Mostly, it’s taken the form of a relentless media campaign across every cultural platform, pouring steaming hot race-baiting, sneering misogyny and non-Cis fearmongering across the top of our national dish, a jumbled up hot-pot of familiar tinned staples and fresh new flavour combinations drawn from around the world, in which all the roughly-peeled vegetables sunk below our increasingly affluent but rapidly shrinking Upper Class have been finely julienne-sliced into siloed slivers a la crabs l‘bucket, and the meatier ingredients are a mix of chunky, slow-cooked ‘Working Families’ thickened up with a minced-up ragu of ‘Workshy Benefit Scroungers’. Very occasionally, when the temperature hit boiling, there’s been the odd opportunistic foray into open violence, but mostly, by design, it’s been an insidious drip-drip-drip of poison into the cultural jus, a toxic aftertaste most don’t even register as out of place because it’s what they were brought up on. It’s ebbed and flowed in intensity and focus with the beat of societal flux, sometimes a full-on, foam-flecked howling for the blood of aliens and deviants, but most of the time couching its raw-milk racism in the seaside postcard populism of Page 3’s Jessie, 23, from Devon, who wants us to know that she’d be ever so excited if all you patriots joined her and her enormous boobs in supporting England’s (and it’s always England’s) Boys in whatever footy tournament they’re about to get knocked out of by the Germans Portuguese bloody Italians.

Dangerous and ridiculous at the same time, but yeah, it’s always been there.

Nowadays, following the stunning success of its longshot Brexit offensive (tagline – Europeans took our country!) which exploited long-standing Tory divisions and the desolate end product of four decades of Thatcherism to drag us thrashing and squealing out of the EU – breaking, in the process, all of our economies, including the political one – the British Right’s campaign has pivoted to blaming all of this small, isolated country’s rapidly accumulating post-Brexit ills, real and imagined, on the made-up threat of Small Boats and Uncontrolled Illegal Immigration (tagline – brown people took our country!). They’ve managed to successfully repurpose whole swathes of social-media from forums for make-up tips, amateur porn and football banter into an unregulated firehose of racist misinformation, plus make-up tips, amateur porn and football banter, with the algorithms weighted towards convincing swathes of the left-behind and under-educated mass of white England that oh, no, no, no, despite the unarguable gravity of the situation they find themselves in, it really would be best for everyone if they didn’t choose to nut-up and take a stand against the rapacious greed of a socio-economic paradigm that has reduced their communities to immiserated hellholes of grinding poverty and cultural deprivation in order to pad the already swollen bank accounts of jet-setting billionaires, but rather looked… Over There! Towards the endless stream of AI generated clips of browns doing bad things and accompanying infinity of AI generated slop about Political Correctness Gone Mad.

Do that for long enough (call it the Winston Smith Treatment) and it becomes obvious that the problems most people face in their daily lives; problems like all of the local shops on their High Streets being boarded up, like it being increasingly hard for them to find work that pays a decent wage, like everything on the shelves being both low quality and costing three times more than they did a few years ago, and like the basic social amenities that their parents and grandparents could rely on to make lower-class lives in Britain’s towns and cities liveable all being stripped away by wave after wave of local government cost-cutting are all, in fact, nothing at all to do with rich people hoarding all of the money, but are solely the fault of Lefty do-gooders and their racist plot to impose Venezuelan style Sharia Law on Heritage Britons by flooding their communities with brown skinned, BMW-driving rape-gangs funded with cash stolen from British taxes by a conspiracy of Woke Charities and The BBC!

Obvs. Yeah? Totally. Totally obvs. Equally obvs is that you’d have to be a titanic fucking moron with a brain the consistency of cheap Brie to believe any of it. Or, maybe, you’d just have to be one of the huge majority of people who “Don’t really follow politics” outside of knowing “They’re all as bad as each other”. The kind of people who get all of their geopolitical ‘facts’ second and third hand from news bulletins playing in the background while they browse Tik Tok, and from all the outraged comments they devour on their ‘neighbourhood’ Facebook groups, the ones run out of Moldovia by a guy who – almost certainly – keeps on losing child custody hearings because of his three convictions for assault and malicious harassment, and because he refers to himself in court as ‘Grimhelm, Trueblood Chieftan of the New Rohirrim’, topless, while sporting questionable tattoos he says he got in Croatia while drunk.

Yes, they know things are fucked up and shit, and they know that someone is to blame, and they’re even dimly aware that they can’t draw any drafts of icy cold truth from the shallow waters of Tabloidland, but the Internet? The Internet wouldn’t lie to them, would it? The people telling them how everything is the fault of Migrants and that only Mass Deportations will Save Our Kids from paedophiles might be bitcoin millionaires with a sideline in smuggling luxury cars out of Bulgaria, but they look and talk just like them, not like those Oxbridge educated wankers on TV with their £1000 haircuts and shiny suits. So, all of the directionless anger and barely contained fear that things for people like them are only going to get worse, quite reasonable anger and justifiable fear that could, if properly addressed by progressive elements with a plan for raising everyone’s boats, seriously threaten the entrenched privilege of the status quo, get harnessed instead into the service of people far, far richer and way more out of touch than even the slimiest politician.

Or, yeah, to be less charitable, it could be that the 30% to 40% of the country that keeps on voting for the worst option available are just a bunch of cowardly fucktards who know full well that their world is imploding, want someone to blame, but because taking a swing at the rich and well-connected types busy partying in safety behind their security gates is a genuinely scary prospect, they prefer to down a few lagers, snort something chemical, and gather in mobs to scream threats into the faces of brown mothers just trying to get her crying kids to school. After all, not judging yourself and just saying the worst thing that comes to mind is what being 21^st century British is all about, innit?

Anyway, who the fuck knows. I’m not a sociologist, I can barely spell it. What I do know is that in 2024 this throbbing geyser of vitamin-free bile gave us a Summer of Violence; one that might have started with hordes of tattooed thugs in Union Jack masks jiggling their pasty white moobs to the tune of Rule Britannia outside of the many run-down former hotels where most asylum seekers have been forcibly ‘concentrated’ by successive Tory and Hard Labour Governments – at great expense to us and great profit to the wealthy donors who own these properties, natch – but which culminated in half-arsed but still terrifying Race Riots that left the poorest parts of some cities – mine included – trashed, and many of our non-white communities traumatised. It was such an ugly ruckus that it roused even the somnolent Sir Kier Starmer from his comfortable spot curled up and purring at the foot of the Ministry of Mediocrity’s towering lobby statue, the one depicting a herculean Tony Blair holding up the severed heads of Socialism, Satire and Meritocracy while declaiming Pecunia Causa Id Feci to an assembly of overweight felines. With his AI-generated speech in hand, our Prime Minion shuffled uncomfortably in front of the nearest camera, set his facial slopes to Mildly-Furious, and droned on in the dullest way possible about how his Government wouldn’t stand for this kind of thing, and would inflict gloomy vengeance and faded anger upon any personage of low account found to have disturbed the stale and greywashed peace of Austerityland 2.0.

Middle-England was pretty repulsed by the footage too, and the opportunity was certainly there for any Government willing to take the fight to the people directly responsible for mainstreaming this hate and use that as a place to begin unifying the country around the simple principle of Not Being Dickheads, but we don’t have one of those Governments, we have Starmer and his clutch of perpetually u-turning wannabes. All the inciters (for which read Nigel Farage, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the vast majority of our Media organs and Elon Musk) got away with it. A few morons caught up in the thrill of smashing up their own streets to preserve ‘England For The English’ getting banged up for six months was an infinitesimally small price to pay for advancing the Overton Window a few miles to the right. Those droolers could always be repackaged later on as political prisoners and martyrs to the cause if it was deemed necessary, but the important thing was that notice had been served to anyone watching of how much anger there was out there, and how easily and quickly the Far Right could muster up a Moron Militia in anyone’s backyard.

But still, while that kind of in-your-face mob violence might be thrilling in small doses, and the intimidation factor is not to be sneezed at, too much of it gets in the way of the Far Right’s preferred – and currently very successful – tactic of pushing at the already half-open door of newnewlabourinc’s Blue Labour influenced policies on Immigration and other Kultur War issues. The aim is always to chivvy Sir Keir’s rootless centre-Right regime ever Eastward Ho in pursuit of that mythologised voter who is ‘culturally conservative but not actually comfortable with open racism’ his Blue Labour advisors so very, very much want to appeal to. The more they can push Starmer and Co into reacting to Far Right outrages with old-school triangulation and focus-grouped statements about “recognising people’s genuine concerns”, the more the Far Right benefits from the clear implication that newnewlabourinc agrees with the Right on the importance of the issues, but just aren’t up to the job of dealing with them quickly or adequately. The last thing Nigel Farage and his clutch of froggy fascists want is to put newnewlabourinc’s reactionary careerists into a position where social disorder on the streets paints them into a corner where they have to crack down or else risk revolt on their own back benches.

With this in mind, what appears to have happened as 2024 bled into 2025 was that the cash-rich spinfluencers of the modern Far Right had a retooling of their hateful messaging and decided they’d be far better off cooling it with promoting anti-foreigner pogroms and should, instead, launch a new summer campaign, one that co-opted the look, ethos and tribal yobbishness of 2000’s-era football hooliganism – a period looked back on fondly by some of today’s aging Gen-Xers – and rebranded it as an authentic grassroots expression of jovial national pride and Bulldog Bringlish unity in the face of, a) THE MIGRATION CRISIS™, but also b) whatever social or personal problems the people they’d successfully radicalised online might be hung up on that could be triggered to get them up on their feet and screaming obscenities at passing non-whites.

First, they quietly organised a campaign of urban flag-tagging. It makes sense as a tactic. Why risk triggering Police interest by orchestrating gatherings of ill-disciplined morons with criminal records (something like 60% of those arrested outside of asylum hostels chanting about ‘protecting our women and kids’ had form for domestic assault at the last count, 60 fecking percent) when instead, you can just pop an order for eight thousand St George flags and Union Jacks into DHGate and send a selection of the same morons trundling around Britain’s boulevards laying claim to everyone’s eyeline? A few cherry-pickers operating in the middle of the night handled the majority of the work, strapping Union flags and St George crosses to lampposts, leaving whole High Streets looking like there was a Royal Visit in the offing, while for propaganda purposes, and to give local press outlets a story they could run with, the smaller-scale displays of guerilla gobshittery in harder to reach areas were franchised out to local oddballs with time on their hands and nothing between their ears.

Picture the scene, Wayne (late 20s, cobweb tattoo across half his neck, owns five identical tracksuits, has four kids by three different mothers, so pale and bony he could find work as an anatomical skeleton) pushing a wheelbarrow piled with red, white and blue tat from which others fan out with tins of red and white paint to transform convenient roundabouts into Bigot Bullseyes, while Twitchy Mark (late 50s, occasional shelf-stacker, spent some time in prison in the 90s, knows an awful lot about the divisional heraldry of the Waffen-SS) shambles along with a rickety ladder over his shoulder (but not on camera, because while he might be absolutely furious about Those People leeching on Our Taxes he’s still trying to claim disability benefits for a bad back) stops under each flickering streetlamp and braces the ladder so that Wayne can shimmy up and down it draping their run-down estate with Bigotry Bunting. There are an awful lot of lampposts in England, every one of which has a midpoint just begging to be home for a primary-coloured warning that ‘we’ don’t like ‘your kind’ around here. And there are a lot of Twitchy Marks and Waynes too. Educating yourself about how the world really works and not beating up your girlfriend is hard work, but flag-lynching? That’s proper easy.

So that happened, and while people were still nervously deciding whether it was safe to pull down the bigot banners without risking a punch to the face (in many areas, it wasn’t, but the Media wasn’t interested in those insignificant details) and a parade of newnewlabourinc spokescreeps, including the Supine Minister himself, were stutteringly affirming how absolutely splendid this outbreak of not-at-all racist patriotism was (“I love the flag! I’ve got ten at home! I have one over the bed so that I can pleasure my wife patriotically! My OnlyFans sign in account is Hot4theflag2025! Please, love me!”) we got to ‘enjoy’ the Far-Right’s crowning moment of not-awesome, a genuine Fascist march in central London. About a hundred thousand gobshites clogging the streets, bald heads gleaming and beer-bellies bulging, spitting at the Police and pissing all over the sacred monuments to British History their social media profiles would have you believe they feel must be protected from Antifa vandals and the opinions of foreign-loving intellectuals.

Truly it was a sight to see. Like Jan 6^th being run out of the back room of a Folkestone BnB by the Mirror Universe cast of Dad’s Army. Tacky and naff and absolutely oozing with fist-clenched rage. The hands down ‘funniest’ bit was when Temu-Hitler wannabe Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Luton-born, Spain-based, Irish passport holding, US/Russian funded chickenshit neo-Nazi) who the Media resolutely insist on calling by his ‘one of the lads’ stage-name of ‘Tommy Robinson’ (because his own name is clearly a bit too middle-class public schoolboy for the Jason Stathamesque image he wants to project) stood on a stage in central London alongside the grotesque live-streamed head of Elon Musk (after said head had just called for civil insurrection and the violent removal of the British Government – oh, that Elon, what is he like? LOL) and joined the mob in chanting “We are all Charlie Kirk”, which was lovely to hear.

• Popular only amongst a tiny minority of the country.
• Inflated by Media hagiography beyond any possibility of long-term influence.
• Doomed to be shot to death by a fellow-traveller over doctrinal differences.

Make it so, fash-trash. I’m so down with that I’m 2D and horizontal. It’s just a pity the whole sorry slurry of them couldn’t have lived that dreamiest of dreams right there and then. Jonestowning their own filth out of the national gene-pool live on camera and leaving the future considerably brighter for those of us left to mourn the fact they couldn’t have done it sooner.

Sadly, it wasn’t to be, and London’s taxpayers were left to pick up the tab for hosing down and disinfecting their streets in the aftermath. A portion of that bill could probably have been made up if the Metropolitan Police had arrested some of the scumbags while they ran riot and issued on-the-spot fines, but that’s not how The Met rolls. Its armoured-up officers are always too busy playing billy big-bollocks while arresting hundreds of peaceful anti-genocide protestors to risk their delicate foo-foos confronting actual anti-social thugs, especially when said thugs have milky white skin and share The Met’s animus towards melanin-hoarders. The only black faces I saw in the melee were either trying to get away from the mob ASAP or else were capering tokens in their Union Jack suits, pushed to the front for the Media’s attention before being bussed up to Jockland to welcome The Pustule outside Balmoral. Funnily enough I don’t remember a single journalist pointing out this very clear message about the kind of people who actually wanted Donald fucking Trump to come to the UK. Maybe I just missed it.

Anyway, the saddest thing about all this was the Government’s response. Der Starmerpartei couldn’t decry the mass flag-shagging, not after this New Changed Labour Party™ had adopted Flobalob’s ‘twin flags framing a pile of shit at a podium’ stylings wholesale to dictate that every Government Minister and spokescreep now has to wedge themselves between at least one pair of enormous Union Jacks whenever they’re saying something ugly and indefensible on TV, leaving them looking like they’ve sprouted oversized patriotic wings, or they’re cosplaying the episode of Mr Benn where he visited the costume shop and picked the ‘Japanese Bannerman Let Loose On ‘60s Carnaby St’ outfit. They certainly couldn’t push back after their response to the flag-tagging craze of a week before had been another predictably sweet surrender to Rightist tokenism. Hard Labour is the face this Government shows to Lefties and minorities and anyone else who doesn’t think ‘cutting handouts to spongers and slashing red tape for business’ is the sexiest new idea since the starched ruff. When it’s Far-Right thugs spreading fear and hatred with Freikorpsitarian abandon they can’t roll on their backs quickly enough, tongues lolling out and big Disney eyes just begging the morons for that electoral scratch on the tummy they’re never going to receive.

