Conversion Excursion

Although the Crown Court backlog may not be down by very much, it is down, but that is beside the point where the Government is concerned. Its desire to restrict trial by jury is ideological, and would therefore apply even if there were no backlog. Even with the prisons at and indeed beyond breaking point, it is cheerfully seeking to create whole new categories of serious criminal offence.

For example, what, exactly, is the “conversion therapy” that would carry a sentence of five years? The Government would no longer be unveiling anything of this magnitude unless it had been signed off by Andy Burnham, so we need not bother looking to him. It has been under Burnham that Manchester has come to present Canal Street as its social and cultural heart and soul.

But most lesbians and gay men had heterosexual experiences in adolescence, and sometimes well after that, before deciding that it was not for them. Why should there be either a cultural taboo around articulating the reverse experience, or a legal sanction for cooperating in someone else’s? Ignore hysteria about things like electroconvulsion, which went out with the Ark.

If conversion therapy is abhorrent, then what about the drastic and irreversible psychological, chemical and surgical aspects of so-called sex changes, which are a vast array of medical treatment for something that is supposedly not an illness at all?

And just as a ban on halal slaughter would also ban kosher slaughter, or a ban on the medically unnecessary circumcision of children would ban the bris, would not this measure ban the pastoral practice of Orthodox Judaism? We could not be having that. Could we?

Spiteful Class Warriors Assemble?

Kemi Badenoch versus Bridget Phillipson? My word. I would not even dare watch that on television. But it was always more than a little suspicious when, desperate to appear to have any specific policy, Labour revived its perennial internal crowd-pleaser, the imposition of VAT on school fees. That one never looked likely to happen, because the promise of it was too useful for when Labour activists started to ask what their party was actually for.

This policy has not been properly thought through. Is it intended as a permanent means of raising slightly less than two per cent of the education budget, or as a device for closing down commercial schools? It cannot be both. But might the real motivation be Phillipson's ambition? Call that a Third Way.

Even without the VAT, the fees for commercial schools are far beyond the reach of anyone in the middle of anything. You can go to school for free in this country, and most people do. But this needless expense makes very affluent people feel as if they are struggling, since they really do have to make certain sacrifices, by their own standards, in order to meet it. In turn, that makes them very vocal against, for example, a modest increase in their own direct taxation.

Moreover, school fees corrupt the parliamentary process. To pay them, the Conservatives insist that an MP has to be paid a gargantuan salary. They then take other work as well, but by then the meeting of their initial demand has drawn other, mostly Labour, candidates who have been attracted by the money. People with pound signs in their eyes also have very sharp elbows. But the present salary is the existing rate for the job. The principles of trade unionism demand that everyone who was entitled to it take it in full, and that it not be cut, either in absolute terms or by being allowed to fall behind inflation. Level up, not down.

Yet while we are seeking to make the world a better place, then we still have to live in it as it is. It is not hypocritical to do so as best we can. The hypocrites are the highly activist Education Ministers, usually Conservatives, who buy their own children out of the practical application and implications of their policies. Their hypocrisy is never, ever called out. Well, it would certainly be called out by me.

And it must be said that the schools that they favour do regularly provide left-wing figures with a platform that they are seldom or never afforded by the schools of the municipal Labour Right. By all accounts, Jeremy Corbyn turned down several invitations to speak at public schools, although he might accept them now. Before he was exiled, George Galloway regularly accepted such invitations. Yet it is impossible to imagine that a state-funded school might offer a platform to anyone from the Left.

It is in the running of state-funded schools that the Liberal Establishment in academia and the media meets the right-wing Labour machine in local government. We ought to be bypassing the weedy brains of the Liberal Establishment and the brainless brawn of the municipal Labour Right, in order to secure the representation that had never been afforded by those who had presumed to speak for our people, but never to our people. That would involve doing deals with the Conservatives. Such a deal secured the Leadership of Derby City Council for Chris Williamson. We could not possibly get less out of them than we had ever managed to get out of the Anna Turleys of the world. Sooner the bosses than the scabs.

Their favoured IGCSE has been banned in the state sector for being too easy. That may be another reason why Oxbridge and socially comparable institutions no longer found their products attractive. But having been denied admission to the universities that they did not quite consider beneath them, the intense ideologues who had hitherto gone straight into overtly political roles at 22 will henceforth be going straight into them at 19. They will retain those roles no matter who had won anything so vulgar as an election.

Those roles include the positions of the Labour Party's almighty staffers. Anyone who has ever dealt with the Labour Party's staff will have noticed both their extreme youth and their extreme poshness. As the Forde Report set out forensically, that combination makes them dazzlingly arrogant and uncouth. Such are the people who always really run the Labour Party. And here we are.

The Flat Truth

Sarah Knapton writes:

In 1838, Samuel Rowbotham, an English inventor and flat-Earth proponent, conducted a bizarre experiment on a dead straight six-mile stretch of the Old Bedford River in the Cambridgeshire Fens.

