Venom

Zack Polanski deserves ridicule for his claims to be able to enlarge women's breasts by hypnosis, and Louise Ellman deserves the same for her claim to have been able to read Jeremy Corbyn's "antisemitic thoughts". Presumably, she considers that he still has them, most recently his condemnation of piracy.

Unhinged hysterics are in the ascendant. Nine years ago, no national emergency was declared after the London Bridge attack. No marches were banned. A COBRA meeting was called after eight deaths, aside from the three perpetrators, plus 48 injuries, 21 of them critical. This week, it took only two of the 150 to 212 knife attacks committed per day in the United Kingdom. Both were committed by the same man. They were two out of the three by him that day, none of which killed anyone.

A white suspect who had already been Tasered would not have been repeatedly kicked in the head by the Police in broad daylight in the middle of the street, much less would the Police have allowed an enforcer for the local "community leaders" to join in, albeit mostly in the classic pose of the bullies' weedy hanger-on, that of holding down the victim. Who had already been Tasered. Take as long as you need.

When it came to the two Green council candidates who had been arrested, if they were charged, then it would look like dancing to Keir Starmer's tune while exacting revenge on Polanski, while if they were not, then the initials arrests would look like dancing to Starmer's tune while exacting revenge on Polanski. Yet neither one week before elections, nor at any other time, has there ever been any Police rebuke by open letter, or any arrest of council candidates with spicy social media histories, when, as has happened repeatedly, Nigel Farage has threatened to bring private prosecutions when the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have not jumped high enough on his orders.

Legacy Youth Zone, Indeed

Steven Downes writes:

Sir Keir Starmer’s niece is a local election candidate in Croydon.

Ellie Sandover is a Labour candidate in Bensham Manor, the second safest Labour ward in the borough.

Sandover was selected in August last year, among the first to be announced of Labour’s full slate of 70 council candidates standing in the local elections next Thursday.

Two of Bensham Manor’s sitting councillors, Eunice O’Dame and Enid Mollyneux, both black women, were blocked by Labour from standing as candidates in 2026. For most of the past four years, Mollyneux has been Labour’s shadow cabinet member for community safety.

Asked about Sandover’s Uncle Keir, one Croydon Labour official today claimed, “That’s news to me,” although they avoided providing an outright denial.

Labour members who live in Bensham Manor say that Sandover’s family relationship to the Prime Minister is known by Croydon MPs Sarah Jones and Natasha Irons. In May and June last year, Sandover worked as a parliamentary intern for Jones, a junior minister in Starmer’s government.

Sandover worked at Croydon’s Legacy Youth Zone for the last year, leaving her position as “youth engagement lead” at the end of March.

In her mid-20s, former BRIT School pupil Sandover has a degree from the Central School of Speech and Drama, and while she was working at Legacy and in Sarah Jones’s parliamentary office last year, she also managed to complete her Masters in law.

Sandover’s mother is Katy Swabey, one of Sir Keir’s three siblings, and the twin of Nick Starmer, who died, aged 60, in December 2024.

Swabey, a qualified nurse, works in the care sector. It was Swabey to whom Starmer, when the leader of the opposition, referred to as “my sister is a poorly-paid care worker” in a Prime Minister’s Questions back-and-forth with Boris Johnson in 2021.

Swabey grew up with her brother Keir in Oxted, from where Starmer has said in recent interviews that he would often travel into Croydon to visit the Whitgift Centre. Starmer’s not been seen anywhere near Croydon recently, and Labour campaign strategists probably wouldn’t want the him turning up any time between now and polling day on May 7, for risk of costing Rowenna Davis, Sandover and other candidates even more votes.

Labour members in Bensham Manor have also noted how Sandover has been rarely sighted recently, suggesting that she might have gone on holiday during the short campaign period, though this has not been confirmed.

On social media, at a crucial time in the election campaign, Sandover’s last canvassing selfie was posted on April 9. Flytipping and uneven pavements were the residents’ concerns Sandover heard on that occasion, “no small issues for people in the place they call home”, she tweeted.

