“We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension,” said the grieving father of Henry Nowak. “We want his story to make our streets safer for everyone.”

Nowak, of course, was brutally murdered by Vickrum Digwa, who falsely claimed to be the victim of a racist attack by Nowak, leading police officers to handcuff the dying 18-year-old.

Shortly afterwards, Nigel Farage declared - in some sort of contrived address to the nation: “Henry’s family have responded to this in just the most extraordinarily dignified way, but I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage.”

Later that evening, far-right extremists rioted in the streets of Southampton. They threw rubbish bins, traffic cones and bricks, bared their backsides, performed Nazi salutes. They included members of outright neo-Nazi organisations.

We are heading to a dark place. As I wrote in the Guardian this week, Reform are committed to sweeping authoritarianism, and it would be much easier to establish a tyranny on British shores than in the federal, constitutional United States.

Racists are emboldened by many things: the ongoing social and economic crises, a disastrous government and its failure to address a broken social order, and the ascent of the far-right across the West and beyond.

There is no cordon sanitaire anymore which keeps the far-right out of legitimate, respectable politics. Indeed there is no longer any consensus on what constitutes unacceptably extreme right-wing politics.

Share

Reform is being outflanked by Restore, founded by one of its former MPs, the millionaire Rupert Lowe, which has positioned itself in an even more extreme position. Reform thus adopts more extreme position to stop itself from bleeding support to its new competitor. The Tories then do the same with Reform. Labour then does the same with the Tories. We are trapped in a right-wing ratchet.

It is striking how racists go through a list of targets. The likes of far-right criminal Tommy Robinson long claimed to champion Sikhs, in a sort of divide-and-rule attack on British Muslims.

Yet despite some far-right activists portraying them as loyal subjects, Sikhs have been repeatedly attacked by racists who think they’re Muslims. In one recent hideous case a Sikh woman was raped by a man who screamed that she was a ‘fucking Muslim bitch’ during the attack.

But now British Sikhs find themselves under attack. The far-right will come for all minorities - and anyone deemed subversive - eventually.

Indeed it should be noted that Henry Nowak was British-Polish. For a period, British Poles were in the firing line.

Subscribe now

One study in 2008 found that crime was one of the main topics that came up in British newspapers when Polish migrants were discussed.

In that same year, the Federation of Poles in Great Britain said of media coverage:

In our view, the worst examples linked Poles with words and phrases like ‘feckless’, ‘chancers’, ‘race riots’, ‘swamp the NHS’, ‘fears for schools’, ‘cut-price treatment’, ‘push British graduates to back of the jobs queue’, ‘killers, drug smugglers and rapist’. We consider that this has made Poles living in the UK feel vulnerable and persecuted.

We need to unite people of different minorities under a common banner. That is: unity of the majority - irrespective of ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation and identity - against the elites.

The far right exist to deflect fury away from those elites. Right now, the wind is in their sails. We need to focus our minds on the present danger.

“Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

That is reportedly what Donald Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu: the Israeli prime minister wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

There is more - which we will come on to.

But it’s first important to confront the inevitable sense of deja vu. Under Joe Biden, there was a near-constant drip of leaks to the media suggesting that the then-president was displeased with Netanyahu, exasperated by Netanyahu, furious with Netanyahu, losing patience with Netanyahu. These leaks often found their way to Axios, and especially to its reporter Barak Ravid, an Israeli journalist and former Israeli intelligence officer.

Take January 2024: four months into the genocide. It was reported that, on 23 December 2023, Biden ended a phone call with Netanyahu by saying, “This conversation is over,” after the Israeli prime minister refused to release Palestinian tax revenues he was withholding. A US official summed up the mood like this: “The situation sucks and we are stuck. The president’s patience is running out.”

The following month, Politico reported that Biden had called Netanyahu a “bad fucking guy”, which the White House denied.

That same month, NBC News reported that Biden had called Netanyahu an “asshole” and “this guy”, complained that he was “giving him hell”, and found him impossible to deal with. One US official anonymously briefed that Biden “just feels like this is enough. It has to stop.”

In March 2024, Biden was caught on a hot mic being pressed by a Democratic congressman over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. The then-president replied: “I told him, Bibi, and don’t repeat this, but you and I are going to have a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting.”

In April 2024, after Israel slaughtered several foreign aid workers and their Palestinian driver in the bombing of a World Central Kitchen convoy - and therefore provoked outrage because white Westerners were among the victims - a US official told Axios’s Barak Ravid: “Biden is pissed. The temperature regarding Bibi is very high.”

Share

That same month, Axios reported that Biden told Netanyahu that, if Israel did not change course in Gaza, “we won’t be able to support you.”

And in October 2024, it was reported that Biden had repeatedly accused Netanyahu of having no strategy, and had shouted “Bibi, what the fuck?” at him in July, after Israeli strikes near Beirut and in Iran.

What did all this mean? To be blunt: it meant shit.

All of it was blatantly for the benefit of domestic US audiences, because growing numbers of Democratic voters were rightly enraged that their administration was arming and facilitating a genocide.

At least $29bn worth of weapons were signed off by Biden so Israel could continue wiping Gaza from the face of the earth and exterminating the Palestinian people. Netanyahu behaved exactly as he wished. He committed whatever war crimes and crimes against humanity he wished. And all of it was facilitated by Joe Biden’s administration.

Now, under Trump, we are seeing a similar pattern.

In May 2025, Axios reported that Trump was frustrated by what it described as the “ongoing war in Gaza” - it is, of course, a genocide - and told aides to inform Netanyahu that he wanted him to “wrap it up”.

Subscribe now

In September 2025, the Wall Street Journal published a story headlined: “Trump Has Heated Call With Netanyahu Over Israeli Strike on Qatar.” According to the report, Trump told Netanyahu that his decision to target Hamas political leaders in Qatar was not wise.

Then, in May this year, Barak Ravid reported for Axios that after a phone call in which Trump and Netanyahu discussed a new effort to reach a deal with Iran, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire.”

Which brings us to the latest Axios report.

A US official summarised Trump’s remarks to Netanyahu as follows: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

Another source claimed that Trump was “pissed”, and at one point yelled at Netanyahu: “What the fuck are you doing?”

Well. Whatever the motives for this leak, if Trump really did tell Netanyahu that “everybody hates Israel”, then he has finally processed something which has been obvious for some time: there has been a dramatic shift against Israel in Western public opinion.

A poll earlier this year found that 60% of US adults had an unfavourable view of Israel, compared with just 37% who had a favourable view. In other words, unfavourable outstripped favourable by 23 points. In 2022, the opposite was true: favourable views led by 13 points. Even more strikingly, 28% now had a very unfavourable view - nearly triple the 10% recorded in 2022.

The partisan split was revealing. Some 80% of Democrats and Democratic leaners viewed Israel unfavourably, up from 53% in 2022. Among Republicans, Israel still retained majority support: 58% favourable, 41% unfavourable. But even that represented a dramatic narrowing. And among Republicans under 50, 57% now had an unfavourable view of Israel.

Subscribe now

We have already seen the MAGA coalition fragmenting over Israel, with high-profile examples including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene. So is Trump feeling pressure from within his own coalition? Or does he simply believe that Israel’s mayhem is undermining US strategic interests?

Because those interests are under strain. This week, Iran indicated it would suspend peace talks with the US in protest at Israel’s murderous onslaught in Lebanon. The US and Israel, of course, lost their war with Iran. Netanyahu played a pivotal role in convincing Trump to join that calamitous war, as New York Times reporting made clear. Iran now has leverage, not least because of the Strait of Hormuz, and it is using that leverage to try to win concessions - not just for itself, but elsewhere in the Middle East, most notably over Israel’s criminal war against Lebanon.

Trump is clearly frustrated because the longer the Iran crisis drags on, the greater the economic costs for the United States - and therefore the greater the political costs for him. Asked by CNBC about the possible collapse of peace negotiations with Iran, he reportedly said: “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.”

Because of course that is exactly how someone who does not care speaks.

Now Mark Levin, the right-wing commentator who called for Trump to nuke Iran, is furious. He thundered that the Axios leak was “a violation of federal law” and had “provided support to the Iranian regime and its Hezbollah proxy.” He demanded to know whether there would be an FBI investigation into whoever leaked the call.

Many have pointed out that, in practice, this means Levin is calling for Trump to be arrested - something, finally, we can all unite around - because, like Biden before him, Trump is apparently angry at Netanyahu while refusing to do anything meaningful about it, and therefore may well have leaked it himself.

And while Washington leaks, Lebanon is being slaughtered.

About 3,500 people have been killed by Israel, and more than 10,000 wounded, since Israel’s dramatic escalation in early March. That includes at least 121 paramedics and first responders. In one horrific example I watched, first responders were treating a father and his daughter injured by an Israeli strike - and then a second Israeli strike hit them.

Subscribe now

This is known as a “double tap” strike. You attack once, wait for first responders and bystanders to come to the aid of the wounded, and then attack again. ISIS used double tap strikes. That is the company Israel keeps.

Israel has occupied much of Lebanon. It is demanding residents flee entire cities. It is razing villages to the ground. But none of this is achieving victory. It is achieving only mass slaughter and destruction.

Hezbollah, we were told, was supposed to have been defeated, not least after the pager attacks. Instead, it is inflicting far greater damage on the IDF than expected. Israel has been here before. It was previously forced out of Lebanon by attrition.

A new poll shows that 87% of Lebanese people regard Israel as their enemy — a figure which cuts across religious, ethnic and sectarian divisions. Strikingly, 51% believed Israel should be destroyed, while just a third supported a peace agreement with Israel. If Israel believes there is a military solution to Lebanon, it is deceiving itself. Its crimes are simply generating ever greater hostility.

And this brings us to another phone call between a US president and an Israeli prime minister.

In 1982, Israel launched its second invasion of Lebanon, seeking to crush the PLO led by Yasser Arafat. Israel committed hideous crimes. Ronald Reagan - a right-wing Republican president - recorded in his diary that he was “angry”. He rang Israel’s then-prime minister, Menachem Begin, and told him that the assault “had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered.” He specifically used the word “holocaust” to describe what Israel was doing, and said the symbol of the war was becoming the image of a seven-month-old baby with its arms blown off.

Twenty minutes later, Begin rang Reagan back to say he had ordered an end to the barrage, and pleaded for their continued friendship.

Think about that.

Ronald Reagan took a harder line with Israel than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump - even though Israel is committing far graver crimes today, armed and facilitated by the United States.

Both presidents have armed and facilitated war crimes. Both are complicit. Whatever they allegedly say behind closed doors, both must face justice.

Britain’s banning of the left-wing, pro-Palestinian American commentators Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur marks another descent into authoritarianism.

Let us be clear about what has happened here. Both men have plainly been barred by the British government because of their opposition to the crime of crimes: that is, genocide, namely that perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people. That same genocide has been armed, excused and facilitated by Keir Starmer’s Labour government.

The West is now in the midst of the greatest assault on free speech since the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s. Then, Senator Joseph McCarthy led a campaign against supposed “Reds”. Today, it is opponents of Israel’s genocide who are being targeted: deplatformed, threatened, sacked, arrested - sometimes violently - imprisoned, and menaced with deportation.

In Britain, Labour has already proscribed the anti-genocide direct action movement Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, placing it on the same legal footing as al-Qaeda and ISIS. More than 3,200 people - many of them elderly - have been arrested for holding placards opposing genocide and supporting Palestine Action.

Meanwhile, protests against genocide have been demonised as “hate marches” and subjected to mounting legal curbs. Organisers have been dragged through the courts.

Freedom of speech in Britain is being curtailed in the service of a foreign state, Israel, which is committing genocide, alongside multiple other crimes.

Critique of that state is being - scandalously and dangerously - conflated with hatred of Jewish people.

Indeed, when Hasan Piker was allowed to enter the country last year and address the Oxford Union, he delivered a speech denouncing the evil of antisemitism. He described it, aptly, as “the canary in the coal mine of fascism.”

Share

Now ask yourself this: what would happen if Piker and Uygur were US commentators who supported Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people?

What if they had declared, say, “I’m glad Israel has wiped Gaza from the face of the earth”; or “good on Israel for slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians”; or “I hope Israel finishes what it started in Gaza”? Would they be barred from Britain? Would they be treated as a threat to public order?

Of course not. There would be no repercussions at all. After all, much of the British media supported drowning Gaza in blood, while our politicians armed the crime.

Then there is the red-carpet treatment afforded to Israeli politicians drenched in Palestinian blood.

Subscribe now

Take Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar. He has variously declared: “Gaza must be smaller at the end of the war”; “whoever starts a war against Israel must lose territory”; and “Gaza in its previous form has no future.” He visited Britain for a private meeting with then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy in April 2025.

