It’s 25% off if you order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST - but only if you hurry!

Waterstones are doing a special sale until 24th July. If you go here and order with the code SUMMER26, it’s 25% off.

The book exposes how the West was plunged into catastrophe by greed, war, hatred, arrogance - and genocide.

It takes on the right-wing lie that Western decline has been caused by migrants, minorities and “woke”.

I’m beyond excited to tell you more about the book. It’s the most difficult and important project I’ve ever worked on. It’s based on a huge amount of research and took me from Palestine to Pennsylvania, Baghdad to Dresden.

Pre-orders really really help with the book - so huge thanks in advance!

The British people believe that Israel is committing genocide.

That’s according to a new YouGov poll which has been studiously ignored by the media.

50% believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza “constitute a genocide” - with just 17% saying the opposite.

Around a third opt for “don’t know”. That means those believing Israel is committing genocide outnumber those who do not by three to one.

The other polling results show overwhelming support for Britain to take action against Israel.

58% oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza, compared to 18% in support.

57% support suspending arms exports, compared to 18% opposed. 52% support financial sanctions on assets of individuals (19% are opposed), 51% support tariffs and import restrictions (20% are opposed) and 48% support a trade embargo (20% are opposed).

Just 15% think the UK should be an ally of Israel, with 55% believing it should not be an ally.

Among those who voted Labour in 2024, 67% believe Israel has committed genocide, with just 10% disagreeing. About 64% of 18 to 24 year olds believe that it is genocide.

Strikingly, even a third of Tory voters believe Israel has committed genocide, with only a quarter saying otherwise - and 40% opting for ‘Don’t know’.

Even a quarter of Reform voters believe that it is genocide - although in their case, more than four in ten believe otherwise.

These figures should be placed in their broader context. The Western media has supported, legitimised and whitewashed Israel’s genocide. The scale of the atrocities committed by Israel has been kept from news bulletins and newspapers.

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Those who oppose the genocide have been demonised variously as hateful, dangerous and extreme.

The consensus at elite-level - that is, among politicians and the media - remains pro-Israel.

So the fact that British public opinion is so decisively hostile to their country’s alliance with Israel is striking. It means there is a chasm separating the views of the British people and the Establishment.

It’s in this context that the new British prime minister Andy Burnham has apologised for Labour’s position on Gaza.

To be clear - that apology isn’t enough. It wrongly characterises Labour’s failure as being too slow to support a ceasefire - when in fact the party actively supported Israel’s genocidal onslaught.

He used emotive language about 7th October - but not about Israel’s own actions. He said “There’s increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed”: he knows full well they have been committed on an industrial scale. He’s just not willing to say so because that would then impose legal requirements on his government to take action.

But the point he’s felt compelled to say any of this shows an understanding that Labour’s position has repelled voters - and helped drive the surge of the Green Party.

More broadly, the polling reflects the trend across the Western world.

In the US, negative attitudes towards Israel are higher than ever. 60% of American voters have an unfavourable view of Israel, with 37% opting for favourable. For the first time, more Americans sympathise with Palestinians than Israelis.

The challenge, of course, is to translate popular attitudes into government action. But Israel’s cheerleaders should be in a state of panic - because they are losing.

This is deeply sinister.

The government is considering legislation which, in practise, could silence independent journalists like myself.

They’ve published a Green Paper that outlines plans to require social media platforms to make a select group of “trustworthy” news outlets more prominent and discoverable in searches, recommendations, and feeds.

The government would decide which news organisations are judged to be more “trustworthy”.

This would, in practise, suppress the content of independent journalists such as myself - as well as other left-wing media outlets.

This could mean my journalism challenging the status quo would disappear from your feed. That includes my work challenging Israel’s genocide in Gaza; opposing disastrous wars; confronting the rise of the far right and fascism; exposing the injustices of capitalism; scrutinising Labour and the Democrats; and platforming voices you rarely hear in the mainstream - Palestinians, Jewish anti-genocide activists, anti-war Iranians, dissenting academics, economists, experts on war crimes.

It would also suppress my work challenging the journalism of the mainstream outlets judged “trustworthy” by the government - whose output would now be boosted.

This could include YouTube as well as, say, Instagram and Facebook.

So before we continue - make sure you don’t just subscribe to my channel. Click on the subscription bell and choose ‘All’, rather than ‘Personalised’. If you don’t, my work could vanish from your feed.

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So what the hell is going on?

Last month, the government published a document with the grandiose title: ‘Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media.’

It is a Green Paper: a document through which the government tests policy proposals and gathers responses before deciding whether and how to legislate.

It isn’t law - yet. The criteria have not been decided, and the government says it will develop its final policy positions after the consultation. But this is not an idle thought experiment either. It is an official proposal, published on 23 June, with the consultation closing on 31 August.

The government says it will “explore legislative options” for a new prominence regime, applying to social media platforms and potentially video-sharing platforms. That would require them to make designated news content prominent and discoverable within their interfaces.

They define “prominence” as giving certain content a “privileged position” - and, as an example, suggests this means “ensuring a specific channel appears at the top of search results or features on a recommendation feed.”

Under proposals under consideration:

• the government creating official criteria for determining which providers qualify as trustworthy;

• qualifying national and local publishers could be included alongside public-service organisations such as the BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4 and Channel 5;

• imposing the desired outcome on platforms while allowing them some flexibility over its technical delivery;

• operating the intervention continuously or activating it during periods of crisis or “heightened vulnerability”;

• and deciding whether users should be permitted to switch the intervention off.

The core principle is extraordinary.

The government is considering the creation of a legally privileged tier of news organisations whose journalism would be given preferential access to the public.

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Who gets to decide what “trustworthy” means?

The government has not yet decided.

It says one possible starting point is the definition of a “recognised news publisher” in the Online Safety Act.

The likes of the BBC would automatically be recognised.

According to the White Paper publishers must satisfy a checklist, which means that publishing news must be their principal purpose; their material must be produced by different people and under editorial control; they must have a standards code, a complaints process, a UK business address and an identifiable person with legal responsibility.

This may all sound super reasonable. What it means in practise is that large, well-funded outlets are prioritised.

A large institution could satisfy all of these requirements and still publish journalism that is misleading, inaccurate, biased, deferential, and/or catastrophically wrong.