Rowbotham postulated that if the Earth really was round, he should be able to place a flag at one end of the uninterrupted watercourse and be unable to see it through a telescope as it would dip below the horizon.

To his delight, the flag remained visible, supporting his view that the world was indeed flat.

However, he had made a grave miscalculation. In January 1870, Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist, returned to the river and showed that the flag had been visible because of atmospheric refraction – a distorting effect that makes objects appear higher.

He carried out his own experiment, placing five posts much higher along the river to avoid refraction, and demonstrated that the middle post was slightly taller than those further downstream, as they fell away with the Earth’s curvature.

It is the same effect that makes ships’ masts visible for much longer after the hull has vanished over the horizon. If the Earth were flat, the ship would shrink uniformly as it headed into the distance.

Wallace’s experiment failed to convince the flat-Earthers, and to this day many still reject the scientific consensus of a spherical planet spinning at more than 1,000mph.

Some adherents believe the world is a disc with the Arctic Circle at the centre surrounded by land masses and with Antarctica at the edges. Others think it is a plain that goes on forever.

They argue that the horizon looks flat even if you climb 29,000ft to the top of Everest or travel in an aeroplane, and claim that water cannot stick to a curved surface, so the seas would simply pour away if they were on a globe.

To explain gravity, some claim that the flat Earth is accelerating upwards constantly, giving the effect of things being drawn backwards towards the surface, in the same way you feel heavier when going up in a lift.

At first glance their arguments appear to hold water, but dig a little deeper and their claims go down the plughole.

For a start, the Earth is vast and the curvature is so slight at that scale that it is imperceptible until you’re looking down from around 35,000ft.

Although planes can fly high enough, the curve is still incredibly subtle and requires a wide field of view that is generally not possible from a passenger window.

So if we can’t personally see it, how do we know that the Earth is round?

The idea of a spherical Earth is not a recent concept. Greek philosophers Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle had come to the conclusion more than 2,000 years ago, after observing the Earth’s curved shadow on the Moon during lunar eclipses.

Eratosthenes, the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria, even calculated the circumference of the Earth in 240BC, based on the differing angles of the Sun at locations hundreds of miles apart.

By 1522, Ferdinand Magellan made the first circumnavigation of the globe, proving there was no edge of the world for ships to fall off.

However, it was not until 1930 that the curvature of the Earth was first pictured, when Capt Albert Stevens of the US army air corps took an aerial photograph over Argentina, clearly showing the horizon slightly bending.

Five years later, Capt Stevens took a high-altitude balloon 72,395ft in the air, capturing a more pronounced curve, and by 1946 the US had sent a missile with a camera attached about 65 miles up, giving us the first glimpse of Earth from space.

From the 1950s, satellites had started to send back the first images of Earth. By the following decade, humans were in space and able to witness the spherical planet in person.

Flat-Earthers will argue that the world’s space programmes are a giant conspiracy – ironically they sometimes term it a “global conspiracy” – yet in 2016, Oxford University calculated that such a conspiracy would have involved so many people that it would have been exposed within four years.

Even if you refuse to believe the decades of satellites, orbiters and astronauts from multiple competing space agencies, there are easy demonstrations that can be done from Earth that prove the planet is round.

A simple one is viewing large objects from far away, such as mountains. Their tops will always come into view before their bases.

The stars are another good indicator. From the Northern Hemisphere, Polaris, or the pole star, sits nearly exactly over the North Pole. Travel to the Southern Hemisphere, and it gradually sinks towards the horizon before it disappears completely. This effect is impossible on a flat Earth, as it would never be out of sight.

The movement of the constellations, arcing into view and then out again, is also only possible because the Earth is round and spinning while stars stay fixed in space.

Likewise, during a lunar eclipse the Earth passes between the sun and the Moon, casting a circular shadow on the Moon no matter where it is viewed on the planet.

“The ancient Greeks had a good handle on it,” said Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“The shadow of the Earth during a lunar eclipse – it’s round, ships disappear below the sea horizon, and the angle of stars like Polaris above the horizon varies with latitude.

“The angle of the sun in the sky at different latitudes was used by Eratosthenes to measure the circumference of the Earth 2,250 years ago.”

In 2018, Bob Knodel, a prominent flat-Earther, attempted to prove the Earth was not a spinning globe by setting up a highly precise gyroscope, which he expected to stay still.

In fact, the gyroscope drifted 15 degrees per hour, definitively demonstrating the Earth’s rotation. Mr Knodel speculated that “heavenly energies” may have intervened.

‘Their beliefs are not fact-based’

So how do you convince a flat-Earther? We asked Lee Mcintyre, a research fellow at Boston University and author of How to Talk to a Science Denier.

“It is nearly impossible to convince a flat-Earther with facts, because their beliefs are not fact-based in the first place,” he warns.

“Instead what I do is talk to them not about what they believe but why they believe it. I ask about their reasoning.