Or take Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who declared in October 2023: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.”

That statement, rightly cited by South Africa in its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, was a chilling incitement against an entire people.

Herzog visited Britain in September 2025, meeting Keir Starmer in Downing Street.

Complicit in genocide? Come on in, you are honoured guests. Oppose genocide? Your presence is “not conducive to the public good.”

Predictably, right-wing extremists are now denouncing opposition to the Piker and Uygur bans as hypocritical, because far-right commentators were also banned from entering the UK to attend Tommy Robinson’s far-right protest last month.

There is no comparison here - at all.

Subscribe now

Take one of those banned far-right commentators, Valentina Gomez. She has declared Black Americans can ‘GTFO’ the country, referred to Muslims en masse as ‘rapists’ and ‘terrorists’, demanded they ‘fuck off’ to Muslim nations, and declared that Islam was “the sword that the left is using to destroy Christian nations.”

That is overt racist hate speech. It is beyond despicable to compare opposition to Israel and its crimes with this.

That said, I do not support the banning of those far-right commentators either. I’ve previously opposed the jailing of people over disgusting, racist comments made during the anti-Muslim riots - indeed, attempted pogroms - of August 2024. I opposed the banning of far-right marches. I even opposed the jailing of the far-right extremist who beat me up on my birthday (he was jailed for 2 years and 8 months).

That is partly because state repression is no solution to political problems. But it is also because, once authoritarian precedents are set, it is inevitably the left that suffers most.

The Conservatives passed the Public Order Act 1936, supposedly aimed at Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts. In practice, it was repeatedly turned against the left. This is how repressive state power works.

There is currently every possibility of Nigel Farage becoming prime minister after the next general election. He may or may not the support of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives, but both are now committed to right-wing authoritarianism - from assaults on the judiciary to bans on protest. They will build on the authoritarian inheritance delivered to them by both Labour and the Tories.

A final point: authoritarianism is always facilitated by cowardice.

Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur were both due to speak at SXSW London, a tech, business, music and film festival. SXSW released a statement declaring that “Decisions on entry to the U.K. are a matter for the Home Office and the individuals concerned.”

Piker has understandably called them “actual fucking losers”, committing never to work with them again. Ash Sarker - who was due to chair the event - has pulled out, and call for other speakers and chairs to do the same. We should all boycott SXSW.

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

Why isn’t this splashed across the newspaper front pages?

Why isn’t it leading the television bulletins? Why aren’t Western politicians issuing statements condemning depraved evil?

The answer is brutally simple.

Because we’re not discussing some activist without power and influence, decrying Israel’s genocide with words deemed inflammatory or extreme.

No: this is a genocidal commitment from a leading Israeli politician who is actually overseeing a genocide.

Israel Katz is Benjamin Netanyahu’s Defence Minister. In a post celebrating the killing of Hamas’ military commander, he concluded with these words:

We committed to eliminating everyone who led the October 7 massacre, and so it shall be: they are all sentenced to death, wherever they may be.

We committed that Hamas will not rule Gaza civilly or militarily, and so it shall be, and also the voluntary emigration plan from Gaza will be implemented - everything at the right timing and in the right manner.

Let us be clear about what that means.

“Voluntary emigration” is an obvious euphemism. Israel’s official policy is the removal of the surviving Palestinian population from their home in Gaza. And Katz’s own formulation spells that out: killing those involved in 7 October; removing Hamas from power; removing Gaza’s population. One package. One project. They are all military objectives - including making Gaza a land with no living Palestinians.

This is inherently a genocidal commitment. Indeed, Israel has deliberately made the conditions of life in Gaza unbearable.

Israel has destroyed homes, hospitals, schools, libraries, universities, workplaces, mosques, churches and civic buildings: the fabric of a society, the basic architecture of a civilisation. It has destroyed agriculture, livestock, fresh water supplies. It has besieged Gaza of the essentials of life. It has forced Palestinians to live under the constant terror of massacre, displacement, disease and hunger.

There is no such thing as “voluntary emigration” in these circumstances. If you reduce a place to apocalyptic ruin and then say its people are free to leave, that is not consent. That is violent coercion.

Share

Last year, the Israeli state even set up what it called a bureau for “voluntary migration”, while reportedly easing travel restrictions for Palestinians who agreed to a one-way journey out of Gaza.

The intention is obvious: remove Gaza’s population slowly, in stages, under the cover of Western indifference and active complicity. Not with one dramatic announcement that might provoke headlines and outrage, but through bureaucratic language, military terror and the assumption that most Western media outlets will simply look the other way.

The language of genocide

Like most Israeli politicians, Katz has a history of genocidal statements.

In October 2023, he posted:

Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water pump will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home.

In March 2025, he told the citizens of Gaza that this was their “last warning”, threatening them with “utter destruction and devastation”.

These are not marginal figures. These are the people running Israel and its military. They do not bother to disguise their intent, because they know the West grants them impunity.

And yet these statements receive little or no sustained coverage in the Western media. Instead, we get endless denunciations of the supposedly inflammatory language of those who oppose genocide. The outrage is directed not at the people starving, bombing and displacing Palestinians, but at those who oppose it.

Why? Because to give these statements the coverage they deserve would force an admission. It would mean having to spell out what Israel’s intentions actually are. And that would expose the role the Western media has played: not as neutral witnesses, but as facilitators of Israel’s crimes.

Subscribe now

“Voluntary migration” was always the plan

This did not begin with Katz’s latest post.

Back in December 2023, Israeli media reported that Netanyahu had told a Likud party meeting he was committed to so-called voluntary migration from Gaza.

“Our problem is countries that are ready to absorb them and we are working on it,”

he reportedly said.

He added:

“The world is already discussing the possibilities of voluntary immigration,”

and said that a team had to be established to ensure that those who wanted to leave Gaza for a third country could do so. He called it of “strategic importance” for the day after the war.

I reported on this at the time. Most of the Western media ignored it.

Then came Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Finance Minister. In November 2024, he declared:

“It is possible to create a situation where Gaza’s population will be reduced to half its current size in two years.”

He went further:

“We can occupy Gaza and thin the population by half within two years,”

through a strategy of encouraging “voluntary emigration”.

“Thin” the population.

That is the language of genocidal monsters.

Subscribe now

Forced displacement - ethnic cleansing, in common parlance - is a war crime. This commitment is also genocidal in intent because it seeks to erase the existence of a people from their land. In this case, the Palestinian people of Gaza.

We do not know how many Palestinians remain in Gaza. We do not know exactly how many have been killed directly by bombs and bullets, or indirectly through disease, starvation, the destruction of medical care and the collapse of basic life. Credible academic studies suggest the true toll is far higher than the official figures - well over a hundred thousand people. We do not know how many have already been forced out.

But we do know the intention, because Israel’s leaders keep stating it.

Within Gaza itself, the area directly controlled by Israel keeps expanding. The so-called ‘ceasefire’ deal allowed them to control 53% - but only as a temporary first phase withdrawal line.

Instead, they have expanded that control in violation of the supposed deal. At an event today, Netanyahu boasts Israel has taken 60%. When he starts by saying “my directive is to move to”, the audience yells “100! 100!”

Netanyahu responded: “Wait, let’s go in order. First 70%. Let’s start with that.”

Subscribe now

Trump’s dystopian fantasy

Not long after Donald Trump became president for a second time, he committed to removing the Palestinian population from Gaza and turning it into some dystopian luxury resort, enriching himself and his associates.

He stopped talking about it after backlash from Gulf Arab states, whose rulers feared the fury such a plan would provoke among their own people. Trump, in turn, feared that backlash might damage his business deals with those states.

But the fact he stopped saying it out loud does not mean the policy ended.

The massacres continue

Meanwhile, the massacres continue, whether or not the media chooses to cover them.

An Israeli strike on a residential building in Gaza killed ten Palestinians, including five children.

Their names were:

Israa Emad Salim, 17.
Sidra Iyad Azzam, 12.
Sarah Sameh Rajab, 9.
Nour Ahmad Abu Halima, 12.
Yamen Ahmad Abu Halima, 13.

Children with hopes, jokes, fears, dreams, favourite foods and songs. Children who had endured what no child should ever be forced to endure. Every life a universe, as the Torah rightly teaches us.

The footage shows bodies of children reduced to burned pieces. An adult man holding what remains of a girl, shredded and burned beyond recognition.

One of the children was beheaded.

Remember how much anger there was about the fictional beheading of Israeli babies on 7 October. Compare that with the silence that greets Palestinian children actually beheaded by Israeli weapons.

This was the family of Ahmad Abu Halima, Director of Student Affairs at Gaza University. The eldest victim was Ihsan Matar Balbul, 81, who I presume was the grandfather.

Imagine surviving 964 days of genocide: the bombardments, the starvation, the displacement, the terror, the grief piled upon terror. Imagine surviving all of that, only to be blown apart and burned to death on Eid.

The genocide never ended - and it’s responsibility to keep speaking out.

I’ll be interested to hear what Tony Blair has to say when he’s in the dock at The Hague, prosecuted for the illegal war in Iraq. Until then, we have his latest “intervention” - released through his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which the media has been dutifully swooning over.

I want to engage with it seriously, because it tells us something important. Not about how to fix Britain, but about what our elites are thinking, what they’re planning, and why - if they get their way - we are heading for catastrophe.

Before we get to the substance, a word on the source. The Tony Blair Institute - and before it, Tony Blair Associates - has been funded by some of the world’s more unsavoury regimes: Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Azerbaijan. Millions of pounds from dictatorships. Blair also held paid advisory roles for several of those same governments.

But there’s a more relevant financial relationship here. Tony Blair’s institute has received vast sums of money from Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. As per the Lighthouse Reports:

While the institute relies on Blair’s political brand, its money comes, in large part, from Ellison, who has had a remarkable 2025. He was briefly the richest man in the world in September, as Oracle’s stake in AI infrastructure drove its share price into orbit…

Ellison invested $130 million in the TBI between 2021 and 2023, with a further $218 million pledged since then. The scale of funding took the TBI from a headcount of 200 to approaching 1,000.

Ellison is positioned at the heart of the AI industry Blair is so keen to promote. His daughter-in-law was chosen to head the government’s taxpayer-backed £500 million Sovereign AI Fund.

All of that is surely crucial context if we are understanding what this “intervention” seeks to do.

Share

Where Blair is right - and where he immediately goes wrong

Blair says the Labour Party is “playing with fire” both with its own future and with the future of the country. On that, I agree with him.

He says Labour does not “have a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world.” I agree with that too.

He notes that Labour won the 2024 election “not by acclaim” but as an “acceptable default option” to a Conservative government the country had rejected. Again: pretty accurate!

That, however, is largely where the agreement ends - except for his argument that Britain needs to move from cure to prevention in healthcare. Though, of course, any serious preventative health strategy would require an all-out war on social inequalities, which is not exactly the politics Blair is offering.

Blair claims that, “partly because of the intellectual wasteland of the Corbyn years,” Labour had “no properly thought-through analysis of how the world was changing and what that meant for policy.”

This gets things precisely the wrong way round.

Corbynism triumphed in the Labour Party in 2015 because the Labour Right - Blair’s faction - was politically and intellectually exhausted. It had a model: an economy dependent on the financial sector, using the resulting tax revenues to fund investment in public services. That model imploded in 2008. Since then, Britain’s economic settlement has failed to provide sustainably rising living standards, security or decent public services.

The Labour Right had no answer to that. It still doesn’t. And nor does Tony Blair.

They had the entire period of Corbyn’s leadership to develop one. They could have used those years to ask why they lost, to reckon honestly with the exhaustion of their politics, and to construct a compelling vision for the world we now inhabit. Instead, when Keir Starmer’s team took control of the Labour Party, they did so by lying through their teeth to the membership - and then spent that time in Opposition failing to develop any coherent vision.

Perhaps it is time to arrive at the inescapable conclusion: they are never going to develop the answers.

Subscribe now

Starmer has not governed as a “soft left” prime minister

Blair claims the government is “governing from an essentially traditional Labour ‘soft left’ position, parked firmly in the party’s comfort zone.”

This is simply untrue.

Starmer has done almost everything the Labour Right asked of him. He has waged a ruthless assault on the left - more ruthless, in fact, than anything Blair himself attempted. He has treated fiscal rules as holy writ, and launched assaults on the welfare state - from the winter fuel payment to disability benefits.

Yes, the government has introduced some social reforms: modest improvements to workers’ rights, bringing rail services into partial public ownership, and a clean energy agenda. But even these are fragmented and limited.

It is worth remembering that New Labour’s first term, for all its abject failures, delivered more sweeping progressive reforms than this government has managed: such as the minimum wage, major investment in public services, Sure Start, the Human Rights Act, tax credits, devolution, LGBTQ+ rights.