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The BBC’s coverage of Gaza shows exactly why this is dangerous

For example, I spent months working on a detailed investigation for Drop Site News into the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

It was based on interviews with 13 current and former BBC staff, an examination of internal complaints and a quantitative assessment of its reporting. It documented what those journalists described as a structural imbalance: greater credulity towards official Israeli narratives; a systematic devaluation of Palestinian life; the sidelining of specialists in war crimes; a failure to connect individual atrocities to an overarching strategy; and a tendency to frame events through Israel’s claimed right to self-defence, with proportionality treated as a secondary debate.

My own journalism is always vigorously evidence-based. On the question of Israel’s genocide, my work was far more accurate than the BBC’s much better-funded output. I exposed atrocities and genocidal plans they ignored; platformed the work of experts and organisations they sidelined; and combatted Israeli lies they amplified.

I explained from the start what Israel’s actual genocidal intentions were. The BBC’s approach was to portray Israel’s genocidal onslaught as a war of self-defence, with a side debate about whether its actions were “proportionate” enough.

The point is that - under the government’s plans - the BBC’s work on Israel and Palestine would be prioritised over my own.

That wouldn’t be based on comparing the evidence or the accuracy of each piece of work. It would simply be based on the BBC being judged as inherently “trustworthy” - and thus prioritised over my own work.

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You do not have to delete somebody to suppress them

The government’s defence will be obvious.

Nobody is being censored, it will say. Nobody’s videos are being deleted. Independent journalists will remain free to publish.

But you do not have to physically remove somebody’s work to suppress its reach.

Imagine two people speaking through microphones. The state orders one microphone to be turned up and leaves the other barely audible. Technically, both people are still allowed to speak. In reality, only one is being heard.

A video that is never recommended, rarely appears in search results and is excluded from the feeds of potential viewers may remain online while becoming effectively invisible.

The speech has not been prohibited. The audience simply rarely encounters it.

That means fewer views, fewer subscribers and less revenue.

For large broadcasters with multiple sources of funding and distribution, YouTube reach is useful. For many independent publishers, it is existential.

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“Official” journalism is not the same thing as trustworthy journalism

There is another fundamental problem.

Too much political journalism is built around access: private briefings, anonymous quotes, lobby relationships, off-the-record lunches and the hope of securing the next exclusive.

This “access” journalism deters reporters from saying things which might upset politicians - because they risk being frozen out.

I spent years scrutinising Keir Starmer and Labour’s leadership. I warned what would go wrong before much of it did. Compare and contrast what I said to the analysis of mainstream outlets.

They applauded Starmer for his deceitful, factional war on the left - without diagnosing the lack of vision or strategy for the country. They were invested in the idea that Starmerism represented competent, stable, sensible government.

I have my contacts, but I am not dependent on access to ministers, party machines and official sources. Neither do I have a worldview that is deferential to power.

Yet my political journalism faces being suppressed in favour of work which was discredited by events time and time again.

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“Crisis mode”

The consultation asks whether this system should be permanently switched on or activated only during periods of “crisis” or “heightened vulnerability”.

Elsewhere, the Green Paper points to periods of “community tension, social unrest and democratic events”. It also asks whether users should be allowed to switch the intervention off.

Would an election count? A wave of riots? A mass protest against a government policy? A huge strike movement? A terrorist attack? A public-health emergency? A constitutional confrontation? A disastrous war in which the government itself was involved?

These are my examples, not situations specifically listed in the document. But that is precisely the problem: the boundaries have not been defined.

Imagine a government leading the country into a catastrophic war and activating a system that privileges officially recognised broadcasters over independent anti-war voices.

Imagine a mass movement against an unjust law, while reporting sympathetic to the government receives greater algorithmic weight in the name of responding to social tension.

Imagine an election during which established outlets broadly share the assumptions of the political class, while those challenging its record are pushed further from public view.

No videos are banned. No journalists are arrested.

The volume is simply turned down.

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There is a real problem. This is the wrong solution.

It’s obviously not the case that there isn’t an underlying problem.

Algorithms can promote inflammatory nonsense, calculated lies and blatant disinformation to mass audiences. Business models based on engagement reward content which provokes fear and rage, regardless of whether it is true.

The Green Paper notes the violent unrest following the Southport murders - in which there was essentially an attempted national pogrom. It cites Ofcom’s assessment that algorithmic recommendations helped spread misleading and divisive narratives.

That deserves a serious debate.

Platforms should be forced to disclose far more about how recommendation systems operate. Their algorithms should undergo independent audits. Qualified researchers should receive access to the data needed to investigate systematic harms. Users should be offered chronological and genuinely subscription-based feeds rather than being trapped inside opaque profiling systems.

But none of that requires the state to dictate which news organisations and journalists are deemed trustworthy.

Indeed, note that many mainstream media outlets promote inflammatory disinformation and hatred - and there’s no meaningful action being taken there to deal with that.

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Think of the precedent

Imagine what a right-wing authoritarian government would do with this precedent. They would simply reclassify right-wing outlets as “trustworthy” - promoting propaganda in their favour, and suppressing their critics.

For those who think we’re scaremongering, note how critics of anti-terrorism legislation argued that it would end up being used against protesters and activists who are clearly not terrorists. That is exactly what ended up happening - with the proscription of Palestine Action as the most striking example.

We need to act before this becomes law

You can respond either by:

1. Going to the official consultation page and clicking ‘Respond online’ under ‘Ways to respond’. You can answer as many or few questions as you like - you don’t need to complete the whole thing.

2. By email: send a response to watchthisspace@dcms.gov.uk.

The deadline is 11:59pm on 31 August 2026.

The directly relevant section is “Prominence of news on social media”, particularly:

• Question 4: should “trustworthy” news be made more visible?

• Question 4a: how should access to trustworthy news work in practice?

• Question 5: should prominence be permanent or activated during periods of crisis?

• Question 6: should users be allowed to switch it off?

This isn’t a defence of the tech bros and their secretive, profit-driven algorithms. Their systems urgently democratic regulation.

That means transparent, pluralistic and accountably regulation.

It doesn’t mean the government dictating which institutions to promote - and which to turn down the volume.

Apologies for the lack of posts: I’ve been finishing my new book The Fall of the West. After a break, both my video channel and Substack will go up a notch…

Israel is conspiring to keep the US at war with Iran indefinitely. That’s according to Vice President JD Vance in a new interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, who believes he is being specifically targeted.

Outlining a US strategy that he claims is both negotiation and military, he says:

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there have been people within the Israeli government who are trying to like actually shift us away from that policy because they want to continue the military campaign.