“The thing I’ve had the best luck with is to say ‘okay, so you claim your beliefs are based on evidence, right? So what evidence – if I had it in my back pocket – would convince you that you’re wrong?’

“And they can’t answer. That’s because they aren’t reasoning like scientists, who are willing to change their views when the facts change. Instead they are reasoning like ideologues, who will protect their identity-based beliefs with everything they’ve got.”

Verdict: Explicable

“It’s a myth that Medieval people thought the Earth was flat; we know the Greeks knew the world was a sphere,” Greg Jenner tells the Radio Four audience at 18:52-18:56. There was Cosmas Indicopleustes, but he had no formal education and thus no influence. Apart from him, though, Jenner is right. But thus is kicked away a key pillar of the National Religion, as passed on in schools and pubs the length and breadth of the land. What next, that The Life of Brian never happened?

Urbi et Orbi was first delivered by Blessed Gregory X, who was Pope from 1271 to 1276. The globus cruciger is at least 800 years older than that, and added the Cross to what had previously been Jupiter’s orb. The one used at Charles III’s Coronation was made for his Restored namesake in 1661, but of course the form is far older. Restoration, indeed. Not that the other side would have disagreed. Published in 1535, and still used as part of the Book of Common Prayer, the proto-Puritan Myles Coverdale had had no compunction in translating the verse that he numbered Psalm 96:10 (the numbering of the Psalms varies; another time), “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King: and that it is He who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved; and how that He shall judge the people righteously.”

“Fast” here does not mean “quickly”, but as in “hold fast”, nor does “cannot be moved” preclude the revolution of the Earth, but rather asserts that God has fastened it such that it could not be blown off course. Coverdale has always been known to have had his problems as a translator, yet I am not aware that this verse has ever been held up as one of them. The Psalms were probably collected in the fifth century BC, but several of them are far older even than that. In any case, the present point is that an English translator who had graduated from Cambridge in 1513 took it as a given that the Earth was round. Did the Ancient Israelites? Anyone with the Hebrew, do please let me know.

In 1514, Coverdale was ordained a Catholic priest. He was to depart from that in many ways, but not in this. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who died in 395, describes a lunar eclipse as the projection of the “spherical shape” of the Earth onto the Moon. Through the subsequent centuries, we find “the rounded mass of the Earth” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and “the terrestrial globe” in the Etymologies of Saint Isidore of Seville, before our very own Saint Bede the Venerable tells us that, “The Earth is like a globe.” At Jarrow. Where he died in 735.

Gerbert of Aurillac made a terrestrial globe and, as was common at the time, wrote a favourable commentary on the assertion of sphericity in the third-century work of Macrobius. In 999, Gerbert was elected Pope Sylvester II. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas, in one of the first arguments advanced in his Summa Theologica, showed that it was possible to arrive at the same conclusion by different methods, since, “So it is indeed a same conclusion demonstrated by the astronomer and the physicist, for example, that the Earth is round.” Elsewhere, he taught that, “The Earth is not only round, but also small in comparison with the heavenly bodies.” Saint Thomas had studied under Saint Albert the Great, who must have had some concept of gravity, and who died in 1280.

In the fourteenth century, Oresme, of whom more anon, published his Treatise on the Sphere, inspired by the work of the same name by the thirteenth-century John of Sacrobosco, who might originally have been English, Scots or Irish. That earlier treatise was republished, completed, and commented upon, for many centuries. In turn, Oresme’s Treatise inspired the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, in which he made remarkably accurate calculations about the radius and volume of the Earth, about the climatic zones according to latitude, and about the polar regions, of which he wrote, in 1410, that, “Those who inhabit the Pole would have the Sun above their horizon for half the year, and for the other half, continuous night.”

Christopher Columbus owned and annotated a copy of the Imago Mundi. As he did of Pope Pius II’s Historia rerum ubique gestarum, which begins, “Almost everyone agrees that the shape of the world [i.e., the cosmos] is spherical [rotundam]; we agree in the same way about the Earth.” It goes on to discusses the measurements of the Earth’s circumference by Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, respectively from the third and second centuries BC. It is true that those ancient cosmologists held the Earth to be immobile at the centre of a closed sphere that was the universe, and that that error lived long after them, but neither they nor any of their successors held that the Earth was flat.

No one ever believed that, at least until the rise of modern Flat Earth Societies. The suggestion that this was the Medieval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of “Gotham” to refer to New York.

I nearly fell out of my chair at 28:26 in the above link, when Dr Seb Falk of Girton College, Cambridge referred, again as if they were unremarkable, to the events of 1277, about which readers of this site have known since 16 August 2007, but about which I have been writing elsewhere since no later than 2001, at first broadly in relation to John Milton; I came across the manuscript again recently, and while the style needs work, the thesis still stands up, so watch this space.

Science as that term is generally understood began at Paris in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris and Censor of the Sorbonne, responded to the growth of Aristotelianism by condemning from Scripture (i.e., explicitly from revelation as apprehended by the gift of faith) 219 propositions expressing the Aristotelian versions of several of fallen humanity’s ordinary beliefs.