Based on his essay, I do not believe for a second that the Tony Blair of today would introduce those policies.

As for this “soft left” Labour government. Take the NHS. Even with current increases, health spending is rising at a much lower rate than under New Labour at its peak: roughly 2.4% to 3% real-terms annual growth now, compared with around 6% to 7% in New Labour’s heyday.

What Blair barely engages with is the obvious question: if this is a left-wing Labour government, why has a party to its left - the Greens - dramatically risen and taken so much of its support?

Surely he must therefore conclude that a significant chunk of the electorate has moved to the left? Why does he think that has happened? Does it make any difference to his political calculations at all? Answers - there are none.

Subscribe now

Workers’ rights are not the enemy of prosperity

Blair suggests Labour’s policies are restricting economic growth, the prerequisite for prosperity and social justice. He particularly has workers’ rights in his sights.

This rehashes the same dogma that has dominated Britain for nearly half a century. Thatcherism smashed the trade unions, stripped away workers’ rights, privatised and deregulated the economy, and slashed taxes on big business and the wealthy. The result was not some golden age of shared prosperity. Average economic growth has been weaker and far less fairly distributed than in the decades when Britain had nationalisation, strong trade unions and higher taxes on the well-off and big business.

It is also worth noting that Scandinavian countries, with stronger trade unions and better workers’ rights, have higher living standards than Britain.

Subscribe now

What is Blair’s answer to that?

He asks: “How do we justify adding to the welfare bill when it is already ballooning, taxes are high and getting higher, and we’re told we have to increase defence spending to prepare for the possibility of war?”

There are several points to make here.

First, welfare spending is projected to rise from £315 billion to £407 billion by 2030–31. But most welfare spending goes to pensioners, and about half of the projected rise is due to pensioner spending - not least because Britain has an ageing population.

Second, we spend vast sums topping up low pay. That is not an argument against workers’ rights or trade unions. It is an argument for them. If workers were paid properly, the state would not have to subsidise poverty wages on this scale.

Third, we spend huge amounts on housing benefit because Britain flogged off council housing and failed to replace it. Around four in ten former council homes are now owned by private landlords, often charging rents at twice the level of the social sector. Building council housing would reduce the housing benefit bill, stimulate the economy, create jobs and increase tax revenues. It has a multiplier effect.

Fourth, yes, there are deeper social crises - not least a worsening mental health crisis - that require us to address causes as well as symptoms.

But above all else - as Paul Johnson - formerly director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies - points out:

Blair’s premise is simply false.

As for defence spending, we are going to have to disagree. Defence is the one area of public spending that is almost never subjected to proper scrutiny. That is how Britain ended up wasting billions on aircraft carriers that the former chief of the defence staff, David Richards, called “unaffordable vulnerable metal cans.”

Spending money intelligently on cyberwarfare and genuine security threats? Yes. An arms race that increases the risk of nuclear apocalypse, drains money from public services, worsens living standards and fuels the disillusionment on which right-wing authoritarians thrive? Absolutely not.

Subscribe now

Blair’s attack on net zero is wrong - and dangerous

What is most striking is that net zero is really in Blair’s sights.

“Does our economy need right now the goal of clean energy or cheap energy?” he asks.

It is quite something to make that argument when Britain has just experienced its hottest May days ever recorded. Who should we listen to: the scientific consensus warning of an existential climate emergency, or a man whose organisations have been funded by multiple foreign dictatorships?

Blair is wrong even on his own terms. Clean energy is cheap energy. For new electricity generation in Britain, renewables are much cheaper than fossil fuels.

He presents climate action as a luxury that Britain cannot afford. The truth is the opposite. The climate emergency is already imposing costs: on homes, infrastructure, food systems, health, insurance, public services and human life itself. The choice is not between cheap energy and clean energy. It is between planned transition and escalating chaos.

Subscribe now

The “last 40 years” were not a left-wing fantasy

Blair attacks what he calls “a rehash of the far-left critique about nothing good coming out of the last ‘40 years’ of ‘neo-liberalism’, which presumably includes the last Labour government.”

But it is simply a fact that the Thatcherite settlement has dominated Britain for nearly half a century. As Tony Blair put it when Margaret Thatcher died: “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them.”

That period has been defined by lower and more unequally distributed growth, rising insecurity, and ever-increasing political turmoil.

It has left us with an over-financialised economy, where investment is siphoned off into share buybacks and dividends. It has left much of the country with crumbling infrastructure, vast regional inequalities and chronically low productivity.

Blair has almost nothing to say about any of this.

That is because to reckon with it honestly would mean reckoning with his own record. Blairism did not overturn the Thatcher settlement. It tried to soften the edges - by depending on an economic model which was itself unsustainable.

Subscribe now

Blair does not understand the left threat to Labour

Blair warns that “when we lose seats to the right” it is a delusion to think the country wants Labour to move left.

This underlines how much he is living in the past.

When Blair was prime minister, he did not have an insurgent party seriously challenging Labour from the left. In his political universe, the left are illegitimate, marginal and electorally irrelevant.

That has now been disproved.

Labour just lost a parliamentary seat to the left - to the Greens in Gorton and Denton. It lost hundreds of council seats to the left in the recent local elections. And it lost other seats to Reform because voters who could not stomach Labour went Green, allowing Reform to come through the middle.

Blair makes no attempt to understand this phenomenon, because it contradicts his entire worldview.

Subscribe now

What Blair actually wants

Strip away the rhetoric about modernity and “the future,” and what does Blair want?

He wants Labour to abandon its workers’ rights package. He wants it to weaken net zero commitments. He wants the government to scrap real-terms increases to the minimum wage. He wants it to water down modest non-dom tax changes. He wants deregulation, welfare cuts, more North Sea drilling and higher VAT.

Higher VAT - that’s real economic genius stuff in an age of inflation, not least inflation worsened by the Iran war Blair wanted Britain to be more involved in.

Indeed, Blair thinks Labour should have granted access to British military bases for offensive attacks on Iran. As it is, Starmer already offered up bases. But Blair wanted more. This is a man who plunged Iraq into blood and chaos in a criminal war, sent British soldiers to die in an Afghan war that ended with the Taliban re-emerging stronger than ever, and now believes Britain should have played a deeper role in an illegal war on Iran.

This is a man incapable of learning anything.

What he demands is that Britain become even more slavishly loyal to Donald Trump - whose far-right presidency is currently in a tailspin because of defeat in Iran.

What on earth would be the point of a Labour government that did all this?

Millions of people have already asked that question and abandoned Labour for a party to its left. If Labour abandoned even the few progressive commitments it still has - and it is almost impossible to identify any progressive elements in Blair’s alternative - then it would collapse as a political force.

Subscribe now

Transparency, honesty - and the “hidden power of elites”

Blair writes: “The challenge of democracy is not transparency, honesty or conspiracy theories about the hidden power of elites. It is efficacy. It is the ability to get big things done.”

But of course - we cannot be having “conspiracy theories about the hidden power of elites,” can we?

It is apparently conspiratorial to look at corporate lobbying. Or political donations. Or the revolving door between political power, big business and money. Very convenient for Tony Blair, that - because it allows him to dismiss scrutiny of himself and his friends as paranoia.

But transparency and honesty are not distractions from getting big things done. They are prerequisites. Without them, decisions will inevitably be made in the interests of rich and powerful people, while everyone else is told those decisions are simply inevitable.

Transparency, honesty and efficacy are not opposites: they belong together.

Subscribe now

The AI revolution - and who it will serve

Blair’s real obsession is artificial intelligence.

The politics he promotes is what he calls the “Radical Centre,” which he says “starts from the proposition that governing in the age of AI will be the principal challenge. And opportunity. The route to economic prosperity and social justice.”

As per the “transparency” Blair is contemptuous towards, here is a man with extensive financial links to AI.

Blair says the AI revolution is coming, with all its upsides and downsides, and that everyone simply needs to accept it. And I do accept that it is happening. The question with any technological revolution is not whether it happens. It is in whose interests it is managed.

In the 2000s, Blair spoke about globalisation almost as though it were the weather: an inevitable fact of life, something happening whether you liked it or not, something you might as well accept rather than bark at thunder.

But globalisation was managed in the interests of elites. It created insecurity, dislocation and a furious backlash - which is what we are currently living through. As a result, globalisation is falling apart.

If the AI revolution is run in the interests of corporate elites, it will have devastating consequences and provoke a colossal backlash of its own.

That is why it matters that Blair’s essay calls for Britain to lobby the EU to deregulate the tech industry. And that is why his own direct links to the tech industry, and specifically to AI, must be emphasised.

Subscribe now

Blairism helped create this crisis

The truth is that Starmer has already enacted much of the agenda Blair wants. Some of Blair’s key people literally went to work for Starmer to make sure that happened.

What Blair is now demanding is not some bold leap into the future. It is not far from what Liz Truss tried to enact in 2022, with catastrophic consequences: deregulation, tax shifts that hit ordinary people hardest, a genuflection before business, and the fantasy that if you give the already powerful even more power, prosperity will somehow trickle down.

Britain is in the state it is in because, in large part, of Blairism.

His governments failed to address the crises embedded in Britain’s economic model: financialisation, inequality, insecurity, weak productivity, the hollowing-out of industrial communities, the overdependence on the City, the deference to American power.

Those failures helped plunge Britain into disaster. They helped produce political turmoil. They helped create the very real threat of right-wing authoritarianism destroying our democracy.

And now Blair’s followers are demanding we take the same road again - only faster, with fewer protections, more deference to billionaires, and more loyalty to an American empire in decline.

That is not the future. It will simply accelerate our march towards oblivion.

Suddenly, there is outrage over Israel’s abuses - and it comes from Israel’s own cheerleaders.

And as strange as it may seem to say it: but that outrage is grotesque.

The Global Sumud Flotilla, an international solidarity mission attempting to break Israel’s siege and starvation of Gaza, was intercepted by the Israeli army in international waters while trying to deliver humanitarian aid to the occupied Gaza Strip.

Those on board were detained - kidnapped, in plain English - and taken to Israel.

Then Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, posted footage of himself taunting and abusing activists from across the world.

In his tweet accompanying the video, he cooed in Hebrew: “This is how we accept the supporters of terrorism.” Followed, in English, by “Welcome to Israel.”

Now just pause for a moment and imagine if this were Iran. Imagine the Iranian state kidnapped a group of Westerners in international waters as they tried to deliver aid to a besieged population. Imagine Iranian officials then filmed themselves abusing those detainees, jeering at them, parading them before the cameras.

There would be wall-to-wall outrage. Emergency statements. Demands for action. Talk of hostages. Talk of barbarism. Talk of the “civilised world” having to respond.

As the official account of the State of Palestine put it clearly:

If this was how white Westerners are treated when an Israeli minister deliberately films and posts it - what do you think is happening to Palestinian in detention when there are no cameras?

Share

Yet the outrage from Israeli ministers and cheerleaders is not driven by moral horror. It is panic about the reputational consequences for Israel when white Westerners get the tiniest taste of what Palestinians are subjected to.

“You are not the face of Israel”

The Israeli foreign minister, who sits in Ben-Gvir’s own government, responded furiously:

But actually, yes. Ben-Gvir is the face of Israel.

He is not some random crank shouting from the sidelines. He is Israel’s national security minister - appointed by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He is in charge of the Israeli police. He is in charge of the Israeli prison service. He is in charge of the border police and guards.

That means he is directly responsible for how detainees are treated. That includes Palestinian detainees. That includes the people Western governments rarely mention, rarely defend, rarely even humanise. Indeed, the primary victims of the Israeli violence which the West facilitates through military, economic and diplomatic support.

The polling is very clear. Israel is a settler-colonial state in the grip of genocidal mania. What Ben-Gvir represents is completely mainstream.

Subscribe now

76% of Jewish Israelis believe “there are no innocents in Gaza”.

82% believe that the entire Palestinian population should be expelled from Gaza.

Months into the genocide, 50.2% believed “an appropriate use of force” was being used in Gaza. Another 43.4% thought Israel was using too little force. Just 3.2% thought too much force was being used.

Last year, another poll found that 47% believed that, when the Israeli army conquered an enemy city, it should act similarly to the Israelites when they conquered Jericho. In that Biblical narrative, every man, woman, child and animal was killed.

This is genocidal mania. Ben-Gvir is no aberration.

Western passports change everything

And because the victims here are Westerners rather than Palestinians, Western governments have suddenly discovered outrage.

Giorgia Meloni, the far-right prime minister of Italy, said:

It should be noted that Italy has been vetoing attempts to impose EU sanctions on Israel. These words are meaningless.

Subscribe now

Now, there are British citizens among the detainees too. But Keir Starmer has not followed Meloni’s lead. Instead, it was left to Yvette Cooper to say:

Again, empty words. Britain continues to arm, excuse, enable and protect the very state carrying out these abuses.