Once again, the Britain that actually voted for Starmer’s Opposition as the least-worst option at the last Election waited for Starmer’s Government to do something, anything, that vaguely looked like meeting the moment, and once again, they were left as disappointed and discouraged as Katie Holmes on her wedding night.

At the end of the day, Starmer’s Government couldn’t respond properly to the aggression of the Right, because Starmer’s Government didn’t want to. When normal people looked at that shitshow in London, they saw a disgusting mob of violent idiots equating British and English with Whites Only thuggery, but when people like Morgan ‘Twat’ McSweeney’s backroom coupists and Baron Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour big-thinkers, the ones who give the careerist Labour Right their intellectual heft (LOL, thewhatnow?) watch the very same footage, all they can see is an energised and easily gulled electorate they’re desperate to appeal to because, whatever else they are, they’re not Leftwing. So, instead of a call to arms and a stirring refutation of neo-Mosleyism, we got the sorry sight of Starmer and Co nervously applauding the racists for, as they put it, ‘proving that this Government has made the UK a bastion of free speech”, even while the orchestrated chants of ‘Keir Starmer is a Wanker!’ trended on everyone’s stream.

Sigh. The one thing everyone can agree on. Keir Starmer really is a wanker.

Speaking of Der Starmerpartei (sadly, I must, they’re the frigging Government) it will surprise no one to hear that they’ve been failing harder than ever since I last vented. You must all have better ways to spend the next few weeks, so why don’t you go do that and come back when normal life just isn’t glazing your cherry? I’ll still be here. 

Incidents & Accidents, Hints & Allegations

When Sir Keir Starmer first elevated Peter Mandelson to the post of UK Ambassador to the United States of America, reactions were, to put it mildly, pretty varied. To some of our more cynical Press lifeforms and to newnewlabourinc insiders (many of whom had come through the ranks of ‘Progress’, Mandelson’s REMF training school in the dark arts of factional fuckery and political wetwork, and as a result considered him something of a mentor and a morality free exemplar of the canny operator) it was a stroke of genius, a cunning throw of the dice that might, if the ever-oleaginous Mandy could charm and flatter the Oval Ogre into sparing Great Britain from the worst of his tariff tantrums, pay off big time. More or less everyone else in the country who ventured an opinion called it an astonishingly in your face example of the Labour Right’s hard-wired obsession with keeping all of the spoils of victory in-house, and of their crippling weakness for displays of oh-so clever-clever One Cool Trickism, the kind of smart arsed sleight-of-hand that might sound tremendously savvy when cooked up around an Islington dinner-table over a couple of bottles of wine and a line or two of coke, but deflates like a first-time flasher’s penis on exposure to the real world.

Funny thing though, for both schools of thought, their reasoning was exactly the same.

You see, Mandelson, the Blairite backstabber long ago nicknamed ‘The Prince of Darkness’ by people who actually sort of liked him (what does that tell you?) had, at this point, already made himself a couple of very successful careers out of wrapping his talents around the genitals of VIPs and whispering flattering bon mots of advice into their ears that, somehow or other, always ended up benefitting Peter Mandelson and various friends/clients of Peter Mandelson. Serially disgraced and forced to resign as a Labour Minister not once, but twice, he’d naturally moved into the world of lobbying and put his skills to work helping very rich people understand, circumvent, and exploit the global regulatory landscape by, basically, telling them who to bribe, with what, and for only a cursory extra fee syncing up everyone’s diaries to make the deal happen just when the best caviar was in season at the nearest Michelin starred restaurant. He was also, like Trump, a part of the whole Epstein circuit. He and the Prince of Perv Island were proper good chums, close enough for Mandelson to arrange a meeting between Epstein and then Prime Minister Blair in 2002 to discuss, well, that would be a secret, wouldn’t it, dear hearts, and also for Mandelson to lodge at one of Epstein’s penthouses in 2009 while its owner was in jail for (checks notes) soliciting underage prostitution. ‘Petie’ and his ‘best pal’ appear to have been very, very close friends. Soulmates, if you will.

Now, bear in mind, the decision to make Mandelson US Ambassador was taken after Epstein’s death, after the former Prince Andrew’s comfortable sinecure as Royal-For-Sale had crashed and burnt on impact with the truth about his own Epstein connections, and long, long after the Epstein name had become a pop-culture byword for sleezy paedophilic influence peddling. It was made when the people in the room discussing the appointment knew full well that he and Epstein had been close, knew that Mandelson had been a frequent guest at Epstein properties, and knew that he’d sent Epstein supportive messages during his trial and after his conviction. To think that making a person like that Ambassador to the US was a good idea, you’d either have to think that the Epstein affair was done and dusted and would never be allowed to raise its head again (sort of possible in 2025, I’ll allow) or you’d have to think that the dirty secrets beneath the Mandelson/Epstein/Trump connection would actually prove an advantage. A sort of sotto voice acknowledgement that the UK Government wasn’t interested in what His Presidential Majesty may or may not have got up to while palling around with paedophile rapists, because, hey, just look who they’d sent to represent them at his Court. Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink, say no more.

Either way, this decision paid off just like a huge proportion of the other decisions made under the aegis of Starmer’s feral Chief of Staff, Morgan ‘Twat’ McSweeney, by which I mean in a colossal and very public fuck-up that smeared pickled chicken ovaries all over his Boss’ immobile face and, to the delight of many and the despair of very few, left Peter Mandelson once again disgraced and forced to resign. Turns out, McSweeney’s vetting process when pushing Mandelson for the job had boiled down to ‘Peter wants, Peter gets’ and he’d lobbied Starmer to push through the appointment before the official vetting had even finished, while the career civil servants whose job it was to warn Ministers when they’re making easily avoidable faceplants had still been expressing their strong reservations about putting someone like Peter Mandelson into a post that left the Government exposed if there were any further revelations. Revelations just like the kind Bloomberg would leak into public view later in 2025, including incriminating details about the depth and length and intensity of Mandelson’s continued relationship with Epstein that he’d either lied about, Starmer and McSweeney hadn’t asked about, or they’d asked about but didn’t care enough about to let it influence their pre-made decision.

Once it blew up, Mandelson, being about three DNA chains removed from a Facehugger, tried to style it all out, responding to Press questions about Epstein with his usual shrewish venom and soliciting a “full confidence” statement from Starmer in Parliament, but it was all for nothing. Petie was obviously done and resigned the next day. Clean-up on Aisle 3, there’s Mandelscandal all over the floor again and we need a crew with stout brushes and buckets of soapy vinegar down there stat to sing yet another chorus of “We had no idea there were any skeletons hiding in the cupboards of Castle Everything-Here-Is-Made-Exclusively-Of-Bones”.

It got worse, of course. It always does where Peter fucking Mandelson is concerned. After a few months keeping his oily head down and waiting for the dust to settle, ‘Mandy’ obviously thought he could remind Trump and Co of what a charming and very useful fellow he was by informing the British Media that Europe’s response to The Orange One’s interest in annexing Greenland was ‘histrionic’. Quite why the British media thought it necessary to share Peter Mandelson’s foreign policy opinions with us is a mystery (it’s not – Mandelson is an important figure on the Labour Right with a presence in all the rooms where Der Starmerpartei makes its decisions, when he speaks, you hear the opinions of the Donor Class) but as they were already interviewing him as part of his reputational reset tour (basically he’s so sorry, Jeffrey who? Let’s put the past behind us, eh?) the savvy understanding was that Mandy would obviously wrap the rotten egg of his return to influence in sweet, chocolaty contrarianism, all the better to signal to the upper echelons of the British Government that he was a Trump-friendly asset they could not afford the bother of freezing out.

It probably would have worked, too, had the latest tranche of mostly redacted Epstein material not included e-mails and photographs that not only underlined, with big, thick sharpie strokes, not just how close Mandelson had been to Epstein for years, but also provided evidence that he had been a mole for Epstein (and the interests that used Epstein as a source of profitable information) within the UK Government for decades, leaking highly confidential secrets about the UK Government’s economic plans and advising foreign financial interests on how to threaten and coerce the UK Government while he was a UK Government Minister!

Yeah, this time, the stake has been truly hammered home. There’s no way even Mandy can slither back from this disgrace. But for me (and I’m not alone in this) the real scandal is that Peter fucking Mandelson was ever in a position to be this scummy. There’s a line in one of the e-mails from 2012 that absolutely sums up who Mandelson – and by extension the entire Labour Right/Labour Together cabal are at a very basic level. Mandelson (after his second humiliating sacking from a Labour Cabinet) was visiting an economic forum in China and described his presence there to Epstein as “trying to make an honest living”, to which Epstein replied “trying something new?” and Mandelson comes back with “Indeed”. That’s the Mandelson/McSweeney brand of ‘Changed UK Labour’ to a fucking tee. Corrupt, smarmy, self-satisfied panderers to corporate profit and authoritarian power who lie for a living and have nothing but contempt for anyone who can’t put money in their pocket or skate away from responsibility by abusing their influence. Mandelson, through his mentorship of McSweeney and behind the scenes networking for Labour Together, created the modern Starmerite iteration of Labour. His tireless fuckery helped give us the narrow Tory win of 2017, Flobalob’s ascension to power, Brexit, the mishandling of Covid, Liz Truss’ near bankrupting of the country and the soul-destroying betrayal of 2024’s promise of Change that could well lead to a Maga-like fascist Government coming to power here in the UK.

All that, and he was rewarded for it. Honoured. Elevated. Rendered infuriatingly untouchable and smirkingly victorious until cast-iron, irrefutable evidence of the decades long friendship the leadership of newnewlabourinc knew he had with a world-renowned PAEDOPHILE RAPIST AND SLAVER was revealed for all to see. That’s the kind of person Peter Mandelson always was. That’s the kind of person Changed UK Labour looks up to and takes its cues from. The only crime they give a fuck about is being Leftwing, and their entire modus operandi remains punishing that crime to the exclusion of all else.

Hissing noise.

All par for the course where this Government is concerned, I’m afraid. Hubris, arrogance, and a dash of delusional certainty that despite all of the intense and relentless hostility shown them by the UK Press since they assumed office, surely this time their bedrock commitment to neutering progressive politics for the benefit of the status-quo would finally pay off in friendly coverage. It’s a delusion their comms team (such as it is, people keep on resigning or getting sacked) clings to because they pretty much have to. The founding myth of the Labour Right’s claim to absolute power is that they are the grown-ups in a Party of idealistic fantasists, the only ones who understand how things really work and have the gravitas and credibility required to handle the Business and Media worlds on an equal footing of mutual respect. For a lot of them, acknowledging that they were never going to be allowed to sit at the Kewl Kidz table and that their mission to drag Labour to the Right only ever made them useful idiots in the eyes of the British ruling elites would break their minds. They have to keep on hoping, otherwise they’d have to admit to themselves that their Grand Plan to replace the Conservatives as the UK’s natural centre-right Party of Government was always just a suicide note written in crayon.

Speaking of which…

But Angie, Angie. Ain’t it time we said goodbye?

Angela Rayner, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Deputy Prime Minster and Housing Secretary, was forced to step down from all of her roleslast September following a long-running media-led scandal centring on her not being entirely 100% accurate when explaining what advice she’d received when she paid stamp duty on a second home. Strictly speaking she probably ‘did it’, and it’s exactly the kind of thing Cabinet members would have been expected to stand down for 10 years ago, but in these post-Flobalobian times it wouldn’t have registered as an unchewed radish-burp on the Corruptionometer if it weren’t for the fact that Rayner, a working-class single-mother widely seen as being on the Left of the Changed UK Labour Party, had been targeted for elimination since the very start of the Starmer Era by McSweeney’s faction of thin-necked absolutists. For comparison, Nigel fucking Farage himself was exposed in a far bigger scandal at the exact same time, with questions being asked over where, exactly, the £885,000 his officially bankrupt partner Laure Ferrari had used to buy Farage’s constituency home in Claton-on-Sea had come from (foreign donors), and if it was a transparent fraud to avoid Farage himself having to pay stamp duty on the purchase (yes, obviously). This scandal was in the news for about thirty-two seconds before the media quickly and efficiently lost interest and forgot all about it. Rayner’s case enjoyed very different treatment. With McSweeney’s slimy rope-cutters on her case, in addition to having the entirety of our right-wing Media scrabbling through her bins and knicker drawers looking for something – anything – they could nail her with, it was always just a matter of time before something was hyped up to force her out.

Now, of course, I won’t deny that I’ve had my own issues with Rayner, but a lot of those issues stem from the position she found herself in as the de facto sole remaining Lefty at the top of the Changed (for the worse) Labour Party™, and I’m temperamentally unable to ignore relevant facts just because they leave unsightly smears on the Great Glass Table of Comfortable Certainty. On the one hand, she’s often been the face and voice of the Party leadership when what they wanted said was indefensible bullshit. On the other hand, it’s pretty obvious that the reason they put her up there to say those things was because they wanted a credible Lefty buffer between them and the results of their decisions, and on the third hand, the likely reason she’d have agreed to make those statements in the first place is because she was trying to play the game by their rules – you do this favour for us, Ange, and we’ll earmark funding for the policies you actually want to push as Housing Secretary. You wouldn’t want to put those nice anti-inequality policies in jeopardy by refusing to be a team player, now, would you? Hmmm?

Thing is, Rayner’s position within the Government wasn’t really based on her being Deputy Labour Party Leader or Deputy PM, the first of which was purely a position she was voted into by Party members at the same time as Starmer lied his way into the Leader’s chair, and the second a position she gained because that was recent tradition and – at the time – Starmer’s leadership campaign was still pretending to be about restoring Party unity. Her position was based much more on her popularity within the Party and the popularity of the policy profile she’d steadily carved out in the years since Starmer’s controllers had tried – and failed – to make her carry the can for losing the Hartlepool by-election back in 2021.

Brief digression – what had actually happened back then was the newly ascendant McSweeney faction, facing its first external challenge where it couldn’t just finagle the rules to kneecap its opponents, had fucked that whole campaign up all by themselves – imposing a crap candidate over the heads of local Party memberships, making former Hartlepool MP Peter ‘see above’ Mandelson the face of the campaign, campaigning as ‘Not Corbyn’s Labour’ with a candidate who’d supported Remain in a seat Corbyn’s Labour had won twice, despite it voting 70% Leave, and this at the height of Flobalob Johnson’s ‘Make Brexit Happen’ popularity. When they inevitably lost that traditionally Labour seat to the Conservatives they tried to dump all the blame for this conga-line of ineptitude on Rayner, but it blew up in their faces, since she was in a post they belatedly realised they couldn’t just sack her from, and she’d been smart enough to keep the receipts for all the times she told them during the campaign exactly how they were fucking it up. Starmer apparently had such a wobble at the time he almost resigned as leader (I doubt it, but that’s the story they put out there later) and then he had to lead a humiliating climb-down that saw Rayner emerge from the mess with an enhanced reputation and a wide-ranging shadow policy profile.