He goes on:

I mean, you know, the ambassador of Israel to the United States I think is actually a really good guy. Obviously, he cares about Israel first. I care about America first.

But there are some people within their system we know beyond a shadow of a doubt who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely. Again, not towards any objective, but just indefinitely.

He goes even further:

People are always going to try to influence the United States of America, whether they’re allies of ours or whether they’re enemies of ours.

But again, when I open up the pages of Time magazine and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and oh, by the way, many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways, you know, my response to that is, well, go to hell.

I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people. I represent Americans first.

He’s referring here to an article in Time magazine headlined ‘Trump’s Ex-Campaign Manager Is Running An Israeli Influence Operation Targeting the MAGA Base’.

It details how online MAGA influencers turned on Trump’s Iran deal, noting “Many of the posts appeared almost simultaneously, with similarities in language and tone.” A senior US official concluded that these influencers were being paid by Israel in an operation led by former Trump presidential campaign manager Brad Parscale.

As well as seeking to prevent young conservatives from turning on Israel, the operation aims to use them to promote Israel’s interests in US politics. These influencers receive “coordinated messaging through private group chats, synchronized the timing of their posts, and were compensated based on the reach they generated.”

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There’s a lot of money to be made for conservative influencers willing to push Israeli propaganda:

It remains unclear how much Parscale’s outfits paid creators as part of the Israel campaign. Another recent Influenceable campaign offered influencers a base payment of $2,250, plus $1 for every 1,000 views, up to 2 million views—allowing influencers to earn as much as $4,250 per post, according to internal text messages reviewed by TIME.

Amusingly, an Israeli official claims to be “pissed” at Pascale, adding: “He was supposed to make things better. We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse.”

What they mean is that US public opinion has dramatically shifted against Israel despite their efforts. It turns out that no amount of propaganda can stop people being repulsed at the genocidal slaughter of civilians.

In this context, when asked by Rogan how he was being attacked, JD Vance explained:

Oh, it’s social media posts. It’s, you know, they’re leaking to reporters. They’re attacking me obsessively, saying that we should not be negotiating with Iran. We should just keep the military campaign going indefinitely.

And that is their explicit position. And coming after me saying that, you know, people have come after me and say that I’m influenced by Qatar, that I’m influenced by foreign governments, that, you know, I take my marching orders from Tucker Carlson.

In other words, Israel has concluded that JD Vance is a weak link in the US administration because he is insufficiently subservient to their interests.

None of this is to sow any illusions in Vance, who is a leading figure in a far-right authoritarian government. He just hails from the more authentically right-wing isolationist tradition.

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What it helps us understand is how Israel organises to manipulate US public opinion and put pressure on the US government. There is a lack of understanding of this, partly because weaponised false claims of antisemitism shut down scrutiny.

There was another fascinating detail, too. When Rogan suggests most people thought Epstein was a Mossad agent, JD Vance says:

Yeah, Mossad or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or another country, or both. You know, look, was he— he clearly had connections to the upper, the highest levels of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.

Meanwhile, it is reported that Trump plans to expand the military assault against Iran, including “enhanced airstrikes, sending ground forces to seize Iranian islands near the Strait, and bombing Pickaxe mountain.”

Trump is trapped between two disastrous outcomes. One is that he accepts that the US has suffered a shattering military defeat - on a scale much greater than Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and indeed Vietnam.

The other is that he seeks to avoid that outcome by dragging out the war, suffering ever-mounting economic costs, inflicting severe damage on Gulf states, and depleting US munitions.

The conclusion is unavoidable

Israel is deliberately killing Palestinian children.

That’s the conclusion of a new detailed report published by a United Nations independent international Commission of Inquiry.

It builds on an overwhelming body of evidence that the Israeli army is deliberately killing children.

Israel’s atrocity deniers claim that stating the truth constitutes a “blood libel”. We’ll come on to a statistic which explains the intentional killing of children by Israeli soldiers.

As the report notes, at least 20,179 children have been killed by Israeli forces, and another 44,143 injured. Children made up 30% of those killed and 26% of those injured since the genocide began.

The report says the children killed represent around 2% of Gaza’s child population

Of those killed, 5,031 were under five, 1,029 were under one, and around 420 were newborns.

Note these figures are underestimates.Save the Children estimate that another 5,160 children were buried under the rubble.

The Commission further documents “the use of torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, including sexual and gender-based violence, against Palestinian children.”

A baby shot while breastfeeding

In one example, on 12th April 2024, a 10-year-old baby was shot by a quadcopter while being breastfed by his mother. He survived but with brain damage. As the Commission noted:

Considering that the shooting occurred in broad daylight, the Commission concludes that the quadcopter controller would have been able to see inside the tent and assesses that the target was a mother and a baby.

In another case, in the Al-Faraa refugee camp in Tubas, the Israeli army shot a 14-year-old Palestinian boy, and when his mother rushed to his help, they shot at her, and then they put a red laser on the head of the paramedics who tried to save his life. He bled to death in front of his mother, surrounded by Israeli soldiers who did nothing to help him and showed no concern about a boy they had shot bleeding to death in front of them.

In Khan Younis, a 15-year-old boy stepped out of his family home holding a white cloth during evacuation. He was shot in the foot, then shot again in the back and neck. His 20-year-old brother ran to him and was shot dead too. His mother tried to signal for an ambulance and was shot in the hand. The Commission says the 15-year-old was likely shot by a sniper rifle from around 200 metres away, and that the shooter should have been able to see he was a child holding a white flag.

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A four-year-old girl in Khan Younis was shot in the head while eating with her family in their tent. No one else in the family was injured. She survived but the left side of her body was paralysed. The Commission concluded she was targeted by a quadcopter mounted with an assault rifle.

Not tragic mistakes - targeted killings

In Sheikh Radwan, the report says Israeli soldiers threw four grenades into a house with 30 family members, badly injuring a five-year-old boy. Israeli forces then entered, shot dead eight family members including his parents, and did not provide medical assistance. A doctor at a school reinserted the child’s exposed intestines using diapers and tape. He later needed multiple surgeries and was left with permanent disability. His six-year-old brother also survived; both had witnessed their parents’ killing, including their pregnant mother being shot.