By contrast, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez - who has actually has taken action - was far more forceful:

Spain has correctly described what is happening in Gaza as genocide. Spain is trying to push for sanctions. Other European countries are blocking that effort.

The panic among Israel’s leaders and cheerleaders is that public opinion in the West has already shifted dramatically against them. They fear the abuse of Westerners will accelerate that trend - and make arms embargoes, sanctions, and isolation far more likely.

Subscribe now

The scandal is not abuse. The scandal is exposure.

Netanyahu himself responded by saying:

First, smear the activists as supporters of terrorism. Then insist Israel has every right to stop them. Then gently admonish the man who exposed too much of the truth.

But Ben-Gvir’s treatment of those activists is absolutely in line with the values and norms of the State of Israel - at least as Palestinians have experienced them for decades. Indeed it is a far more diluted version.

They are worried about Israel, not the victims

Take Eylon Levy, the British-Israeli former paid propagandist for Netanyahu. He posted a screenshot from an intern working on an initiative that, in his words, “fights for Israel’s good name in the global media.”

That phrase - “Israel’s good name” - alone is delusional. Israel’s “good name” is not being destroyed by bad messaging. It is being destroyed by mass killing, siege, starvation, apartheid, occupation, torture, humiliation and impunity - in short, a live-streamed genocide.

Read that carefully.

There is nothing there about the victims.

Nothing about the people abused. Nothing about the terror of being kidnapped in international waters and dragged before a far-right minister to be humiliated. Nothing about the Palestinians who endure far worse, every day, without cameras and without the diplomatic support of a Western state.

The concern here centres exclusively Israel’s image. The concern is ammunition for “our enemies” - that te cruelty was strategically inconvenient.

This is the moral disgrace at the heart of the whole saga. Human beings were abused, and the reaction from Israel’s defenders is: look what you’ve done to our PR campaign.

“A Palestinian with a kippah”

Take as an example this post from an Israeli influencer named Ido Halbany:

In supposedly condemning Ben-Gvir, he uses ‘Palestinian’ as a racist slur.

This whole episode again repeats a message clear throughout the genocide, and for decades before. It’s about whose lives matter, and whose do not.

There is no pretence that Palestinian life has any worth. The crime of Ben-Gvir was to abuse Westerners, and do it on camera - thus embarrassing Israel and its cheerleaders.

What a nauseating spectacle.

I am apparently “very dangerous”.

That, at least, is according to Morgan McSweeney - Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff and his former right-hand man.

I know this because I submitted a Subject Access Request to Labour Together, the organisation once run by McSweeney with the explicit aim of defeating Jeremy Corbyn and smashing the Labour left. In response, I was sent a 42-page dossier of emails, strategy documents, polling extracts and internal discussions in which my name repeatedly appears.

Some of it is absurd. Some of it is revealing - and some of it is frankly disturbing.

Before we get to the “very dangerous” part, though, it’s worth briefly explaining what Labour Together actually is.

Under McSweeney’s leadership, Labour Together sought to lay the groundwork to seize back the party. It received £730,000 in donations from millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen between 2017 and 2020, which it failed to properly declare. The Electoral Commission eventually fined the organisation and found it guilty of more than 20 breaches of electoral law.

The investigative journalist Paul Holden has done excellent work exposing Labour Together and its operations - particularly in his book The Fraud, which I strongly recommend reading. Labour Together responded by launching a smear campaign against Holden and two Sunday Times journalists, including attempting to link them to the Russian state.

That led to left-wing commentators and MPs submitting Subject Access Requests. You may well hear from others!

Share

“I think this guy is very dangerous”

One of the emails in the dossier concerns a blog post about me from 2018 titled That Jones Isn’t Funny Anymore.

Now, what was this blog actually arguing?

It was about Labour’s so-called antisemitism saga. The author described me as occupying a kind of hybrid role - simultaneously journalist, activist, Labour insider and movement spokesperson. His argument was that because I didn’t deny antisemitism existed, but defended the Labour leadership against claims that it itself was antisemitic - while also arguing allegations against the leadership were being politically weaponised - that made me “worse than the deniers”, as he put it.

The blog said of me:

“His actions then and subsequently have been of a familiar type, enough outrage to keep his anti-racist credentials up but always with a view of protecting Corbyn and the project.”

The truth is I had a position at the time which I held - and still hold - in good faith.

I believed it was an outrageous and baseless claim that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leadership, and the overwhelming majority of Labour members were antisemitic. I consistently defended the leadership against those accusations. But I also believed there was an antisemitic fringe which had to be confronted, because antisemitism should always be dealt with where it actually exists.

The blogger portrays that as some cynical political manoeuvre. It wasn’t. It was - and remains - my genuine view.

Subscribe now

And I’d note this too: at the time, I received criticism from parts of the left - and still do - from people who argue I was part of the problem during a smear campaign against the Labour leadership. This is normally based on distorting, misconstruing, erasing or inventing what I said or did.

But what McSweeney’s email shows is that the Labour right absolutely did not see my position that way. They regarded it as a “very dangerous” position.

I also think that because of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and because of the increasingly flagrant weaponisation of false accusations of antisemitism to smear opponents of that genocide, many more people are now alert to how these accusations can be abused politically.

But the Labour right certainly weaponised antisemitism in order to destroy the left. And it’s worth remembering that Martin Forde - the barrister commissioned by Keir Starmer after the leaked Labour report into antisemitism and factionalism - concluded there had indeed been weaponisation of antisemitism within Labour’s internal conflict.

What’s striking is that McSweeney simultaneously regarded me as “very dangerous” while also wanting access to my audience and the wider left-wing ecosystem around it.

Mapping the Labour membership

One of the documents is a 2018 Labour Together survey of Labour members, asking who they’d like to lead the Labour Party from a selection of figures who weren’t Labour MPs.

Caroline Lucas tops the poll on 25%. David Miliband and Sadiq Khan are both on 16%.

And then there’s Muggins here on 14%.

Below that: George Galloway on 3%, John Prescott on 3% - and Hillary Clinton on 2%

Which is obviously one of the strangest imaginary Labour leadership contests ever devised.

Flattered though I am at my leadership prospects eight years ago - leaving aside the fact I can barely tie my shoelaces - what was the point of this exercise?

I think the answer is fairly obvious. We were being used as political totems - a way of mapping ideological instincts and affiliations inside the Labour membership.

What McSweeney wanted to do through Labour Together was understand Labour members inside out: their reference points, who they looked up to, their emotional and political loyalties. Because if your goal is to wrest control of the party away from the left, you first need to understand how the left thinks.

And ultimately, that knowledge would be used to run a leadership campaign designed to deceive Labour members in order to steer the party sharply rightwards afterwards.

Subscribe now

“Outriders” and the problem Labour has now

Another document contains these fascinating passages:

First of all: “young” is doing some heavy lifting there in my case. I’m a geriatric millennial!

But the passage is revealing.

Because they correctly identified something that was real: the Corbyn movement had a broader political-media ecosystem around it. Not centrally controlled, but broadly sympathetic. We were people who genuinely believed in the project and argued for it publicly.

Labour's problem now is that it cannot reproduce that organically.

Why? Because younger people today have suffered years of overlapping crises - from living standards to housing to debt. They are socially progressive. They are infuriated by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and despise Donald Trump.

They look at Starmer’s Labour and see a party with no serious answers to the crises defining their lives. They see social conservatism, deference to wealth and power, facilitation of Israel’s genocide, and sucking up to Trump.

So the pool of young people genuinely enthusiastic about defending this version of Labour is much, much smaller.

And many of the people drawn towards Starmer’s Labour are precisely the sort of hyper-careerist operators who are usually terrible communicators because nobody believes they stand for anything except self-advancement.

Anyone who has spent time around Labour factional politics knows the type immediately.

Subscribe now

A failed podcast project

One of the most fascinating parts of the dossier concerns a podcast project called Changing Politics.

In 2018, McSweeney helped develop a podcast fronted by comedian Gráinne Maguire and journalist Marie Le Conte. The aim appears to have been to build an alternative-media platform capable of rivalling the pro-Corbyn online ecosystem while gently steering listeners toward Labour Right politics.

Here’s one such email:

One proposal suggested an opening episode with me, Ed Miliband and a “Corbyn social media person”. (This is all a bit Alan Partridge).

I was never invited - and the likely reason is pretty funny.

Subscribe now

McSweeney sent an email:

A co-host replied replied:

“Owen Jones absolutely hates my guts so there is an exactly zero chance he will [go] on a podcast that I’m co-hosting.”

Well, this must be Marie Le Conte. I hope she doesn’t mind me saying - but “hates my guts” is much stronger than I’d put it. Certain misgivings, sure! (I once stole her hat at Labour conference for a picture and it went downhill from there).

But what matters is the broader strategy here.

Subscribe now

They were trying to build a platform that could attract left-wing Labour members and audiences - and then seed support for Labour-right politics and personalities ahead of an eventual leadership contest.

And honestly, one element in particular made me feel sick.

One of the suggested episode themes was trans rights (which, I’d note, both co-hosts sincerely support).

Today, this Labour government has presided over an extraordinary collapse in trans rights in Britain. According to the latest Rainbow Map rankings, the UK is now near the bottom in Europe - barely above Russia, Hungary and Bulgaria.

But at the time they clearly recognised that younger Labour members cared deeply about trans rights and saw it as a way of generating enthusiasm and credibility with progressive audiences.

Nauseating cynicism.

The podcast itself was not a success - and the co-hosts had to chase McSweeney to get paid.

Radicalising people

There’s an interesting email to Morgan McSweeney and someone else, including a New York Times piece about online radicalisation through YouTube.

They wondered if the so-called “far left” benefit from this phenomenon in the UK, citing Novara and myself.

This is clearly “horseshoe” stuff - trying to equate the far right with the left.

But I would note that the video projects of both Novara and myself are much bigger than they were in 2018. So if they were worried about people being politicised to the left through video content, they are probably much more concerned now!

Subscribe now

Understanding, mapping, exploiting

Elsewhere in the documents there’s a fragment discussing increasing reach among Labour supporters in Coventry, with the “key personality” listed as “Owen Jones”.

I genuinely have no idea why I’m linked to Coventry specifically. Perhaps they think I have a secret West Midlands political machine I’m unaware of.

But again, the broader pattern is obvious.

Labour Together was systematically trying to understand left-wing audiences, map political influence networks,, identify trusted communicators, and work out how to tap into those ecosystems.

And ultimately McSweeney used the infrastructure, political intelligence and strategic thinking developed at Labour Together to run Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign.

That campaign was used to dupe Labour members - whom McSweeney had obsessively studied.

We are now living through the consequences of that political project: an operation defined by factional conquest and hostility to the left, rather than by any coherent transformative vision of its own.

And it has now collapsed - as many of us warned it would.

Last month, I reported on the numerous testimonies from Palestinians who say the Israeli state used dogs to rape detainees.

Mainstream media outlets have overwhelmingly failed to report on this - just as they have largely ignored Israel’s industrialised use of sexual violence against Palestinians more broadly.

That has now changed, at least in part. The New York Times has published a piece by Nicholas Kristof, a twice Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs commentator who represents as establishment a voice as it is possible to find in American journalism.

Based on the testimonies of 14 Palestinians, it’s headlined ‘The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians’.

It is, of course, welcome that this has finally appeared in a mainstream publication - even if it is a newspaper which has done so much to whitewash Israel’s genocide.

But there has already been an avalanche of testimony and evidence about the systematic use of sexual violence by Israel throughout the genocide - and indeed long before October 2023. It has taken all this time for such allegations to appear in the New York Times at all. And even now, they are not on the front page, but tucked away in the opinion section.

Share

The article concerns the use of sexual violence by the United States’ key ally in the Middle East: a state armed to the teeth by Washington and given more US military aid than any other country on Earth. It plainly deserves vastly greater prominence. That it does not receive it tells you, yet again, everything about the value attached to Palestinian lives, wellbeing and suffering.

The piece notes that Israel has, in recent years, “built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become,” as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.”

It cites testimonies from Palestinians who say they were raped with rubber batons, metal rods and other objects, including carrots. They describe extreme pain, bleeding and fainting..

Others recount different forms of sexual abuse. One testimony describes a female guard squeezing a detainee’s penis and testicles until he screamed in agony.

They quote from the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor:

a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

The piece also documents the sexual abuse of children.

Subscribe now

And it includes testimony about the use of dogs to rape Palestinian detainees. One Palestinian recalled:

“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.

On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.”

“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.

This builds on other such testimonies which I previously reported on.

