Taking It On The Chinn?

Keir Starmer has had the Labour report since he became Leader, two weeks ago tomorrow. Nobody named in it has been suspended from the party that once expelled someone for tweeting that she liked Foo Fighters.

How did this clique of would be hangers, burners, and turners of people's faces into dartboards, ever rise to the top of the Labour Party, especially since their political opinions were far to the right of the public mainstream?

Well, between the Iraq War and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, there was more or less nobody in the Labour Party. Such members as it had were mostly old, or inactive, or both. Hardly anybody would ever have applied to be employed by it. Look who did.

As for Starmer, he refused to prosecute MI5 for torture, MI6 for unlawful rendition to Libya, or anyone at all over the deaths of Ian Tomlinson and Jean Charles de Menezes. He did, however, begin the ongoing torture of Julian Assange for exposing war crimes, and threaten to send "benefit cheats" to prison for 10 years.

Starmer was knighted for having refused to prosecute Jimmy Savile, and if anybody treated the Labour Right in the way that it treated everybody else, then there would be a remorseless concentration on that fact, complete with nudges and winks about Starmer's own proclivities.

Poetically, Starmer could and should lose his own seat to Paul Gambaccini. If Gambaccini cannot afford to spend to the limit in Holborn and St Pancras once that limit had come into effect, and to spend without limit there until that day, then Cliff Richard can.

Starmer also turns out to have received £50,000 from Trevor Chinn, a member of the Executive Committee of the infamous British Israel Communications and Research Centre. Chinn also gave £104,000 to the Leadership campaign of Owen Smith, and he has repeatedly made donations to Lisa Nandy. Nandy has been made Shadow Foreign Secretary by Starmer in place of Emily Thornberry, who had been an outspoken and articulate critic of the Saudi war in Yemen, a war that Israel strongly supports.

Another Starmer donor was Lord Myners, who funded first Gordon Brown's Leadership campaign (Brown made him City Minister) and then Change UK, in between which he called for Starmer to become Leader immediately upon his election to Parliament in 2015. Lo and behold, the party's stuff went so far as to embezzle its funds in order to throw the 2017 General Election for the other side. And here we are.

All in all, it is no surprise that Starmer is still talking about Labour anti-Semitism as if there had been such a thing, a proven falsehood that media that had spent four and a half years peddling it obsessively now cannot bring themselves to report as such. Yes, there is other news. But even so.

Meanwhile, serious politics continues elsewhere. The Budget of March 2020 has ended the era that began with the Budget of December 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. Please give generously.