So Farewell Then Morgan McSweeney

In the end, not even the architect of supposedly making Labour electable again - by the masterstroke of scoring 560,000 fewer votes in 2024 than when the party, so the media establishment narrative goes, was totally unelectable back in 2019 - could save his own skin, not after the revelations concerning Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein.

So it was that Morgan McSweeney fell on his sword, to the great relief of all those who wished he had never wielded it at all, and the thinly disguised pleasure of all those Labour activists who had to take the abuse on the doorstep during the 2019 campaign, knowing now that McSweeney and his cabal were at that same time working to throw the election.

It was to the yet further relief of all those Labour members who took Keir Starmer at his word when he made his pitch for the Labour leadership, who were lied to in order to get them to back McSweeney’s chosen candidate, the reasoning of The Great Mastermind being that they, like all those voters, would have to return to Labour as they had no other political home.

But, sad to say for the Labour Together clique, the deeply unpleasant McSweeney departing the stage is not going to be the end of it. Not only that, the rest of that clique, especially its most visible representatives, know it, but being of less than perfect courage, are lying low right now, while their hero and his “allies” brief our free and fearless press in a rewriting of reality.

Especially mirth-inducing has been Alex “Billy Liar” Wickham claiming “Allies of Morgan McSweeney say he was not responsible for Peter Mandelson’s appointment, contrary to the narrative pushed by Labour’s soft-left”. Narrative, well-sourced, pushed by the real world, more like. Starmer took the decision to appoint Mandelson, but McSweeney was the cheerleader.

It got worse, with “a colleague” adding “an incalculable loss to the government that has devastated those who know how much he has done for Labour. How fitting that his final act in government is to take full responsibility for others’ mistakes, as he has done for years”. Like he took responsibility for Sue Gray. And Angela Rayner? Nah, someone else briefed against her.

Worse, and oh so tellingly, McSweeney’s resignation statement tells that he is stepping down from The Government. But as Downing Street chief of staff, he was merely a political appointee, a salaried staffer, unelected by any constituency of actual voters. OH WHAT A GIVEAWAY! And thus the assertion that Starmer was not really running the show was confirmed.

What happens next? Steve Howell is another focusing on Labour Together: “McSweeney has resigned, but his collaborators are still there. Labour has no chance of a political recovery unless it completely clears out the discredited Labour Together faction, including [Steve] Reed, [Pat] McFadden, [Wes] Streeting, [John] Healey, [Shabana] Mahmood and Starmer himself”.

Any advance on those names? Martin O’Neill has another: “Now that Morgan McSweeney has 'resigned' as chief of staff, if the Labour Party has any hope of restoring any of its reputation, others figures who were close to Mandelson and did his dirty work also need to be removed. Josh Simons also has to go”. Simons, it seems, commissioned the surveillance of critical journalists.

Pamela Fitzpatrick has another very interesting name to add. “In June 2023 I was trying to make a complaint to Lords Standards about Mandelson’s close association with known peadophile Epstein. Meanwhile Luke Akehurst MP was inviting Mandelson to be guest speaker at a Labour First Dinner”. Careful there, you don’t want to be accused of anti-Semitism!

So will McSweeney’s departure be the end of it? Almost certainly not: if Labour does not just lose the Gorton and Denton by-election, but comes third in a formerly safe seat, and has a seriously bad round of local election results in May, Starmer will be out, if he hasn’t walked already. And no amount of spin, on the subject of how much more electable he is, will save him.

McSweeney is out. Starmer will soon follow him. Just rejoice at that news.

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So Farewell Then New New Labour

How would the Labour leadership seek to rebuild bridges with all those activists who took so much abuse on the doorstep during the 2019 General Election campaign, only to find that the cabal now leading the party had been working to throw the contest? How would they heal the wound of Keir Starmer deliberately lying to get himself elected to the Top Job?

What would a rational and sensible leadership have done? What would a pragmatic and responsive top team have done? What would Nietzsche have done? Ah, but New New Labour does not operate on that intellectual plateau. Hence the revelation that Starmer’s minder Morgan McSweeney was himself being guided by none other than Peter Mandelson.

Mandelson, so utterly devalued by his past, was involved with vetting prospective parliamentary candidates for the 2024 General Election. As if his being appointed UK ambassador to the USA was not unwise enough in itself, the ultimate political slimeball was there once more behind the scenes.

