers do give us a sense of some centrist Democrats’ overwhelming public fixation on Piker, and their lack of focus on the GOP candidate who potentially stands to beat their nominee.

Meanwhile, as explicit calls to sabotage El-Sayed’s campaign get louder, those who a little over a month ago were wailing about the dangers of self-defeating “factionalism” suddenly don’t care. Matthew Yglesias, the centrist blogger aligned with the party’s corporate wing, has literally dozens of tweets bemoaning how the Left was engaged in a dangerous “factional” mission that put beating centrist Democrats ahead of defeating Trump and the GOP. Mind you, this was about left-wing candidates simply competing against centrist Democrats in primaries, when Trump and other Republicans weren’t even on the ballot.

But now that it’s centrist, pro-Israel Democrats who are outright saying that they want the Republican to win the whole thing so they can come out on top in the factional intraparty war, even if it endangers a Democratic majority in the Senate, what is Yglesias’ response? He thinks “the whole leftist sabotage narrative is way overblown,” and that the Left should simply stop “lying” about this and point to all the centrist Democrats who are supporting El-Sayed instead.

Far From Unprecedented

If it sounds far-fetched that a contingent of centrist Democrats would try to deliberately tank the Michigan race, even at the cost of a Senate majority, it shouldn’t. After all, as Senate leader Chuck Schumer recently acknowledged, the Democrats can technically still win control of the upper chamber even if they lose that seat.

It would also be far from unprecedented. In fact, it’s exactly what happened with the United Kingdom’s Labour Party at the end of last decade. It’s now a matter of public record that a group of centrist UK Labour officials concocted a well-funded plan to undermine the party’s leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn; that they manufactured an “antisemitism crisis” as one of the principal ways to do so; that they explicitly listed a future Labour government under Corbyn as an obstacle to their plans; and that their chosen strategy to do this was to try to take back control of the party after he lost a general election.

An inquiry into the matter later found that, in the UK’s 2017 elections, centrist Labour officials secretly diverted resources away from Corbyn-aligned candidates fighting for “winnable seats.” When the party ended up having a much better showing on election night than expected, these officials were “silent and grey-faced,” with one senior Labour official describing the strong result as the “opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years.”

These kinds of calculations are hardly unique to British politics. As Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen reported in their insiders’ account of the 2020 US election, centrist Democrats were torn about who they would vote for if that race came down to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, since “their fears of losing their party to socialism competed with their fears of Trump winning a second term.”

Many Democratic voters would likely find it hard to believe prominent figures within their party are cynical enough to intentionally favor Trump and his allies if it meant winning the party’s faction fight. At least some have done them the favor of saying it explicitly, so there can be no mistake.

Before Pleasure

The old “never run a business” line is being thrown at the Cabinet, but there have been 16 Leaders of the Conservative Party since the War, and beyond shareholding, or being married to businessmen, none of them has had any business background worth mentioning, if at all. They have had stopgap jobs and what have you, but nothing more than that, and not even that in some cases. Nearly half have been beneficiaries of the massive public subsidies to landowning.

Winston Churchill, toff. Anthony Eden, toff. Harold Macmillan, toff enough. Alec Douglas-Home, toffee toffee toff toff. Ted Heath, full-time politician since university. Margaret Thatcher, millionaire’s wife. John Major, full-time politician all his adult life. William Hague, full-time politician since childhood. Iain Duncan Smith, paid by the Army to go away. Michael Howard, full-time politician since university, more than 40 years earlier. David Cameron, toff. Theresa May, millionaire’s wife. Boris Johnson, unaccomplished, semi-aristocratic Classicist whom none of his hearers at the CBI would have employed even before he had extolled to them the virtues of Peppa Pig World.

Liz Truss, failed at Shell, and then unemployed for several years before a sinecure at a thinktank enabled her to sleep her way into Parliament. Rishi Sunak, briefly at Goldman Sachs before he became the full-time son-in-law of a foreign gazillionaire. And Kemi Badenoch, hacked Harriet Harman’s website for The Spectator, an act that carried a potential prison sentence of five years when she did it, and that is about it unless anyone can find anything else that she did before politics, insofar as that could be said to have been so. It is not even clear where she was born, although her British citizenship depends on the answer.

Andrew Griffith has very considerable business experience. He was also the Financial Secretary to the Treasury at the time of the mini-Budget, and Truss even tweeted her congratulations when he was appointed Shadow Chancellor. The mere suggestion of the mini-Budget crashed the economy, but Labour pretended to oppose only one measure in it, the one that Truss had not included in her prospectus to Conservative Party members, while actively supporting all of the others. Look what those proposals did even without being enacted. Yet had they ever been put to a Commons Division, then the Labour Whip would have been to abstain, and even then only because of the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, a pretended opposition that was purely opportunistic.

And Griffith was a protégé of Lord Young of Graffham. So much Thatcher’s fixer that she trusted him even over Norman Tebbit, Young was later a Number 10 insider during the Coalition to which the more pro-austerity and pro-war party was the one in which Truss had started out. One of that party’s Coalition stalwarts, Ed Davey, has suggested that in the event of another hung Parliament, then the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats might take up where they had left off in 2015. After all, the Coalition has been by far the most stable and, in its own terms, the most successful Government since 2010. 

