…Roundabout?
A campaign flyer has been catching the eye around Holland Park and Shepherds Bush in recent days. Invoking the Palestinian flag, symbol of resistance and unity in the face of colonialism and ethnic cleansing, at first glance you’d presume it relates to Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip. On closer inspection, it’s more parochial – encouraging people to oppose Transport for London’s proposed cycle lane on Holland Park Roundabout. Continue reading
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the political-media establishment went wild with its virtue signalling; opposing Vladimir Putin’s government as a pariah and offering unrestrained moral support to the plucky underdog Ukrainians. When Israel accelerated its genocide of Palestinians in October, the same establishment did a 180. Instead of calling for international law to be upheld, or offering moral and military support to the victims of a decades-long occupation and siege, establishment figures went from virtue signalling to sin signalling. For Ukraine, there was one audience, for Palestine, another. One audience required virtue, the other something very different.
Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine triggered a full-spectrum psychological operation against the minds of the British population. A clean sweep of politicians, commentators and public figures demanded that we uphold human rights and support the Ukrainians at any cost short of direct British military confrontation with Russia. Continue reading
In the parliamentary constituencies of West London, politicians have responded to the renewed war in the Middle East. Most have failed to oppose Israel’s genocide; some have encouraged the killing, and others have tried to position themselves on the side of peace: a mix of cowardice, complicity and clarity.
Israel & Free Speech
Speaking truth about Israel-Palestine is now almost forbidden, such is the level of hysteria it triggers. The hysteria deters free-thinking, deters open recognition of Palestinian rights under international law and the impact on Western political discourse is chilling. The reasons for the chronic pro-Israel bias include:
Palestinians have sacrificed so much since Britain gifted their land to the Zionist movement. Palestinian steadfastness has remained constant while the essence of the conflict has not changed in 75 years: a colonial regime that seeks to remove the indigenous people from the land and replace them with an exclusively Jewish population. The occupation and its violence are illegal under international law. The right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return home is also uncontroversial under international law. The same goes for their right to resist oppression. Seven decades have added much detail to the story but it remains a case of illegitimate occupier versus legitimate resistance. Are our local politicians acting on this truth?
Westminster North
Labour MP Karen Buck, who is a veteran of the Palestine solidarity movement and visited Gaza in the aftermath of Israel’s 2008-9 massacre, has shown little appetite for fighting for the people she knows to be the victims of a brutal siege. Buck toes the party line, focusing on humanitarian assistance rather than addressing the cause of the humanitarian crisis.
The Conservative party have not yet named their candidate to challenge Buck.
Hampstead and Kilburn
Tulip Siddiq is Labour’s Shadow City Minister and has issued boilerplate statements on the war that serve to support Israel’s ongoing genocide. Siddiq claims she “can’t bear watching it” and says Israel must act in line with international law but does not condemn Netanyahu’s government as it breaches international law daily.
In an email to constituents, the MP’s focus, like most Labour politicians, was humanitarian aid. Like almost every British politician, Siddiq ignores the Palestinians’ right to resist and blames the resistance movements in Gaza, rather than Israel, for the situation.
The Tories and Liberal Democrats are yet to announce candidates in Hampstead and Kilburn.
Hammersmith
Andy Slaughter is Labour’s Shadow Solicitor General and a long-time supporter of the Palestinians who visited Gaza with Buck in 2009. To maintain a just-about-plausible pro-Palestine stance, Slaughter has broken ranks somewhat from the zealous pro-Israel line of Keir Starmer and Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, retweeting Palestine’s Ambassador to the UK and Sadiq Khan’s call for a ceasefire.
Unfortunately, Slaughter also retweeted a very telling post by Labour Campaign for Human Rights: “We are horrified by recent atrocities in Israel and subsequent developments in Gaza” – note the profound racism of the language: Young Palestinians breaking out of their concentration camp for the first time and killing Israelis qualifies as “atrocities” while Israel’s systematic destruction of a whole people in the name of religious and ethnic supremacy is regarded as “developments”.