The publication of the article has triggered a firestorm. Israel’s Foreign Ministry described it as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”

As Mahmoud Khalil - the Algerian-Palestinian activist detained by ICE in the US, facing deportation for his anti-genocide activism - says:

Everything is a blood libel. The ICJ ruling, a libel. The ICC warrants, a libel. The UN reports, libel. Amnesty, HRW, B’Tselem, libel. Survivors’ testimony, libel. Your own soldiers charged at Sde Teiman, a libel. Chants at protests, libel.

The only entity on Earth that never lies, apparently, is the one currently on trial for genocide.

Indeed, the repeated invocation of the term “blood libel” is absurd.

“Blood libel” has a specific historical meaning: the medieval antisemitic myth that Jewish people murdered Christian children for use in religious rituals. There is no evidence that this ever happened. It was a murderous fiction used to justify persecution.

But nobody disputes that Israel, a heavily militarised state, deploys violence on a mass scale, or that it has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza alone. Even Israel’s defenders do not deny that. To be absolutely clear: medieval Jews were not murdering children in ritual sacrifice. Israel, a state armed with one of the world’s most advanced militaries, has objectively killed vast numbers of people.

Subscribe now

Yet “blood libel” is now routinely deployed to smear anyone who speaks out about Israel’s crimes as antisemitic. Netanyahu has even used the term against political opponents inside Israel itself - including figures who fully supported the genocidal onslaught against Gaza.

Pro-Israel apologists are now flooding social media insisting that testimonies about dogs being used to rape Palestinians must be false because such acts are supposedly biologically impossible.

That is simply untrue.

There are Holocaust testimonies describing how the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie trained dogs to rape women.

In Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, a German shepherd dog named Volodia was trained to rape prisoners by Ingrid Olderock, a Chilean-German torture official known as “The Dog Lady”.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright has also written about evidence that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak regime trained dogs to rape detainees.

There is already overwhelming evidence that Israel uses dogs to attack Palestinians. The Israeli army itself accepted responsibility in the case of Muhammad Bhar, a 24-year-old Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome who died after being attacked by an Israeli military dog.

There are, in addition, extensive testimonies from Palestinian detainees describing attacks by Israeli dogs.

Subscribe now

We also know about the case of a Palestinian detainee allegedly gang raped by Israeli soldiers on camera - an incident that triggered pro-rape riots in support of the accused soldiers, attended by Israeli politicians. Reports at the time said footage was leaked by a senior Israeli military lawyer, who later resigned and reportedly attempted suicide.

All charges were dropped against the soldiers. They were transformed into national heroes. Netanyahu referred to them as “heroic warriors”.

It is also worth noting that the New York Times piece quotes Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009 and a longtime former member of Netanyahu’s Likud party:

“Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.

“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”

“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.”

There is now overwhelming evidence that the Israeli state is systematically using sexual violence against Palestinians.

The silence surrounding these crimes once again underlines the extent to which Israel’s actions are whitewashed - and the extent to which Palestinian suffering is treated as though it simply does not matter.

Labour is being replaced by forces to its left. But the party is dominated by right-wing factionalists whose entire political worldview is defined by hatred of the left. Indeed, that is essentially the only political vision they happen to have.

Now that the full results are in, we can make some definitive political conclusions.

As expected, Reform came top, chalking up just over a quarter of the vote. That is, of course, grim - last week, the party essentially called for concentration camps for migrants and refugees to be opened up in communities that vote for their political opponents.

But their projected national vote share declined by 4 points compared to last year. The party has pivoted to loud-and-proud Thatcherite economics - this was after a flirtation with, for example, nationalising the water industry. And it has absorbed several former Tory Cabinet ministers. These may well be repelling some voters who are opposed to immigration, but who are economically speaking on the left.

Meanwhile, the Green Party came second with 18%, a 7-point increase compared to last year. That exceeded much of its current polling.

In Manchester - where only some seats were up for election - the Greens hoped to win at least 6 councillors: they won 18, bringing their total to 18. In Newcastle, they went from 4 seats to 24. In Sheffield, they went from 4 to 10. In Birmingham, their seats went from 2 to 19. Independent candidates rooted in Muslim communities opposed to Israel’s genocide also surged - although alas, many do not have a progressive inclination.

Share

In Hastings and Norwich, the Greens won control of the councils altogether.

They won the popular vote in Manchester, Oxford, Norwich and Hastings.

In London, the Greens won historic victories.

In Hackney, Zoe Garb won the mayoralty with over 47.2 of the vote, a near 12-point lead over Labour. In the last 22 years, Labour have won every single contest - and their smallest ever victorious margin was 25 points.

They stormed Hackney council, too, gaining 42 out of 57 seats. In the 2022 election, they had won just 2 seats.

The Greens won the Lewisham mayoralty - again, breaking uninterrupted Labour hegemony - and won the council there, too, winning 40 out of 54 seats. They didn’t win a single seat in 2022.

In Waltham Forest, they took the council with 31 out of 60 seats. Here, too, they didn’t win a single seat at the last election.

They also became the biggest party in Lambeth - where they went from 2 seats to 29 - and Haringey - where they won 28 seats, compared to none last time.

The pattern is clear: the Greens are displacing Labour across urban England.

Subscribe now

If you look at the results through a parliamentary lens, then the Greens would have won 35 seats in a general election.

But the Greens should expect to do even better than that. Only some English local authorities held elections last week. That includes places where the Greens could be expected to win seats, like Bristol, Brighton (these two already have a Green MP each), Liverpool, Manchester (the parts which didn’t have an election) and Lancaster.

There’s another factor, too. Younger voters are even less likely to vote in local elections than in general elections - and they are the Greens’ strongest supporters. Conversely, that means older voters - who are most likely to vote Reform or Conservative - are even more overrepresented in local elections.

The Greens, therefore, could expect to do even better in a general election.

It’s also true that the Greens were on the receiving end of a vicious smear campaign. That certainly cost them votes - I know this having spoken to local activists across the country. But that factor isn’t going to go away - in fact, it’s only going to intensify. So they need a strategy to deal with that.

Subscribe now

But as a blog by pollster YouGov’s Patrick English underlines, it is the Greens who pose the biggest challenge to Labour.

He writes:

During the overnight count in the small hours of Friday morning, John Curtice appeared on air to suggest that the ward level results suggested that Labour were losing out more to the Greens than they were to Reform. The evidence was quite clear on this when we looked at who was ‘suffering most’ when either the Greens or Reform were advancing strongest.

According to the data collected and analysed as part of the BBC’s Keyward exercise, Labour were dropping back on average by a whopping 37 percentage points in wards last contested in 2022 where the Greens were advancing most strongly in 2026 (up 30pts or more).

He goes on to say:

Conversely, Labour were down by much less than that, 20pts (which is still an awful lot, by the way), where Reform were up by 30pts or more versus 2022.

The relationship becomes even clearer when we look at the other side of the respective scales. Where the Greens were advancing least (by only up to 10-points or less), Labour were only down by an average of 12pts versus 2022. But they were still down by an average of 20pts where Reform were advancing by only up to 10% or under - making the relationship on that side of the coin completely flat.

Or, in other words, there is little to no statistical relationship between Reform performance and Labour performance, but a very strong (negative) relationship between Labour and Green performance.

It’s in areas where Labour previously had high vote shares where the Greens did best.

The evidence is overwhelming. The Greens are the most successful left-of-Labour party in history. It is replacing Labour in its urban heartlands. But Labour is led by ideologues who are fanatically opposed to the left.

Their understanding of politics is that the party must chase voters from a right-wing direction - by clamping down on immigration, or opposing progressive economic policies. Kicking out foreigners is a “legitimate concern”: wanting to hike taxes on rich people is not.

And what about Wales: Welsh Labour was the most electorally successful political party on earth, winning every national election since 1922. Yet here the party was wiped out, collapsing to just 11% of the vote. It was Plaid Cymru, Welsh nationalists with an unashamedly left-wing political orientation, who triumphed in the Senedd election. The Greens, too, won their first two seats.

But it’s not the Labour hierarchy who are in denial. The British media refuses to treat the left as legitimate political actors. The acceptable political universe has to span ‘centrist’ to extremely right-wing.

A compelling reason to change the media landscape in this country.

The Green Party has submitted a complaint to The Times newspaper after it published a cartoon depicting Zack Polanski using obvious antisemitic tropes.

They note that the cartoon shows Polanski with a visibly hooked nose, perhaps the classic example of antisemitic imagery.

The Green Party have issued the following statement:

It is astonishing that amongst a rising climate of anti-Semitism in the UK, a national newspaper has chosen to publish a cartoon of the only Jewish political leader in the country using tropes so clearly associated with anti-semitic depictions of Jewish people.

“Zack faces daily anti-semitism, and in the past six weeks two people have been arrested for anti-semitic actions towards him. The words used by both politicians and the media this week, directing further attacks towards Zack in the wake of a violent attack on his community, are deeply irresponsible.

It comes as the country’s only Jewish party leader is subjected to a relentless pile-on after two Jewish and one Muslim Londoner were attacked on Thursday.

Share

All the main party leaders and British media outlets have made Polanski the focus of their attention.

This is a deeply disturbing campaign - and it is clear what the strategy is, as I’ll write more about. They are going to seek to strip away Polanski’s Jewish identity and relentlessly smear him - and the Green Party - over antisemitism. Above all, that’s because he is a) pro-Palestinian and b) left-wing.

The party need to go on the offensive. That’s the only way to face down these bad faith attacks.

The Commissioner of the scandal-afflicted Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, just interfered in our democracy - and we have to take action.

He wrote a public letter condemning Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, just a week before local elections.

This concerned a retweet by Zack Polanski about the nature of the police arrest of the man charged with the antisemitic attack in Golders Green.

Forget what you think about the retweet. Accepting this sort of police interference in our democracy legitimises a disturbing precedent - and we need to do something about it. Here is the public letter from Mark Rowley.

We need to write a complaint to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which you can do here.

I’m including a model letter for you to adapt which has been written by investigative journalist Paul Holden. You can read his own letter here.

Here is his model letter:

Share

I am writing to complain about the letter from Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley to Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader. The letter was posted to X at 5:35PM on the 30th of April 2026.

I would like the IOPC to investigate whether Sir Mark Rowley’s letter to Mr. Polanski violated his duty to act in an impartial political manner.

In investigating this matter, the IOPC should consider:

1.⁠ ⁠The tone of Sir Mark Rowley’s letter, which was condescending, ‘snarky’ and sarcastic;

2.⁠ ⁠Sir Mark Rowley’s decision to publish the letter widely without first raising his concerns privately with Mr. Polanski or the Green Party;

3.⁠ ⁠The timing of the letter, with specific reference to the upcoming local elections, including across multiple London boroughs;

4.⁠ ⁠The context of the letter, namely, a highly combustible period following a deplorable antisemitic terrorist attack, in which community tensions and emotions are running high;

5.⁠ ⁠Widespread social media and mainstream media comment about the inappropriateness of Sir Mark Rowley’s intervention;

6.⁠ ⁠The way competing political parties and politicians have used the letter to attack Mr. Polanski during a highly competitive election period.

It’s also worth nothing that Nigel Farage has repeatedly attacked the police’s operational conduct - denouncing what he calls “two-tier policing”. Not a retweet - a constant line of attack. He has never received a public letter from the Commission publicly condemning him, let alone in the run-up to an election.

I also just want to emphasise something which Paul Holden wrote in his letter. The way that Mark Rowley wrote about Zack Polanski erases his Jewish identity, and talks about the Jewish community as though it is not something he is part of.

There is a growing campaign to de facto strip Polanski of his Jewishness, linked to efforts to smear him and the Green Party as a whole with antisemitism. That is deeply sinister and the letter from the Commissioner - whatever his motives - feeds into that.

You can also see the video footage of the arrest here.

The dire failure of both politicians and our media over Morgan McSweeney’s Peter Mandelson testimony is absolutely extraordinary.

Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff was questioned this week by MPs at the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Select Committee over his role in the appointment of late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s friend as US Ambassador.

It took 77 minutes until the most important details were discussed - and that was bungled.

To be clear, McSweeney stated that he believed Mandelson when he said Epstein was a “passing acquaintance”.

To begin with, reports of Mandelson’s closeness to Epstein go back many years. Three weeks after Epstein died from suicide, the Daily Mail carried an article about what they described as “a Gatsby-esque friendship.”

It stated:

All of which brings us back to Mandelson. He’s known the generous host in these pictures for several years, having previously once visited his Caribbean island for a holiday — when neither Epstein nor any of the girls were there — and, on another occasion, dined with various celebrities at his $77 million New York townhouse, filled with erotic art and lurid photographs of young women.