Where Sandover’s home might be, though, she won’t say, as Labour members in Bensham Manor are becoming concerned at the way she has been “parachuted into a safe Labour seat”.

One concerned resident said, “Ellie’s a very new member to the party.” The usual requirement by the Labour Party is for those seeking selection as a candidate to have been a member for at least six months – which suggest that Sandover must have been a party member by at least February 2025 were she eligible to be selected that August.

Labour, of course, is used to selection controversies in Croydon, with four people facing charges of cybercrime offences over the 2023 Croydon East parliamentary selection.

Bensham Manor ward is in Croydon West, the constituency of MP Sarah Jones.

“Bensham Manor members disappointed no selection happened,” one member alleged.

“Members are disappointed that Ellie is not doing the work,” they added. Members were already “missing Enid Mollyneaux”, they said.

“Ellie’s not very visible in campaign or community.”

Sandover did not respond to Inside Croydon’s questions today about her uncle who lives in Downing Street, although social media does seem to suggest she has visited No.10 at least once.

Devices

SA Mathieson writes:

London cops are being told by their staff association to be “extremely cautious” about carrying work devices off duty, after the Metropolitan Police Service (“MPS”) deployed Palantir’s technology to investigate hundreds of its own officers.

The Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents more than 30,000 MPS officers, is considering legal action over the force’s use of the US firm’s AI to analyse employee data, including location tracking.

“Courageous colleagues across London do not deserve to be treated with this level of suspicion by their Big Brother Bosses,” said Matt Cane, the federation’s general secretary, in a statement.

“For several weeks, the federation has known of Met’s intention to upgrade its Lawful Business Monitoring software, yet we were never informed that the upgrade would include the deployment of Palantir’s artificial intelligence. This continuous 24/7 geo-location tracking is highly intrusive and risks monitoring officers when they are off duty, on rest days or at home. This presumption of wrongdoing and attack on officers’ personal lives is unacceptable.”

The MPS said last week it had introduced new capabilities with Palantir – best-known for its military and security work – to consolidate professional standards data the force holds on its officers.

“This represents a significant step forward, enabling a stronger public health style approach focused on early identification, prevention and proportionate intervention,” it said, citing examples such as flagging staff who rarely attend work and yet have declared a second job.

The MPS said Palantir’s service has already helped identify serious corruption leading to the arrest of two officers and the suspension of two more. It is also investigating 98 officers for abuse of the shift roster IT system, with 500 others sent prevention notices, and is assessing 42 senior leaders for misconduct after they breached the hybrid working policy.

Additionally, 12 officers face gross misconduct proceedings for failing to declare Freemasonry membership, with 30 more sent prevention notices for suspected but uncorroborated links to the organisation.

“By bringing together the information we already lawfully hold, we can identify risk earlier, act faster and be fairer and more consistent,” said MPS commissioner Sir Mark Rowley in a statement.

“Alongside new vetting powers, this gives us the tools we need to remove those who should not be in policing and strengthen culture for the future.”

The deployment is part of a broader technology push under Rowley, who has expanded the force’s use of drones and live facial recognition (“LFR”). A legal challenge to the force’s use of LFR failed just last week.

London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, was not consulted on the Palantir contract, which fell below the £500,000 threshold requiring mayoral scrutiny, according to the BBC. A spokesperson said Khan nonetheless has concerns about “using public money to support firms who act contrary to London’s values.”

The Register has asked Palantir to comment.

Clever, Inquisitive, Contrarian

Of events going back to when the Conservatives were in office, five of Reform UK’s eight MPs were Conservative Party members, four were Conservative MPs, and two were Cabinet Ministers, Kathleen Stock (apparently she no longer uses “Professor”) writes:

Back when I worked at Sussex University, I sat through a lot of meetings. To relieve the tedium, I used to note changing fashions in language; bureaucratic phrases arriving from other institutions and working their way mimetically through management brains. As I remember it, there was a lot of dizzying movement: many deep dives into data and much drilling into figures; endless circling back, driving forward, and cascading downwards. The contrast with our sedentary laptop lifestyle was marked.