Slaughter also foolishly retweeted false claims about Hamas killing babies.
Once a marginal, but now a Labour stronghold, Hammersmith will be contested by Conservative Andrew Dinsmore in 2024. He does not seem to have commented on the war yet.
Chelsea and Fulham
Greg Hands MP is Conservative Party Chairman and Minister Without Portfolio in the Sunak government. Hands is prolific on social media and since the Palestinian resistance’s attack on October 7th, he has offered relentless support for Israel and no acknowledgement of the rights of Palestinians.
Hands’ month-long stream of propaganda has included smearing Labour MP Apsana Begum for her solidarity with the Palestinians; claiming without evidence that Israel is not an apartheid state; conflating resistance with antisemitism; celebrating the government’s awarding of £3 million to the fear-mongering Community Security Trust, and retweeting the false claim that the Palestinians bombed their own hospital. Hands supports genocide with total impunity and has shown no interest in calling for a ceasefire, let alone addressing the causes of the war.
Hands will face Labour’s Ben Coleman at the next election. Another prolific tweeter, Coleman appears to be an unthinking supporter of Israel and has retweeted a large number of pro-Israel statements from Starmer and Lammy as well as a photo of the Israel flag on 10th October when the genocide was well underway.
Brent Central
Labour MP and veteran of the Corbyn era, Dawn Butler has called for a ceasefire. She is supportive of peace, but like Andy Slaughter speaks only within the limits of debate set by the media and party leaders. Butler enjoys a huge majority with almost 75% of the vote last time out and is uncharacteristically quiet over Israel’s genocide. There has been no announcement of who her Tory opponent will be.
Kensington
Felicity Buchan, Tory MP in the marginal seat of Kensington, was an enthusiastic supporter of the “western values” of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion but takes the opposite approach when it comes to Palestine. The Under Secretary of State for Housing and Homelessness in the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is fully supportive of Israel’s destruction of Palestinian housing, their creation of millions of homeless people, and their levelling of the Gaza Strip.
Like her colleagues, Buchan’s focus is Israel. Palestinian suffering receives barely a mention from Kensington’s MP despite her large Muslim constituency, aside from a reference to “the tragic loss of civilian lives” as if an earthquake has struck Gaza, rather than a campaign of ethnic cleansing by a military regime that has illegally occupied the territory since 1967, maintaining it as the world’s largest ever concentration camp. Buchan dismisses acts of resistance by inhabitants of the camp simply as “terrorism”.
To compound her anti-Palestinian approach, Buchan has shown more concern about the conduct of peaceful anti-war protests than she has for the genocide of mainly children and women, reassuring her Twitter following that there will be “a robust approach to policing these demonstrations”.
Complicity Felicity’s main challenger at the election will be Labour’s Joe Powell who has limited his response to retweeting and liking pro-war, pro-Israel voices like Barack Obama (“we stand squarely alongside our ally, Israel”) and David Lammy, who claimed during a pro-Israel rant on Sky News that Hamas has “raped babies” and who’s diplomacy has extended only as far as supporting “humanitarian pauses” in the genocide.
The phrase “humanitarian pauses” has been created to enable liberal politicians to imply that it is fine to commit genocide while still pretending to care. This focus on humanitarian aid is lipstick on the pig of Labour’s full commitment to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The party’s vision for the Middle East is a region dominated by a militarised apartheid state; a colonial anachronism in the 21st century, with any challengers to that power imbalance brutalised and denigrated in an attempt to kill off any hopes they have for justice.