The report describes the decomposing bodies of four babies found in Al-Nasr Paediatric Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit after staff were forced to evacuate and could not safely move the most vulnerable infants. The babies were reportedly still attached to life-support equipment rendered useless by the electricity outage and attacks. The Commission says the video was digitally verified and notes that Israel did not claim Al-Nasr Paediatric Hospital was used by Hamas.

After the October 2025 so-called ceasefire, two brothers aged 10 and nine were killed by an Israeli drone strike near Khan Younis while gathering firewood for their wheelchair-bound father. Israeli forces said they were “suspects” and an “immediate threat”. The Commission rejected this, noting they were more than 300 metres from Israeli soldiers, were visibly children, and were collecting firewood.

Note that none of these children are named. Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer and one of the UN Commissioners, explained why.

In other words, the UN fears that if they name the children, their families are risk of reprisals from the Israeli army.

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Killing in the West Bank

This reports builds on the overwhelming evidence of Palestinian children being deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli army.

In 2024, the NGO Defence for Children International published a report documenting 141 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, between 7 October 2023 and 31 July 2024.

116 of the 141 children were shot dead with live ammunition or by snipers. DCIP says nearly all were shot in the head or torso, and 18 were shot in the back, which it describes as “a crystal clear indicator” that the child posed no threat.

Most were killed with a single bullet either to the head or the torso., which DCIP says indicates shooters targeted them “with intent to kill.” They described how Israeli forces “order Palestinian paramedics and ambulance drivers to leave the scene at gunpoint”, as well as firing at people trying to offer aid to injured children, as well as blocking roads and detaining ambulance crews.

In some of the cases, Israeli soldiers surrounded children they had shot as they bled out, “alone and in pain, with the intent to ensure death”.

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It says there is no evidence warnings were issued by Israeli forces in advance, and that the evidence “indicates that Israeli forces in practice have a policy in place that amounts to wilful killing.”

A report just published by Israeli human rights’ organisation B’Tselem finds that 235 Palestinian children and teenagers were killed in the West Bank since October 2023, with another 5 killed by settlers.

In nearly a quarter of the cases they examined, Israel delayed or completely prevented medics or residents from reached wounded children to offer help.

Nine minors, including two girls, were killed during military raids where no arrests were made.

What the doctors saw

There are the testimonies of doctors. A New York Times piece in October 2024 carried the testimonies of dozens of US-based medical staff who served in Gaza. 44 of them testified that they saw “multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza”.”

, too. I interviewed Dr. Nick Maynard, for example, a leading consultant surgeon from Oxford who served in Gaza three times during the genocide.

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He described treating “very young teenage boys, sometimes as young as 11 or 12,” shot by Israeli soldiers and quadcopters while trying to get food for their starving families at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites. What horrified him most was the pattern: one day boys arrived with gunshot wounds “to the head,” another “to the neck,” another “to the chest or the abdomen,” and on one day four young teenage boys arrived together with gunshot wounds “to the testicles.” The “clustering” was so striking, he said, that it was “inconceivable that it was coincidence”: it looked like “some sort of obscene target practice,” with Israeli soldiers “playing a game.” Maynard added: “I would not have thought it possible if I had not seen this with my own eyes.”

Meanwhile, Jewish-American surgeon Mark Perlmutter - who also served in Gaza - testified that Israeli snipers are deliberately targeting children in Gaza. Recalling witnessing children shot twice, he said: “No child gets shot twice by mistake.”

And even despite the BBC’s dire failures, the World Service year examined 160 cases of children being shot in Gaza. They found that in 95 cases, the child was shot int he head or the chest, and in most cases, they were under 12 years old.

The society that justifies killing children

We could go on. The evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible.

We are told that it is a “blood libel” to state this obvious fact.

So consider this. According to a poll last year, 76% of Jewish Israelis believe there are no innocents in Gaza.

Process that again: no innocents in Gaza. That, of course, includes children and babies.

In another poll, 47% of Jewish Israelis answered yes to the question:

Do you support the claim that the [Israeli army] in conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites did when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, ie to kill all its inhabitants?

In other words, half of Jewish Israelis support killing all Palestinians in Gaza. That includes those, of course, who are actually serving in the military.

But what makes this even worse is that polling consistently shows that Israeli soldiers are more extreme than the average Israeli citizens.

The polling shows that soldiers skew right. That is partly because - unlike in many societies - younger Israelis tend to be more extreme than older generations.

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Every child becomes the enemy

Furthermore, Israeli television frequently features guests who make clear their murderous intentions towards children, partly on the basis they claim they will one day become “terrorists”. (This is exactly the same logic the Nazis used during the Holocaust).

In one interview, the Israeli politician Amit Halevi - a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said:

In the Al-Shifa Hospital, they caught 150 terrorists and killed them. At the same time, 300 terrorists were born in the maternity ward.

On Israel’s Channel 14, while commenting on footage of devastation in Gaza, Israeli journalist Yaki Adamker said:

I do not think anyone in the State of Israel, in the Land of Israel should feel sorry for these Gazans, not for the adults, not for the elderly, not for the young, and not for the children (...) The Gazans? For all I care, let them starve to death. What do I care about them?

Another Channel 14 journalist, Yehuda Schlesinger said:

There are no innocents in Gaza. There are no ordinary citizens in Gaza. Every adult was trained to kill. Every woman is a monster. Every boy aspires to be a martyr Every baby will grow up to be a terrorist. wipe out, kill, destroy, annihilate.

In another example, Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin went on Channel 14 to say: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy.” He added: “Every child you are now giving milk to will, in 15 years, rape your daughters and slaughter your children,” as well as calling to conquer and settle Gaza so “not one Gazan child remains there”.

This is the genocidal hothouse of Israeli society - where politicians and journalists openly describe their murderous intent towards children.

There is no doubt. Israel is deliberately killing Palestinian children on a mass scale - and the atrocity deniers who claim otherwise must be disgraced.

Years before he entered No. 10, it was obvious that Keir Starmer’s project would end in catastrophe. It was entirely predictable - and indeed, predicted.

Well, by those of us on the left. Not by the vast majority of “mainstream” commentators.

I told you so’s are always undignified. I offer no apologies. These predictions were ridiculed at the time - but we can’t move forward unless it’s understood why Starmerism has fallen apart.

In years of Opposition, Starmer proved that his project was always defined by dishonesty, that it had no vision for the country, and that its arrogant architects weren’t even up to the job.