Policy documents would arrive full of empty second-hand phrases, awkwardly strung together. For instance: “The curriculum shall not rely on or reinforce stereotypical assumptions about trans people, and any materials within relevant courses and modules will positively represent trans people and trans lives.” This was one of several overbearing clauses in Sussex’s “Trans and Nonbinary Equality Policy Statement”, launched with internal fanfare in 2018. The wording came from a template provided by Advance HE, an organisation supposedly concerned with improving teaching standards in the higher education sector. It was robotically copied by several universities, Sussex among them.

Last year, the Office for Students issued a large fine to Sussex on the basis of introducing this policy, and cited my adverse experiences there as evidence of its chilling effect on academic freedom. Indeed, while I was working as a philosophy lecturer, attempting to broach thorny issues of sex and gender while avoiding disciplinary investigations from management, the mere sight of a link to this particular policy in an official email would cause significant clenching of my jaw. But this Wednesday, the passive-aggressive wording sidled back into my life, to enrich my dentist further. The High Court ruled that the fine had been unlawful, and the Office for Students had misapplied its own rules.

Central to the judgment was the finding that the trans policy did not in fact count as a “governing document” — meaning that the Office for Students was wrong to conclude it ever seriously breached their regulations. Yet on the ground at the time, the policy felt very much like a governing document. Indeed, it seemed positively Stalinesque in its effect. It combined with several other EDI policies and communications to inculcate a general feeling of menace: warnings about transphobia and hate speech; instructions about preferred pronouns and how exactly to apologise if you got them wrong; links to helplines for those affected by speech-based bigotry, and trans flags fluttering all over the shop.

But according to this week’s ruling, “governing documents” in this context only ever means constitutional texts such as statutes and charters, not policies attempting to force change in cultural values or behavioural norms. And the judge also ruled that the OFS failed to consider other Sussex policies defending freedom of speech, supposedly more definitive of the institutional stance — though as I recall, these were squirrelled away in remote corners of the website, given far less prominence in everyday life.

There are other points in the ruling, less easy to paraphrase. Though the overall verdict is clear enough — the OFS messed up badly, misunderstood its own regulations, and also showed bias in its determination to make an example of Sussex — much of the text is taken up with the byzantine interaction of particular OFS regulations and Sussex documents, not easy for the non-specialist to decipher. Still, other matters are made transparently clear. As pertaining to the OFS’s academic freedom director, Arif Ahmed, for instance, the judge explicitly found that there was “no vitiating apparent bias in respect of Dr Ahmed’s personal role in the decision-making”, and that Sussex’s attempts to demonstrate otherwise had failed.

But history is written by the victors, as they say; and yesterday the victorious Vice-Chancellor Sasha Roseneil was doing the media rounds, calling for Ahmed’s head nonetheless. Originally a Cambridge philosopher of language, he is well-known within free speech circles for his refreshingly unadorned critiques of emotional safetyism within universities, including an earlier successful fight to see Cambridge remove a regulation requirement to be “respectful” towards opposing points of view. It would be completely in keeping with our times to see a confident plain speaker like him ousted by someone whose warm and fuzzy aim for her organisation, as of yesterday, is to “continue to focus on creating an open, inclusive and respectful campus culture”.

Though herself a sociologist, Roseneil also seemed in the mood to do a bit of historical reconstruction, waxing lyrical about the university’s “proud history of being the place where the most contentious issues of the day are aired”. During court proceedings earlier this year, Sussex’s barrister even went so far as to call the university a “bastion of free speech”. Reader, I laughed. Perhaps it was once so, and could be again; I have no idea, having relinquished my former connections. But it may not surprise you to learn that this is not my recollection of the place; and nor can it really be Roseneil’s. She arrived to run it in 2022, a year after I had left.