Those beliefs were, and are, eternalism, the belief that the universe has always existed; animism, that the universe is an animal, a living and organic being; pantheism, that the universe is in itself the ultimate reality, the first cause, God; astrology, that all earthly phenomena are caused, or at least influenced, by the pantheistic movements of the stars; and cyclicism, that every event repeats exactly after a sufficiently long time the precise length of which varies according to culture, and has already so repeated itself, ad infinitum.

In particular, Tempier strongly insisted on God’s creation of the world ex nihilo, a truth which has always been axiomatically acknowledged as able to be known only from revelation by the faith that is itself mediated by the Church’s ministry of God’s Word and Sacraments, with the liturgical context of that ministry passing on from age to age and from place to place the Revelation recorded in and as the Bible and the Apostolic Tradition of which the Canon of Scripture is part.

This ruling of ecclesial authority as such made possible the discovery around 1330, by Jean Buridan, Rector of the Sorbonne, of what he himself called impetus, but which was in fact nothing other than the first principle of “Newtonian” Mechanics, and thus of “science”, Newton’s First Law, the law of inertia: that a body which has been struck will continue to move with constant velocity for so long as no force acts on it.

Buridan’s pupil Oresme, afterwards Bishop of Lisieux, developed this discovery vigorously and in detail, around 1360. The ideas of Buridan and Oresme spread throughout Europe’s universities for three centuries, and were especially associated with Spanish Salamanca, with Portuguese Coimbra, and with the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano, now the Gregorian University. They passed, through Leonardo da Vinci and others, to those who would formulate them in precise mathematical terms: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and finally Sir Isaac Newton in the conventionally foundational text of modern science, his Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Without the Christian Revelation, apprehended by the faith mediated in, as and through the life of the Church, human beings are by inclination eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic, astrological and cyclicistic; and in that intellectual condition, the scientific project is impossible. That is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe.

The reception of Newton’s Principia bespeaks a willingness, whether or not it can be identified in the work itself, to regard science as independent of the wider scientia crowned by regina scientiae, to have physics and the logical without metaphysics and the ontological, ratio unrelated to fides. This is disastrous for science, which cannot demonstrate, but rather must presuppose, the falseness of eternalism, animism, pantheism, astrology and cyclicism.

And it is also disastrous for art, because the world comes to be seen in terms of a logic newly detached from aesthetics, as from ethics. Thus, these become mere matters of taste or opinion, dislocated even from each other in defiance both of the whole Western philosophical tradition and to use in its ordinary manner a term deriving from Newton’s Early Modern age, of common sense.

In such an environment, art attracts increasing distrust as the morally evil is held up as having aesthetic, and not least literary, merit. Meanwhile, aesthetic experiences are so distinguished from everyday experiences that art is degraded to a frivolity and an indulgence. Thus, they are restricted to those who have the time and the money for it, indeed who actually have too much time on their hands and more money than they know what to do with.

At the same time, regard for the true and the good declines relentlessly in the supposedly superficial context of poor aesthetics, of literally false and bad art. Doctrinal orthodoxy and moral standards slip and slide where the liturgy and its accoutrements are less than adequately tasteful or edifying. Educational standards collapse and crime rockets in the midst of hideous architecture and décor. And so forth.

Forget, for the present purpose, Galileo, who was never imprisoned, who was never excommunicated, who died professing the Faith, the daughter who cared for whom in his last days became a nun, and so on. His error was not to say that the Earth moved around the Sun, although he could not prove that scientifically at the time; we happen to know, centuries later, that he was right, but that is not the same thing. Rather, his error was to say that the Church should teach heliocentrism as proved out of Scripture, which is in fact silent on the subject. His was not an erroneously low, but an erroneously high, doctrine of Biblical and ecclesial authority.

In the absence of scientific proof in his own age, he wanted his theory, which turns out to have been scientifically correct but which neither he nor anyone else could have known to have been so in those days, to be taught and believed on that authority, the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church. That, the Church refused to do. Who was on the side of science in that dispute? I think that we can all see the answer to that one. As, in the end, did he, dying as he did a Catholic in good standing. Buy the book here.

Cabinet Reconstruction

Cutting sickness and disability benefits is not a hard choice. It is a very, very easy choice, and all the more shameful for that. Universal Credit for those who had been found permanently medically unfit for work, a process so arduous that it not uncommonly kills people, has already been halved for new claimants and frozen until 2030. We are expected either to welcome that as the Government's compromise with Labour MPs, or to scorn even that as a capitulation to them.

We have seen nothing yet. After he had failed to persuade Gordon Brown to let him charge 26.8 per cent interest on crisis loans, James Purnell resigned from Brown's Cabinet as part of an attempt to replace him with David Miliband. Miliband is now touted as a potential returnee to the Foreign Office, presumably by means of a peerage. But if he were to contest a by-election, then he should face either a Chagossian or a victim of his torture, and the former would command broader public sympathy. All in all, Andy Burnham is showing us who he is. Some of us were so old that we already knew.