From that moment on, the McSweeney Tendency were out to get her by any means necessary. Not just because her position as Deputy PM made her the de facto front runner in any post-Starmer leadership contest (we’ll come to that) but because for the first time since Corbyn’s election as leader and the close-run thing of General Election 2017, they’d been humiliated by a despised Lefty Trot, and if there’s one thing those behind-the-oven mould spores are good at, it’s maintaining grudges against The Left for years and years until they can act on them, to hell with the consequences. They were behind the deselection of her partner, Sam Tandy, as a Labour MP, exploiting their iron control over the Party’s bureaucracy and its vote-counting software – all overseen by then Election Supremo McSweeney’s office and current Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood – to ensure he’ lost’ his reselection vote (they did that a lot during the years of The Purge) and I’d bet my collection of erotic Joe Pesci figurines that the Media were given off-the-record briefings by ‘Party insiders’ clueing them in to exactly where she was vulnerable. After all, Rayner had discussed her financial affairs with these ‘party insiders’ when it first came up, to clear the air and seek advice. They knew exactly where the media should look.

But anyway, with Rayner out, there had to be an election for a replacement. The McSweeney Tendency would have preferred to just appoint someone loyal and obedient and less charismatic than their foundering figurehead to the post (a faded black and white photograph of a severed fish head on a pike, perhaps, or a thinly buttered strip of curling linoleum from the floor of a crackhouse toilet) but that annoying democracy thing got in their way once again. They had to content themselves with fucking over the election process itself, insisting that candidates had to gather a much larger than usual selection of MPs signatures within a ridiculously truncated period while the House wasn’t even in session, which gave candidates who already had connections within the Party machinery and the media an insurmountable advantage. In the end the only candidates to make the cut were Starmerite Education Minister Bridget Phillipson and former Leader of the House (sacked by Starmer for daring to have reservations about welfare cuts) Lucy Powell.

The whole sorry fiasco just sums up, yet again, everything wrong with Hard Labour. Powell, a solid old-school Blairite in all things who, nevertheless, seemed to understand that the Party’s right-facing drive for Tory votes is leaving it bereft of centre-left support, was painted by ‘party insiders’ as a crazy, divisive Marxist who was nothing more than a mouthpiece for their current Bête Noire, Manchester Mayor (and likely future Labour leader if he ever solves the conundrum of how to get selected as a candidate for a Parliamentary constituency while McSweeney’s appointees still control the selection process) Andy Burnham. The insider smearing was intense, super-sexist, and so factionally extreme it even annoyed Phillipson, who was left to wear the albatross of ‘Starmer’s Choice’ around her neck in a race where everybody but the people running the Party knew the membership were out to send Dear Leader a message.

End result. Powell 54%, Phillipson 47%. Starmer fail.

Cheers, Morgan. You prick. How the hell do you still have a job?

So Many faces, Most Looking Right

We also had Party Conference month here in The Bottomlands, and you know what that means! Four weeks of vox-pops, earnest pieces to camera while not much was happening, and swooping camera shots as the BBC, that ever so carefully cultivated field of conservative-friendly legumes (by which I mean the editorial execs and the on-screen ‘talent’, not the dedicated employees who do the actual technical work of making TV very, very well indeed) tried to collect enough Entertainment News-style footage to edit and clip together a traditionalist narrative their Tory-appointed commissars could approve of. Right Wing = Sensible & Statesmanlike, Left Wing = Chaotic & Concerning, Centrist = Boring & Bumbling. Now with the added fizz of the Frog Fascist Far Right, which apparently = Interesting & Inevitable.

Nigel Farage’s ‘Reform Party’ isn’t an actual political Party, of course, though you’d never know that from the Media coverage. The ‘Reform Party’ is, just like its ‘Brexit Party’ predecessor, a limited company, with Froggy fuckface as one of its directors (since he had to officially divest himself of full ownership earlier this year) meaning it has entirely opaque funding and no real voice for the non-existent membership. If any vaguely left-leaning Party ever tried to operate in this way they’d be hounded day and night by armies of journalists and pundits affecting shock-horror outrage at the gross insult to basic democratic standards this all represents, but since it’s the Fascists, and since the UK Media is run by the people who work for the people who hold shares in the companies invested in by the people who fund Frogage and the whole Alliance of X-rated International Scumbags, it’s just another one of the things we’re sometimes tersely informed by plastic-wrapped pundits that “No one but Proggy scolds cares about”.

The Reform conference itself was exactly what you’d expect from a bunch of slab-foreheaded wallies too extreme for the modern Tory Party. Flag-shagging, an obsession with Securing The Border, unfunded bait-and-switch lures for the votes of ‘honest, working families’, sneering at, blaming and threatening various cartoonish Enemies, and just a general sense that the people on stage were having a fine old time out-doing each other with performative lunacy because everyone involved knew the whole thing was just a great, big theatrical stunt no one was supposed to take too seriously. How could they? If they ever did get into Government all of their policy decisions would be made far, far away from the hoi polloi, by much more important people. People with money. People, ultimately, called Vlad. In the end, all Reform PLC served up was a heaped plate of ‘Deport All Foreigns’, ‘Preserve Our Kultur’, and similar moronic three-word phrases, and their conference was little more than a cheap market stall for the kind of bitter and measly racism that used to be the preserve of the National Front and British National Party, back when the UK still had a veneer of civilisation about it, but since the disaster of 2016 has, sadly, but not accidentally, been rendered so mainstream it’s now tonally indistinguishable from a lot of what you’d hear at the Labour and Conservative conferences.

Next up were Ed Davey’s Homely Heroes of House Hufflepuff AKA The Liberal Democrats, the Party with 14 times as many seats as our Froggy Fascists, but 0.0001% of the coverage. Nobody really knows what their policies are (probably the political equivalent of a nice village hall Bake Sale in support of Edna Pickerslee’s asthmatic nephew Harvey’s charity walk from Mablethorpe to Hythe raising money to buy radio ads warning against logging in the Amazon – all nice and well-intentioned, but it’s not going to get the job done). The UK Media generally stopped paying attention to the Lib-Dems when Jo Swinson’s rabidly anti-Left version took a bullet to the tote bag in 2019, and the Liberal Democrat membership did themselves no favours by rejecting the ambitious Left-leaning option of Layla Moran as leader in favour of Davey’s Centrist Dad shtick, with its cringey stunt-appearances and tortuous defences of the Lib-Dem Party’s 2010-15 Coalition with Cameron’s Conservatives, the period that utterly shattered their hard earned reputation as being the Nice Party.  I’m tempted to put their rightward lurch down to the influx of ex-Tories that followed Brexit, but I don’t care enough to check. Davey is – trying – to wave the flag for last-century consensus politics, but that boat sank a long time ago, and all hands were lost.

Der Starmerpartei themselves imposed their Annual Conference on my own fair city of Liverpool. A mismatch of people and place similar in scale to that time August Escoffier tried to serve the full twelve courses of his revolutionary Flambee Soufflé to battalions of Les Poilus at the Battle of Verdun, only this time with fewer radicalised socialists and many more corporate hospitality booths. I was actually in the Town centre doing some charity work during that weekend (ooooh, virtue signal be bright today) and it was like someone had released a cattle car full of teenage Mad Men aficionados at Lime Street Station, hundreds of them zipping around the drizzled streets like bespectacled electrons in their Party-issued uniform of short mack and pointy shoes, oozing contempt from their clogged pores for the very concept of ‘Liverpool’ while dragging tiny wheeled suitcases through puddles and searching forlornly for the other 90% of their facial hair. Unfair, I know. A lot of them were probably terrifically decent people trying to keep the progressive Labour tradition alive while yoked to a leadership machine that hates their guts, but it’s just so hard to tell them from the ambitious Olivers and Tabithas who scored their delegate badges by spending their University holidays pruning the local constituency membership rolls of anyone with a social media account who had ever voiced less than 110% support for the leadership’s ever shifting policy offerings, so, yeah, I’m very okay with being mean.

The Not Tory sectors of the Media are used by now to the iron-fisted style of newnewelabourinc’s brief moments of uncomfortable intercourse with its despised membership, all stage managed to within a hair’s breadth of asphyxiation to avoid any more embarrassing outbreaks of democracy on the floor, with VIPs prowling around backstage cocking and uncocking their soundbite shotguns in front of rows of floor to ceiling mirrors and gimlet-eyed ‘advisors’ barking orders in between gulps of no-fat virgin blood. They waxed all kinds of lyrical over Starmer’s signature speech, with its very, very belated bleating about Nigel Farage being, maybe, a bit racist adjacent, but not actually racist, because of course that would be slander, while Reformites themselves were very fine people led astray by a fast-talking huckster and the raging intensity of their deeply held beliefs that were, despite all appearances, definitely not racist, honest. A step change in newnewlabourinc’s much reviled policy of symbolic synchronisation with Reform’s agenda, perhaps? Could our Sir Keir finally be learning the lesson of the last year and be making it easier for Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr to justify their FTF Guardian sinecures? Could this be the start of Labour reunification and a return to popularity?

Fat chance.

Before the echoes of applause had faded it was the turn of the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, a woman who, as mentioned, made her bones heading up the election manipulation unit tasked by Hard Labour with making sure as many of the ‘the right candidates’ as possible made it through the reselection wars of 2020/21, to stand at her podium and give a headline speech chucking the same old divisive contempt at immigrants, proposing 2^nd class status and Forced Labour as ways for them to ‘prove their dedication to becoming British’, and generally underlining two things for the hard of thinking. One, while Changed UK Labour™ would grimly endure a degree of applause from the soft-left for punching Farage in his soft gut, their number one priority was always to showcase their square-jawed rejection of namby-pamby, Pinko ‘progressive’ solutions by giving as many of Farage’s actual policies as possible a vigorous hand-job. And two, Shabana Mahmoud had clearly displaced Health Secretary Wes Streeting as the definitive new standard bearer for Blue Labour-brand authoritarianism, and was most definitely going to be a contender in the leadership race that was already revving up to replace Starmer.

They are so inept. So determinedly unpopular. So completely unwilling to admit a mistake that they’re reaching more and more often into the toolbag of authoritarian solutions they used to crush opposition in the Party and applying them to the country at large. Frankly, the only people to come out of that farce of a Conference with a modicum of self-respect were the people who risked being added to the Must Expel List to go see Andy Burnham making speeches about a more hopeful future for Labour at fringe events, and the Left-wing journalists Der Starmerpartei had booted from the Arena for doing basic journalist things. One of them was the FTF Guardian’s own token Leftie Owen Jones, who committed the cardinal sin of asking the parachuted in MP for North Durham and Greater Israel Luke Akehurst (imagine a mottled puce balloon on which a crying child has been asked to draw the angry face of their nastiest teacher) to explain the Government’s continued military support for Netanyahu’s war crimes and his own apologia for genocide. Spoilers, he couldn’t, but he did get ever so angry, and so Owen had to go.

The Green Party Conference, by contrast, went quite well. Lots of energy, lots of applause, and a lot of sensible things said about the need to address the UK’s gross inequality and spiralling corporate greed. In new leader beardless Zohran Mamdani Zack Polanski they’ve got a charismatic, media-friendly figurehead who is admirably nimble-footed in dealing with our turgid media’s predictably hostile reaction to anyone not blaming everything on THE MIGRATION CRISIS™!!! The speeches were good, zeroing in on the fact that what most people are actually angry about isn’t immigration, but inequality and the rising cost of living, and that the prime drivers of these problems are the same old same old – corporate welfare, right wing economics and Brexit. If it weren’t for the possibility of an actual Party of the actual Left maybe emerging out of Your Party, I’d already have joined up. As it stands, if there’s no YP candidate standing in my constituency in May (when the local elections are) then they’ve got my vote, and I am far from alone. Millions of centre-left voters sent flying out of the Labour tent by Der Starmerpartei’s Purity Police will likely end up finding a home in the Greens, eventually, I might even be among them.

Then the Tory Conference. Jesus Christ, how the mighty have fallen. In Kemi Badenoch they evidently hoped they were getting a plausibly Hard Right leader who could slow, and hopefully reverse, the exodus of voters to Reform by championing similar policies under the Conservative banner, an attack dog of crisply-vowelled extremism that could win back the Tory voters who had flocked to Reform’s No-Shame food-truck back in 2024 while sporting the right skin pigmentation to deflect accusations of being a gross racist. Unfortunately for them, what they actually got in Badenoch was a dim-witted gaffe machine who routinely launches ill thought-out tirades against the usual targets (Wokeness, Lefty Lawyers, Eurocrats, Immigrants, etc) that either fall flat because other people with larger megaphones have already said it, or go splat against the wall because they’re so telegraphed a banana plant could move fast enough to dodge them. It’s just embarrassing. I can’t even muster a good hate for her, she’s just so awful and she really doesn’t seem to know it.

At the dispatch box she’s a belligerent fantasist who lacks the basic political skills to inflict any kind of damage on Starmer. Say what you like about Flobalob Johnson (and I very much did) but he would have absolutely relished the weekly opportunity Prime Minister’s Questions allows for the Leader of the Opposition to tear Sir Plastic Poultryfucker into quivering strips of humiliated jerky. A toddler could do it, but Badenoch doesn’t have that level of professionalism. The only thing keeping her in place leading the Tories (into extinction) are the rules governing when Tory leadership challenges can take place and the fact that not many Tory MPs want her job. All that drama aside, the Tory Conference was basically just the Reform Conference, except everyone was older and had all the optimistic gaiety of a speed-dater who can see Larry Summers eyeing them from the next table. Hovering around 16% to 18% in the polls. Broken, ignored, absolutely devoid of relevance or new ideas. No one cares, let’s move on.

Your Party, the fledgling centre-left party for all the people Labour Together told to fuck off out of ‘their’ Changed UK Labour Party™ also held its inaugural Conference in Liverpool, at the same venue in fact, so a great deal of time had to be spent in advance steaming the place for lice and wiping Morgan ‘Twat’ McSweeney’s faecal scrawlings off the walls (I won’t repeat them here, but I will just say that he’s a very angry young man with a tenuous grasp on both human anatomy and appropriate inter-familial relationships). It was all considerably less chaotic than the UK Media were hoping for. No riots. No slanging matches. No orchestrated walk-outs. No deadlocked midnight votes over the minutiae of clause 931 of Subsection 442.a of Comradely Pronouns, Acceptable Pronunciations Of. Nothing for the pundits and their audience to point and laugh at. The member-delegates turned up on time and got on with the actual work of debating and voting on the Party’s foundational principles and rules while all the coverage was snoozeworthy gossip about how Jezza Corbyn and Zara Sultana, like, totally hate each other, right? And it’s all, like, hair-pulling and face-scratching. The UK Media either can’t or won’t wrap their ossified minds around the idea of a Member Led political Party that will choose its own policies and leaders and doesn’t ascribe to the personality-driven faux-presidential style of One Man – One Vote the Media prefer because it’s easier than doing their job. Will it work out? Only time will tell. But I can tell you it makes a refreshing change to have membership votes translate into progressive, inclusive Party policy, instead of membership votes being derisively ignored by a leadership cabal that thinks democracy is for losers.

Ah, British politics. Please change.