It’s easy to say - well, it’s the Daily Mail. But, of course, Mandelson could have used legal means to block claims which were untrue. We can now say conclusively that the claims were true - hence they went unchallenged. Instead, the newspaper reports:

Mandelson, who these days earns a crust in the well-renumerated world of lobbying, is similarly quiet: he declined to answer questions the Mail submitted regarding his dealings with the convicted paedophile.

Share

There are many details about Mandelson’s longstanding friendship with Epstein, such as:

A 2002 report in New York magazine stated that the ‘British Cabinet minister’ had attended an intimate dinner party at Epstein’s New York home alongside a motley collection of guests including Donald Trump, magician David Blaine and Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. It added that food had been cooked by celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito, at a cost to Epstein of $50,000.

Strangely, Mandelson — then a serving MP — did not see fit to declare the expensive hospitality he received in the Commons register of interests — though he did register other events he attended during a 2002 visit to New York.

It carries testimonies, including from the now late Virginia Giuffre:

Like Andrew, Mandelson also met Virginia Roberts, a victim of Epstein who was photographed with the duke and claims to have been paid to have sex with him on three occasions in the early 2000s (allegations Andrew disputes). ‘I never heard of Jeffrey knowing Tony Blair, but he did know Peter Mandelson,’ Roberts told an interviewer in 2011.

‘I remember him [Mandelson] being at the house in New York and I was introduced to him at a dinner party.

‘He and Jeffrey talked business. I assumed they were in business together. I was never asked to give him [Mandelson] a massage.’

The same year, Channel 4’s Dispatches broadcast a documentary which included testimony alleging Peter Mandelson was so close to Epstein that the paedophile called him “Petie”. Which, of course, turned out to be true.

Subscribe now

Crucially, in 2023, an internal JP Morgan report from 2019 was filed to a New York court.

It concluded that “Jeffrey Epstein appears to maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew the Duke of York and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government.”

It confirmed that Epstein called him “Petie”, but also went much further than that. It showed that Mandelson stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse when the paedophile was serving his prison sentence for soliciting prostitution for a minor. “Peter in Paris with me”, read the subject line of one, with other such alleged meetings featured.

Indeed, Epstein closely described Mandelson’s movements. “Peter just got back from Russia,” read one Epstein email; “Peter will be in London next week,” said another. Mandelson offered advice about JP Morgan’s relationship with the Chinese government, while Epstein discussed the Labour Lord as a useful potential business and government contact.

This was covered by various newspapers at the time, including the Financial Times, headlined ‘Links between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein detailed in JPMorgan report’, which did this follow up article - ‘Jeffrey Epstein claimed to have set up meetings with senior UK ministers’m which said “The report suggests Epstein and Mandelson spoke and met “on a number of occasions”.

It is clear from the different reports that the Labour leadership office was repeatedly asked about the operation.

Subscribe now

The Telegraph even ran a story under the headline:

‘Sir Keir Starmer won’t freeze out Mandelson over Epstein friendship’. The story stated that “the Telegraph understands” that Starmer would continue to receive advice from Mandelson “despite accusations he maintained a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.” To pull back the curtain: “understands” in this context means “we spoke to Starmer’s advisors”.

In January 2024, the Financial Times’ Jim Pickard asked Starmer whether Mandelson had questions to answer over staying at Epstein’s townhouse.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” the then-Opposition Leader said. But knowing what this journalist knew was more than sufficient. Like McSweeney, Starmer claims to have been deceived by Mandelson about the depth of friendship with Epstein. But how is that tenable given the public evidence at the time?

Extraordinarily, the JP Morgan report evidence was only presented to McSweeney 77 minutes into his interrogation, by the Labour MP Abtisam Mohamed. “I can’t recall reading it, no,” McSweeney said, “but I do recall thinking it was a problem and we need to ask some follow-up questions.” What were these follow-up questions? He wasn’t clear and the panel didn’t probe him. McSweeney did refer to the questions he put to Mandelson about the Epstein relationship in 2024 and said the problem was “the nature of [Mandelson’s] answers and the lack of honesty”. But, astonishingly, he wasn’t properly challenged on what he meant by this, since it appeared to contradict his earlier insistence that “I assumed wrongly he was telling the truth”. (“Sorry, I might have mumbled my words,” he said when the chair asked him about the inconsistency.)

Was Mandelson asked if Epstein was lying about repeatedly meeting him, or offering business advice? McSweeney wasn’t asked. After all, he could have been asked, there are only two possibilities. The emails were inventing times that Epstein spent with Mandelson, and his knowledge of Mandelson’s movements - or Mandelson and Epstein had a close friendship.

Subscribe now

Despite the failure to properly hold him to account here, the questions by Abtisam Mohamed were the most important element of the entire testimony, as noted by Politico’s Playbook:

But that was literally the only coverage of Mohamed’s questions in the entire British media. Why?

The utter failure was further underscored when Labour’s Fleur Anderson asked about reports of Mandelson hosting monthly dinners. She got this wrong: it was reported by The Guardian that Lord Liddle hosted a “Sunday supper club” whose regular attendees included McSweeney, Mandelson, and Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Her basic lack of preparation enabled McSweeney to evade answering a key question about his closeness to Mandelson: he referred to a handful of meetings with the disgraced Labour dignitary at his home and restaurants.

If the Labour leadership were not sufficiently acquainted with the public details of Mandelson’s association with Epstein, then they are beyond incompetent. Yet this is the same leadership which proved itself remarkably adept at compiling dossiers to block left-wing parliamentary candidates over Twitter likes. That included economist Faiza Shaheen, deselected on the eve of the general election over liking a tweet about a Daily Show video sketch whose text called out the Israel lobby. Apparently, this obsessive commitment to obscure details does not extend to Britain’s most senior Ambassador.

So many other questions went unanswered by our elected representatives. McSweeney suggested Mandelson would not have been appointed if Trump wasn’t re-elected. This sought to cement the narrative that he was chosen because his Machiavellian traits would endear him to a far-right demagogue. Yet Mandelson had previously described Trump as “a danger to the world” and “little short of a white nationalist and a racist.” Why wasn’t he asked why this would endear Mandelson to Trump’s team - which in any case it did not? As Trump’s campaign co-manager tweeted: “This UK govt is special replace a professional universally respected Ambo with an absolute moron - he should stay home! SAD!”

What a farce. There is more than enough evidence that the Labour leadership appointed an ill-suited man with no diplomatic experience as US Ambassador, despite compelling public evidence he was close to a convicted paedophile, for factional reasons. Mandelson, protested McSweeney, was his “confidante” rather than his “mentor”. Perhaps we would know exactly what “confidante” means in practice if McSweeney had not allegedly had his work phone stolen - including correspondence with Mandelson that were not backed up - by what he says was “a black guy” on a bike.

There is overwhelming evidence that the Israeli military is raping Palestinian detainees with dogs.

We don’t just have repeated testimonies from Palestinians - but that of Israeli soldiers, too.

Last week, Euro Med Monitor, an NGO based in Geneva, released a report headlined “Another genocide behind walls”: Sexual violence in Israeli prisons and detention centres and engineered impunity.

They carry the testimony of 35-year-old Amir, who was detained by the Israeli army in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp. He testifies the following:

I was detained in Sde Teiman. They took a group of detainees and me to a corridor between the sections and forced us to strip completely naked. The soldiers brought in several dogs. One of them urinated on me. One of the dogs then raped me, penetrated my anus in a trained manner while I was being beaten. This continued for several minutes. I felt profoundly humiliated and violated.

Subscribe now

They then report the testimony of another 35-year-old Palestinian former detainee in the same camp, who says the following:

We heard dogs barking in the area, and from time to time, the dogs would urinate on us while we were detained in the metal cages. The shock came when they forced me to lie down, and a dog climbed on top of me and tried to insert its penis into me. At first, I did not understand what was happening, but then I realised that I was being raped.

I was completely naked, with no clothes on. I felt the dog’s fluids on my body. I tried to resist, but I was handcuffed, and the space was so small that I could not move. Two of them were holding me down tightly. This went on for three to four minutes.”

Last November, another NGO, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, also released a report carrying the Testimonies of Systematic Rape and Sexual Torture in Israeli Detention against Released Palestinian Detainees.

Share

They detail the case of a Palestinian man named A.A. who reports being tortured during 19 months of his detention including forced stripping, obscene insults, threats of rape against him and his family, culminating in his rape by a trained dog inside the Sde Teiman military camp.

He says:

I was moved to a section I didn’t know inside Sde Teiman. During the first weeks there, amid repeated suppression operations, I was taken with a group of detainees in a degrading manner to a place far from the cameras—a passage between sections. We were stripped completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on me. Then one of the dogs raped me—the dog did it deliberately, knowing exactly what it was doing, and inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us and spraying pepper spray in our faces. The dog’s assault lasted about three minutes; the overall suppression lasted about three hours. Because of the severe beating, all of us sustained injuries across our bodies. I suffered a severe psychological breakdown and deep humiliation; I lost control because I could never have imagined experiencing such a thing. Afterward, a doctor stitched a wound in my head caused by the torture—seven stitches without anesthesia. I also suffered bruises, fractures in my limbs, and a rib fracture.

Subscribe now

In October 2024, Al Jazeera aired the video testimony of a Palestinian detainee.

Here is what the Palestinian detainee says:

“Sde Teiman wasn’t just a normal prison. It was a place for exacting vengeance.

Let me tell you about the worst thing I experienced at Sde Teiman prison.

They called the names of three people, and I was one of them. We came out into a cement courtyard, dedicated to one form of torture. They removed our blindfolds.

We were crouching on our knees. They came and took one of the other men.

They beat him. After they beat him, they forced him to the ground on his belly.

They tied his hands and tied his feet. There were about eight or nine soldiers.

They stripped him of his underpants. A captain came and sprayed something on his backside.

There was a dog there. They unleashed the dog on him.

The dog raped the young man. It raped him, literally speaking. Rape.

In another article published by The New Arab in 2024, a detainee is interviewed:

MA: Yes…one day after your visit, a group of soldiers came with dogs, they came to where we were. They selected prisoners at random from every age group … children, young men, old men. They made them lie on the ground, face down, their hands tied behind their heads.

They made the dogs attack them, tearing at the skin and flesh of the prisoners […], then they stood them up and put them in a corner where there was a big “iron window”. They put [the prisoners’] hands on the window, then began beating them on their backs, their buttocks, and their legs from behind.

Then they set the dogs on them again, and then one of the soldiers tried to get one of the dogs to rape one of the prisoners! They teach their dogs to have sex with prisoners! Can you imagine?

[…]

They attacked another prisoner called "J.M." in the same way - they beat him and abused him, and brought in dogs to rape him. They stripped him naked and put the dogs on top of him, they were ripping at his flesh, then a soldier came carrying an "electrical baton", which emitted high-voltage electric shocks, and they started beating the prisoner on his genitals.

They also electrocuted his backside, then they stood him up on his feet and took hold of his genitals and started yanking them down violently until he fainted. Then they took him to an unknown location.

Now, Shaiel Ben-Ephraim is an Israeli academic and former soldier, who has sources in the Israeli military. He says the following:

I talked to two guards in Sde Teiman, on more than one occasion. One had seen this happen and said it was too awful to talk about. The other said that he had heard about it from others and believed it was true. This happened. This is happening still. The evidence is too overwhelming.”

This is a level of depravity that the vast majority of people would struggle to imagine anyone even thinking up, let alone enacting. And yet the evidence is overwhelming: that the Israeli military is systematically using dogs to rape Palestinian detainees.

Keir Starmer is a man without integrity, without principle, without loyalty, without honesty. We could add more - charisma, competence - but the point is simpler than that: there is nothing to recommend him, or his premiership.

He is a void. A political non-entity. A frontman - nothing more - for one of the most odious factions in modern British politics. And as events continue to demonstrate, he will throw anyone under a bus if he thinks it might save his own skin.

None of this should come as a surprise. It was all visible, all there in plain sight. And yet much of the British media is implicated in what followed - because the real story, even now, is still not being properly told.

The scandal surrounding the appointment of Peter Mandelson - an associate and friend of late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein - arose for a straightforward reason. It has a clear origin point: six years ago, a right-wing faction seized control of the Labour Party under false pretences. That original sin is what will, in the end, bring this government down.

Today, the senior civil servant sacked by Starmer - Olly Robins, the former Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office - gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. It was, by any measure, damning.

Robins made clear that at no point was the Mandelson appointment made conditional on vetting, despite being announced well in advance. The Cabinet Office, he said, argued there was no need to vet Mandelson at all.

His office, we were told, was subjected to relentless pressure from No. 10 to push the appointment through regardless. One official even reportedly rang his predecessor to say: “Just fucking approve it.”

That intervention is alleged to have come from Morgan McSweeney - Starmer’s former chief of staff, a close associate and protégé of Mandelson, and the man who ran Starmer’s deeply dishonest 2020 leadership campaign, in which sweeping left-wing pledges were made to members and then discarded wholesale. McSweeney denies the allegation.