A Chilling Effect

Dania Akkad writes:

A leading British civil rights barrister faces contempt proceedings once again after a judge decided to refer allegations against him for a second time.

The original proceedings brought against Rajiv Menon KC were thrown out last month for procedural reasons.

But on 22 June, Mr Justice Johnson ruled that Menon’s case met the necessary “threshold conditions” to proceed and that it was in the public interest to do so.

He said the case should be referred to a judge who can “deal with the matter expeditiously”. “I stress that nothing in this judgement decides that Mr Menon has acted in contempt of court,” Johnson wrote.

“My findings do not bind the presiding judge. The presiding judge will only institute contempt proceedings if they consider that it is the appropriate and justified step.”

Garden Court Chambers, where Menon has practised for three decades, said on Monday that the proceedings brought against Rajiv were unprecedented and have “sent shock waves through the legal profession.”

“The impact of these proceedings is already being felt by the criminal defence community, especially juniors, with concerns that public confidence in the independence of the Bar and the integrity of our system of justice will be damaged.”

Menon has more than 30 years experience spanning high-profile cases such as Stephen Lawrence, Hillsborough and Grenfell. 

Prior to becoming a judge, Johnson represented a range of clients including MI6 and the Ministry of Defence. 

How we got here

Menon is accused of violating Johnson’s orders in his closing statement in the trial of six Palestinian Action activists who broke into an Israeli-owned arms factory near Bristol in 2024. 

The judge had warned defence barristers not to tell the jury that they could reach a verdict according to their conscience, a principle known as jury equity. 

In his closing speech, Menon, who represented one of the activists, told the jury about the Bushell case, a landmark ruling from 1670 which established the independence of juries. 

He read from a plaque at the Old Bailey commemorating the jury in that case, saying “it established the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions”. 

In February, the jury acquitted all of the activists of aggravated burglary, but failed to reach a verdict on several other charges. 

The Crown Prosecution Service sought a retrial while Johnson filed the original contempt of court complaint against Menon. 

In May, four of the defendants – Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Rajwani – were found guilty of criminal damage. Corner was also convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent. 

Two others, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin, were found not guilty of criminal damage. 

It then emerged, as reporting restrictions were lifted, that the four activists faced being sentenced as terrorists even though the jury had not been informed of that possibility. 

In a marathon court hearing on 12 June, Johnson ruled first that the four would indeed be sentenced as terrorists and then handed down a combined total of more than 25 years in prison. 

Meanwhile, three court of appeal judges had ruled that the contempt proceedings levelled against Menon were unlawful. 

They said that Johnson could decide whether to refer the complaint to another High Court judge, the Attorney General, to the Bar Standards Board or take no further step. 

Now Johnson has made his ruling, it will be up to the new judge to decide whether contempt proceedings continue. 

Garden Chambers said it was awaiting the outcome of “this already protracted process” and would continue to support Menon “through this difficult time”. 

Kirsty Brimelow KC, Chair of the Bar Council which represents barristers in England and Wales, has previously said the contempt proceedings against Menon “risk a chilling effect on the profession” and called it a “troubling episode”.

Subject Access

Paul Holden, Jessica Murray and John McEvoy write:

Newly released documents reveal the inner workings of Labour Together and its role in covertly undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party.

The documents were disclosed to Corbyn in response to a subject access request. They contain emails from Labour Together’s two key figures Morgan McSweeney and Josh Simons.

McSweeney went on to be Keir Starmer’s chief of staff while Simons became a cabinet minister until he resigned following revelations that he had hired a reputation management firm to “proactively undermine” journalistic investigations into Labour Together, McSweeney and Sir Keir Starmer.

Simons subsequently vacated his Makerfield constituency seat for Andy Burnham.

Internal documents detail how Labour Together under McSweeney’s watch (2017-20) conducted polling of the Labour membership to monitor its views on the incidence of antisemitism in the party.

This polling allowed McSweeney and his allies to track responses to the antisemitism narrative that they were simultaneously helping to sustain by placing arguably alarmist stories in the media.

The documents further detail how The Canary media outlet was highly trusted among Labour members and identified as a political challenge because it defended Corbyn amid antisemitism accusations.

The Canary was subsequently targeted by the McSweeney-linked Stop Funding Fake News campaign with an advertiser boycott, which helped to diminish its revenue.

Weaponising antisemitism 

McSweeney quietly inflamed the “antisemitism crisis” that would dog Corbyn’s leadership from at least 2018.

He did so by seeding and placing stories into the press that helped to build the narrative that Corbyn’s Labour had become riddled with antisemitism and that this flowed inexorably from a resurgent left-wing anti-imperialism.

At the same time, the new documents show, Labour Together was paying YouGov to repeatedly poll Labour members on whether they agreed with the framing of the party as a hotbed of antisemitism.