“Bring Me, My Special Spade”

Back in February last year messages from a WhatsApp group called Shiver Me Timbers used by some arsehole Manchester Labour politicians were leaked to the media and caused yet another scandal for Der Starmerpartei. Apart from being shitty about constituents and the Left in general (which is, like, totally promotion-worthy content as far as the McSweeney Tendency are concerned), the messages were racist, misogynistic and – the kicker – borderline antisemitic, and it led to the MP for Gorton and Denton, Andrew Gwynne, being dismissed as a Minister and suspended from the Party. Fast forward to January and Gwynne finally decided to step down as MP, which meant a by-election to replace him.

The thing that made this national news was that Gorton and Denton, being a constituency on the edge of Manchester, was seen as a natural fit for Manchester’s three-times elected Mayor Andy Burnham should he want to step down and stand as an MP. Actually, there’s no ‘should he’ about it. Burnham has made no secret about his desire to return to Parliament where a LOT of MPs see him as the standard-bearer for the kind of centre-left Labour policies the McSweeney Tendency has started rendering taboo following its successful purge of the Party’s socialists. With Starmer tottering and looking odds on to be defenestrated should newnewlabourinc get its balls kicked off in the local elections due to take place this May, there would almost certainly be an election for a new Labour leader and, therefore, a new PM. The behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings started early and have been going on for a long time. Inspired partly by Starmer’s historic unpopularity (he’s the most unpopular PM in history, basically) and partly by the open secret that Old Pained Expression was never actually meant to be PM at all. Back when the McSweeney Tendency picked him as their figurehead it was purely in order to give their extremist faction a candidate to hide behind who could plausibly (not very, IMHO) offer the Party’s exhausted membership an end to factional divisions and a popular Party manifesto of ‘Corbynism without Corbyn’. The McSweeneyites expected Flobalob to remain the darling of the UK Media for a good long while yet, and therefore stand a reasonable chance of being a two term PM, leaving them free to quietly purge ‘their’ Labour Party of anyone to their Left and replace them with safe, obedient, corporate-friendly drones acceptable to the real Interests that rule Britain, after which Starmer would fall on his sword after losing the 2024 Election and they could elevate a properly house-broken and semi-charismatic frontman to the leadership (they were probably thinking Wes Streeting) just in time for the electorate to get bored with Tory sleeze and hand them the keys to the kingdom in 2030.

Covid, Partygate, Truss, Rishi Sunak’s refusal to be a white male in an era of rising racism on the Right, all combined to shatter the Tory Party way ahead of schedule and catapult the Plastic Peer into a role he is temperamentally unsuited for and incapable of getting to grips with. A genuine leader with his own firmly rooted beliefs and ability to take people with him, when handed a 170+ majority and the current mayhem on the Right, could have been truly historic in the scope and scale of their ambitions – but we got Keir Starmer instead, an awkward, dismal, monotone of a man with the strong belief that he’d quite like a comfortable post-politics career chairing various important institutions and all the charisma of a damp urinal cake sandwiched between two off-grey woollen socks. A recent book had a quote from Dowing Street insiders (implied to be either McSweeney himself or one of his inner cohort) describing Starmer as, to paraphrase, the guy who thinks he’s driving the train because he’s allowed to sit in front with the autopilot on. Quite how no one was fired for that candid assessment is the answer to the question “Who really runs Changed UK Labour?” – Clue: Not Keir Starmer.

By lashing himself so firmly to McSweeney’s line of punching Left and lunging Right, all Starmer has managed to do is shatter the link between Changed UK Labour and its most loyal voter base and give Reform PLC free rein to monopolise public attention on the areas it wants to campaign on. By coming into office with a scandal about accepting freebie gifts from rich donors and then aiming newnewlabourinc’s lustful gaze directly at the swollen pockets of the American Right’s Tech-Bro Axis, he’s shielded Nigel Farage’s status as a bought and paid for acolyte of rich donors and allowed him to skate past the reality that he’s just the fictionalised creation of a Red, White & Blue themed billionazi social media promotion. Everything that the British electorate have come to despise about Changed UK Labour has Sir Keir Starmer’s inert moan of a face plastered all over it, he’s toxic. The unstated truth is that getting him gone from Number 10 at the earliest credible opportunity isn’t just vital for newnewlabourinc’s electoral chances (slim as they are) it’s vital for the careers of those who want to replace him there.

So, it looks like there are two main candidates already in position to campaign to be post-Starmer leader. Shabana Mahmood, snarling face of what I’d call the Blue Labour faction. Basically, the lobby group devised by Baron Maurice Glasman to promote what it calls “blue-collar and culturally conservative values within Labour, particularly on immigration, crime, equality and diversity and community spirit”. If that sounds highly Americanised, it is, because Glasman is an admirer of Trump and Bannon and wants Labour to become a populist movement promising (if I may translate their self-description into real terms) closed borders, heavy handed policing, the marginalisation of minorities and White Identity Politics. Blue Labour more or less think the Right has won the propaganda war and that the only way to preserve any kind of ‘progressive’ inheritance in the face of climate change and environmental collapse is for Labour to become the Party of Nationalist Socialism and shrink its outreach down to just the WWC and the most assimilated non-whites. Why would Mahmood, a woman of South-Asian heritage, be this faction’s chosen standard bearer? Because Blue Labour want to be able to claim that they’re not really surrendering to racism, they’re just providing a home for patriotic people of all colours and creeds who want to work hard and rescue the working classes from the scourges of out of control crime, mass immigration and Benefit Culture. That’s why Mahmood has moved fast to position herself as the (Fe)Mailed Fist of Order, announcing plans to end jury trials (temporarily, of course), create a National Police Service to combat terrorism (being redefined as we speak to mean saying words genocide apologists don’t like and targeting innocent likkle arms suppliers) organised crime (foreign born grooming gangs) and public disorder (dirty, UnBritish protestors and their dangerous placards) by bringing in a raft of exciting new high-tech tools produced by, ahem hem, Peter Thiel’s Palantir, and to force immigrants to accept second-class status and compulsory ‘public service’ requirements in order to stay in the country.

She’s chilling. The media love her.

Then there’s Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary and the man most affiliated with McSweeney’s own Labour Together faction. Though they’re often interlinked and have worked with and through each other for years, Labour Together lacks Blue Labour’s internationalist, populist themes. Labour Together is basically Peter Mandelson’s malformed seed injected into the Labour Party, now grown into an invasive parasite determined to march its horrified host in ever tighter rightward circles until nothing of the Left remains. The eventual aim is to replace the Conservative Party as the ‘natural Party of Government’ by shedding every progressive, leftwing policy and swapping its old electorate for the one that won elections for the Tories for most of the last century. Corporate-friendly, hostile to Unions and progressive causes, anxious to please and appease the right-wing Press and donor class at every turn. Streeting was their bright-eyed boy going back to 2016, when he was one of the faces of the anti-Corbyn smear machine that eventually cost the Party a couple of million votes and ushered in Flobalob. Under Starmer he was given the Health portfolio and embarked upon a mass reorganisation of the NHS (costing jobs but achieving very little) more tech-solutions waffle (new US-sourced IT systems produced by his donors that I can personally confirm are shit) and a bossy, confrontational, finger wagging attitude to junior doctors and nurses that has led to continued industrial action and the stalling of his ambitions. I’ll give Streeting this, though. He was one of the first to sniff the perilous rot in the foundations of Starmerism and, with Mahmood monopolising the Labour Right position, has been quietly, cynically, trying to redefine himself within the Party as Centre-Left Wes, the smiling solutions-orientated pragmatist with a good heart and a great media presence.

He’s transparently ambitious. The media love him.

Which is where Gorton and Denton comes back into the picture. Farage’s Reform PLC are polling at something like 30% there, with their MAGAesque message of Immigrants Are Stealing Your Jobs, Kids and Futures!!! offering low-info/high-misinfo residents something performative and ugly to vote for, as opposed to the “You get fuck all for your vote and you should like it, pleb” shriek emanating from the tin-eared brass-necks over at newnewlabourinc’s campaign strategy garderobe. With Burnham as the Labour candidate, that could well have shifted hard. He’s popular, has a record he can point to, and due to the Party leadership’s well-trumpeted hostility to him he could campaign there as a Labour candidate with something different and new and meaningful to offer. They might not garner the 50% of the vote they got last time (never mind the 60%+ Corbyn’s Labour got in the area) but surely enough to keep the seat and deny Reform PLC victory in another historically Labour constituency. All the Labour Party’s NEC (National Executive Committee) had to do was vote to allow him to resign as Mayor so that he could stand.

So, of course, by an 8 to 1 vote of the NEC’s executive officers, they blocked him. Mahmood herself, sitting as NEC chair, and after telling the media that she thought Burnham would be a great addition to the Parliamentary team (that was a clue as to the eventual decision right there) abstained, but Starmer himself voted to block while Deputy Leader Powell was the only officer to vote yes. Politically, how fucking stupid is that? For all newnewlabourinc’s feral spokescreeps piously repeating to the media that “Andy is doing too good a job as Mayor” and “Oooooh, it would cost so much to hold another mayoral election”, it was made absolutely crystal clear in every anonymous briefing and off camera quote that newnewlabourinc’s one and only concern was in preventing Burnham from becoming an MP because then he could stand in the next leadership election, and would probably win. They actually seem to think that they can sell this as some kind of display of strength, when all anyone can actually see is pants wetting weakness. The McSweeney Tendency is so wedded to stamping out all potential threats to its grip on the Leader’s Office that they just came out and fucked that chicken right in front of the whole country. Fucksake, Starmer himself voted to block, when any half competent advisor would have been screaming at him to either abstain or even vote with Powell (“Look how little I fear potential rivals and how totally democratic we are when the Leader is just one vote amongst many”) but being Starmer, he just did as he was told by Morgan and faceplanted straight into a puddle of fail.

So now Der Starmerpartei get the worst of all worlds. Their candidate for the seat is immediately tarred (however unfairly) as Starmer-approved and is already coming under heavy social media assault from pro-Reform PLC trolls, the Green Party (who have already stated they’d be willing to work with a Burnham-led Labour Party, but not Starmer’s iteration) are polling second to Reform PLC and looking like the safest bet for tactical voters who want to repeat the success of Welsh voters in the recent Caerphilly Sennedd election by voting for the most electable non-Reform PLC candidate. It’s funny, the constant bleat out of Changed UK Labour that everyone who doesn’t want a Reform PLC Government has to vote for them as the only viable alternative turns into a garotte around their thin necks when their own enthusiastically courted unpopularity renders them terminally unviable. They’ll almost certainly lose the seat, and either hand the Greens a ton of welcome credibility or give Farage a boost at a time when his political franchise is struggling to explain how its claims of being the anti-Establishment choice jibe with the sudden influx of failed Tory ex-Ministers to its ranks and he himself is struggling to shake off entirely believable accusations of being a lifelong racist antisemite.

All this, because when the choice was between listening to large swathes of their own Party who want one of the few well-known Labour politicians with a positive approval rating back on the national stage arguing the progressive case for a Labour Government or denying Labour MPs and members even the vaguest hint that they would be allowed to replace Sir Keir Starmer with anyone other than a Rightwing candidate he personally approves of, Morgan ‘Twat’ McSweeney could and would only ever choose option two.

Once more, with feeling.

Morgan. You prick. How the hell do you still have a job?

Anyway, I’m cutting it short here. That’s way over two hours worth of ranting and I haven’t even touched on newnewlabourinc’s self-owns on the Budget, Trump, and its shameless shilling for the interests of the genocidal extremists running a certain Middle-Eastern country. Enough is enough. Hope this note helps you feel a little better about events in your own country, where you might have Faecal Fascism and the Steve Miller Bund running the show, but at least your non-fascists seem willing to put up a decent fight.

What I’m saying, in an uncharacteristically roundabout way, is that all of my bottles of fizzy vim had drained away into the sand and I was a million miles short of wanting to expose my raw nerves to all the pointless, preening toxicity of the boring old blame game, with its clamour of mulish certainties, foot-stamping victimitude and rude jostling for sole narrative authority. I was content just to live in the now. So, I did. Mostly. I’ve got a job I really enjoy (why did no one tell me such things existed?) that keeps me so busy I’ve even come to value the weekends again, and a lovely family who are always happy to see me. Also, if I’m going to be writing about good people facing down the forces of chaotic evil, I’d rather it be in a genre where I can at least envisage some kind of happy ending for them.

So, I did all that, and it helped. Then, after a while, I looked up and realised that the ever-present din of Shit They Are Pulling had stopped being too depressing to contemplate and once again become too annoying to ignore. Sure, in some ways it might be 1933 redux and 70+ million utter gobshites in the US with ONE SIMPLE FUCKING JOB THEY HAD TO DO have instead flipped a crusty middle finger to observable reality by serving up to the world a brain-addled mish-mash of Father Coughlin, Sequel Biff Tannen and a plate of gelatinous orange rinds, with a non-optional side order of the most venal shit-shovelers on the menu to blank-check his many imbalances, but realistically, what can I do about that? I’m not American. I didn’t vote for or against it, so I don’t have to live each day with the existential pain of knowing that I share a country with the kind of mental morlocks who’d much rather re-elect (not elect, fucking RE-ELECT) an openly malignant slurry of America’s worst mistakes to a position of Absolute Powah than suffer the castrating shame of being ruled over by a Vagina of Colour. I went through the British version of all that after 2019 and once was enough for me.

No, I thought, Spring is in the air, Liverpool FC are once again back on their perch as Champions of England, and the world is chock full of decent people trying to get to grips with how to fight back against the Darkness. In the greater scheme of things, what did I actually have to complain about?

Oh yeah. 80s-retro crapfashions, obligatory autotune, and British Politics.

Then again, I suppose if anything could bless you good people with a momentary distraction from the last two hundred plus days of unrelenting bullshit, it might just as well be stories of someone else’s country dashing blindly through the scrapheap of 21^st century ideo-cultural malaise, catching its collective rumpy rucksack on the barbed wire fence of political misadventure, and being left howling like the man who mistook a drill-socket for a glory-hole while swinging inches above the snarling jaws of societal chaos and right-wing populism. Maybe, maybe not, but looking around the national playbox that’s all I’ve got, so set waffle receptors to maximum and crank open those bile bay doors, this chunky monkey has to vent.

Right. Now. Okay. Focus.

You may or may not recall that July 4^th 2024 saw the UK electorate drag themselves away from Love Island and Homes Under The Hammer long enough to shamble on down to the polls and honour the spirit of American Independence Day by turfing out a bunch of pig-snouted Tory Royalists guilty of treating the rights of free men and women with contemptuous disinterest in favour of an ambitious coalition of lawyers, slaveowners and mercantile opportunists in the shape of The Corporate Franchise Opportunity Currently Trading Under The Name Of ‘The Labour Party’ (which I usually choose to refer to – because venomous shorthand amuses me –  as newnewlabourinc, or Hard Labour or Der Starmerpartei, or whatever other euphemism for Those Vile Twats suits my mood). A Party led – in a sense, but only in a sense – by that ghostly apparition of undignified wraithdom Sir Keir Starmer, a man so comically ill-suited to the role and demands of inspirational leadership that he needs a Peloton video and signed permission from three Party donors before he can wipe his own arse.