But it doesn’t end there.

Share

Robbins also claims the government attempted to install Starmer’s former director of communications, Matthew Doyle, as an ambassador. Doyle is a personal friend of Mandelson, and a member of the same faction.

They worked together inside the Labour Party, and during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership they met regularly - over dinners involving figures like Wes Streeting and Mandelson himself - to plot their course.

Like Mandelson, Doyle is also linked to a convicted paedophile: former Labour councillor Sean Morton. Morton was charged in 2016 with possessing indecent images of children; Doyle campaigned for him even after those charges were brought. Morton was later convicted.

These links were known. Yet Starmer appointed Doyle to the House of Lords. The SNP’s Stephen Flynn was among those who warned against it. Only sustained outrage forced Doyle’s suspension.

Doyle denies any knowledge that No. 10 pushed for his appointment to an ambassadorial role. But we already know - from correspondence released during the Mandelson scandal - that Robins’ predecessor recorded: “The Prime Minister had indicated his intention to recommend… a small number of political appointments to serve as His Majesty’s Ambassadors overseas.”

Starmer, for his part, has repeatedly denied knowing that Mandelson was denied security clearance. But David Maddox, political editor of the Independent, messaged No. 10 last September to say he’d been told by two sources that Mandelson did not clear vetting with MI6 but the prime minister pushed his appointment anyway. So how did he know but the prime minister did not know?

It is all rather academic in a sense. Starmer is merely the frontman for this faction. As his own advisors briefed journalists in 2024: “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”

The DLR, for those who don’t know is a driverless train.

Subscribe now

What we know is that Morgan McSweeney spent years - whilst Corbyn was Labour leader - using the ‘Labour Together’ think tank to lay the groundwork for a right-wing takeover of the party.

That effort was funded by £700,000 in secret donations from business figures - conveniently declared only months after Starmer became leader, dismissed by McSweeney as an “admin error” after an Electoral Commission fine.

(If you haven’t already, do buy Paul Holden’s The Fraud on all this).

Once in control, they remade the party in their image.

Selections were stitched up. Leading factional members were parachuted into constituencies they had no connection to, bypassing local members entirely. And as we now see, the same mentality extended to the state itself - attempting to hand out ambassadorships to factional allies with no relevant experience, but with deeply troubling associations.

And still, most political journalists looked the other way.

Why? Because they approved of the war waged by Starmerism on the left. They saw it as good politics. And so they overlooked all the traits which have emerged in undeniable full force during the Mandelson scandal.

Five years ago, I wrote the following about Starmer’s leadership:

The one thing I got wrong was that Starmer was unelectable, and that had absolutely nothing to do with him - it was just because the Tories destroyed themselves more comprehensively than any government in our history, and the electoral system gifted Labour two-thirds of the seats with only a third of the vote.

This faction must be driven from British politics. But alas, they rigged the parliamentary selections to ensure that the parliamentary Labour party is now full of their loyal drones.

That’s why the Labour Party needs to be replaced - and why voting Green in the upcoming elections is one way of achieving that.

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

The Daily Telegraph is being acquired by a German-based media giant - and now its journalists are formally expected to support Israel.

The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has cleared the takeover by Axel Springer SE. Its CEO, Mathias Döpfner, has written to Telegraph staff “outlining his commitment” to the paper.

An employee at The Telegraph has sent me that letter. It is deeply revealing.

Döpfner insists that the values of The Telegraph and the publishing house founded by late tycoon Axel Springer - dubbed ‘Germany’s Rupert Murdoch’ - are aligned. They are, he says, “Freedom, free markets, individual freedom and freedom of speech.”

He goes further. Axel Springer, he explains, is “guided by a clear editorial compass.” Its employees are rooted in its Essentials - “core values to which we are firmly committed.”

There is, he adds, “no such thing as neutral journalism”: only journalism that is “pluralistic and surprising, fair, and fact-based.”

And yet, having invoked “freedom of speech” as a foundational principle, he insists these Essentials are not partisan - but rather “define a socio-political framework within which maximum journalistic freedom and intellectual independence can flourish.”

“We support the right of Israel to exist”

Döpfner then sets out those ‘Essentials’:

1. We stand for freedom, freedom of expression, the rule of law, and democracy.

2. We support the right of Israel to exist and oppose all forms of antisemitism.

3. We advocate the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe.

4. We uphold the principles of a free-market economy.

5. We reject political and religious extremism, as well as all forms of discrimination.

Note where “we support the right of Israel to exist” sits: second.

“Freedom” - within limits

Döpfner emphasises that editorial independence will be protected, including from pressure by politicians, celebrities, or advertisers. “I value debate in the spirit of pluralism and freedom of expression,” he writes.

But the description of the Essentials is, frankly, Orwellian.

It is not reconcilable to argue that these tenets create the conditions for “maximum journalistic freedom” while simultaneously requiring adherence to a political position on a specific foreign state.

Out of 193 UN member states, only one is singled out in this way.

No state has a “right to exist” under international law. Peoples have a right to self-determination - a right denied, in this case, by Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and by subjecting its people to apartheid, colonisation and genocide.

Share

A Telegraph journalist put it to me bluntly:

To be firmly told by our new parent company-to-be’s CEO that the second most important guiding principle is affirming the right of a country committing genocide and ethnic cleansing is more than a little concerning. It also raises the question of how any reporting from the paper can be considered factual if that is our core principle.

As they note, this principle comes before any explicit rejection of discrimination.

What “Israel’s right to exist” means in practice

In practice, the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” has been repeatedly deployed by Israel’s cheerleaders across the West to justify Israel’s crimes - from occupation and colonisation to apartheid and, now, mass destruction in Gaza.

It is also telling what is not said. The Essentials do not prohibit racism in general, despite later rejecting “all forms of discrimination”. There is no explicit rejection of Islamophobia, for example, or anti-Arab racism.

Instead, “oppose all forms of antisemitism” is fused directly with “support the right of Israel to exist.”

That conflation matters.

Because we know that defenders of Israel have repeatedly blurred the line between antisemitism and opposition to the actions of the Israeli state.

So how, exactly, might Axel Springer SE interpret “oppose all forms of antisemitism”?

“Free Palestine” is a “pro-Hamas topic”

There are very strong clues, let’s put it that way.

The late Axel Springer himself declared:

It is the task of our generation to stand firmly by Israel’s side, even if this causes difficulties for our policies elsewhere.

He further added:

The country does not need encouragement, but advocacy, wherever and whenever it can be provided – in the European Community, in the United Nations, in diplomatic relations, at work, in the family.

He described this as a “German duty”.

In June 2021, when emoloyees complained about the Israeli flag being raised at company headquarters, Mathias Döpfner responded:

I think, and I’m being very frank with you, a person who has an issue with an Israeli flag being raised for one week here, after antisemitic demonstrations, should look for a new job.

He was referring to demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza that May.

In October 2023, a Lebanese employee at Welt TV - part of the Axel Springer empire - was dismissed: he says it was after he challenged the outlet’s pro-Israel positions. Axel Springer SE refuse to comment on “individual personnel matters.”

Subscribe now

In an internal email which was leaked that year, Döpfner reportedly summarised his political worldview with the phrase: “Zionism über alles” - “Zionism above all.”

He has penned repeated pro-Israel polemics. “Will we stand with Israel against the enemies of freedom despite the risks, or will we allow fear and opportunism to prevail?” he wrote in October 2023, demanding “massive, unstiting political, financial and military support”.

On a podcast for his employees, Döpfner claimed “a majority on Instagram, on other social media, and in particular on TikTok, took sides for the Hamas’ actions.” He argued that “an almost global wave of Anti-Semitism suddenly showed its ugly face”, which he described as a shock, despite knowing “that it is here and there, well hidden or presented in a politically correct manner as Anti-Zionism or “Woke-ism” or whatever.”

And he said something deeply revealing about TikTok:

“Concretely, more than 4 million posts until today have been published under the hashtag of #FreePalestine or other kind of pro-Hamas topics. And only 50,000 something, 53,000 posts basically standing by Israel.”

“Free Palestine”, he argued, was a “kind of pro-Hamas topic”.

Conflating antisemitism with critique of Israel

When Israel launched its first war on Iran last June, Döpfner declared it was “surprising that Israel is not being celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise and necessary strike.” Instead, he claimed:

the public response is dominated by anti-Israel propaganda. The intelligence and precision of Israel’s actions are not admired but are instead used here and there to perpetuate blatantly antisemitic stereotypes. This attitude is characterized not only by racist undertones, but also by a strange self-forgetfulness.

In other words, he directly conflated critique of Israel’s war with antisemitism.

A few months ago, he quoted claims about atrocities committed on October 7th which included: “A first responder testified before the Knesset that he had seen the severed skulls of three children.” The claims that Israeli children were beheaded have been comprehensively debunked.

He went on to write that:

justified criticism of decisions made by an Israeli government is mixed with deep-rooted hatred of Jews and that, as a result, instead of an obvious global wave of compassion and solidarity, a global wave of cold-heartedness and increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism has emerged.

The piece further criticised the German government - Israel’s most loyal European defender - for “massively” restricting arms sales to Israel. Tellingly, he said that decision meant that “From now on, unconditional support for Israel’s right to exist is effectively subject to conditions.” He described the recognition of Palestinian statehood “as a reward for the barbarism of Oct. 7.”

Subscribe now

Last October, Al Jazeera published an investigation into German tabloid Bild, a cornerstone of Axel Springer SE, headlined ‘The Story of Israel’s Propaganda Machine Specializing in Anti-Palestinian Incitement’.

Al Jazeera reported that the newspaper had suggested that a Palestinian journalist killed by Israel was a “terrorist”, denied famine in Gaza, and published a lengthy report it claimed had been found on the computer of late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It transpired that the document was old, not authored by Sinwar, and had reportedly been leaked by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

The newspaper, reported Al Jazeera, had also “consistently demonised pro-Gaza demonstrators in Germany, labelling them as “mobs”, “Israel-haters”, and “anti-Semites”.”

BILD has described student protesters in the US as “Judenhasser-Studenten” (“Jew-hater students”) - even though they included Jewish students.

What happens to Jewish critics of Israel in Germany?

We should also note the atmosphere in Germany, in which antisemitism is widely conflated with critique of Israel, to the extent that Jewish people there have been repeatedly denounced, deplatformed, and arrested.

Alex Springer SE’s outlets have repeatedly singled out Jewish critics of Israel.

Die Welt newspaper argued that Jewish American photographer Nan Goldin “misused the opening of her retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie to level serious accusations against Germany and Israel – supported by pro-Palestinian activists.”

Another article attacked Deborah Feldman, a Jewish American-German writer who has spoken out about how the German government ignores “the way dissenting Jews in Germany are being thrown under the same bus as they are in Israel.”

A piece in Bild said of her:

Her political views are close to conspiracy theories: in Germany, one is not allowed to say what one wants, the police are infiltrated by right-wing extremists, and the Federal Republic is preventing "peace" in the Middle East (anti-Semitic subtext: because it obeys the all-powerful Israel lobby). This is roughly the worldview of the author, who years ago also had a Netflix hit with her autobiographically inspired bestseller "Unorthodox".

In other words, falsely suggesting a Jewish writer holds antisemitic views because of her opinions about Israel.

Subscribe now

Rewarded by Israel

Last October, the Israeli President Isaac Herzog presented Döpfner with the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honor - alongside Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American business tycoon who donated $100 million to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Israel’s justification for Döpfner’s award was that he “is a brave voice against antisemitism and a staunch supporter of Israel. He has demonstrated unprecedented solidarity with Israel during the current war.”

Herzog incited genocide back in October 2023, when he declared of Gaza:

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians who were not aware and not involved. It is absolutely not true.”

Notably, Axel Springer SE has a business empire in Israel. That includes acquiring Israeli classifieds platform Yad2 for €165 million in 2014. Yad2 is involved in Israel’s property market, and reportedly advertises properties in illegal settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank.

What this means for the Telegraph

To be clear, the Telegraph has already had a partisan pro-Israel orientation, publishing multiple pieces justifying Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Gaza.

But this takeover embeds pro-Israel bias into the newspaper’s very fabric. Its new owners are zealously pro-Israel, and have repeatedly conflated antisemitism with critique of Israel.

They claim that “freedom of speech” is a core value.

The truth is that Israel’s supporters in the West have launched the biggest assault on free speech since the height of McCarthyism.

We can see where the Telegraph’s new owners stand on that.

What on earth was the BBC thinking?

Earlier today, former Trump ally Tucker Carlson was interviewed by the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire on its flagship politics programme.