The goal was apparently to gain a detailed guide to the opinions of the party’s membership as McSweeney sought to detach it from Corbyn’s leadership.

Although the precise cost is unknown, polling of this kind was likely to be expensive.

It was also at this time that Labour Together unlawfully failed to declare most of its donations, amounting to over £700,000, with key funders of the organisation including hedge fund manager Martin Taylor and pro-Israel lobbyist Trevor Chinn.

‘Deliberately exaggerated’

One email from October 2018 shows McSweeney sharing a range of polling questions about what members thought of Corbyn’s leadership, who they thought the next leader of the Labour Party should be, the traditional media that they consumed, and what social media platforms they used.

Emails show that McSweeney was directing what questions to be put to members by YouGov.

Included in the survey was a question about antisemitism, which asked:

There has been quite a lot of news coverage recently about antisemitism in the Labour Party. Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?

• It is a serious and genuine problem that the party leadership needs to take urgent action to address
• It is a genuine problem, but its extent is being deliberately exaggerated to damage Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, or to stifle criticism of Israel
• It is not a serious problem at all, and is being hyped to undermine Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, or to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel
• None of these
• Don’t Know

The results of two polls conducted in November 2018 and July 2019 suggest the Labour membership was sceptical of the “antisemitism crisis” narrative.

For instance, 76% of respondents believed in November 2018 that the crisis was either “deliberately exaggerated” or effectively non-existent and being “hyped” to damage Corbyn and protect Israel.

This dropped marginally to 71% seven months later despite a firestorm of media coverage.

‘Dreadful performance’

McSweeney appeared to be displeased with the poll results, writing in one 2018 email that “there is nothing at the moment to suggest that Corbyn is challengeable before 2022 but equally there is every reason to be optimistic about what happens next”.

He added that Corbyn’s “absolute numbers are still very high (68%) particularly given his dreadful performance on Brexit and antisemitism”.

The poll results are additionally striking given Starmer’s decision to withdraw the whip from Corbyn in November 2020 after he said “the problem [of antisemitism] was dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside of the Party”, reflecting the majority views of membership. 

In the July 2019 poll, Labour members were asked to rank their support for other MPs in head-to-head battles with Corbyn. While Corbyn beat every contender, the closest contender was Starmer, who received 45% to Corbyn’s 55%.

According to insider accounts, it was around July 2019 that McSweeney became a member of a loose working group supporting a potential Starmer leadership bid and providing polling data towards that end.

The Canary

The documents also indicate how Labour Together and McSweeney were concerned about The Canary’s ability to rally support for Corbyn.

Included in the new disclosure is a two-page briefing note about The Canary which appears to have been written in 2018 and contain Labour Together polling data.

The note complained that The Canary “is one of the most trusted news sources amongst Jeremy Corbyn supporters”, and was well ahead of “The Times, The Mirror or the BBC”.

The data also showed The Canary had a “net positive 23%” trust score among Labour members, equalled only by The Guardian. The New Statesman, by contrast, received a score of minus six.

To that end, the briefing aired serious concerns about The Canary’s political influence in Britain.

“The Canary’s dominance of left wing online media will make [sic] a key influencer in deciding the next Mayor of London, the next leader of the Labour Party and the future direction of the country”, the note observed.

It further claimed The Canary was “sympathetic to anti-Semitic viewpoints and publishes articles in defence of politicians who have got into trouble for anti-Semitism”, an allegation which was debunked by the independent media regulator Impress in 2021. 

Stop Funding Fake News

When read against other emails and Labour Together’s polling, the briefing note points to concerns about how The Canary was undermining the antisemitism narrative that McSweeney and his allies were covertly helping to inflame in this period.

In March 2019, McSweeney and his ally Imran Ahmed would launch the Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) campaign, which sought to demonetise The Canary by pressuring companies to withdraw advertising from its website.

While being led by factional Labour insiders, the SFFN campaign presented itself as a project run by committed grassroots activists who were concerned with the proliferation of “fake news”.

Interestingly, the internal briefing note, which appears to have been a precursor to the SFFN campaign, made no mention of the accuracy of The Canary’s reporting.

The emphasis was on its political influence, strongly suggesting the subsequent campaign was initiated in response to The Canary’s challenge to the political ambitions of Labour Together, onto which claims of “disinformation” were grafted.

Indeed, McSweeney reportedly told Labour Together colleagues: “Destroy The Canary or The Canary destroys us”.

That campaign, alongside changes to social media algorithms, played a powerful role in circumscribing the impact and reach of The Canary by late 2019.

By then, Labour Together’s plan to install Sir Keir Starmer as the leader of the Labour Party was well-advanced.

McSweeney and Labour Together’s fixation on polling would carry over the organisation while led by Josh Simons (2022 – 2024).

These intense polling efforts apparently also helped the organisation to create caricatures of target voters for the Labour party which were at once crude, bizarre, and insulting.

A version of the “Workington Man” curated by Labour Together was 62 years old, white, “absolutely despised Jeremy Corbyn”, “hates Europe and European culture”, drives an “Audi A4”, and “thinks South Asians who live nearby are terrible drivers”.