But it was not the UK’s free and fearless press that exposed the extent to which Mandelson had infiltrated Labour, the reality of his closeness to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, or his willingness to allegedly pass the most confidential of information to the USA’s best-connected child abuser. That has come as a result of releases of The Epstein Files in the USA.

So many of those within the media establishment were gushing their praise of Mandelson when he was given the plum job in DC. So many of them were more than happy to socialise with the Prince of Darkness. So many of them, like so many senior Labour MPs, now claim they didn’t really know what Mandelson was like. Except they did, or they were totally naive.

Anyone with brain plugged in and a hole in their backside knew of the all too close friendship between Mandelson and Epstein. And that Mandelson, for instance, stayed at Epstein’s pad in New York City during the time that the latter first spent in jail. So the He-Lied-To-Us-Which-Means-We’re-The-Real-Victims-Here schtick is total baloney. It won’t bring alienated Labour activists back into the fold. Nor will it take the heat off Starmer and McSweeney.

As things stand, Labour can wave goodbye to the Gorton and Denton by-election. Wes Streeting can wave goodbye to any chance of becoming Labour leader - another media establishment creation, someone the media likes, but who is disliked by many of the voting public. It’s likely that without Starmer and McSweeney both walking the plank, it’ll only get worse.

Starmer is now saying he’s really, really, really sorry. He’s apologising profusely to Epstein’s victims. But it’s not Starmer who pushed for Mandelson to be given the DC job. It’s McSweeney. And for all those disillusioned activists, those who have left the Labour Party in their droves, this will not cut it. The sleazy, authoritarian, intolerant cabal running the party has to go.

Without their ground game at election time, Labour are finished. After that by-election comes a round of local elections. Shortage of foot soldiers means another horrendous set of results looms large. Removal of those who shat on Sue Grey, may have been not unconnected with Angela Rayner resigning, and who removed so many prospective candidates, is the only way out.

That means Starmer has to go. And working the PM from the shadows, Morgan McSweeney has to go, too, together with his cabal on Labour’s NEC. The media establishment has to tell this rabble of creeps that they will no longer accept the whisper-in-the-ear-drip-of-poison briefing. The Labour Together cancer must be cut out before it kills the party stone dead.

Senior Labour MPs, many in and around the media establishment, and those who have bankrolled those now slowly killing a once great party, need to take a long look in the mirror and realise that they have become the problem. The public is through with the lying, smearing, gaslighting and sleaze. They’re not the masters of the universe. They’re not even very naughty boys.

They’re just a stain on the body politic. And it’s time to wipe it clean.

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Trump Is Gaga - Say So, BBC

There has been a marked reluctance at some media outlets to call out the deteriorating mental state of Combover Crybaby Donald Trump. He rambles incoherently, has difficulty walking in a straight line, seems disoriented, forgets names and places, mixes up names and places, and lies as often as he draws breath. So it was when he rocked up in Davos this week.

He gave a speech, but for The Donald, just reading out what has been written for him is never enough. The off-piste moment was never far away, and so it came to pass. This is, verbatim, part of his shambling delivery.

“But equally importantly, we're cracking down on more than $19 billion in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits. Can you believe that Somalian, they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. We say these are low IQ people. How did they go into Minnesota and steal all that money? We have, you know, they’re pirates, they're good pirates, but we shoot them out of the water just like we shoot the drug boats out.” Drug boats in Minnesota?

There was more. “They're not pirating too many boats lately, do you notice? When they go out into those boats, they want to take over a billion and a half dollar tanker, load it up with oil, and they say, ‘We're going to blow up your boat, they have powerful weapons.’ You hit the side of the boat, you blow the whole thing up. The insurance companies are petrified, so they say, ‘Just give them the boat, we'll give them money instead.’” Eh? Er, do go on.

“And I don't do that. We blow them right to hell out of the water. We see them going out, we blow them out of the water. We don't have any pirates so much anymore. We do. They won't be there long. We've cut down with the hitting of the boats that are loaded up with drugs, including submarines.”

So not in Minnesota, then. And there was yet more. “Can you believe they actually buy some, they call mini subs. Very fast. They're meant for drugs. We've knocked out to them the Democrats. They were fishing. You have ruined somebody's fishing. We can't, I would say, a submarine is not a fishing boat. You don't fish. But we've knocked down drugs by water. The oceans, the sea, by 97.2%. Think of that.” Anyone still hanging on in there?