I have described my Sussex experiences too often to rehearse them here again. By now, I am quite bored of remembering, so God knows how everyone else feels. But for an economical snapshot of what life was like back then, consider the tone and content of this “Dean’s update” email, sent by my line manager to all staff in the arts and humanities in April 2021, including me, and preserved on the internet for posterity. In particular, attend to the lengthy sections on “Equality, Diversity, Inclusion” and “LGBTQ+ inclusion”, bearing in mind that this deathless managerial prose was composed years after my public complaints about Stonewall’s overreach had first attracted local acts of animosity, and five months before the large scale protests against me started. And if you think this sounds like an “open” or even “respectful” environment in which to criticise the presence of males in women’s prisons or the medical transition of minors, I have an extremely scientific encyclopaedia of gender identities to sell you.

For those who are big fans of such things, I’m sure the High Court result will be triumphantly received as proof that stories about my tumultuous time at Sussex were always overdone. The judge stated in her ruling that she was not adjudicating on the substance of those events, about which the then-Vice-Chancellor expressed profound regret at the time. Roseneil also stressed the separateness of the two matters in her own statement. But in my experience, you can’t expect people who believe in magical gender essences to care much about finer details. In any case, whatever they are saying I’m not reading it, having blissfully given up monitoring my public image in the eyes of such people a long time ago.

For related reasons, I am not clued up on exactly what this means for the sector as a whole; and nor do I really wish to remedy the deficit. But from the outside, it seems that one astonishing thing to have emerged from the ruling is that existing free speech statutes have literally nothing meaningful to say about the hundreds of politicised documents that have proliferated like weeds in British universities in the last decade, praising some forms of expression as desirable and proscribing others as suspicious or outright hateful; fuelling a culture of student complaints, disciplinary investigations, and fear.

Perfectly rationally in the circumstances, thousands of academics are still self-censoring, having taken note of the finger-wagging policies appearing on the website, the sententious managerial sermons flowing into their inbox, the politicised commemorations and flags, the aggressivity of activist staff networks, and the extremely selective forms of “lived experience” highlighted by the institution as morally instructive. The High Court judgement is based on the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA), and implies it is not the regulator’s concern whether a university’s culture produces intimidating obstacles to freedom of expression like these, or avoids them. If this is true, it can only emphasise the total irrelevancy of HERA to freedom of expression in the modern context, and the urgent need for a different approach. The new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has yet to be enacted, and one can only hope it will do much better.

For ultimately it is the moral crazes rippling periodically through universities that constitute the biggest threat to freedom of expression there, and the regulator needs to catch up. These are fuelled partly by innate staff susceptibility, and partly by more hard-headed desires of managers to hop onto whatever bandwagon students are currently riding, hoping to benefit from larger application numbers and better student scores. They don’t tend to result in changes to foundational constitutions, but they do produce large numbers of suffocating bureaucratic tendrils, along with a lot of busywork: new policies and guidelines to keep people in line; marketing messages to tweak, and social media campaigns to launch; workshops for staff re-education, and fresh positions of power for true believer staff to occupy.

In this stifling environment, better regulations would of course be welcome; but the country also needs to decide what universities are actually for. Are they just an expensive means of teaching middle-class kids to mouth certain attractive words and phrases, with which they can then drive forward progress, take deep dives into inequality, circle back to kindness, and drill down into the oppressive status quo? Or might they be better championed as places where such heartwarming, mind-numbing platitudes can be challenged and even mocked, without personal or professional cost? Having left the university sector behind me, I’ve now got full freedom to think for myself. It’s a glorious gift; one that all the clever, inquisitive, contrarian people still stuck in ivory towers and redbrick towerblocks can only dream of.

Starmer’s Incredible Rise To Power

Jonathan Cook writes:

Few believe British prime minister Keir Starmer when he says he learnt only recently that Peter Mandelson, his political mentor in the Labour party, failed to receive the security clearance needed to be appointed as ambassador to the United States in late 2024.