Meanwhile, “Stevenage Woman” was 42, non-white, “hates Boris for breaking the rules on Lockdown”, “thinks we should have fewer migrants”, “doesn’t think migrants improve British culture,” and “has a Ford Focus and is a very cautious driver”.

In April 2023, Labour Together under Simons published a report called Red Shift, which argued that the Labour Party should target ‘Workington Man’ in order to win an anticipated General Election.

It contended that the party could do so by holding its line on “social and cultural issues” by being “tough on crime”, “exerting a firm grip over migration” while embracing the Union Jack and singing the national anthem at conference.

Red Shift described Workington Man as representative of a “patriotic left”, but did not repeat the crude caricatures reflected in internal documents.

Together, the documents add to a growing body of evidence about serious misconduct at Labour Together under McSweeney’s leadership.

“What is revealed makes the call for an independent inquiry into Labour Together overwhelming,” John McDonnell, the Labour MP and former Shadow Chancellor, told Declassified.

Corbyn also reacted to the revelations, saying: “Here it is in black and white: a grand anti-democratic heist against a political party, from the many to the few. They don’t need to answer to me. They should answer to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary members who wanted to build a real alternative to poverty, homelessness and war”.

Labour Together is now called ThinkLabour. ThinkLabour, Josh Simons, Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney were asked to comment.

To Bring Local Anger To A Boiling Point

Al Carns is touted as a potential Prime Minister. The heirs and even persons of the Shankill Butchers have taken to the streets over Hadi Alodid but not over Jeffrey Donaldson, about whom it becomes more obvious by the day that the Unionist Deep State on both sides of the Irish Sea had known all along, raising the question of why his 40-year protection was ended when it was. Untrained in any other method, the Imperial Class governs Britain as its last great colony. And an Edinburgh man but born in Fife, my father was in the Black Watch when he won the 1939-1945 Star, the Africa Star with 8th Army Clasp, the Italy Star, the France and Germany Star, and the War Medal 1939–1945, so it causes me no small pain to read Kit Klarenberg:

Leaked emails expose how British military-intel officials deliberately provoked riots among occupied Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant communities, which they then exploited to justify repression. In private diatribes, veterans of occupied Ireland who later became MI6 officers still obsess over “keeping Northern Ireland British” and mock the death of Bobby Sands.

Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone offer an extraordinary insight into the covert activities of prominent British military and intelligence veterans posted to occupied Ireland during the 1980s. Still possessed of enduring contempt for Catholics and visceral hatred for prominent Irish Republican freedom fighters, these men believe to this day that their patriotic duty remains to “keep Northern Ireland British.”

Several British veterans of the so-called Troubles have found employment at a private spying firm called Hakluyt, which has been referred to as a “rest home for spies.” Founded by longtime MI6 officers, including the former spy who inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond character, the firm has been plausibly accused of serving as a cutout for the agency.

Keith Craig is another MI6 journeyman who joined Hakluyt, serving as its CEO for ten years. While public details on Craig’s time in the British Army are scarce, the leaked Hakluyt communications place him on the frontline of the Troubles as part of the military’s elite Black Watch unit.

The leaks contain several revealing exchanges between Craig and Pablo Miller, a veteran MI6 officer suspected to have served as the handler for the now-missing Russian turncoat Sergei Skripal. At the time of the Skripal poisoning affair, Miller maintained an address in Salisbury, UK, not far from the Skripals’ home, and worked for Orbis Business Intelligence, the private firm established by Christopher Steele, his former MI6 colleague and the author of the fabrication-filled “Steele Dossier.” (The British government placed Miller’s name under a D Notice immediately after Skripal’s alleged poisoning, preventing the country’s press from mentioning him directly).

In leaked emails, Miller and his Hakluyt colleagues unite around their vitriolic resentment of Irish Catholics, and delight in rehashing the schemes they hatched to push the local Republican population toward violence during the Troubles. These twisted machinations included placing a sandwich on the tombstone of the martyred hunger striker Bobby Sands.

A sandwich on Bobby Sands’ grave had “the desired effect”

In emails to longstanding military and intelligence friends and collaborators, the MI6 vet and Hakluyt leader Keith Craig wistfully recalled a morbid intrigue that occurred while he was posted to the Catholic heartland of West Belfast in March 1983, around the anniversary of the 1981 hunger strike.

Led by Bobby Sands, Irish Republican prisoners starved themselves for prolonged periods in protest of inhumane conditions and persistent torture. Craig reported how Black Watch fighters “much-anticipated” Catholic rioting in support of the hunger strikers, but were disappointed when it failed to materialize.

“The locals were in fact remarkably well-behaved,” Craig lamented.

In a cynical attempt to bring local anger to a boiling point, a Black Watch night patrol taunted the Republican population by placing a bacon sandwich on Bobby Sands’ grave. This “had the desired effect and we were on riot duty for a week,” he recalled.