Because he wasn’t finished. “And I actually say, ‘Who the hell are the 3%?’ Because I would not want to be piled in one of those boats. We knocked them down and now we're going to start on land. We're going to knock it all out. The land is the easy part. What we did on sea is incredible. And that's our great military.” He’s not all there. But not all media outlets are saying so.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic was saying so. “No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous”. Aaron Rupar added “Trump is now confusing Greenland and Iceland”. Three times.

Adam Schwarz noted “Trump in Davos, Switzerland: ‘Without us, right now you'd all be speaking German’. German is the main language of Switzerland”. Vatnik Soup concluded “While his entourage is in Davos and nobody is controlling his output, you can clearly see Trump as he is: A demented old man in cognitive decline. A mad king. Listen to this and tell me this couldn’t be any elderly man rambling in a nursing home”. So what of the BBC?

Faisal Islam’s report from inside the room did not make any mention of Trump’s incoherent rambling. It did talk of the speech taking a dark turn, but not of the disbelief among those watching. What happened? Has there been another of those words behind the scenes from Robbie Gibb?

We are told that “Trump is shaking the world order more than any president since WW2”. There is a fact check of his “free-wheeling speech”, together with its “contested claims”. The Corporation’s website tells “US allies won't forget Trump Greenland crisis”. But his clear cognitive decline is seemingly off limits. It should not be. Trump is not fit to be President.

As in, yet more unfit than he was at the beginning of his first term. He’s declining before our eyes. Tell us, BBC. That’s what you’re there for.

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Zack Polanski And Anti-Semitism

The Green Party, in no small measure because of its new leader Zack Polanski, is advancing in the opinion polls. One recent survey suggested that Keir Starmer could be vulnerable to losing his seat to a Green opponent. And then, by total coincidence you understand, the nudges and winks began, the first signs of a concerted attempt to pin anti-Semitism on the Greens.

But here a problem entered: Polanski is Jewish. What to do? Fortunately for anyone needing to see the direction of travel, help was on hand from the so-called “Anti-Semitism Czar”, “Lord” John Mann, who is hot on the slightest hint of anti-Semitism, providing someone explains it to him first, nice and slowly. “Lord” Mann suddenly decided to go after Polanski.

In doing so, he revealed the Modus Operandi: “he refuses to deal with antisemitism in his own Party”. Owen Jones spelt out what is likely to happen next. “Expect the state to try and do over the Green Party on bogus claims of institutionalised antisemitism. This could involve John Mann, and certainly the EHRC … whose Commissioners are handpicked by the government”.

And for those whose first thought is to dismiss Jones’ take as a step too far, he added this: “You might think that trying to crush the only political party led by a Jewish person on grounds of antisemitism is just too ludicrous to pull off. But I would not put it past them”. After all, as he observed of “Lord” Mann, “He's not Jewish, and he is lecturing the only Jewish party leader on antisemitism”. Mann, meanwhile, got a little tetchy with Polanski.

“Perhaps you can identify which antisemitism you have dealt with inside your party as leader? And every manifestation of antisemitism that I have chosen to ignore”. Well, apart from not defending Polanski against the recent cartoons showing him with A Really Big Nose, there are other instances.

Like now disgraced former alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson authoring a novel which “was also criticised for depicting Jews as ‘controlling the media’ and being able to ‘fiddle’ elections, an evidently antisemitic trope”. Like Jacob Rees Mogg referring to Oliver Letwin and John Bercow (who are both Jewish) as “Illuminati”, an old anti-Semitic trope.

Like Suella Braverman talking of “Cultural Marxism”, a Nazi-era anti-Semitic slur. Like Priti Patel using the phrase “North London Metropolitan Elite”. Maybe I failed to notice “Lord” John Mann’s interventions in all these instances. Nor did I notice “Lord” Mann being on the case of Reform UK Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage over recent allegations.

But all those instances were from the right, while Polanski is most definitely on the left of the political spectrum. Moreover, he “has stated that he believes that the Gaza war is a genocide and should be treated as such by the UK government”, thus drawing to the Greens an increasing number of voters who empathise with the plight of the Palestinians and are critical of Israel.

On top of that, “He has expressed the belief that the British government conflates Jewish people with Israel, and that this ‘makes [him] feel less safe as a Jewish person’”, which will infuriate those running the Labour Party, some of whom actively undermined former leader Jeremy Corbyn in an attempt to throw the 2019 General Election.