Badenoch dismisses Reform UK as “dishonest” “drama queens”, and would prefer another General Election to a “monstrous Reform-Conservative hybrid”. But she has not rebuffed Davey. His party’s competition with hers for the votes of the same people always makes the difference between a majority Government and a hung Parliament across the economically Thatcherite, socially liberal, and therefore Rejoiner South either outside London or barely in it. Think on.

Don’t Dream It, Be It

Reform UK is now third in the polls, and Nigel Farage reentered the House of Commons to silence, without so much as a handshake from the Speaker, before telling GB News that he hardly intended to set foot in the place again. Starting as he meant to go on, he did not attend one second of Andy Burnham’s three and a half hours at the Despatch Box.

That was only marginally less time than Keir Starmer’s entire service as a Member of Parliament alongside Jeremy Corbyn and Rishi Sunak, both of whom have outlasted him. Suggest uses for Starmer. There, that didn’t take very long, did it? But the deaths of Tim Curry and Dolly Parton remind us that we shall never see Dolly’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter, which would have broken all box office records. Starmer could at least give that his best shot, with other parts played by Waheed Alli, Peter Mandelson, Jenny Chapman, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Darren Jones, and so forth. But which ones, and why? Thanks to Alli, Starmer already has much of the costume. Bought for his wife, my foot.

There might also be a cameo in the Ali G film that should have been, if there had to be another one at all, catching up with the former Alistair Leslie Graham MP. Isla Fisher really must have taken Sacha Baron Cohen to the cleaners, since he will now do absolutely anything. At 54, older than Richard Wilson was when he first played Victor Meldrew, he is lampooning a youth subculture that has not existed in more than 20 years. Not unlike the Starmer Project, in fact. The new film’s critical and commercial failure will be a fitting tombstone on the grave of Starmerism, and Zack Polanski’s equally tasteless comedy act will deserve to lose the Holborn and St Pancras by-election by fewer votes than had been received by an authentically left-wing candidate who was therefore, and as much unlike Reform as unlike the Greens, sound on Ukraine, drugs, gender identity, and much else besides.

The Rot Was Built Into The Foundation

There were 17 Labour losses on Camden Council this year, including the Leader. They will be circling Keir Starmer’s seat like piranha. Meanwhile, Starmer will be looking forward to spending more time with his families. The media round today has been done by Jonathan Reynolds, who committed the specific criminal offence of pretending to be a solicitor. Thank heavens that he was not a black Professor at Cambridge. Reynolds went on to be the Chief Whip when the Parliamentary Labour Party brought down Starmer, after which he was reappointed to the position from which Starmer had sacked him, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and President of the Board of Trade. See also John Healey, whose resignation as Defence Secretary was key to the coup, and who has emerged from it as Chancellor of the Exchequer, with his stated reason for having vacated the Defence brief shelved indefinitely. The true believing Al Carns has not been made the Minister for anything. He really is new to this politics lark. Unlike his fellow combat veteran, which Healey is not any more than Starmer was, Paul Knaggs:

A baton, in a relay, passes smoothly from one runner’s hand to another while both are moving, still on the same track, still running the same race. That is the neat, reassuring image Sir Keir Starmer reached for when he told the Camden New Journal he was ready to “pass the baton to a successor” and step down as MP for Holborn and St Pancras after eleven years. It is a tidy, dignified metaphor. Set against the actual record of his tenure in Downing Street, a catastrophic experiment that ended not in a victory lap but in disgrace, public rejection, and record-low popularity, it is a grotesque rewriting of reality.

He chose to slip his exit line into the local pages of Camden rather than face the House of Commons. He lists his local achievements with practiced pride: breakfast clubs, free school meals extended to thousands of children, the two-child benefit cap lifted for 2,500 local families, a Renters’ Rights Act, an Employment Rights Act. These measures are not nothing, and a publication that speaks for the working class will not pretend otherwise. Free school meals are real meals for real children, regardless of who delivered them.

A political legacy is not a curated list handed to a local reporter on the way out the door. It is defined by the character of the government that produced it and the state of the country it leaves behind. Both tell a far darker story than “passing the baton” allows.

The rot was built into the foundation. Labour’s landslide in July 2024, winning 411 seats on just 33.7 per cent of the popular vote, was the thinnest, most illusory supermajority in British history. It was the lowest vote share ever recorded for a majority government since the modern franchise began in 1830. It rested not on a wave of popular hope, but on a collapsing Tory Party splitting its vote three ways. Crucially, Labour’s support fell to historic lows in England’s poorest constituencies, even as it gained in affluent suburbs. It was a mandate built on sand, an fragile electoral coalition managed by technocrats who believed they could govern without the burden of principles or transformative ambition.