It’s doesn’t take a degree in any of the political sciences to note that an absolutely crushing Tory defeat in the last election was as inevitable as the drooler-in-a-wheelchair defence at a Weinstein sentencing. David ‘Pigfucker’ Cameron started that clock ticking back in 2010 when his Coalition Government imposed crippling austerity on a country still reeling from 2008’s Banker Bailout, and then by allowing his own Party’s lunatic Hard Right to use the 2016 Referendum on EU membership to shift responsibility for all of the damage the Tories had inflicted onto the EU and ‘The Foreigns’. Theresa ‘Grey-Bot’ May sped it up by continually shying away from a long overdue reckoning with her own Party’s out-of-control radicals and pointlessly dragging out the torture of Brexit ‘negotiations’ without ever being straight with the country about what these meant, an act of cowardice which, by the time she was ousted in 2019, left a great big populist shaped hole at the heart of the Conservative Brexit Project that only the most dishonest and grasping fantasists could hope to fill.

Yes ‘Boris’, you appalling floater, I’m talking about you, but not just you.

The catastrophic tri-disaster that ensued for the country, its relationships, its economy, and its overwhelmed sub-culture of politically based snark, finished the job, thanks to the 1-2-3 gut-punch of Flobalob Johnson, Lettuce Truss and Pinocchio Sunak leaving the idea of electing another Tory Government about as popular as thong-rot at a Burlesque festival. The clarion cry of this election, audible in every preceding by-election and opinion poll from Ultima Thule to Lyonesse, was ‘Anyone. Except the Tory’, and in hundreds of seats that’s exactly what the vote delivered. The brutal hammering they received was hailed by cheerleaders of the incoming newnewlabourinc regime as a sweeping mandate for the amorphous concept of ‘Change’ they’d campaigned on in place of any actual policies, but, as ever with the delusional group-masturbators of the Labour Right, their claims were a casserole of fishy offcuts and bovine excrement.

In reality, the pro-Right vote had been split between Sunak’s continuity Tories and the froggy, fag-smoking  fascism of Nigel Farage’s latest PR wheeze, a foreign funded, privately listed company branded as ‘The Reform Party’, selling the same boxed sets of white supremacy and misdirected resentment as his previous UKIP and Brexit Party vehicles, while newnewlabourinc itself, under the obsessive control-freakery of Starmer’s astonishingly unpleasant campaign chief Morgan McSweeney, was so laser-focussed on distancing itself from anything that actual Labour voters might get enthusiastic about that it had somehow managed to haemorrhage hundreds of thousands of votes from 2019’s ‘historically disastrous’ total, while still scraping by with slim pluralities of nose-holding tactical voters in enough seats to come out the other end with a ‘historical landslide’ on the lowest winning vote share since the 19^th century.

To put that into numbers, our First Past The Post electoral system had spat out a result that transformed 33.7% of a turnout of 55.9% of eligible voters into 63.4% of seats in Parliament and 100% of political power. Which is ten tons of bollocks in a two-ton bag, but that’s the undemocratic system the traditional parties love too much to change, and it meant that Der Starmerparteicame into office with a majority so big that, in our Winner Takes It All system, there was technically nothing holding it back from doing whatever it wanted. All of its online fanbois had spent the period before and during the election haranguing naysayers and doubters with injunctions to “Wait and see what they do in office before you judge them”, whispering comforting lies about the leadership’s ever-so cunning plan to tiptoe and shimmy into Government without giving our rabid media any distracting scandals to splash all over the front pages, before dramatically whipping off their dull grey camouflage to reveal the tight rose-gold spandex of social-democratic saviours hidden underneath.

Just give them a chance, was the mantra. Hold your tongue, swallow the shit-sandwich, let them do what they have to do, because before they can change anything they simply must gain power. Well, they did. Complete and unchallengeable power, with a parliamentary majority twice as large as Flobalob’s 2019 ‘landslide’. Job done, can I start judging them now? No? How about in three months? No? Six? No? How about in a year? No again? What a surprise. Tell you what, Starmerfanz, here’s a tasty bag of salted dicks for you to chew on, now go sit in the corner, because, like most of the country, I’m tuning your bullshit out.

Cards on the table, I’ve never made any bones about my deep and abiding distain for Starmer and his entourage of sneering asset-strippers and backstabbing hypocrites, and I’m certainly not going to start now. I expected them to be terrible because that’s who and what they showed themselves to be before, during, and after their takeover of the Party, but even I’ve been left rocked back on my snazzy Cuban heels by the historic awfulness with which Hard Labour have gone about the business of, well, everything, but mainly anything to do with the vital political art of making large numbers of people want you to stay in power. From day one of newnewlabourinc’s first term in office since 2010, from the very moment their Party issued alarm clocks (donated in bulk by valued Party donors Lumen Corp) lit up with a rousing chorus of “Believe in Keir – Or Else”, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they were driven, collectively if not always individually, by an intense desire, a burning lust almost criminal in its ferocity, to make themselves as despised and distrusted as possible by every single compartmentalised sliver of British society other than the ones that everyone knows will never, ever, ever vote for them.

Say you’re a red-faced racist Gammon with a shotgun in the attic and Ebony/Intersex porn clogging up your hard drive, they’ll be right on over to butter your scones and service your Bentley. If you’re a sharp-suited Interface Element extruded by the AI mainframe of a foreign tech conglomerate or blood-soaked ‘defence’ manufacturer, they’ll tear down all the curtains and lay splayed on folds of Venetian velvet for your indecent pleasure. And if you’re one of the ethical abscesses looming shroud-wrapped behind a top-floor desk at one of the four or five venal slime-drips we call the popular British Press, oh lordy, they’ll give you their firstborns wrapped in the skins of their first loves and ask nothing in return except the opportunity to occasionally place their balls in your claws and their names and mugshots above front page PR paeans to the wisdom and profundity of whatever Four-Minute Hate is being slopped out to the reading masses this week.

But if you’re anyone else? Not me, of course, I’m just a dirty Lefty who believed them when they told me who they were and set my expectations accordingly, but if you were, say, a mildly progressive middle-class voter on the softy-leftish side of centre who’d been put off in 2019 by the Media’s reinvention of Corbyn as a blood-soaked Red Hitler, but then voted for that nice Sir Keir hoping that, now he’d successfully carried the symbolic Ming vase of Labour’s campaign across the highly polished floor of electoral danger, he would take the huge majority handed to him and prioritise policies that would make the country a better place to live? Ha! As if! Get back behind the yellow line and assume a submissive position, Commie agitator, and be thankful if a firehose of nothing is all you get. Don’t you know that every time you think a bad thought about Sir Keir a Tory goblin climbs through a window to steal a human child?

Sigh.

This is the problem I have with talking about the Starmerite version of Labour. It’s so easy chatting shit about Tories because that’s essentially what they’re for. The decision each of them made to be a Tory is like a genetic marker for a propensity towards generalised vileness in every field, especially greedy self-advancement and irredeemable moral turpitude. In essence, they’re just a bunch of anamorphic stereotypes; posh private school dumbos and dyed-blonde social climbers ashamed of their roots, corporate stooges parachuted into rural seats and second-generation immigrant ladder-pullers determined to prove to the Right people that they’re the Right kind of darkie. A mish-mash of humanoid awfulness revolving around the gravitational pull of an eternal truth – the Conservative Party is always going to be the natural Party of Government, because the extremely vested Interests who own the UK will always need a conservative Party to sell the maintenance of the status quo to the have-nots, and the deal is simple, as long as you wave the flag and bash the trots, you too can keep your nose in the trough and your misdeeds out of the papers long enough for your children’s children to be considered ‘good sorts’. That eternal truth might, finally, be going the way of all the other formally eternal truths that litter human history, but for this era of Tories, it remains the simple idea that informs their actions.

But Der Starmerpartei? The Labour Right? They’re a much sicklier mouthful of bad medicine. Their essence is a cross between an entryist sect and a contractual failsafe. An invasive parasite of a non-ideological ideology that has systematically colonised the vital organs of its host and assumed control over its executive functions by aggressively attacking any rival cognitive centres. The heirs to St Anthony B’Liar’s revelatory credo that The Great British Public had been conditioned for generations by the infotainment assets of the nation’s most entrenched Interests to have a very blinkered view of what an ‘electable’ Party of Government should look like and talk about, so should any Opposition stray too far left of wherever the Establishment’s Tory favourites sit at any given time, then The Great British Public simply wouldn’t be allowed to see them as anything other than dangerous extremists. Their version of Labour can exist quite comfortably in this scenario because it’s pitched as the ‘dull but nice’ guy in the toxic relationship that is British politics. Sure, that slutty bitch Veronica Voter will keep on jumping into the sack with bad guy Tobias Tory, but when she’s left broken hearted and STD-riddled for the ten thousandth time, she’ll always come crawling back to Lennie Labour for a couple of terms of boring, suburban normality before falling off the wagon and back onto the other guy’s pox-pocked funstick.

It’s a sad, self-hating way to sell yourself, but it does come with a guarantee of short windows of access to the perks of Government for people willing to play along, and it provides an opportunity for ambitious high-achievers who simply couldn’t cut it for one reason or another as Tory made-men to wet their beaks and sow the seeds of profitable future relationships with The Money. The Labour Party membership and an ever decreasing number of its MPs may see things differently, some of them may even see themselves as the heirs to a progressive tradition that has effected massive, positive changes in British society by taking on the entrenched power of the elite Establishment and telling it to go and fuck itself with a frozen balloon animal, but as fans of Starmer and the wider Labour Right will tell you over and over and over again, usually while in the process of making some huge political error that a blinded mole-rat in a backwards balaclava trapped at the bottom of a lightless pit in the sub-basement of Darkly Manor with a broken torch and Paint It Black playing at half speed while Goth kids dance melancholically around a pile of tear-streaked Sandman comics could see coming, that kind of naïve Gay 4 Ché Student Union thinking is just performative  ‘politics of protest’, while grown-ups (like them) understand that this is a conservative country full of greedy, selfish liars who might say they want tolerance, equity and top-quality public services, but will always reject paying for them as soon as a smooth bugger with a side parting utters the dreaded curseword ‘socialist’, and that’s just how things are supposed to be.

But to quote an observer who knew more than her fair share about how exploitative wankers operate, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Now here, I’m cutting out about twenty paragraphs of bladed bile relitigating my opinion on how and why and with what assistance the Labour Right deliberately and with huge oodles of malice aforethought sabotaged any hope of ousting the Tories between 2016 and 2020 because Dog only knows I’ve said it all before and, frankly, I’m past caring whether or not some people feel the need to dispute the theory that 1 + 1 does indeed = 2 because Wilmer Sux or whatever. Discussing the right wing of the Labour Party makes me incoherently furious because they have – by force and deception – taken the only progressive mass-movement ever to challenge the power of the UK’s ruling elite off the table and replaced it with this hollowed-out husk of a relic, this ghastly vessel of painted skin stretched and pinned across a juddering framework of marrowless bones and bent paperclips, jerkily propelled over a field of screaming faces on wheels of malevolent greed, its tattered sails stitched together from broken promises and betrayed hopes catching the occasional gust of frustrated despair and grinding cruelty.

(Melodrama chip deactivated)

See? I simply cannot talk about these fuckers and the damage they’ve done to the cause of progressive politics in the UK without lighting my hair on fire and running around the parched fields of Toljaso Island toting a hungry scythe and crying out for blood and justice. Lives have been destroyed, communities deprived and wrecked, people have straight up died, all because an entire strain of ‘centre-left’ thinking has become so infested with factional spite that nothing in the world is more important to them than ‘owning the Trots’.

That’s not healthy, is it? So, I’ll just say this and move on.

These pus-swollen gonads and their midge-swarm of infinitely credulous defenders got where they are today because, when the choice before them was between a continuation of Tory Government or a Labour Party they didn’t control, they willingly fucked their Party over and made themselves into useful idiots for powerful Interests in the UK and abroad who shared their opposition to Britain having a leftwing Labour Government and were more than happy to help them burn the country down to prevent it. Shielded by a collusive media establishment with the same Teflon coating the Tories have enjoyed for eons, they had a five-year period where they were allowed to run riot across the political battlefields of post-Referendum Britain like rogue Medieval sell-swords with an indulgence from the Pope, leaving burnt fields and traumatised goats wherever they passed through. Nothing discrediting was ever allowed to stain their manufactured image of mature moderation, none of their skeletons were allowed out of the closet to impinge on the national consciousness, and every cynically dishonest yap emitted from their nethermouths was granted the unearned authoritative weight of a NYT Editorial and the cursory scrutiny typically given to a Walnut Kennedy infomercial about vaccines causing testicular discolouration in mice.

While they were waging their Unholy War to reclaim their Labour Party from the filthy Trots they were proffered a level of Establishment support and protection normally out of the question for anyone even nominally on ‘the Left’, and I think a lot of their current problems might stem from too many of them getting too used to playing the political game on Super Easy level. After the spine-jellying shock of 2017’s near thing, driving The Left out of mainstream political debate was the priority for a lot of otherwise incompatible groups, and the Labour Right were so richly rewarded for wielding their back-seeking knives without mercy or restraint that wasting time thinking about anything else, like what they’d actually do to fix the country if they stumbled backwards into power again, simply wasn’t on the to-do list (for most of them). But they did get into power again. They are the Government. The country is in undeniable need of genuine, radical change, and yet all this lot seem capable of dishing up is an endless Riverdance of Catastrophuckupery.

(head hits desk)

Right, let’s back up a bit. Put this in some context. What, exactly, have they done to earn this opprobrium? Why are they now posting opinion poll figures so dire that Starmer himself seems far happier tootling around the globe playing at international statesman than he does back here in the puddle of cold piss that is modern Britain?

Well, it goes like this.

In the run up to the Election, one of the things Starmer did to show how very mature and Westminster-attuned His Party (as Starmer charmingly refers to the 125-year-old Labour Party) had become was the recruitment of Sue Grey as his Chief of Staff. Those with good memories might remember Grey as the long-term Civil Service fixer whose hi-profile investigation into Flobalob’s Covid-Era partying at Number 10 never quite blew the tubby waster out of the Big Chair, but it did a lot to grease the wheels that churned him towards the exit. People were annoyed that she refused to pull the trigger, but no one who had followed Grey’s career should have been at all surprised that her priority was finessing the problem rather than tackling the root cause. Her speciality was always helping Ministers and their staffs negotiate the complex Whitehall/Westminster System in such a manner that the right secrets got kept and the wrong people took the blame for any distressing fallout. Appointing her his COS over the squeals of the Tories at once displayed strength in a way the Media understood and signalled to the Interests that His Party would not be rocking any of their boats. As COS she reportedly took a tight grip on Starmer’s office and started prising The Hollow Man out of the sweaty grip of the coterie of young, ball-swinging lads-in-suits McSweeney had established as his Praetorian Guard, controlling access to the PM and beginning the process of retooling the cogs and wheels of a fractious political machine into something that slotted into the well-worn grooves of British Government.

Civil-Wars in virgin-field Governments tend to slow-burn into conflagration, this one went up like Casey Kasem’s wig in direct sunlight. McSweeney was NOT a happy chappie, and so the leaks started almost instantly. The Media were soon gobbling down leaks that Grey (a woman!) was paid more than her Boss (a man!) but the inciting event was the revelation that Starmer – always appreciative of the good things in life his lofty status entitled him to – had been ‘gifted’ clothes, accommodation, VIP tickets and even designer glasses by wealthy Labour Party donors and seemed to think that because he’d belatedly declared his receipt of Rich List largesse, no one of importance could possibly consider it an issue.