The other challenger to Buchan is independent candidate Emma Dent Coad, who resigned from the Labour Party earlier this year. Dent Coad has been far more outspoken than any other West London politician, without reticence about her affiliations to Stop the War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and her support for Palestine solidarity. Dent Coad has retweeted fiercely independent anti-war journalists like Matt Kennard, helping the spread of important information about the war, its origins and its true intention: the destruction of the Palestinian people.
by Tom Charles @tomhcharles
The liberal freak out following two acts of democracy in 2016 (Brexit and Trump) trapped our culture in binary (liberal and conservative) thought patterns. The lies that Russia influenced the EU vote and hacked the US election were eagerly lapped up by liberals, helping consolidate an anti-democracy pro-war consensus that currently dominates power (posing as two parties) and laid the foundations for a Psychological Operation that has force-fed us non-stop since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Psy-Op has been stunningly effective, leading us to the brink of nuclear catastrophe while shutting down free speech, diplomacy and our prospects for survival.
Propaganda
The Psy-Op pushes unrelenting propaganda across the most trusted mainstream media outlets. From the start of the war, these outlets presented highly dubious claims about the most serious crimes as true.
Some of their reporting has been entirely false, including the Snake Island ‘heroics’ that you probably forgot a couple of weeks later.
It’s all additive, so even if it’s a lie, it still works because it builds the one-sided narrative and they don’t have to admit or report that they misled us. No other media will call them out because they are at it too.
The Psy-Op has censored alternative (including fact-based) perspectives. No dissenting opinions (including those advocating diplomacy) have been allowed; in the age of mobile phones very little footage of the war is broadcast; Ukraine’s defeats are ignored or downplayed; President Biden’s historic role in the most corrupt country in Europe is under-reported; the inconvenient Ukrainian death toll is generally ignored as if it’s a minor detail, while the dead soldiers are lauded as “heroic” – part of an emotional, irrational justification for British arms manufacturers to export more weapons. The pro-war legacy media refers to these weapons shipments as an “extraordinary level of support” without which the war could not continue.
Imagine if half of the UK’s current population was sacrificed to save Europe from Nazis. That’s what happened to the Soviet Union in World War Two. This historical perspective is omitted from the coverage, yet it is pertinent, as Ukraine’s army contains Nazi battalions. The Psy-Op has even tried to rehabilitate the image of Ukraine’s Nazi Azov Battalion. Nazis – the people we were raised to hate and fear, who blitzed our cities and sought to enslave us. The Holocaust.
To the Psy-Op, Nazis are not a moral problem, only a public relations challenge.
The Psy-Op immediately proscribed the Russian perspective. No more Russia Today on your telly. The war (2014-ongoing) on the Donbas in east Ukraine, covered by all news outlets until 2022, is now omitted from reporting. Why?
As millions of refugees left Ukraine, with millions more internally displaced, the Psy-Op focused on President Zelenskyy as the embodiment of virtue and bravery. He dressed in military colours but is an actor, not a soldier.
Green?
In October, the Psy-Op told us that Russia blew up its own pipeline, Nord Stream 2. It didn’t make any sense, not from any perspective, but you could accept it or suppress your doubts because no other view (such as the truth) was given air time. Severing the economic partnership between our two most powerful neighbours (Germany and Russia), the pipeline sabotage is a climate catastrophe but the perpetrators will go on to decide sustainability goals for the world.
The Psy Op plays a game of Them & Us. Russia is them, Ukraine is us. Ukrainians are dying fighting for our values, politicians tell you. The name Ukraine quickly became synonymous with liberal Western values. Despite being located in the east, and despite its intricate ethnic, religious, historical, cultural, and familial ties with Russia, we were suddenly informed that Ukraine is European like us, while Russia is talked about as if it is non-European. Did it help that on day one of the invasion, every single news reporter simultaneously started pronouncing Ukraine’s capital city as Keev? Was that all it took? No doubt the yellow and blue flags everywhere helped too. For those in a torpid state of binary identity politics, joining in with the hysteria was seamless.
An American, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, was recently appointed as a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The transgender journalist with her outlandish propaganda is not the only American mercenary in Ukraine and Biden has authorised combat pay for them, despite them not officially fighting for the US.
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
Suspicious? You surely are by now. We have consented to a merger with other NATO states and Ukraine’s autocratic government in an extreme provocation of a nuclear power and nobody is talking about diplomacy. Why not?
