Some Hope

I salute the enemy on having made the story, not that Britain had gone to war and thus caused attacks of sorts on British personnel in Bahrain and on a British sovereign base on Cyprus, but that Britain had not gone to war hard enough. Would Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage prefer the full bombing of RAF Akrotiri, and of the United Kingdom Naval Support Facility at Mina Salman, where it was opened by the Duke of York in 2018, 10 years after the conviction of Jeffrey Epstein?

Neither the Iranians nor the Chinese classified the then Ruth Smeeth as “strictly protect”. As Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, she was yesterday made a Parliamentary Secretary in the Cabinet Office while remaining a Whip. Not bad for having lost her Commons seat to Jonathan Gullis. Even with the departure of Josh Simons, there are now four Parliamentary Secretaries under Darren Jones, and three Ministers of State, including Dan Jarvis, who delivered today’s Commons statement on Chinese spying. That amounts to a Prime Minister’s Department with, including Keir Starmer, nine Ministers, the most of any Department. They must do something. What is it?

As an ultimately successful parliamentary candidate in 2015, Smeeth-Anderson described herself as “the Deputy Director of Hope Not Hate”. When Labour returned to office in 2024, then Anna Turley was both a Director and a Trustee of Hope Not Hate. At committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act, the evidence of Hope Not Hate was given by Liron Woodcock-Velleman, who was then a Labour councillor in London like Sam Gould. Both are now convicted paedophiles. Gould offended while on the staff Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was not much more than six years ago.

In 2015, Streeting chaired the Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. On Tuesday 2 September last year, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

Phillips had been supported for Leader by Hilary Armstrong and by Armstrong’s erstwhile staffer, Peter Kyle. Both Joe Docherty and Matthew Doyle were introduced to the House of Lords by Armstrong, whose Whips’ Office in the Commons had included all three of Phil Woolas (did someone say something about electoral fraud?), Ivor Caplin and Dan Norris. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote for the Iraq War, and here we go again. Norris does not turn up to Parliament, but he has one of the best voting records, because despite his own suspension from the Labour whip, his proxy vote is cast every single time by the Labour Whips. Armstrong was the political patroness, both of Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Kyle. Armstrong remains an active Labour member of the Lords, giving it as her institutional affiliation when she endorsed a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. As the young people say, every accusation is a confession.

That right-wing Labour machine gets almost everywhere. Sir Robin Wales, the man who made Newham what it is today, is now Reform UK’s London Director of Local Government, while his close ally, Clive Furness, is that party’s candidate for directly elected Mayor of Newham. When Robert Jenrick promised a high profile defector from Labour, then we had been expecting Peter Mandelson. Still, Jenrick has signed up Reform to Gordon Brown’s surrender of democratic political control over monetary policy, and to George Osborne’s and Nick Clegg’s Office for Budget Responsibility, while Reform is so opposed to the importation of foreign disputes and to their influence over British policy that Richard Tice visits from Dubai to address rallies of émigrés waving foreign flags on the streets of London to demand that Britain invade Iran in support of two foreign powers.

The Epstein Class encompasses centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and the world’s only famous anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist. The Greens are probably the party that Noam Chomsky would support in Britain, and he ought to be asked the question. Hope Not Hate has never campaigned against the Green Party. Gorton and Denton has done its work. Now do not vote for any party or candidate for whom anyone in the Epstein Files would vote, or against whom Hope Not Hate would not campaign. And oppose any measure such as digital ID or the abolition of most trial by jury, and supremely oppose any war such as that on Iran, which aligned with the Epstein Class interest. That interest is hate, not hope.