As has so often been the case with this leadership team, what Sir Keir considers appropriate and uncontroversial is not in the same hemisphere as the opinions of other, warmer-blooded life forms, like, for example, the middle-of-the-road swing voters who had believed his ever-so-sincere promises about restoring probity and dignity to public office in the wake of Tory sleaze. And of course, it was red meat to a News Media only too happy to play the Both Sides card now that the country was safely in the hands of comfortably Centrist careerists. The craziest thing was that this was all in the wake of the scandals about Flobalob accepting gifts from rich donors, something he’d been endlessly (and rightly) castigated for by Starmer’s team. The very clear link between accepting ‘gifts’ from wealthy patrons in return for a welcoming ear and future ennoblement had been made in the minds of the public, so for them to turn around and dismiss concerns as confected nonsense was just the first warning that the Labour Right’s infamous tin ear for advice it didn’t want to listen to was in full effect.

Grey got the blame for allowing the scandal to blow-up, which added to the leaks from McSweeney’s team about how controlling and power-hungry she was (projection being a well-thumbed card in the Labour Right deck) was enough to make her position untenable, so Starmer took McSweeney’s advice and replaced her with… McSweeney! I know!! Proper Dick ‘Dick’ Cheney vibes there. The fallout from all these behind closed doors shenanigans was that newnewlabourinc’s first faltering steps in power were being orchestrated, not by a long-tenured veteran of the wood-panelled back rooms and well-trodden corridors of power, but by an angry Irish chaos-monkey with a pathological hatred of The Left and an entirely inflated view of his own genius. Everything that newnewlabourinc has done in office since this mini-coup has been guided by the McSweeney credo that Blair didn’t go far enough in acknowledging the privileges of the Haves, and that if ‘Labour’ wanted to be in power for any extended period of time, they had to do two things – show the Establishment that they were its only defence against a progressive Left, and position themselves to the electorate as the only viable option on the polling card other than out-and-out fascism.

And so, it began. Badly.

As soon as the close-packed berserkers of Der Starmerpartei’s victorious horde swarmed off the decks of their corporate-branded war-galleys and into Parliament’s legislative firing-ranges, their mission statement seems to have been to grab the nearest blunderbuss and start blasting away at their own feet, because that’s what they did. As time has gone on and natives of central London have become inured to the frequent rain of smoking toes, the only thing that has changed has been the calibre and rapidity of the self-inflicted barrage d’pied.

Pretty much the first major thing they did in office was to announce to a nation desperately hungry for some kind of positive change that they intended to end the Winter Fuel Allowance, a couple of hundred-pound seasonal bump to all pensioners introduced by Labour under Gordon Brown to help old people not die of hypothermia over Christmas. It always should have been tapered to exclude richer pensioners who actually don’t need it (not the brick and stone ‘millionaires’ who just happen to live in houses with exploded resale values thanks to our insane housing market, but the real cash rich ones) but since it was always intended as a fudge to avoid third-railing about with the state pension, that didn’t happen.

There could, of course, have been discussion and debate, a well-thought-out media campaign to sell the public on the rationality and fairness of making sure only poor pensioners got the WFA as part of a wider message about reallocation of public funds according to need, but that would have been too ‘progressive’, too ‘Lefty’ for these buffoons. They just made the announcement, told everyone how inspirationally amazing they were for making these ‘tough but necessary decisions’, paused expectantly for the required applause to start… and then reacted to the tidal wave of public shock and outrage with the kind of snippy, dismissive ugliness that is the hallmark of the Labour Right and its online defenders. All pensioners were now relabelled as presumed millionaires who spent their WPA funds on foreign hollibobs and expensive cookware, greedy parasites sucking on the teat of ‘working families’, which is an absolutely astounding way for those supposedly hyper-efficient mavens of electoral realism running newnewlabourinc’s comms to insult the most reliable voting group in the country, but given that they’re actually a circlejerk of solipsistic focus-groupies with all the political nous of that guy who stands on a box at Speaker’s Corner dressed like the Childcatcher and holding up a sign reading ‘ASK ME ABOUT MAN/BOY LOVE’, it’s entirely in character, because after the backlash got too loud and painful, they were forced to announce a fucking U-turn! WFA payments would be restored, with those given to pensioners with an income of over £35.000 getting clawed back in tax – which is exactly the solution opponents of the cuts suggested before they ever went through, but Starmer’s coterie of powder-sniffing vein-poppers refused to even consider.

Because. They. Are. Knobheads! (incoherent howling of frustration)

It’s been more of the same ever since. If there’s an issue on the agenda crying out for kindness, newnewlabourinc have always chosen to be cruel. Like when the Scottish National Party introduced an amendment in Parliament that would have removed the Two Child Cap that limits child support payments to families on benefits to the first two children, a decade old Tory policy that has been proven to drive families deep into poverty and to keep them there, in the process costing the country something like £39 billion actual pounds in order to ‘save’ £1.3 billion in benefits, Starmer’s goons just decried it as a partisan political trap to embarrass The Leader and ordered all Labour MPs to vote against it. When seven decent Labour MPs did find the moral courage to represent their constituents by voting for the SNP’s amendment, they were immediately punished by having the whip removed, meaning they were suspended from being Labour MPs and had to sit as Independents. Some of them have since been given the whip back, but other haven’t and simply never will.

That kind of thing just doesn’t happen in proper democratic parties. Even in Blair’s day, MPs were allowed to vote their conscience as long as it wasn’t a vote the Government could lose, but the control freaks running Hard Labour under Starmer couldn’t see past another opportunity to make ‘tough decisions’ and punch down at the few left-wing MPs they hadn’t managed to expel from the Party. Once again, the needless cruelty of it all went down like a cup of cold sick, and newnewlabourinc reacted in the same way, attacking critics as naïve idiots who just didn’t understand grown-up politics, and defending the policy itself using language that could have been (and thanks to their reliance on ChatGPI, probably was) cribbed from Heritage Foundation press releases.

Back when they were in Opposition, and during Starmer’s own abysmally dishonest leadership campaign, the injustice done to the WASPIs (Women Against State Pension Inequality) was something Labour were definitely going to redress. It wasn’t a manifesto promise, but candidate after candidate – including Sir Say-Anything himself – lined up for photo ops with the WASPIs and were eager to associate themselves with their cause. Basically, the passage of the Pensions Act by the Tory/Lib-Dem Coalition in 2011 meant that a lot of older women born in the 1950s would have their pension plans thrown into chaos by the rapid introduction of pension-age equivalence, and report after report has concluded that they were given insufficient guidance and support by the Government, leaving them financially robbed.

So, of course, once they were in a position to actually do something about it, the Brainless Trust in charge of newnewlabourinc proudly announced that they were, once again, ‘making the tough decision’ to renege on their election promises and leave the WASPIs with nothing. Same post-betrayal rulebook came out. The WASPIs were smeared as greedy and feckless wenches who wanted decent taxpayers to foot the bill for their refusal to do due diligence, anyone disputing the latest underbussing was, since helping the WASPIs had been part of the 2019 Labour manifesto, dismissed as a Corbynite wrecker, and/or a Tory enabler (those terms being pretty much interchangeable for the bots stationed at newnewlabourinc’s Brown House) because the need for flashbang-bright projection and a slight variation on Cleek’s Law seem to be surgically imprinted into the brains of Starmer’s team during the same process that sees ethical conscience and the ability to learn from mistakes consigned to the chum bucket.

Like me, it just goes on and on and on.

A particularly egregious example, and the one (other than supporting genocide in Gaza) that’s done them the most damage, is the announced ‘reforms’ to the eligibility criteria for the Personal Independence Payment, changes that newnewlabourinc tout as saving £5 billion a year in ‘waste’ in return for £1 billion in funds to ‘help disabled people find work’. Short version, disabled people in the UK have already had their support payments cut to the bone and been forced to jump through hoops for what they do receive. The PIP is a benefit that is supposed to support disabled people who are already in work to stay in work. A disabled-friendly car? Help with electricity payments to charge your wheelchair or breathing equipment? Money to hire a carer to help you get dressed and at work on time? That kind of thing. The new eligibility criteria Hard Labour were planning would require applicants to score 4 points just once on a questionnaire, except everyone who had seen the new criteria said it would be basically impossible for most disabled people to score 4 points in any of the categories. So, in actuality, the changes would mean millions losing their PIP payment, and with it their ability to live independently and function in the workplace. Throwing productive working people onto the Dole, which is the opposite of what they still insisted was the purpose of the ‘reforms’.

But even more insidious than that, eligibility for PIP is effectively a passport to a ton of other benefits. Making it impossible to qualify for PIP is a backdoor method of making swinging cuts to the disability budget without admitting you’re making cuts. Don’t have to pay out for benefits no one can claim, do you? High-Fives all around. Sure, lots of people will die and the country will end up paying a lot more in unemployment benefits and medical treatment for the millions forced out of work, but that’s a problem with a similar Cut and Slice solution, isn’t it?

Once again, when disabled groups and charities and anyone with a conscience said that this Bill was the very epitome of a false economy and to disability rights what the Coldplay kiss-cam is to the expectation of discrete infidelity, the kneejerk newnewlabourinc response was to attack the disabled as greedy leeches, lie about what the policy did, and then, when the scale of the discomfort on the Labour benches skyrocketed with over 120 MPs saying they were going to vote for an amendment that would basically kill the planned Bill stone dead, a plunge into high-handed arrogance with Starmer, in his trademark unbearable nasal monotone, delivering a sneering dismissal of opposition as ‘Noises Off’, a theatrical term meaning unimportant offstage sounds that the important actors in any performance have to be professional enough to ignore.

Maybe it was this encapsulation of the withering contempt Starmer’s inner circle of callow young murgatroyds have for Labour’s MPs that broke the camel’s back in twelve places, because by the next news cycle Party whips were in a blind panic over how resolute the ‘No Fucking Way’ camp were. Meetings with the Work & Pensions Minister were offered, but they went so well that more MPs threatened to sign on to the amendment. Anonymous spokescreeps around Number 10 started threatening that they would consider the vote on the amendment to be a de facto confidence vote on Starmer’s leadership, so even more MPs let it be known they were considering signing on to the amendment. In the end, they had to strip more or less everything out of the Bill that the rebels didn’t like – pushing any changes off to a later date and only after some kind of to-be-confirmed consultation and advice period – in order to reduce the rebellion to manageable numbers and get something passed, but it was a humiliation on every level.

This disaster encapsulated everything that is driving disgust with newnewlabourinc. Bad policy that punches down on the weakest. Tone-deaf comms that are always pitched arrogant and clueless. A Plan A of threats and bullying, then when that fails to work, an uncoordinated collapse as they all look around the cabinet table at each other and realise that there actually is no Plan B, this is all they have. The habitual ‘all resistance is punishable by expulsion’ brutality that they were allowed to get away with when it was aimed at non-Starmerite Party members and elected officials simply wasn’t fit for purpose any more, not now that the formerly cowed legions of centrally selected Labour MPs all had mailbags bulging with angry voter commentary and were looking down the barrel of electoral wipeout at the next election if they didn’t put a stake through the heart of PIP ‘reform’. So, Der Starmerpartei got the worst of both worlds – they forced through gutted reforms that saved no money (which was their main selling point), and trashed Labour’s reputation with millions of disabled and disabled-adjacent voters, and for what? So that Morgan McSweeney wouldn’t have to admit he’d fucked up? Again!

Now, before we go any further, let’s get one thing clear. Everybody and their maiden aunt knew going into the last election that fourteen years of Tory austerity and corruption had left the country face down and drowning in a financial riptide that would take some rough swimming to get out of. You couldn’t not know it, since “£22 billion blackhole in the public finances!!” was all you ever heard from Rachel Reeves, newnewlabourinc’s then Shadow-Chancellor (now Chancellor, in charge of The Treasury) whenever she was asked what, exactly, newnewlabourinc planned to do about it that was different from the Tories or, you know, maybe a bit better? And it’s true. Years of austerity and decaying infrastructure, added to the suicidal throat-cutting of Brexit, added to the bill for Covid, added to the industrial-scale one-way suction pumps successive Tory (and Tory-Lite) Governments have fitted to the public purse for the benefit of private corporations, the UK is a LOT poorer than it was a decade ago. Cuts will have to be made. But what cuts? Whose ox gets gored? That’s the question. Would it be the undertaxed millionaires and billionaires who have seen their wealth skyrocket since the Credit Crisis? Or would it be the little people? The ones with the least to give and the least chance of bending the right ear at the right meeting or backroom party at DAVOS? Mmmmmnnnn. Now let me think, what kind of person is Rachel Reeves?

A joyless energy-vampire and foot-shuffling fan of bands like The Market Is God and Silence In The Prole Pens, Reeves was selected by the donors and lobbyists ‘advising’ Starmer to spearhead newnewlabourinc’s fast-paced ideological redeployment away from the previous leadership’s centre-left, worker-centred, moderate progressivism and towards a more ‘grown-up’ embrace of budget-cutting, down-trickling, philo-corporatist orthodoxy not too dissimilar from that of pre-Brexit Tory Governments. And redeploy she did. Hard Labour would no longer be, in Reeves’ own words, ‘the party to represent those who are out of work’, but ‘the party of Growth and Opportunity’, because there’s nothing in the world the Labour Right loves more than offering zero-downside financial incentives to rooms full of nice-smelling Business Leaders with cold eyes and predatory smiles, and nothing it despises more than the smelly scroungers and lazy layabouts of the Urban Working Classes with their perpetual pleas for more and bigger handouts that they’d only spend on fripperies like food and rent and clothing for their granny-mugging spawn.

Still, say what you like about her ideological biases, no one could ever deny that Reeves had the gravitas and credibility to underpin her faith in the untapped potential of private finance, given that she was, according to her CV, a former Senior Economist at the Bank of England and Halifax Bank of Scotland with years of high-level experience guiding the flows and surges of financial…. (checks notes) oh, hang on a minute, no, sorry, there must have been some kind of perfectly understandable administrative error in the processing of Ms Reeves’ CV, because in reality, it turns out she was just a former graduate scheme entrant at the Bank of England and then a customer service manager at Halifax Bank of Scotland in the run up to 2008’s global banking crash. Still, who better to run herd on the rabid beasts of the City of London than someone whose job it had been to advise people on issues around their mortgages between 2006 and 2009, eh? Especially when that someone had lost their job (Ed – Ahem!) sorry, had taken voluntary redundancy from that job by mutual agreement in a decision that had nothing at all to do with her being one of three senior managers under investigation for taking the piss with expenses claims so extravagant that even HBOS thought they crossed the line.

In the banking world.

In 2009.

So, yeah, that’s who Rachel Reeves is.