Polanski has said he could not imagine supporting a coalition Government led by Keir Starmer, which will also infuriate the pro-Starmer cabal. But having “Lord” Mann going after him is risky, especially as “Mann faced criticism for allegedly perpetuating racial stereotypes against Romani people and travellers in a booklet he produced on antisocial behaviour in 2007”.

No matter, “Lord” Mann has carried on taunting Polanski, playing the victim and suggesting a meeting. File under pointless. But, as Mrs Beckermann tells Charlie Croker in The Italian Job, it wasn’t an accident. Whether it is low grade clowns like “Lord” John Mann, or the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press, the smearing of Zack Polanski will get worse.

The Green Party leader needs to learn from what happened to Corbyn. Because Mann has let slip that this is what is intended for Zack.

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Labour Weasels On Venezuela

Combover Crybaby Donald Trump, the living and still breathing definition of an amateur human being, has ordered the armed services of the United States to, effectively, invade Venezuela, which is a sovereign state. Added to this minor breach of international law, he has had the country’s President, Nicolas Maduro, kidnapped, along with his wife.

This is in addition to several acts of piracy upon the high seas, where oil tankers that had loaded up in Venezuelan ports, along with their cargoes, were boarded and seized. Could the charge sheet get any longer? Don’t ask: Maduro has been put on media display, in a flagrant breach of the Geneva Conventions. Worse, Trump did not get Congressional approval beforehand.

But he did consult with the oil industry, so for him, that’s all right, then. He has decreed that the USA is going to “run” Venezuela, which may interest those who remember the chaos in Iraq, when the USA decided to “run” that country. Whichever way you slice it, this is illegal and corrupt behaviour several times over. Which brings us to the international community’s response.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro - whose country is in the line of fire, remember - was unequivocal: “A clan of paedophiles wants to destroy our democracy. To keep Epstein's list from coming out, they send warships to kill fishermen & threaten our neighbour with invasion for their oil”. China has demanded that the US release Maduro. So has Iran.

So, New New Labour, what is the UK Government response to be? How would a confident Government, sure of its interpretation of international law, respond? What would a statesmanlike Prime Minister and his cabinet colleagues do? What would a seasoned human rights lawyer, like Keir Starmer, have done? What would Nietzsche have done?

Sadly, the New New Labour Government, so quick to approve the Israeli removal of water and electricity supplies to Gaza in another display of collective punishment, does not operate on such a lofty intellectual plane, and so the response, when it eventually came, was craven in the extreme.

Here’s Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper: “The UK has consistently rejected Nicolas Maduro’s legitimacy, and called for a peaceful transition of power in Venezuela. I have spoken to our Chargé [d’Affaires] in Caracas, and travel advice has now been updated to advise against all travel to Venezuela … As the Prime Minister has made clear, we support international law”. So you’ll be condemning the US breaches of that international law, won’t you?

As if you need to ask. Instead of any kind of condemnation, Mike Tapp, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Migration and Citizenship, has appeared before the inquisition of Sophy Ridge of Sky News, where he was asked if he would condemn any move by the Trump gang to annex Greenland. “We’re not going to give a running commentary”. Christ on a bike. And it got worse.

He couldn’t say Trump should not invade Greenland? “Diplomacy is delicate, which means we're not here to give a running commentary in the news”. It’s not an intellectually demanding call. Flagrant breaches of international law should be condemned. And what of the UK’s Prime Minister?

Here it comes, per the Guardian. “I want to get all the material facts together and we simply haven’t got the full picture at the moment - it is fast moving”. Meaning he spewed out a word salad of excuses rather than show a hint of backbone. Also, he needed to talk to Trump first. And there we all were believing that the UK was a sovereign state. Silly us, eh?

Steven Swinford of the Murdoch Times has, since then, asserted “Britain will refrain from criticising the US over the capture of Maduro amid concerns about angering Donald Trump”. Airstrip One Redux. He wants to seek closer relationships with the EU, but with his tongue firmly up Trump’s arse, the EU might not want to know. Diplomacy is delicate, dontcha know?

What will it take for New New Labour to get it? Invasion of Greenland? Invasion of Colombia? Handing Ukraine to Putin? Voters who have left Labour will not be returning if this is the level of leadership on show.

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