Derbyshire put to him allegations of antisemitism, including from Republican Senator Ted Cruz - and then from someone she introduce as ‘Republican Congressman, Randy Fine’. He had called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America’.

Just who is this Randy Fine? He is the most unapologetically extreme racist elected to the US legislature. This isn’t an exaggeration.

Subscribe now

Here are some direct quotes from Randy Fine:

• "If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one."

• "‘Palestinian’ is just another word for demon."

• In reference to "mainstream Muslims", he said: “I don’t know how you make peace with those who seek your destruction. I think you destroy them first."

• “There is no suffering adequate for these animals. May the streets of Gaza overflow with blood.”

• "“Palestinian” = Hamas. #BombsAway"

• "Gaza must be destroyed."

• “In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here. There is something deeply deeply wrong with this culture, and it needs to be defeated.”

As you can read, he is a genocidal racist fanatic.

The BBC must have known who Fine was when they made the editorial decision to include him in their script. How could they possibly conclude that this was an acceptable person to quote on anything, let alone on the question of racism?

If a politician had said similar statements about Jewish people, would the BBC quote them?

No, they would not. They would - rightly - think that would be a scandalous thing to do.

What does this tell us about the BBC’s attitude towards Muslims or Palestinians? How can the BBC possibly argue that they take racism against Muslims or Palestinian seriously after this?

You can complain to the BBC here. It was on ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’, BBC One, 9am, Sunday 12th April 2026.

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

The so-called ceasefire is already crumbling, but have no doubt: this is the biggest strategic defeat the US has suffered since it emerged as a superpower in 1945. It isn’t even close.

The US and Israel went to war believing they could variously overthrow its regime, impose a stooge leader, plunge the country into violent chaos or even dismember it, destroy its nuclear programme, neutralise it militarily, and steal its oil.

None of that has happened. Instead, Iran has secured de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s main economic arteries. It has inflicted severe economic pain on the US, the West and its Gulf allies. It has certainly suffered huge damage - including to civilian infrastructure - but its military prowess has been proven. Its nuclear programme, including its enriched uranium, remains intact.

US military prestige was already severely damaged by the Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya disasters, but now it has been shattered. It’s much worse than the precedents. Its stamina hasn’t been whittled down by years of guerrilla warfare. It went to war with a state, and within weeks, was driven into retreat after suffering severe economic damage.

Trump threatened to inflict genocide against Iran, declaring that its “civilisation will die” if it did not bend to his will. Regardless of what happens next, a line has been crossed there. Every day Trump remains in the White House represents a mortal danger: he must be removed.

But this genocidal threat clearly represented his fury and frustration at being unable to secure what he had presumed would be an easy victory. He hoped the threat could somehow overshadow the reality, which is a colossal strategic defeat.

Iran can now use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage: for example, to raise money by imposing a toll, or to demand the removal of sanctions.

Right now, Israel is unleashing unspeakable violence in Lebanon, both an attempt to destabilise the ceasefire and to inflict revenge on its people after a humiliating strategic defeat. Iran has responded by enforcing the continued shutdown of Hormuz, making clear its continued involvement in ceasefire talks depends on an end to conflict everywhere.

As it was, very few ships were likely to pass through the Strait without a secure peace deal on the grounds that the ceasefire there could fall apart at any moment, stranding or outright endangering shipping. There’s also the question of how the toll with Iran would work - and all of that matters for insurers giving the go ahead for ships to pass, without which traffic remains at a standstill.

The gravity of the defeat is clearly making White House tetchy, to say the least. After I shared a version of Iran’s 10 point plan, and concluded “This is the biggest strategic defeat suffered by the US since its emergence as a superpower,” the White House Director of Communications and Assistant to the President fired some choice words at me:

Share

Why is Steven so grumpy? His Administration claims they’ve just secured a major victory - so why so mardy, in Northern English speak?

The truth is, of course, is that Trump did indeed describe Iran’s 10 point plan as “a workable basis on which to negotiate”. And here they are in the Wall Street Journal:

Imagine, on the day this war began, you discovered several weeks later that this was what the US intended to negotiate. You would rightly understand that the US must have suffered a terrible defeat to even countenance this.

Hence several Trump allies, like the truly toxic Laura Loomer, have shown awareness of their country’s strategic plight:

Not cheerful, is she?

Trumpism was a response to US decline. Trump believed he could reverse US decline by brute force. That has backfired spectacularly. Instead, the US’s weaknesses are more starkly on display than any time since the end of World War II.

China, in particular, stands to gain, not least as it tries to position itself as a rational, stable, reliable alternative.

But the collapse of US hegemony, alas, does not mean a new world order based on peace and justice emerges in its place. Instead, violent chaos and authoritarianism beckon. Unless, of course, we establish an alternative.

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

We’ve had over a decade now of news cycles revolving around the latest outrageous tirade Donald Trump has fired off on social media.

I get it: the shock has long since dissipated. These days, such posts can often expect to attract, at most, an exhausted eye roll or perhaps a mildly raised eyebrow.

We’re now over a month into Trump’s illegal war on Iran, and the president is repeatedly and openly posting flagrant threats and admissions of war crimes.

We cannot normalise this.

All the way through Israel’s genocide, many of us warned that the consequences would not just be felt by the Palestinian people. Israel was (and is) committing every war crime imaginable in the world’s first livestreamed genocide. Its leaders repeatedly flaunted their bloodcurdling genocidal statements of intent.

The lack of outrage - let alone accountability - would normalise our slide into barbarism, we warned. The international order was always defined by deception and hypocrisy, rigged as it was in favour of the West. But the naked, shameless abandonment of the most basic norms governing the conduct of state violence would have devastating consequences.

The Iran war began with the US slaughtering 165 mostly Iranian schoolgirls. The lack of outrage over this was itself indicative of our slide into the darkness. Which brings me to Trump’s latest post:

Blasting Iran “back to the Stone Ages”, he declares, not even bothering to pretend that he isn’t presiding over the total abandonment of the Geneva Conventions.

There was this post from 10th March:

This was straightforwardly genocidal, threatening as it did to make it impossible for Iran “to ever be built back.” He’s also declared that Iran “is dead”. Gone are any lies about liberating Iran’s people.

Share

That’s without even discussing his so-called War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has the air of someone who spends much of his time furiously masturbating over footage of exploding bombs.

This cannot be dismissed as Trump sounding off, as the unhinged rhetoric of an internet troll. This is the despotic leader of an admittedly declining superpower, and specifically the commander-in-chief of its military engaged in illegal warfare.

Indeed, there is ample evidence of Trump’s bile being acted upon. Here are photographs of Mobarakeh Steel Company, Iran’s largest industrial unit and the biggest steel complex in the Middle East. It has been destroyed. The impact on Iran’s economy - and its people - is incalculable.

And then there’s this. Israeli missiles have destroyed a major pharmaceutical factory in the Iranian capital. Note that sanctions have meant that Iran has had to manufacture most of its medicine production domestically:

These are blatant, unapologetic war crimes.

Subscribe now

But of course, the context is the last two and a half years. Israel destroyed schools and hospitals and mosques and libraries, slaughtered over 1,600 medics, blew up most civilian homes, and ravaged agriculture, livestock and plantlife. It butchered well over a hundred thousand people, including deliberately shooting children in the head. It disappeared, tortured, raped civilians, and arbitrarily killed its kidnap victims. It starved an entire population, and deprived them of the necessities of life.

We could go on. And the West not only failed to express its outrage - it armed and facilitated those crimes.

And now what? The Iran war will prove the greatest strategic military defeat the US has suffered since it emerged as a superpower. But that will only amplify Trump’s murderous rage. Unable to emerge victorious, he will simply escalate his vengeful crimes.

This depravity is being entirely normalised. The fall of the West is chaotic indeed, and far more barbarism awaits.

I’m very excited to announce my new book - The Fall of the West - is now out for pre-order.

You can do that here!

I’ve felt very guilty about not posting as much on Substack - it’s because I’ve been finishing off the editing. But that will soon change!

It’s a book I’ve been working on for two years. I’ve travelled from Baghdad to the Rust Belt, from Kenya to Palestine.

The book challenges the dominant theory about Western decline. It’s one you’ll have heard a lot - that the West is in crisis because of immigration, Islam, multiculturalism, ‘woke’, the supposed defiling of Western history and Western guilt and shame.

Share

That theory of decline has become central to the rise of the far right. But they are both symptoms and accelerants of decline.

The truth is Western elites got high on their own supply. They believed the collapse of the Soviet Union meant they were militarily invincible, that their economic model was unchallengeable, that they were morally supreme. The End of History, as it were.

They opportunistically used this triumphalism to grab wealth and power. That led - economically and militarily - to catastrophe.

That’s left the West in a grave crisis at home and abroad. The West has dominated the world since the early 19th century - but now its power is in freefall.

Trumpism is a symptom of that decline - and as we can see both in the assault on democracy and war in Iran, it is only accelerating the fall.

Anyway, there is a lot more to say - and can’t wait to share more!

Pre-ordering really helps if you’re able to. I’ll keep you updated!

Thanks so much for your support again, and I’ll be regularly updating here shortly!

Iran is winning the war.

The regime only needs to survive in order to win. Despite the constant shifting of official war goals, Donald Trump clearly believed that assassinating the Supreme Leader would lead to a stooge leader being installed in Tehran within days.

But Iran’s regime has achieved more than survival. Consider the Iraq, Afghan and Libyan wars. All of these were strategic catastrophes for the West, all severely weakening US hegemony. But in all of these examples, the regimes in question crumbled swiftly in the face of the overwhelming advantage of Western conventional warfare. What did it for US power, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, was years of guerrilla warfare; in Libya, it was its collapse into a failed state.

In this case, the Iranian regime has not only survived - it is more hardline than it was, and has greater power. It has used its leverage to inflict a devastating economic cost on the West - by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil passes, and pounding the Gulf allies of the West.

Iran’s strategy is straightforward: inflict such a great cost that the US and Israel not only cease their attacks, but they do not dare to renew their attacks months or even years down the line.

Forget about Trump’s wounded pride. If Iran achieves that goal, then US hegemony formally collapses. Its military weaknesses have already been exposed by the disastrous foreign adventures of the 21st century - which Trump was aware of, hence his commitment to end ‘the forever wars’.

But this would be in a completely different order: not years of being worn down by insurgency - but rather a foreign state facing down an attack altogether.

As it is, Iran has stripped away what seemed to be a US monopoly over economic warfare. That’s a crucial plank of US power - its ability to menace other countries economically, not least by sanctions. In a sense, Iran has instead sanctioned the West.

This is why esteemed political scientist Professor Robert A. Pape says:

“Counterintuitive reality: Iran may be winning the war strategically

The regime is consolidating power, fracturing the U.S.–Gulf coalition, and driving global energy shocks.”

It’s also why Trump’s former Defence Secretary Mark Esper suggests that it is in fact Iran which has more “endurance”.

It’s also why Trump sounds increasingly unhinged, even by his standards, declaring that Iran is “dead”, and resorting to disturbed genocidal rhetoric:

Gone is any pretence about saving the Iranian people: now Trump is talking about permanently destroying their entire country.

His desperation is also underlined by his toying with the strategy of “declaring victory and going home”:

The problem here is that Trump cannot just “declare victory and go home”, because Iran can continue to inflict further economic damage which the US will suffer from. If the US withdrew in those circumstances, it would simply be read - correctly - as a catastrophic defeat US power could not recover from.

Yesterday, Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gasfield - a crucial plank of its energy infrastructure. Iran had repeatedly promised that if such infrastructure was attacked, it would respond in kind - and, in accordance with its threats, attacked Qatar’s liquified gas facilities.

Share

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump supported this strike in order to somehow pressure Iran into opening the Straits of Hormuz.

But Trump has now issued an extraordinary post:

Whatever the truth here, Donald Trump has lost complete control of the war of aggression he decided to launch.

He claims not to have known anything about Israel’s attack - which, if true, means he is admitting that he is not in the driving seat of his own war. But either way, he is clearly shocked by the Iranian response, despite Iran have explicitly and repeatedly warned what it would do. And here he threatens a catastrophic escalation which would surely mean Iran destroying other Gulf energy infrastructure - or even the desalination plants which make its neighbours habitable.

The danger of this moment cannot be understated. For Iran’s regime, getting through the war without surrender is existential. But for the US, this is now an existential question about its own hegemony. That’s why it is trapped in a cycle of escalation, with serious talk of US ground troops - which would land the country in a disastrous quagmire, not least given Iran’s geography.

The question facing humanity now is not about the fall of US hegemony - but how steep and chaotic that descent turns out to be.

Apologies for lack of posts - currently editing my new book, appropriately titled ‘The Fall of the West’. Off to Cuba now for a few days and normal service will resume!