Anyway, while Starmer himself has been moulded by McSweeney into the outlet for a lot of the terrible shit newnewlabourinc have flushed onto the country, Reeves has, if anything, outdone him in the lavatorial sourcing stakes. Her mantra from the start has been Growth = Future Recovery, based on the idea that the Tories had so thoroughly denuded the public finances that any long-term upturn in spending could only come after a period of belt-tightening and reorganisation to make the UK more attractive to private investment. In other words, if the UK wanted nice things in the future, it just needed to do what all the hot, young countries were doing these days; powder its cheeks, raise its hemlines and go shake its booty on the street corners where Mr Job Creator and friends go looking for short-term company. A very familiar line, sure. There are old cassette tapes of it being droned out in the same management-speak monotone at corporate funded business conferences from 50 years ago, but it’s how she’s gone about it that has left economists baffled and many figures in the wider Party shaking their heads. Austerity and performatively cruel cuts for the ones who have the least, tongue baths and the deepest respect for those who have the most. If the last forty years have taught us anything (other than you pretty much can lie to all the people all the time if you have enough money, and that fruit does not belong on pizza) it’s that that particular spreadsheet will never balance.

Reeves isn’t the only member of the Cabinet to give off distinct Peter Principal vibes. She may hold the purse strings, and her ‘iron-clad fiscal rules’ may be the tightening noose around the throat of public spending, but there are plenty of other Ministers all too eager to make their bones showing how ‘moderate’ they are by being as cruel and dismissive to non-VIPs as they can. Two in particular really get my billy goat very gruff indeed.

The PIP changes and other cuts to disability benefits are the life’s work of lizard-brained nightstalker Liz Kendall, a double-dipped acolyte of the Cult of St B’Liar the Toothsome whose 2015 campaign to be Labour Party leader was so cartoonishly right-wing that she only received a humiliating 4% of the vote. Her campaign manager in that debacle was the same Morgan McSweeney whose billionaire-funded Labour Together grouping would later become the binding-force and command centre of first the ‘Destroy Corbyn’ project, and then its ‘Choose Starmer, Choose Lies’ and ‘Ain’t No Party Like A Purged Party’ successors, before becoming Starmer’s Chief of Scat. Kendall’s 2015 campaign had proven her to be so out-of-step with Labour Party feeling and unappealing to actual Labour Party members that Starmer, when he was finally in a position to make good on his own leadership election promises to ‘unite the Party’, just had to stick finger number elebenty-billion in the eye of Those Dirty Lefties by appointing her Work and Pensions Minister. Getting someone as gleefully repugnant as Kendall to present the ‘moral case’ for denouncing the disabled as workshy frauds who just need to be tipped out of their wheelchairs and ‘incentivised’ through the workhouse gates with whips and tasers was always going to be vomit-worthy, but it takes a special kind of diamond-plated effrontery for the millionaire wife of a former Merrill-Lynch banker to stand outside Number 10 affirming the desperate need for benefit cuts while flashing a watch that, at its cheapest, retails for more than the average PIP claimant would lose in a year if her cuts took place. That’s newnewlabourinc in a nutshell, though. Arrogant. High-Handed. And as prickish as Fergus the Fifty Phallussed Penisaur in the final round of the Jurassic Jerk-Off Championships.

The high-profile Health Ministry, with its control over the NHS, went to Wes ‘Utter Twat’ Streeting, another testicle-headed graduate from the Peter Mandelson School of Griftcraft and Complicity who came to prominence acting as the squeaking front-arse of the anti-Corbyn media campaign, always just a phone-call away when Fleet Street needed a ‘moderate Labour MP’ to validate their latest antisemitism smear, and he traded that exposure, plus a tight relationship with the moneymen behind McSweeney’s Labour Together and the Trump-friendly ‘Blue Labour’ lobby group, into a secure Cabinet posting within knifing distance of Starmer’s back. Imagine a sly fart in a crowded lift being given a tailored suit and the face and voice of an 18^th century Earl’s overindulged bastard son, that’s Streeting, and he’s currently the blue-eyed boy of the faction that wants to replace the Tories as the de facto Party of the Centre Right. As Health Minister he’s brought with him a snot-trail of ties to Peter Thiel’s Palantir and a range of US Healthcare corporations, along with a ‘unique’ management style built on attacking the very concept of a taxpayer-funded health service, smearing its overworked staff for the failures of upper management, turning a blind eye to the huge profits being made by private companies chosen to fill gaps in the NHS’ crumbling infrastructure, accusing junior-doctors of holding the country to ransom for demanding the wage hikes he’d already agreed to, and dismissing the ongoing mental health crisis with an airy handwave about “an epidemic of over-diagnosis”. The only fly in Wes’ mercury-based skin ointment is the fact that he only barely held on to his Ilford constituency in the last election, coming within a few hundred votes of being unseated by a pro-Palestinian Independent candidate, and his popularity hasn’t exactly kept pace with his public visibility in the year since. Come the next election, whether he’s still at Health or has been installed as Starmer’s replacement, Wes will either have had to find another seat to squat in or take advantage of the Government’s brutal anti-protest laws to jail any potential opponents, because his shiny, round, dead-eyed face is on the target list of a whole range of groups who see him for the soulless bottom-feeder he truly is.

Yuck. I feel dirty just writing about those two. I swore only to use my typing finger for good and now look at me. What a fraud I turned out to be.

Anyway, it’s not just newnewlabourinc’s catalogue of nasty cuts or its Cabinet full of Monster of the Week cast-offs that have made re-election a toss-up. It’s their wider platter of right-lurching policy decisions, some revolving around money, some around principles, or their lack of them, but mostly revolving around the likes and dislikes of the very narrowly structured focus groups of ‘hero voters’ (three fat, white drunks from a Wetherspoons pub in Folkestone, by all appearances) that Labour Together relies on to keep the Party steering firmly rightward. Even when the policy itself is something popular enough to garner a lot of bi-partisan and pan-factional support, they either can’t resist the temptation to load it up with toxicity or they just plain want to make the rest of the world gobble down a shit-sandwich.

Take Ukraine, for example. Everyone but the Putin-fondlers over in Reform wants to see them lay the Russian Bear out flat and secure their freedom, and with President Putin-fondler over there in Washington squirting tantrum-juice into everyone’s eyes the urgency has ratcheted up a lot of notches. Taking on more responsibility for directly supporting Ukraine? Check. Reaching out to European allies to establish a solid pro-Ukrainian coalition? Check. Wrapping the whole shebang up in nauseating flag-waving militarism, using it as an excuse to pay tribute spend billions on buying tactical nuclear weapon platforms from Trump’s America, and funding it all with brutal cuts to the foreign aid budget? That’s the kind of Ra-Ra, let’s make the foreigns cry ugliness that went out of fashion with Flobalob, but that’s newnewlabourinc, always refighting the last war with their weapons cocked and pointed down the front of their own pants.

Trans-rights? Same tack taken. After that steeply fallen icon (whose full name is, serendipitously, an anagram of ‘A Long Wanker Line, Then Jo’) and her fellow X-chromosome goons in the Sorority of Intolerant Scolds for Trans Exclusion and Removal from Society lost a couple of legal cases where they claimed that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act referred only to Women just like them, the Dark Lady’s expensive lawyers took it all the way to the UK Supreme Court, which gave them the win they wanted. The Court’s judgement was that when the Act was passed in 2010 no one was in any doubt about what was meant by ‘woman’, which I’m sure came as a surprise to the many, many trans people who were alive and living as their proper gender in that far-off Antediluvian epoch, and definitely came as a surprise to the people who actually advised on the drafting of the Act. We know that because they said so, pity the Court never thought to ask them. Eh?

Nevertheless, that was the judgement. Combine it with the ‘greased pig out of a water-slide’ rapidity with which Baroness Kishwer Falkner, noted transphobe and the Flobalob-appointed head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission moved to demand that every single public and private body in the country immediately start interpreting the judgement to mean that Women’s toilets were now high-security zones from which anyone who failed to pass a biological spot-check had to be excluded on threat of future legal action, it was enough to give Der Starmerpartei licence to drop the act and sidle gracelessly towards the retrograde side of yet another Kulturwar issue. Starmer was straight out of the gate thanking the Court for bringing ‘much needed clarity’ to the issue and doing a textbook 180 on his previous ‘deeply held beliefs’ by insisting that he’d always believed that only biological women were women.

‘Clarity’ was the buzzword all of His Ministers were ordered to use when talking to the Media, which, of course, got them into all kinds of trouble when they were asked some of the obvious questions, like, could you explain what was supposed to happen to trans men now? Were they supposed to use women’s toilets? How did this square with the claim that women needed to be protected from ‘men’ invading their toilets? Would they have to ‘prove’ themselves to be a biological sex they didn’t belong to? What was to stop a predatory Cis male from going into a women’s toilet and claiming to have been born a woman? Where, exactly, was this ‘Clarity’, and did the Government, which claimed to be supportive of Trans rights, plan to amend the Equality Act to add language specifically acknowledging Trans women as women so they wouldn’t be put in the horrible position of using Male toilets or pissing themselves in public?

Cue the inevitable bulging eyes and panicked gobbling as Minister after Minister ran smack bang into the hard contradiction at the black heart of the newnewlabourinc project. You can pander to the biases of the revanchist Right in a fruitless quest for a new voter base or you can promote the policies of the progressive Left voters your Party is supposed to represent, you can’t do both, not without looking like a hypocritical moron. Every time a stiffly uncomfortable Starmerpartei mouthpiece tried to push the scripted line that everything was just fine and there was no gulf between what the Government was saying and observable reality, it just made the people living in that reality frustrated and angrier. The Right didn’t really want women ‘protected’ from mythical pre-op rapists, they wanted the Trans community tagged, targeted and turned into an Other they could eternally save the country’s easily corrupted children from. While the side demanding inclusion, equality and all those other things that are part and parcel of building a better society, were under no obligation to pretend that Hard Labour were being anything other than mealy-mouthed cowards who should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for leaving the Trans community out to dry.

It was the uproar on the progressive side, and not any action by Starmer’s Government, that led to the EHRC backing off from its initial slavering haste to ostracise Trans people and belatedly agree that a period of consultation – in which Trans voices would actually be included this time – was a necessary prerequisite before any legal guidance was actually issued. Yet again, the cunning überbrains over at newnewlabourinc central had stuck the Party’s head into a beehive looking for the sweet, sweet honey of Reform-curious votes and came out with nothing to show for it but a faceful of stings and a near-fatal case of anaphylactic shock.

On Immigration? Same depressing story, familiar to anyone who’s been paying a modicum of attention to the how and the why and the who of the world’s current ‘glass half-full of Santorum’ condition. Far-Right billionaire-fuelled troll-farms have been helping Farage’s Reform Party with its 5 MPs (oops, no, now it’s only 4, turns out they’re not so hot at the whole ‘don’t recruit barely civilised slugs with fascist-tourettes’ thing) by flooding social media with cut-and-paste horror stories of strapping young bucks of military age coming over here on ‘The Boats’, being handed the keys to luxury penthouse suites in 4-star hotels, monopolising all of our goods and services to leave nothing but scraps for ‘traditional’ British people to fight over, imposing Sharia Law on whole cities and forming predatory rape-gangs that roam around the unpoliced no-go areas targeting innocent British virgins to the alien sounds of the muezzin’s plaintive call.

You’d think that a confident, centre-left Government with a huge majority and an official Opposition as astonishingly badly led as Kemi Badenoch’s Tory Party (don’t get me started, that’s a 20,000 word extended gulp of disbelief all on its own) would hop, skip and jump at the opportunity to tell the Public that they’ve been lied to about all of this since Brexit, wouldn’t you? That criminal gangs are only able to exploit the people who risk their lives to come over here on small boats because of the Brexit Farage campaigned for. Or that none of these people are ‘illegal migrants’, but rather asylum seekers who have had all of their legal routes to entry – and the concomitant facilities for processing their claims handled quickly – slammed shut by the Tories. Or that without immigration the goods and services the British people rely on to eke out their existences in Austerityland would crumble overnight. Or that the Right’s recent obsession with ‘Asian paedo grooming gangs’ is just dog-whistling racism and frantic squirrel-waving to draw attention away from the fact that the vast majority of child sexual abuse in this country is carried out by white family members or white, wealthy pillars of the Establishment. Or that the UK would be immeasurably better off if we just acknowledged what a disaster Brexit has been and started the process of reconnecting our economy with this massive captive market on our doorstep.

You’d expect that. But since this is only a proper, centre-left Government in the same way that Dean Cain is a paragon of Truth, Justice and The American Way (fictionally), you’d be advised not to hold your breath too long waiting for it. Instead, what we’ve had is everyone from Sir Starmer the Concerned Llama on down the pecking order validating Reform’s obsession with The Immigration Crisis by bleating on and on about how very tough Hard Labour are being on ‘illegals’ and how much tougher they can be if that’s what their focus-groups want. Rather than defend human decency, they’ve capitulated to Reform’s demands for pointless inquiries into how rapey the browns are that, let’s face it, Farage will just dismiss as a fake-news cover-up anyway when the conclusions don’t suit his need for outrage, and they simply won’t talk about Brexit other than as something that they’ve got to ‘respect’ and ‘make work’. Instead of pulling MI5 off their ‘infiltrate dangerous Lefty pacifist groups’ missions and unleashing them against the well-funded bastards busy poisoning the minds of hundreds of thousands with straight-up Race War porn, Hard Labour prefer to see the ‘totally valid concerns’ of brainwashed white rioters who want to murder asylum seekers as a political opportunity for them to open up murky blue water between themselves and the Party’s hippy-dippy past.

Starmer himself, always on the lookout for a rake to step on, stunned a lot of his most obdurately loyal defenders in the Church of the Ever Moving Centre with a frankly disastrous speech on the topic in May, when he channelled the corrosive poison of Enoch Powell’s ‘River of Blood’ rhetoric from the 1960s into a Party Political Broadcast for the Reform Party. Jaws dropped when he warned that mass immigration risked us becoming an ‘Island of Strangers’, attacked immigrants for not integrating into British culture, spoke of recent immigration as ‘a squalid chapter for our nation’ that had done ‘incalculable damage’, and promised to ‘take back control’ of our ‘open borders’.

If you’re unfamiliar with Powell and his shameful place in British history, imagine if a Democratic President gave a speech on ‘The Border’ that contained language directly echoing Governor Wallace’s ‘Segregation Now. Segregation Tomorrow. Segregation Forever’ speech. That’s the kind of timeless original Starmer was riffing off. Being as obdurately incompetent as they are, Hard Labour’s comms team responded to the outrage by sending Sir Pirouette d’Flipflop back out there to defend his choice of language and tut-tut at anyone claiming he could possibly have been echoing one of Britain’s most famously divisive racists. Then, when that didn’t win the news cycle, they tried throwing the speechwriters under the bus, because it’s quite believable that anyone with a political bone in their body could have written, edited or delivered a speech on Immigration using that language without one of them thinking, “Hang on, are we sounding a bit like the Baddies here?”. Eventually, as has so often been the case since Hard Labour took power, Starmer had to change tack and sort of half acknowledge he’d fucked up by saying how much he regretted giving nasty people an opportunity to misinterpret his totally non-divisive words, but as has so often been the case since they took power, the damage to their credibility was already well and truly done.