Mandelson has become politically toxic since last September, when it became clearer how deeply he was connected to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – including the fact that, while in government in 2009 and 2010, Mandelson passed on insider information that would have been of considerable benefit to Epstein and others.

Starmer has been desperate to off-load responsibility, accusing Oliver Robbins, the then recently arrived top civil servant in the Foreign Office, of failing to tell him that Mandelson had been denied clearance.

Robbins, in turn, told a committee of MPs this week that by the time he took up his post the deal on Mandelson was done. Starmer’s office put “constant pressure” on his department to retroactively approve Mandelson’s appointment.

His testimony to a parliamentary committee suggests that, given the febrile climate in Westminster at the time, he may have been misled over what the vetting process had discovered in a bid to smooth Mandelson’s path to Washington.

These claims and counter-claims serve chiefly to obscure the central fact Starmer is either a liar or grossly incompetent.

Mandelson was sacked as ambassador last September over his ties to Epstein. Either Starmer failed to check on the politically explosive matter of Mandelson’s security clearance in the meantime, or, more likely, he did and has been “misleading” – that is, lying to – the media and parliament ever since.

As Starmer himself admitted to the House of Commons this week – to raucous laughter – the whole story sounds “incredible.”

In truth, everything about Starmer’s rise to power – and the media’s permanent incuriosity about how that rise was engineered – is incredible.

The deeply troubling backstory to Starmer’s political evolution is yet to be told by the establishment media. As critical as they currently are of his treatment of Mandelson, the media are telling only half the story – the surface part.

The prime minister’s political subservience and vulnerability to Mandelson – why Starmer was determined to promote him to the post of ambassador despite the all-too-conspicuous dangers – have gone largely unexamined by the media.

The answers are available elsewhere, such in investigative journalist Paul Holden’s recent book The Fraud, an examination of Starmer’s rise to power, which has still not been reviewed by a single mainstream publication.

Secret Operations 

At the very least, the real story should have come to light when Mandelson, the grand old man of the Labour right, was arrested in February on suspicion of “misconduct in public office.” He is accused of passing on confidential market information, in his role as business secretary, to Epstein.

That followed the resignation weeks earlier of Morgan McSweeney, Mandelson’s protégé who propelled Starmer to high office. He was forced to quit as the prime minister’s chief of staff over his involvement in Mandelson’s appointment.

Around the same time, Josh Simons, then a minister in the Cabinet Office and a Starmer loyalist, was investigated – by the Cabinet Office – over revelations that he funded a covert smear campaign against journalists critical of Starmer.

Simons has since stepped down from the government.

There is a thread connecting all three figures – a thread that ties them intimately to Starmer and the current furore.

They were each essential to the operations of a shadowy think tank called Labour Together. It was founded in 2015 in the immediate wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader.

The group quickly strayed from its ostensible remit of uniting a party divided by Corbyn’s election between, on the one hand, hostile MPs and a hostile party bureaucracy and, on the other, the Labour membership. Labour Together’s real, covert task was to deepen those divisions.

With the help of rich donors, Labour Together created a secret slush fund worth at least £730,000 to wage a public relations war against Corbyn and the left – a campaign that was enthusiastically supported by the establishment media.

With Corbyn finally ousted, Labour Together then mounted a new operation, using those same funds, to deceive party members into crowning Starmer as leader on the basis he would continue Corbyn’s policies.

Following his election, Starmer immediately set about purging Labour of its left wing, driving down the record membership numbers brought in by Corbyn and relying instead on rich business donors. Labour under Starmer became another party entirely captured by the business class. The Conservative and Reform parties were thereby given permission to hew even further to the right, to distinguish themselves from Labour.

Skating Close to Illegality 

For the past decade, Labour politics has been a charade – and one that not only betrayed the values it publicly claimed to espouse but skated constantly close to illegality. 

The Electoral Commission fined Labour Together for unlawful conduct after McSweeney repeatedly failed to abide by its warnings to declare the money wealthy benefactors were pouring into his slush fund.