The leaked admission that British occupiers deliberately instigated riots raise new questions about the August 9, 1983 murder of Thomas ‘Kidso’ Reilly in Belfast by a British soldier who opened fire on the apparently innocent 22-year-old. “He done nothing,” an eyewitness remarked. “He was walking up that road and he was shot.”

The killing of Reilly, a road manager for an array of famous bands, brought crowds of infuriated Catholics into the streets. As the protests grew, British soldiers opened fire on them with plastic bullets, further exacerbating their anger. It now appears clear the British military had every intention of provoking violence to justify its occupation.

In 1984, Reilly’s killer, Ian Thain, became the first British soldier to be convicted of murder in occupied Ireland during the Troubles. Despite receiving a life sentence, he was quickly released and returned to frontline military duty.

MI6 veterans “threw a party” to celebrate Bobby Sands’ death

Since 1968, British military-intelligence operatives have killed hundreds of Catholic civilians with near-total impunity. Keith Craig and his associates at Hakluyt are nonetheless proud of their time in Ulster, and reserve murderous venom for Bobby Sands to this day.

In March 2020, Craig emailed British Army and MI6 associates a photo of a well-known plaque commemorating Sands in Rosslea, a Catholic village in Ulster bordering the Republic of Ireland. An ad for a weight loss business was emblazoned above the plaque.

Among the recipients of the mocking photo was Pablo Miller.

In a separate leaked email, Miller recalled how his Royal Tank Regiment squadron “threw a party” to celebrate Sands’ death. A banner was hung above the squadron’s bar, which read “Bobby Sands DIY.” Miller boasted how “our Fenians joined in enthusiastically,” using a derogatory term for Catholics of Irish descent in the unit. The grim celebration was reportedly “all very non-sectarian.” 

In another leaked email, Miller referred to his habit of singing Protestant songs, “taunting the Fenians, so lustily in my misspent youth.”

In a separate exchange, Keith Craig proclaimed that the motto of Black Watch was “nae [no] poofs [homosexuals] nae blacks nae Fenians.” He nostalgically described the elite special forces unit as, “just enlightened chaps from the back streets of Dundee.”

Black Watch formed a core part of Britain’s active military engagement in occupied Ireland 1969 – 2007, London’s longest in history. The unit was hated by Catholics, and a frequent target of armed Irish Republican groups.

Miller’s casual anti-Irish racism is all the more striking given he himself is a practicing Catholic. In a leaked self-authored account of his service, Miller romantically describes life in the RTR in occupied Ireland, during the late 1980s. As operations manager, he coordinated with the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Ulster Defence Regiment, while ensuring patrolling British forces remained safe from attack. He considered Republican “terrorism” to be “the greatest threat to the British constitution in the second half of the 20th century.”

Miller felt he had “earned the professional respect” of his RUC and UDR counterparts, and established “close” personal relations with some of them. It is uncertain how many “part-time” UDR operatives he met were also members of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA).

The UDA acted as an anti-Catholic death squad throughout the Troubles, in close coordination with the British Army and MI5. Many of its weapons were sourced from UDR barracks, and the Regiment’s soldiers frequently moonlighted in the UDA, committing “terrorist acts.”

From 1970 – 1997, the UDA killed at least 400 people, most of them Catholic civilians. The full scale of its crimes, and the true extent of its collusion with the British Army and intelligence services, will never be known. Convicted UDA terrorists participated in UDR operations throughout this time, and vice versa.

Among the UDA’s most prominent victims was Pat Finucane, a Belfast lawyer executed at home in front of his family in February 1989 for the crime of representing Irish Republican hunger strikers in court.

Prime Minister David Cameron admitted to “shocking levels of collusion” in Finucane’s execution in 2011, however, he rejected requests by the victim’s family for a full inquiry. “There are people in buildings all around here who won’t let it happen,” Cameron explained in private, referencing his office’s proximity to the headquarters of the Ministry of Defence, MI5 and MI6. 

It is for this reason that so many shocking crimes perpetrated by Protestant paramilitary groups in collaboration with British intelligence remain unsolved.

Miller waxes nostalgic about fight to “keep Northern Ireland British”

In private accounts of his involvement in the Troubles, Pablo Miller defended Britain’s dirty war on Irish Catholics. “No state – least of all a liberal democracy – can afford to tolerate with equanimity an existential threat to its constitutional order,” he asserted. Miller went on to express pride in his “small role in helping to defeat Republican terrorism, keep Northern Ireland British and protect the integrity of the British constitution.”

“It may sound a bit pompous or portentous, but Northern Ireland, as part of the United Kingdom, remains very important to me personally,” he continued. “The British Army lost a lot of chaps – and of course it cost even more Northern Irish lives – defending our constitutional order. So I would be a bit miffed, to say the least, if we were ever to return to those times again.” 

Read Pablo Miller’s reflections on his time as a patriotic British Army tank regiment soldier in occupied Northern Ireland in full here.