That technocratic management collapsed the moment it met reality; it was founded on broken promises. Campaigning for the leadership in 2020, Starmer made ten explicit pledges, including public ownership of rail, energy, water, and Royal Mail. Every single one was scrapped. The 2024 manifesto promised no tax increases on working people; within months, Chancellor Rachel Reeves hiked employers’ National Insurance by £25 billion a year and froze tax thresholds, forcing workers to foot the bill.

For years, Labour promised to abolish the Conservatives’ cruel two-child benefit cap. Once in office, Starmer kept the cap, and when seven of his own Labour MPs voted to scrap it in July 2024, he suspended them from the party for six months. When the cap was finally lifted two years later under intense pressure, it was offered to Camden voters as a benevolent gift rather than what it truly was: a battle the government spent two years losing to its own backbenches.

Within weeks of taking office, the government stripped winter fuel payments from ten million pensioners, restoring them to nine million only after severe council election losses and a humiliating lost by-election proved the sheer cruelty of a policy estimated to push 100,000 elderly citizens into poverty.

Starmer's broken promises

While breaking faith with working-class support, the administration mounted an assault on civil liberties unmatched in modern times. In July 2025, ministers proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, turning mere vocal support for a protest group into an offence punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. Police systematically arrested pensioners in their eighties and teenagers in Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square for holding placards: nearly 900 arrests on a single August weekend. They were protesting the continued licensing of arms to a state carrying out what millions recognise as a genocide in Gaza. Even after the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful in February 2026, the government appealed rather than accept the verdict. Simultaneously, ministers rammed through the Courts and Tribunals Bill, stripping defendants of the right to a jury trial for a vast array of offences, ignoring the desperate pleas of over 3,000 lawyers, solicitors, and retired judges.

Personal hypocrisy completed the ruin. In 2024, details emerged of Starmer and his inner circle accepting over £107,000 in lavish gifts, accommodation, and designer clothes from peer Waheed Alli. By 2026, records showed Starmer had racked up 39 foreign trips costing taxpayers £4.2 million in under two years, including a £60,000 overnight flight to Zurich for a football match, just months after promising to reign in official jet usage.

Then came the Mandelson affair. Starmer’s reckless decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador imploded amid appalling revelations regarding Mandelson’s ongoing ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Police searches followed, senior party leaders called for Starmer’s resignation, and his chief of staff and communications director resigned in tandem. His approval ratings collapsed to minus 57, matching the record low set by Liz Truss during her ill-fated mini-budget. A prime minister who leaves office rivalling Liz Truss, having curbed jury trials, sent police after pensioners holding cardboard signs, and protected corporate arms flows, has not earned the right to call his departure a graceful handover.

The party machine tried desperately to manage the decline, but the electoral arithmetic caught up with them. When Andy Burnham sought to return to Westminster through the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour’s National Executive Committee blocked him, with Starmer voting to bar him from standing. The result was an unprecedented disaster: Labour finished third in a seat it had held continuously since 1931. Panicked by the collapse, the same executive executed a cynical U-turn months later. On May 14, sitting MP Josh Simons, former head of the Labour Together think tank, resigned his Makerfield seat explicitly to clear a path for Burnham. Simons admitted the party was heading into a leadership contest with “no hope, no energy that anything would change.”

Burnham won the manufactured by-election, Starmer resigned four days later, and Burnham was installed in Downing Street by July. It was not a relay; it was an insider fix. Vacating safe seats to engineer a line of succession is an old and dirty parliamentary trick. When Harold Wilson tried it in Leyton in 1965 to force Patrick Gordon Walker back into Parliament, voters revolted and elected a Conservative instead. While Makerfield proved more compliant, the underlying insult to democracy remains identical: a governing party that cannot find a leader among its sitting MPs simply fabricates a vacancy and demands the electorate rubber-stamp its choice.

Now, Sir Keir abandons his constituents entirely, breaking a clear promise made just weeks ago to remain as MP for Holborn and St Pancras until the next general election. The moment his prime ministerial perks vanished, representing the working class of Camden lost its appeal. International consultancy, global defence forums, and the lucrative international circuit beckon.

Labour headquarters will try to manage the upcoming Holborn and St Pancras by-election with the same centralising arrogance, parachuting in another compliant manager. But the public has seen behind the curtain. They have watched a party block a candidate in January, beg him back in May, and execute a corporate takeover of the state while ignoring the voters who put them there.

A baton passed fairly leaves the team stronger and the runners in unison. Keir Starmer leaves his constituency a sudden by-election, leaves his party a leadership installed by backroom manipulation, and leaves the British public holding the bill for two years of authoritarian, corporate management masquerading as democracy. Sir Keir Starmer has passed the baton, but he has left the country holding the bill.

Starmer’s parting shot was to claim to have rescued the Labour Party from “moral and financial ruin”. But under Jeremy Corbyn it was in the black for the first time since the 1970s. It was under Starmer that, despite huge corporate and individual donations, Labour has returned to an overall deficit approaching four million pounds. That lie itself is a mark of its moral ruin under Starmer, but of course there have been very many more, from Lord Alli to Lord Mandelson.