Now, I get it, sort of. The McSweeney/Blue Labour roadmap for the transformation of Labour into a centre-right Party requires a seismic shift in its traditional positioning on issues like this. They calculate they can take Immigration away from the Right as a vote-winning issue by re-making Hard Labour into the Party of closed borders and hostility to Illegals, and if this offends and drives away Labour’s minority support – well, great, they’re all smelly Lefties whose aggressive swarthiness puts off ‘traditional working-class voters’ (wink wink) anyway. They think they can step right over the broken mess of Badenoch’s Tory Party and park their tanks directly on Reform’s lawn, promoting Farage’s openly fascist Volkspartei as Hard Labour’s main opposition in order to consolidate the split on the Right, while earning enough anti-immigrant credibility of their own to force Farage and his supporters into increasingly nutty xenophobic claims that might appeal to some uneducated white communities and the Yaxley-Lennon fringe, but will turn off millions of former Tories who are ‘concerned’ about immigration, but don’t currently feel all that comfortable with the idea of concentration camps and lynchings, leaving Der Starmerpartei the default option in enough marginal seats for them to scrape back in at the next Election. The doubters remaining in Hard Labour’s mushy middle will either jump ship or will see that newnewlabourinc really doesn’t need the Left to stay in office, and most importantly, the UK stays on the right side of the people who have all the money and power.

Purely as an exercise in political theory, I can see where they’re coming from, but in the real world I think they’re wrong on a level alongside whoever is advising Sydney Sweeney. They might not think that Farage has the special sauce to maintain his Party’s current polling lead for the next four years (yes, that’s right, a year into their glorious reign Hard Labour are polling well behind the UK version of MAGA) and they might not think that the rump Tories have it within themselves to recover while nutters like Badenoch are the best they can offer, and they might even be right about that right about now, but let’s not forget, THIS. IS. ENGLAND! Only five short years ago Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson was King of all he surveyed and the apple of the Media’s eye, firmly in place for a decade of jolly fun and frivolity. The fluid cultural shifts now underlying British politics can change the rules really bloody quickly, and once a Government’s popularity goes down the pan, the Opposition doesn’t need to be Pedro Pascal in a powder blue suit sitting across from you on a moonlit balcony to seem a more attractive option, they just need to have a pulse and to not be the sitting Government. One thing that is certain is that we’ll definitely find out who’s right at the next Election, but by then it’ll be too late. In the meantime, the whole debate about Immigration is being carried out on Reform’s terms and using Reform’s divisive versions of ‘facts and figures’, which only gives Reform, already well on its way to being anointed 2029 Election Champions by the BBC and the wingnut media, a ton of unearned credibility with a nervous electorate.

And then, of course, there’s Gaza. The whole issue of Israel/Palestine generally, but specifically how Hard Labour have responded to the Israeli Government’s cynical decision to exploit Hamas’ Oct 7 atrocity as cover for Netanyahu’s long-stated desire to stay out of prison and the wider Israeli Far-Right’s even longer stated desire to permanently solve their ‘Palestinian Problem’.

Where do I even start with this comprehensive disaster? To say that Der Starmerpertei have shit the bed here is like saying that the NYT made a small journalistic boo-boo in hounding Joe Biden for non-existent dementia when Donald Trump was drooling fetid arse-gravy out of his facial orifice every time he got in front of a camera. The bed in question very much did not shit itself. It was shit upon. From a very great height. Repeatedly. With gaps between each shitting for three course meals consisting of room-temperature oysters, suspiciously sourced ‘meat-based products’ and coffee laced with cod liver oil. And the people doing the shitting came to the bed on pre-booked buses with their schedules cleared and no pants on. This was very much not a case of anyone being caught short, defecation was always the plan.

It’s not even that surprising that Hard Labour have taken the line they have on Gaza, how could they not? For a start they are terrible, terrible people, but they’re also in an even worse bind than the UK Media Establishment, the slightly less toxic organs of which have spent the period 2023 – 2025 trying to quietly decouple themselves from their 2015-2020 editorial stance of mainstreaming some of the most extreme pro-Israel lobby groups in the UK and backing the formerly fringe campaign to force every institution in the UK (starting with the Labour Party) to adopt the Israeli Right’s maximalist take on what constitutes antisemitism. The FTF Guardian, for example, has quietly tippy-toed back to something like its pre-2015 take on the Israeli Right and their reflexive accusations of antisemitism, ending its cozy relationship with propaganda rags like the Jewish Chronicle now that Corbyn’s threat to the political system is safely disposed of, and is trying its best to pretend that it didn’t spend years treating the Chronicle’s stable of bankrupt liars as The Guardian’s story editors.

Der Starmerpartei can’t do that. They don’t have the same ability to simply wipe the board clean of incriminating evidence. There are already books out there where journalists who knew what was happening at the time are revealing (in non-judgemental, passive-voice mode) how the Labour Together bastards decided just after they lost their 2016 leadership challenge to Corbyn to make fake antisemitism accusations the bedrock of their new scorched-earth offensive. Were they to piss off the wrong people there are no doubt recordings of meetings and WhatsApp conversations from the period that could be leaked, with disastrous effects on certain very important careers. When they allied with the Israeli lobby to destroy the Labour Left, they also gave extremist groups like the Jewish Labour Movement official authority to decide what did and did not constitute antisemitism within the Party, leaving themselves no legitimate avenue through which to dispute their assessments. As events during the Election proved, that was an elementary mistake. Like when Starmer loyalists had to be thrown under the bus after secret recordings were leaked of them having ‘clear the air’ meetings with furious Muslim Party members and referring to the widely held and pretty well-established belief that Netanyahu deliberately ignored warnings that the Oct 7 attacks were about to happen. When you declare ‘Your Party is closed to ‘antisemites’ as code for ‘purge the Left’, but you appoint watchmen who see any questioning of Israel or concern for Palestinians as ‘antisemitism’, you kind of put your nick-nacks in a vice that will be snapped tight on their schedule, not yours.

My heart bleeds. Obviously.

Starmer himself irredeemably stained his own reputation back in ’23 when he said in an interview (yes, he is a former human-rights lawyer, why do you ask?) that of course Israel had the right to violate international law by cutting off food and electricity to the Gaza strip. After that shocker it was clear that newnewlabourinc’s stance on this issue was going to stink like Russell Brand’s bed after a three week pity-party. Against the backdrop of rising public horror and with the example of Russia’s daily slaughter of Ukranians to act as a counterpoint, Der Starmerpartei stubbornly ignored legal and national opinion in order to press on with its policy of sticking like a limpet to whatever line Washington DC was taking. So, they’ve continued selling arms to Israel, providing the IDF with intel and data from RAF surveillance flights and even used its bases to train IDF forces, all despite clear and indisputable evidence that Israel has been openly committing war crimes from the start of the conflict. You don’t have to be a dirty Lefty to recognise that the extreme bias shown by Sir Keir ‘unapologetic Zionist’ Starmer towards Netanyahu’s vile Likud/Lunatic regime has been shameful and disastrous for the Party’s standing, you just have to be an honest observer.

How bad has it got? There have been pro-Palestine marches here for years, cranking up in numbers and frequency once the obliteration of the Gaza ghetto started in earnest and the UK Government donned its thickest Whatabout blinkers in order to pretend that Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ trumped everything. Public opinion polls have only got worse for Israel and her backers with every upward crank in the obscenity level. Blowing up ambulances. Murdering journalists. Bombing schools. Targeting medics. Levelling hospitals. Hijacking aid ships. Deliberately causing famine. Herding starving people into free-fire zones and sniping at different body parts to turn executions into a ‘game’. It would take a soul as black as George Hamilton’s hair dye to turn a blind eye to all that, but Der Starmerpartei have proven themselves up to the task. Always available for displays of crocodile tears and mealy-mouthed condemnations of some specific acts when the occasion demands it, but they’re never backed up by anything concrete until all other options have been exhausted.

But when it comes to domestic opposition to all this, in whatever form, they suddenly veer into “Hulk Smash!” mode. Palestine Action, a direct-action group opposed to Britain’s pro-Israel policy, recently broke into an RAF base and threw red paint into the engines of two airplanes they claimed were off to aid the Israeli war crime effort. Back during the Iraq War a certain Keir Starmer was the lawyer who defended a member of the Fairford Five, another direct-action group who broke into an RAF base to try and stop US bombers heading to Iraq. His argument back then was that criminal action (like breaking and entering, trespass, and property damage) was justified in prevention of war crimes. He must have argued it well, because the accused were acquitted of the charges. As Prime Minister, his thinking on the issue has clearly ‘evolved’. Rather than let the Police and the Courts deal with Palestine Action, he and his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper chose to dump all over the very concept of proportionality by shoehorning PA onto a list of banned terrorist organisations, sandwiched between the homicidal Maniacs Murder Cult and the neo-Nazi Russian Imperial Movement.

This, to be undeservedly kind, is fucking obscene. It’s exactly the kind of politically influenced abuse of the Terror Laws opponents said would happen back when they were passed. Palestine Action isn’t in any sense of the word a terrorist group. But now that it’s been labelled one, this Government has effectively labelled all pro-Palestinian advocacy as potential terrorism. Not hyperbole. Seriously. Just writing those words here is probably a criminal offence in the UK. People have actually been arrested for having the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Action’ near each other on placards or for holding copies of a page from the satirical magazine Private Eye mocking the Government’s authoritarian overreach. People have been arrested for waving Palestinian flags. People have been arrested for saying Israel is committing genocide. And not just arrested, but held in cells overnight, interrogated about their ‘terrorist activities’ while their homes are being raided, and then being put on curfews and watch-lists for their ‘crimes’.

I suppose all this police-state bollocks makes perfect sense to the inhabitants of Fuckhead Fascistville, the suburb of Know Your Place City where most of our baton-swinging brethren sleep at night like steroided-up babies in their Judge DreddPJs. Palestine Action wave Palestinian flags, don’t they? Palestine Action say Israel is committing genocide, don’t they? Now that it’s illegal to ‘display support’ for that one group, the Police have all the ‘reasonable suspicion’ they need to infer that anyone supporting Palestine or opposing genocide is a supporter of a banned organisation, don’t they? Yeah, it might look like straight up security-state madness out of the Putin handbook, but it’s just common sense, innit? Have Hard Labour’s leadership raised so much as a quizzical eyebrow at these baseless arrests? Of course not, because this has nothing to do with ‘fighting terrorism’ and everything to do with criminalising opposition to their support for Netanyahu’s regime in the most cynical and cowardly way possible.

It’s all of a dreadful piece with the shameful way Der Starmerpartei’s leadership have decided to address the widespread and growing disgust with their policy of appeasement. And it’s not even going to work. The stupid fucks have just had the London Met drag in extra police from all over the country to mass-arrest over 500 peaceful protestors for daring to oppose this stupidity, and are doubling down by stamping their feet and insisting that Palestine Action are too a “very violent” organisation (they just can’t tell us why because of ‘national security’, which I’m going to go out on a limb and conclude translates to “Israel say they are, but haven’t given us any actual evidence”) and that those they’ve had arrested are going to ‘feel the full weight of the law’ crashing down upon them. Images of 80 year old civil-rights activists being manhandled, handcuffed and dragged into Police vans for opposing the slaughter of children isn’t a good look, any more than harassing punk bands from Ireland for daring to equate the Palestinian struggle with that of their home country, or demanding that rappers at Glastonbury calling out ‘Death to the IDF’ be banned from public view, or even threatening the BBC (the fucking Tory-run, pro-Farage, desperately in need of a wholesale management clear-out BBC!) with cuts in funds for not sacking the staff who didn’t immediately censor footage of the above. It’s ham-fisted at best and long-term it’s electoral poison.

Breathe. Breathe. Think of them naked, oh, ye gods no!

If it was just Gaza, the wankers at Hard Labour could do what they always do and sneeringly dismiss all this anti-genocide protest as irrelevant, but added to horror at their hard-line on Immigration, disgust with their nastiness to the Trans community, anger at their policy of ‘Cuts to Welfare, Billions for Warfare’, fury at their attacks on pensioners, the disabled, and ridicule over their kowtowing to Trump, it all adds up to a majority of the public coming to view newnewlabourinc as just another untrustworthy mob of Tories in red ties who, IMHO, seem to think that, if they just pick the wrong side of every argument, they can somehow lay claim to the equivalent of the 17.5 million moron votes that ‘won’ Brexit and stay in power interminably.

Sigh. It’s fucking idiots all the way down. Idiots standing on the backs of knobheads standing on the eyeballs of lunatics.

So, what’s the future? Are newnewlabourinc going to continue on this death march towards rule or ruin? Are the voters of the UK really going to close their eyes and push the button for the frog-faced fascist just to ‘try something different’? Are the Tories going to wise up to the opportunities they’re missing and tack back towards the centre-right? Are the owners of the UK Media going to allow whatever the new ‘Leftwing’ Party turns into to put its case without a barrage of concocted smears (okay, now I’m just being silly)?

We don’t know. But we can guess. As long as the McSweeney faction remains in control of Starmer and the wider Labour bureaucracy, there will be no diversion from the roadmap set out by Blue Labour. MAGA in the bedroom, Tory in the boardroom, and no room at all for the wider centre-left. The Tories simply have to get rid of the almost mesmerically terrible Kemi Badenoch (she’s out there today beating the drum for common-sense concentration camps, FFS), but she’s just a symptom of their malaise, not the root cause. As with the period when Blair was in power, they’re stuck defending the sins of their past and the electorate don’t take them seriously, but unlike the period Blair was in power, the UK is in a seriously depressed state, economically and culturally, and the Tories have a rival Party to their (far) Right that is occupying the space their most influential MPs and a dangerously large chunk of their actual Party membership want to move into. They – could – make an alliance with Reform, though that mob are so closely associated with Farage himself that it’s hard to see him playing second fiddle to whatever Tory leader gets coughed up after Badenoch gets moved on. They could also take the radical road pioneered by Cameron and Osborne in the early 2000s, pretend to move back towards some kind of mythical centre ground and suggest that they’ve learned from their mistakes. The mainstream media would love that, probably, and this would give them space to shed the hard-right to Reform and work hard to recruit non-lunatics as candidates. Chances are, though, they’ll try to fudge it and wait to see if Reform burns out over the next year or so before making any moves. Badenoch is awful, but who else have they got right now?

The Lib-Dems under Davey seem to have peaked. He’s just not charismatic enough to cut through, has the weight of his past service in the Lib Dem/Tory coalition dragging on his nice-guy image, and despite having something like nineteen times the number of MPs that Reform can muster gets something like 0000.1% of the coverage, because the News Media are all-in on the drama of breathlessly reporting on everything the itinerant MP for Clacton-on-Sea vomits up, but haven’t been interested in anything the Lib Dems say or do since they were ‘Jo Swinson’s Lib-Dems’ back in 2019 and it was tactically useful to promote that nutter’s anti-Corbyn diatribes. The Greens have done well out of newnewlabourinc’s lurch to the right, picking up a lot of protest votes, but if this new Party of the Left emerges out of what Corbyn and Zara Sultana are doing a lot of those votes will probably dry up and they’ll return to being a very small-scale threat to the status quo. A semi-official alliance and some kind of tactical voting agreement between all of these smaller parties might be a way forward, but our electoral system renders that incredibly complicated, and none of them will want to open the way for a minority Reform or Reform/Tory Government.

Whatever happens, it can’t go on this way. 2029 might be a long way off, but when you’re tumbling downhill like a mint-condition Tesla, velocity gobbles up distance faster than you’d think. And thanks to last November, it’s all taking place in a world that has also to deal with the very unnatural disaster polluting your White House.

You know, sometimes, I even depress myself.