This was not an oversight. It was because McSweeney did not want Labour Together’s activities – subverting the democratic process by using Big Money – to become public knowledge. The very nature of Labour Together’s anti-democratic agenda necessitated operating in the shadows.

It was for that reason that Corbyn called in February for an independent public inquiry into what he termed the “sinister operations” of Labour Together.

The government responded dismissively. But that is because, were the threads to unravel further, they would almost certainly lead directly to Starmer’s door.

Mandelson was one of the driving forces behind Labour Together, famously alluding to his role in a 2017 comment that “every day, I try to do something to save the Labour Party from his [Corbyn’s] leadership.”

That same year McSweeney took over the reins of Labour Together, using the undeclared funds to covertly character-assassinate Corbyn and then dupe Labour members into voting for his and Mandelson’s preferred candidate, Starmer.

In late 2023, a year after taking over Labour Together, Simons turned to the same character-assassination playbook developed by McSweeney.

This time, instead of smearing the Corbyn-supporting Labour left, he targeted a handful of journalists who had started to dig into the covert, and unlawful, operations behind Starmer’s rise to power.

Simons commissioned a report, codenamed Operation Cannon, into the journalists’ “backgrounds and motivations.” It claimed, without evidence, that these journalists had colluded in a supposed Kremlin-backed hack of the Electoral Commission. 

Slush Fund

Simons went so far as to pass on this disinformation about the journalists to the National Cyber Security Centre, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), presumably so they could be investigated for breaching national security. Tellingly, the centre refused to get involved.

What Simons was up to is not hard to fathom. Labour Together was trying to create a British version of the U.S. Democratic party’s years-long, fruitless efforts to promote a “Russiagate” conspiracy theory that Donald Trump had colluded with the Kremlin to get elected.

The goal in both cases was similar.

The Democrats hoped to foreclose any examination of their incompetence and institutional corruption in losing the 2016 presidential election by attributing any such discussion to Russian disinformation.

Labour Together, meanwhile, wanted to shut down any examination by journalists of its own misdeeds by attributing them to Russian disinformation. The aim was to scare these journalists away from scrutinising Labour Together’s activities.

But the truth is the establishment media continue to have little appetite for the bigger Labour Together story, even though its journalists have known about the group’s illicit activities since at least 2021, when the Electoral Commission issued its fine for 20 breaches of electoral law.

More likely, some in the media knew what was going on even earlier, when McSweeney and others close to Starmer were ignoring Electoral Commission demands that the slush fund money be declared.

The media are still resolutely refusing to join the dots – and continuing to allow Labour Together to hide in the shadows, even though it has a starring role in this and the Mandelson story.

The reporting of McSweeney’s fall solely concerns his poor judgement in promoting Mandelson to the U.S. ambassadorship, not about his unlawful behaviour as head of Labour Together.

The reporting of Mandelson’s fall is about his alleged insider trading with Epstein, not about his conniving with Labour Together to undermine the democratic process.

The investigation of Simons is attributed personally to his poor judgment in financing a report against journalists, rather than the fact that this smear campaign was entirely of a piece with Labour Together’s activities over many years.

In an uncritical BBC report last month Simons claimed only that he had been “naïve” in colluding in the smearing of the journalists rather than concede that it was Labour Together’s modus operandi.

In so far as Labour Together has been mentioned in this story, it is only because it provided the pot of money Simons used to target journalists who had fallen foul of Starmer.

Tellingly, Simons alludes to his and Labour Together’s real agenda in the BBC account, telling the state broadcaster that he acted – to damage the reputation of journalists – out of fear that their reporting “might be used to retell the story of the antisemitism crisis that happened under [Labour] and to downplay it.”

In truth, this decade-long campaign desperately needs retelling – in a way that makes clear how the Labour right, backed by establishment media like the BBC, weaponised antisemitism to oust Corbyn.

Not surprisingly, outlets like the BBC are not likely to dig deeper to reveal what really took place.