A caveat. I didn’t vote for Keir Starmer to become Labour leader - I voted for the left-wing standard-bearer Rebecca Long-Bailey. When he won the 2020 leadership contest, I nonetheless accepted his victory in good faith, conditional on him sticking by his leadership pledges.

The political direction of his leadership swiftly became very clear. Here is what I criticised - and predicted.

In October 2020, after Labour abstained on a Conservative bill making it legal for undercover agents to commit sexual assault, torture and murder, I wrote:

For the second time in as many weeks, Labour offered a vacuum in place of leadership against state-sanctioned violence against civilians. It has paid a profound moral price, and conceded yet more ground to its opponents.

(I should note that, in this period, Keir Starmer would repeatedly contact me to object to my criticisms, in one case telling me I was better than this).

In February 2021, I wrote a piece headlined ‘By ignoring young voters, Labour is creating an opening for the Greens’.

I warned:

If the new Labour leadership insists on alienating young people who prefer a strong state to intervene to achieve greater economic and social equality, and transition to a greener economy in order to reduce the impact of the climate crisis, then it may find, as in Scotland and with the red wall, another chunk of Labour’s electoral coalition finds somewhere else to go. A similar phenomenon is happening in Wales, where Plaid Cymru is on the rise and nearly half of young Welsh citizens support independence.

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The same month, I wrote that Starmer’s Labour had placed itself to the right of the Tories on tax, adding:

Labour’s opposition to tax increases is yet another illustration of an increasingly obvious truth: the party’s leadership lacks a political soul and is devoid of any meaningful coherent vision for the country it seeks to lead.

I added:

Political direction is coming from the focus groups because Starmer’s team lacks a political vision to guide them. They desperately want to win power, but they don’t know why.

And concluded:

Instead, the Labour leadership seeks power without a vision. That is, to be fair, an interesting political experiment, but one that is unlikely to end well. It is not too late to change course.

In May 2021, I wrote:

Starmer’s team are on safari, knowing nothing about communities they didn’t grow up in, leading to cosplay, caricature and flag-waving, which screeches inauthenticity and nothing more.

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The same month:

After a year as leader, Starmer has shown a lack of political vision, a thin-skinned aversion to criticism, and an over-dependence on a small circle of inexperienced advisers, all of which have been on display over the past few days.

Then in June 2021:

Many Muslims, like many young people, who felt listened to under Corbyn’s leadership now feel sidelined, only deemed of use as voting fodder. Whether in this byelection or next time around, they want to give Labour a kicking until they are listened to. That is, after all, how many diehard Scottish Labour voters felt: but when they crossed the electoral Rubicon, they never came back.

In September 2021, I wrote about Starmer’s dishonesty:

Dishonesty corrodes democracy like acid. If politicians make promises they renege on, voters conclude that none can be trusted and disengage from the political process. Accountability – a prerequisite of any functioning democracy – becomes impossible, because if dishonesty is normalised, a priced-in background hum of politics, then objections to the stench of deceit can be shrugged off by politicians on the grounds that all of their colleagues are in the sewer, too.

I added:

When I described Starmer’s team as “maniacs” because of their abortive attempts to reintroduce an electoral college granting MPs disproportionate power in the next leadership election, a shadow minister responded to me: “It’s worse than that: they are incompetent.” Starmer, whose own allies describe him as a man without politics, is surrounded by crude factional figures with an obsessive grudge against the left and no vision for the country.

And I further added:

There is nothing to recommend Starmer’s leadership. He is, as we have seen, unprincipled. He is not honest. Where Blair and Neil Kinnock were talented orators, Starmer lacks any charisma or warmth. He extolled “integrity” in the leadership election, but as his sacking in May of deputy leader Angela Rayner from her role as Labour chair underlined, he has none. That more Labour voters than not desire his resignation, that more than six in 10 people do not see him as a prime minister in waiting, and that he lost the Hartlepool byelection – a seat Labour retained even in the landslide defeat of 2019 – shows he is unelectable. Starmer is Labour’s version of Theresa May – who was originally lauded as a serious, public-spirited politician before being undone by her own cynicism and woodenness.

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What I got wrong here was about Starmer being unelectable. But this was entirely down to the Tories’ self-destruction. The column was written before partygate and all of the other Boris Johnson scandals which destroyed him. It was written before the Liz Truss catastrophe. And then there was the return of a ferocious squeeze in living standards, and a collapsing NHS - and all the dire failures of the Rishi Sunak era.

And yet despite being handed the election on a platter - and indeed the Tories’ calamitous election campaign - Labour only won a third of the vote on a dire turnout. They were saved by Nigel Farage dividing the right-of-centre vote.

The points I was making here - about Labour’s dishonesty, their lack of vision for the country, their hatred of the left, and Starmer’s own lack of leadership qualities - are exactly why it all fell apart.

In February 2023, I wrote:

While Starmer’s team behaves as though it’s 1997, Britain’s current state is more like 1974 – that is, in crisis and turmoil. If a Labour government offers only tinkering around the edges of the economy, and the lives of struggling households do not substantially improve, mass disillusionment may soon kick in. It remains the case that the most interesting ideas are bubbling away on the left: banishing them from Labour’s future is an act of self-harm. If a meek Starmer administration disappoints, a now cowed left may find an audience willing to listen. Starmer’s team is buoyant now, and understandably so: but history tell us where hubris leads.

Again, I noted Labour’s lack of vision for the country - and how the left could win an audience as a consequence. We can now see that with the surge of Zack Polanski’s Green Party.

Here’s what I wrote in October 2023, when Labour had a colossal opinion poll lead:

So consider this for a scenario. Labour triumphs at the next election, but wins by default and with no enthusiasm for Starmerism in the tank from the start. Unlike 1997, the new administration rules a country defined by turmoil and decline, but offers no transformative policies to answer our multiple and overlapping crises. Disillusionment sets in, while the Tories complete their metamorphosis into loud, proud, brash rightwing populism, hoovering up votes from the disaffected. In the general election of 2029, a new model Tory party – flushed with British Trumpism – stages a stunning comeback.

True, this is not the US: your gut instinct may say it can’t happen here. But when, in the past, you looked in bemused horror at their culture wars, you may have assumed they’d never arrive on our shores – but they did. Farage marched through conference not as a hostile outsider, but as a conquering general. His mission is not yet complete, however, and a final prize may beckon.

What I got wrong here was the suggestion that Nigel Farage could take over the Tories. But my basic point - a government with no answers to a turmoil-afflicted country would open the door to a Farageist insurgency - was obviously correct.

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Here’s what I wrote in December 2023:

Those hoping this is all one big pretence and, once safely ensconced in No 10, Starmer will yell “Surprise!” and enact a new shiny progressive dawn are set to be most disappointed. And this is now the most interesting question in British politics. When Starmer wins his decisive victory – which he will – and little changes after two years, what happens next?

Alas, there were no shortage of Starmer supporters predicting he would enact a shiny new progressive dawn. Here’s Andrew Marr predicted Starmer would be a “radical” prime minister - two months after I penned that column. Alas, it was not to be!

A day after Andrew Marr’s video, in February 2024, I wrote the following:

An administration that lacks meaningful answers to domestic crises and is wedded to a toxic foreign policy will soon find itself in trouble. Look at Starmer’s political equivalents in the US, Germany and Australia: they won but swiftly became unpopular, and none U-turned so comprehensively as him on their original promises. If he enjoys a honeymoon, it will be short-lived.

And here was a key point - Starmer-like politics in Germany was particularly instructive, given the insurgency of the far-right AfD. But of course we also saw what happened to Joe Biden.

Just after the general election was called, I wrote:

Labour will win this election not because there is any real enthusiasm for the party’s agenda nor any real belief in Starmer’s capabilities as a leader. It will win because the Tories have set one of the lowest bars in British political history. And then, when Labour is in power, enjoying so little support and enthusiasm among its natural voters, what next? Winning because people wanted to rid themselves of the incumbent party is not the same as winning because you offered a vision that voters rallied behind.

After this week, the mask is off. Labour’s leaders are sending a clear signal that once they have secured No 10, they will behave with the same power-drunk arrogance and the same disregard for democratic norms that they are showing now towards their own MPs. Starmer should consider, for a moment, the cautionary tale of Boris Johnson – another leader who purged his parliamentary party. Yes, he scooped an 80-seat majority. But then, in less than three years, he was driven from office in disgrace, and the Tory party was left in tatters.

Bear in mind, Labour had a 20 point lead in the polls at the time.

But this is indeed what has happened!

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When the election results came in, I noted there was hope:

Despite the excessive media focus on the Farageist insurgency, the left revolt is just as significant. If the Labour leadership was rational, it would acknowledge this disaffection and seek to reverse the rot. The party, after all, has secured the same share of the vote as in 2019, winning its landslide thanks to Nigel Farage dividing the right and the vagaries of our electoral system. The juxtaposition between its dominance of the House of Commons and the lack of enthusiasm it enjoys in the country will be increasingly felt.

But here’s a prediction. Those surrounding Starmer are too politically defined by their hostility to the left to learn from this. There will be precious little conciliation: quite the reverse. In the coming years, growing numbers of voters will be driven to the Greens and other leftwing formations. As long as leftwing forces in Britain build on this moment and find common cause – yes, a big but – then this could be a new beginning indeed.

As I predicted, Starmer’s team ignored the evidence of disillusionment from the left - and simply doubled down on further antagonising the left.

My view was that the big challenge facing the left was a question of leadership. After Zack Polanski assumed the leadership of the Greens, he did indeed build on this moment.

It should have been obvious that Starmerism was an empty project - a vacuum filled by dishonesty, arrogance and a craving for power for its own sake.

But instead Starmer was treated as a competent, serious “grown-up in the room” who would offer a new found stability. The idea, basically, was that we were trapped in a Tory psychodrama - and when the party was ejected from office, all of that would go away.

The basic problem is that most political journalism treats politics as a soap opera.

It’s driven by personality - who’s up and who’s down - rather than ideas and the realities affecting ordinary citizens. There was no understanding of the crises afflicting this country - and Labour’s lack of answers to them.

That’s why Starmerism was so badly misreported.

The raging dishonesty of Starmerism always told us that this would end in catastrophe.

But political journalists ignored his dishonesty.

Why?

Because he used it to destroy the left - and they admired that, and saw it as smart politics.

None of this is evidence of my prophetic skills. It should have been obvious what would happen. It is a damning failure of political journalism that this was not understood.

(This is an updated version of this piece from last year)

Forget the World Cup. This is where the real entertainment is right now.

Israel is in meltdown, and so are its cheerleaders. That’s after Donald Trump capitulated to end the illegal Israeli-American war in Iran, agreeing — according to reports — to proposals including permanently ending the war, ending the naval blockade, a $300bn reconstruction plan for Iran, ending sanctions, and allowing the free export of Iranian oil.

This was a war launched to overthrow Iran’s rulers and secure what Trump described as UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.

Instead, it has ended with Trump signing up to terms which have left the people who spent years inciting this catastrophe - and then cheering on their fantasy as it opened with the mass slaughter of Iranian schoolgirls - in a state of total despair, anguish and terror.

It is not tasteless to find this funny. These people are furious at peace breaking out - after they bet the house on a cataclysmic war which has produced the literal opposite of everything they hoped for.

The unfunny bit is the death and destruction they helped cause.

Let’s start with the United States, shall we?

Nikki Haley

What about Nikki Haley, Trump’s former US Ambassador to the UN? When the war began, she was beyond delighted. This was a “history-defining” and “legacy-defining” thing that “needed to happen”, she said.

Well, she was certainly right about one thing. This is a legacy-defining and history-defining moment.

With the war she cheered on now over, Haley responded to reports that the deal allows Iran to immediately sell oil by tweeting:

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John Podhoretz

Podhoretz has long been a passionate supporter of war with Iran. When Trump first attacked Iran in June 2025, Podhoretz was so delighted that he wrote an article declaring its impact potentially “enormous” and “world historic”, before concluding:

Trump has said since the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., that he believes God spared him for a reason.
And now, so do I.
This was—is—the reason.”

John Podhoretz believed that God literally saved Donald Trump from being assassinated so he could bomb Iran.

Parking, for a second, the theological question of why God did not just stop the assassination attempt from happening in the first place: does that mean God spared Trump in order to go to full-blown war with Iran, only for Iran to emerge victorious?

Because Podhoretz is very clear that this is the outcome of the Iran war.

In a video call, another panellist suggested Iran wants “to humiliate Donald Trump and move on to the next president.”

Podhoretz spluttered: “And they’ve already succeeded!”

His conclusion was bitter: “There is no person on Earth who is going to say that America didn’t lose this war” - unless he said, “you are literally a paid agent of MAGA related to Donald Trump or some lunatic who is really excited by the possibility of Trump turning on Israel.