Media Cover-Up

Instead, the media are treating these episodes as individual failings rather than evidence of institutional capture of the Labour party by the Epstein class and its hangers-on.

Labour Together emerged as an exercise in democracy subversion to stop a socialist gaining power. And it then continued as an exercise in democracy subversion to install permanent guardrails against the Labour party ever being led by anyone other than a placeman, like Starmer, for the billionaires.

The point was to make British politics a simulacrum of U.S. politics: two main parties representing – and ensuring the permanent rule of – the super-rich, and mirroring minor internal differences in their perceptions of how to best safeguard their class interests. 

All of this happened in full view over the past decade. But it was impossible to get it into the mainstream.

Even at this stage, the real story is not being allowed to break through. Because it would expose not just corruption at the heart of the British political system but at the heart of the British media system too. 

The state and billionaire-owned media was happy to see democracy covertly subverted if it ensured Corbyn would be prevented from winning power. And the media was equally pleased to promote the Starmer cabal as gatekeepers over who would be allowed to lead the Labour party.

There was a shared interest in entrenching how the system was rigged.

Anyone who doubts that the media has been deeply complicit in the cover-up of Labour Together’s activities should recall that there were journalists – and others – reporting on Labour’s dismantling of internal democracy to preclude the emergence of any kind of meaningful political choice. However, they were denied mainstream attention.

The internal plotting against Corbyn was first highlighted in 2017 by Al Jazeera’s three-part undercover investigation The Israel Lobby, which showed how an Israeli embassy official, Shai Masot, was covertly working with the rightwing Labour factions to use antisemitism to destroy the party leader.

Three years later, as Corbyn stepped down, a cache of internal Labour party documents were leaked showing that the party bureaucracy – loyal to the Mandelson wing – conspired to bring about Corbyn’s downfall. It even prioritized his destruction over winning the closely fought 2017 general election.

Starmer appointed a KC, Martin Forde, to investigate the leak – chiefly, it seems to identify who was responsible and punish them.

Forde would later admit that Starmer’s team had obstructed his work and tried to endlessly delay the report. But when it was finally published in summer 2022, Forde confirmed what was already obvious: that the Labour right had waged a dirty factional war against Corbyn and the left of the party, weaponising antisemitism to tar them.

Months later, Al Jazeera would air a second, four-part investigation, The Labour Files, showing how the party’s right wing – loyal to Mandelson and McSweeney – purged the party’s left wing based in most cases on false accusations, fabrications, misrepresentations and smears.

The documentary fully justified one victim of those purges describing the past few years in Labour as a “criminal conspiracy against its members.”

All of this happened unreported by the media.

The revelation in The Israel Lobby documentary that Labour had been infiltrated by an Israeli spy with the active collusion of sections of its members and MPs to take down a potential prime minister provoked no political or media debate.

The follow-up disclosures in the leaked Labour internal review, the Forde Report and The Labour Files have similarly dropped off the radar, even as the story they tell is the only way to make sense of the serial falls of McSweeney, Mandelson, Simons and, soon, Starmer.

Facts Buried

Similarly, Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, which brings the unlawful activities of Labour Together sharply into focus, is being ignored rather than mined for details of what has really happening in British politics over the past decade.

These resources have all been buried, even as the Mandelson furore fully justifies their vigorous excavation.

There is good reason. Because the plan is to roll out the same, anti-democratic playbook against the Green Party and its leader Zack Polanski, because he is seen as another Corbyn-like figure who refuses to bow down before the Epstein class and rejects the warmongering, money-laundering, resource-grabbing exploits of the western war machine posturing as a NATO “defence” alliance.

Polanski is Jewish, but the signs are already there that this will not stop the same charlatans who defamed Corbyn from “outing” Polanski as an “antisemite.”

It can happen again because the same media that colluded in Starmer’s rise by engineering Corbyn’s downfall will once again do their duty and defend the interests of the billionaire class.

The system is rigged – and the people rigging it are not about to draw our attention to the reality of what they have been up to.