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John Bolton

What about John Bolton, professional warmonger, George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the UN and Trump’s former National Security Advisor?

Boy, has this man been a supporter of bombing Iran. It is his one true passion in life. “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran” was the headline of his New York Times column in March 2015.

Just after Trump started the war, he told PBS:

“I’m sorry it took so long finally for somebody to take action. I think the world would have been a much safer place if somebody did it 20 years ago.”

What’s he saying now? He says of Iran:

“They’ve played him like a violin. That’s why they’ve got the deal that they want.”

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Batya Ungar-Sargon

A month and a half into the war with Iran, when it should have been absolutely obvious that it was a terrible catastrophe, right-wing US presenter Batya Ungar-Sargon tweeted:

Now she tweets:

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Will Chamberlain

When the war began, prominent right-wing US activist Will Chamberlain tweeted:

On 14th April, he tweeted:

Now he tweets:

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Laura Loomer

At the beginning of the war, Trump rang Laura Loomer, a far-right fanatical anti-Muslim bigot named Laura Loomer, who recalled the conversation at the time:

I said it’s a great job and people all around the world are cheering you on. He’s making us proud to be American.

Now she tweets:

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Israel

What about Israel?

When the war began, an astonishing 93% of Jewish Israelis supported the war with Iran, with just 3% somewhat opposing it and 1% strongly opposing it.

At the end of May, Trump had a net positive rating of 23 points in Israel.

Three weeks later, it had dropped by 46 points to minus 23.

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Emily Schrader

The Israeli journalist Emily Schrader was ecstatic when the Iran war was launched. She said it was pure elation the part of Israelis, that “it’s been absolutely incredible” and praised Trump to the hilt.

“No other leader has had the courage to do what President Trump” had done, she said.

Where’s she at now? She shared Trump signing the memorandum with a picture of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain after his infamous visit to Munich, adding the caption: “Peace in our time. Coward.”

In another tweet, she wrote:

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Yinon Magal

When the Iran war began and the Supreme Leader was killed, an Israeli programme hosted by journalist Yinon Magal opened with singing and dancing. The panel even shared chocolates.

What’s he saying now?

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Zvi Yehezkeli

When the war began, the Israeli TV presenter Zvi Yehezkeli declared “the regime will fall”, declaring “A historic move that will change the face of humanity, the Middle East, and certainly the face of Islam by taking down the Shiite head.”

Now he declares that “Trump has thrown Israel away”

Itamar Ben-Gvir

When the war began, Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared:

You will wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven, you will not forget “The State of Israel has embarked on a historic campaign against the Iranian terrorist regime - I support the Prime Minister, President Trump, the IDF fighters and all security forces who are working courageously and determinedly to defend the State of Israel.

Now he declares:

Trump’s agreement does not bind us. Israel is not subordinate to the United States. We are an independent and sovereign country. We are not partners to this agreement, which does not safeguard our security. We must not withdraw from any territory [in Lebanon] that our fighters have captured.

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Bezalel Smotrich

At the start of the war, his colleague Bezalel Smotrich said: “We embarked on an existential campaign to overthrow the Iranian regime.”

Now he declares: “’It’s impossible to escape the sense of bitterness that characterizes all of us today,” adding “the agreement with Iran is a bad deal for Israel and for the entire free world.”

Yair Lapid

When the war began, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid declared:

“We are united behind the pilots, fighters and security forces in the most justified operation there is. We are all united on the operation.”

Now he says:

“Netanyahu promised us a historic victory – and we got a crisis with the Americans, Hormuz open to the Iranians, money for the Revolutionary Guard, ballistic missiles aimed at Israel, and Israel waiting in the corridor like a scolded child.”

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Jake Wallis Simons

Here in Britain there was no bigger cheerleader for the Iran war than Jake Wallis Simons, odious pro-Israel propagandist and former editor of the Jewish Chronicle.

Just look at some of his headlines.

There’s been a little gear shift.

Take a look at his more recent headlines.

Completely discredited

The warmongers have been discredited again and again and again.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, now Iran.

They must never be listened to ever again.

Donald Trump has turned on Israel.

Not because he has a conscience or undergone a Damascene conversion. Let’s get that out of the way immediately: do not give this man any credit. Along with Joe Biden, Trump has armed and facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its other war crimes across the region, including in Lebanon. Mouthing off about Israel is one thing. Doing anything practical to stop its crimes is another.

But what Trump said at the G7 should still be understood for what it is: a confession. Before the cameras, he complained that Israel’s war in Lebanon has dragged on too long, and that “too many people are being killed.”

Then he said something striking:

You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody. There are a lot of people in those apartment houses and they’re not all Hezbollah.

Trump here admitted that Israel - thanks to the weapons and support provided by the US - is destroying apartment blocks full of civilians.

Of course, the evidence for this is overwhelming.

That includes in Lebanon itself.

Take the Israeli attack on an apartment block in Ain El Delb in September 2024. The justification was that Israel was targeting a Hezbollah commander. The Israeli air raid hit the six-storey building, tipping it over down a hillside, killing 73 people and injuring 60 others. Of those killed, 23 were children.

AP carried the testimony of one survivor, who said it was worse than being trapped in a coffin.

The BBC also carried the story of Julia Ramadan, a young woman who was terrified about Israeli strikes in Lebanon and so went to stay at their family home in Ain El Delb, hoping for safety. She was killed.

In Gaza, this crime has been particularly widespread.

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The Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 magazine has extensively covered Israel’s destruction of entire residential blocks in Gaza in order to kill a purported Hamas military target - including Hamas targets of no military value, or people with no military connection branded as legitimate Hamas targets, or indeed people who have no connection to Hamas at all.

They covered one example in which the Israeli army authorised the killing of around 300 civilians to target a Hamas commander, involving the destruction of several large multi-story apartment buildings. “Entire families with children were killed,” as one paramedic they quoted tells them.

In another example, the Israeli army destroyed a high-rise building to try to kill Mohammed Shabaneh, a Hamas commander. They didn’t kill him, but they killed dozens of civilians.

So when Trump suggests Israel is destroying apartment blocks full of civilians, he is not revealing something new. He is saying aloud what the US administration knows to be true - as it delivers weapons and support.

Trump further said:

I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon and with Hezbollah. They should have been able to do the job faster. It just goes on forever. And when that happens, it throws a negative light on the big deal, and that’s the deal with Iran.

That’s not all. Following an Israeli attack on Beirut, Axios report that Trump told its reporter:

Why did Bibi have to do a fucking attack? I was so pissed off. I let him know. He has no fucking judgement. I let him know that.

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At the G7 summit, Trump also said:

Without the United States, there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel, because no other president was willing to do what I did.

It’s certainly true that Israel is dependent on US weapons, aid and support - whether that be subjugating the Palestinians, including occupation, apartheid and genocide, as well as invading and attacking Arab states.

Israel has received about a quarter of a trillion dollars in inflation-adjusted terms in US aid over the decades.

Trump also dismissed Israel as “the very small partner”.

What the hell is going on?

Trump has not suddenly been awakened to the horrors perpetrated by Israel. There’s a more straightforward explanation. He feels hoodwinked by Israel into launching a war he believed would be a devastating success, which has instead plunged his presidency into crisis, imposed mounting economic costs, and completely humiliated US power.

Trump further feels that Israel is now trying to sabotage attempts to end the war it promoted and which ended in humiliation for an already flailing superpower.

Indeed, the official agreement between Iran and the US represents a surrender by the aggressors .

It means the US signing up to such proposals as permanently ending the war, ending the naval blockade, a $300bn reconstruction plan for Iran, ending sanctions, and allowing the free export of Iranian oil.

As an article in Foreign Policy magazine puts it, it’s “a strategic calamity far greater than the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.”

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Obviously, Trump cannot admit to feeling tricked by Israel, because that would make him look extremely gullible and weak. After all, Israel did not force him to launch the war with him.

But this catastrophe offers an opportunity. In the US, public opinion has dramatically shifted against Israel. Among Democrats, that’s overwhelming - but it includes a majority of younger Republicans, too.

The US patronage of Israel could come to an end, and those who perpetrated terrible crimes could, in time, face justice.

That may once have seemed utopian. It no longer is.

Earlier this year, the high court ruled that the government’s banning of anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action using anti-terror legislation was unlawful.

That has now been overturned by the Court of Appeal, who have ruled that the government’s ban is lawful. That means expressing support for Palestine Action can lead to a prison sentence of up to 14 years.

Palestine Action focused its actions against Israeli weapons firm Elbit, in the context of the British government facilitating Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. Their proscription puts them on the same legal footing as ISIS and al-Qaeda.

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Thousands have been arrested for holding placards. As a result, as the i paper’s security correspondent Lizzie Dearden notes: “The average terror suspect arrested in England and Wales is now a white woman in her 50s as a result of the Palestine Action ban.”

But I want to focus on comments made by the lady chief justice, Sue Carr, as she read the judgment. She said:

It is not, as it claims, a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes operating transparently in the open. It is a covert organisation that operates using secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy the property of third parties. Palestine Action’s activities have caused injury as well as property damage.

What the hell is this judge talking about?

For a start, the suffragettes engaged in far more extreme acts than Palestine Action. The anti-genocide activists have smashed up the equipment of an Israeli weapons’ factory and thrown red paint at two RAF planes. One person has been convicted of GBH without intent after an altercation with a police officer.

The suffragettes planted bombs, burned down residential homes, attacked churches and schools and smashed up art galleries. Between 1913 and 1914, they were responsible for more than 300 incidents of arson and bombing.

They killed at least four people!

By any sane measure the suffragettes engaged in far more extreme acts than Palestine Action. Indeed their actions would unequivocally be criminalised as terrorism today.

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If the distinction is based on being covert or transparent, then it is as pedantic as it is ludicrous. Yes, the Women’s Social and Political Union ran a public-facing campaign, employed staff, organised huge demonstrations, and printed a weekly newspaper.

But when they were carrying out acts of sabotage or indeed violence, they were clearly not “operating transparently in the open”. They did so in secrecy, and many of the perpetrators were not caught.

The WPSU even had a secret group called the Young Hot Bloods which organised arson attacks, acid bombs, and attacks on homes.

Academic researchers who studied the suffragettes concluded that they became more covert in their final phase, meeting “the definitional criteria of what we call a ‘covert social movement network’ (CSMN).”

Palestine Action was a public-facing campaign with a website, social media accounts, press releases and a membership. It had two identifiable co-founders, Huda Amoori and Richard Barnard, who did public media interventions.

The lady chief justice has desecrated our history - and erased the truth about activists who fought for the rights of women like herself.

The proscription of Palestine Action is a sordid episode in our history, and marks our continued march towards authoritarianism. It is obvious what a Reform government would do with the repressive legal precedents and infrastructure it would inherit.

But we should note that proscribing dissident groups as terrorists is one hallmark of authoritarianism. Another feature is rewriting our past.

On Thursday, the people of Makerfield will vote and decide whether Andy Burnham win and replaces Keir Starmer - or Reform UK triumph, with Nigel Farage on course to become prime minister.

I went up there and recorded this video. It’s not public yet, but wanted to give paid subscribers a sneak preview. Your support makes all of these videos possible.

I’m currently finishing the edits of my book ‘The Fall of the West’, but we’ll do far more of these videos when that’s done!

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I’m really delighted to join newly launched in the UK. You can read my first article here:

Zeteo UK

The Belfast Riots Are an Anti-Migrant Pogrom - and the British Media Has Serious Questions to Answer

A note from our Editor-in-Chief…

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a month ago · 400 likes · Owen Jones

It’s an offshoot of Mehdi Hasan’s hugely successful project in the US - and we desperately need it here.

Despite some bright spots, our media landscape is catastrophically dire. It’s dominated by aggressively right-wing outlets that focus on inciting fear and hatred, deflecting accountability from elites, and shutting down any challenge to our broken status quo.

Britain is currently heading towards the abyss. Years of scapegoating migrants have brought us the growing threat of violent pogroms - and the very real prospect of an authoritarian right-wing government which threatens democracy.

Both our politicians and media outlets are to blame for this.

This is the soft launch of Zeteo UK - it gets into full swing in September. But there’s incredible names involved - not least Shehab Khan, poached from ITN, who is Political Editor, Sangita Myska, Peter Oborne, Afua Hirsch, and Grace Blakeley.

Nothing will change in Britain unless we have a different media landscape.

So I hope you’ll sign up to Zeteo UK - with lots of excitement developments to come!

“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.

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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.

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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.”

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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“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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.