In 1947, the United States, at the pinnacle of its unassailable global power, passed its National Security Act. That same year, President Truman warned of the “Red Menace” and the American population got used to the permanent state of fear that justifies military spending. In 1950, a top-secret National Security Council policy paper called NSC-68 committed the US to never negotiating with Russia, the bad faith approach that encompassed the creation of NATO, its aggressive eastward expansion, and American/British interference in Ukraine’s democratic processes.
Politicians, unconcerned by the environmental destruction of the Nord Stream sabotage, and undeterred by the Ukrainian death toll, have played their part to perfection. Any parliamentarians who resist, even slightly, are easily brought into line.
There’s a non-existent dividing line between the media and the state. The media, politicians, and some citizens too, love to demonise President Putin, diplomacy, and peace, but I am yet to meet a British person (aside from British-Ukrainians) whose daily life has ever been negatively impacted by Putin (or diplomacy, or peace).
The Russian government was duped into playing along with the Minsk Accords, hoping to bring peace to eastern Ukraine where Nazis and other Ukrainian units were targeting ethnic Russians. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted the Accords were just a ruse to buy time to prime Ukraine for war. She framed this as a clever move, which it is if you’re a psychopath who doesn’t care about human life.
Projection: “the attribution of one’s ideas, feelings, or attitudes to other people or to objects.”
The Psy Op’s functionaries project their own characteristics and psychology onto Russia. What are the traits? A salivating desire for violent domination of others. This enables the functionaries to ignore or downplay the very real prospect of nuclear war. The UK follows the country that dropped two atomic bombs on Japan for no reason other than pursuit of a destructive rivalry with the Russians. President Biden is “leading” the Western world, yet he can’t walk or talk straight. He doesn’t know our prime minister’s name, but we follow him anyway, enslaved.
British people have sponsored approximately 180,000 Ukrainians to escape the hell of war. What a contrast to the cynicism of the officials and corporations who knowingly sacrifice Ukrainians, and possibly Ukraine as a functioning state, for their own ends.
Us
British popular culture and millions of individuals declared their solidarity with Ukraine at the onset of Russia’s illegal invasion.
But this was a passive activism reflecting a herd mentality. Manchester City players wore tracksuits emblazoned with ‘No War’ but it reflected the Psy-Op’s co-opting of the language of peace rather than an effective grassroots movement calling for an end to hostilities. It was all easy, risk-free, socially acceptable virtue signalling.
Nuance is still not allowed. If you suggest that diplomacy is preferable to war, get ready to be shadow-banned or shut down immediately by those in the pay of the Psy-Op, or those who understand that the war industry (the constant state of war that keeps us scared and arms dealers’ profits high) benefits them and their economic status and have appointed themselves as Psy-Op cops policing the home front for signs of critical thinking.
From day one of the invasion, anybody with a functioning brain cell knew the war could only end one of two ways: defeat for one side or a negotiated settlement. Because engaging diplomatically with Russia would undermine the purpose of the Psy-Op, the media and Psy-Op cops parroted the lie that Ukraine was winning. The Psy-Op’s victims, on (and in) the ground in Ukraine and the population of the Western world therefore had to maintain two contradictory ideas in their minds: Russia was so terrifyingly powerful it had to be stopped quickly before it decided to conquer all of Europe. And Russia was so meek that it was sure to be defeated on the battlefield by Ukraine.
Confidence in a Ukrainian victory was useful in the early months of the war, to persuade the public that it was all worth it and that there was no need to consider alternative solutions while BAE Systems and the rest reaped the spoils of war (they will reap the spoils of reconstruction too).
Consideration of the Russian point of view has been left to serious analysts who are not invited to appear in legacy media, which has become infantilising and lightweight.
At home, the state is becoming increasingly draconian. Journalists are imprisoned in Belmarsh or harassed if they publish inconvenient facts, and the right to protest has been significantly limited. Parliament’s official opposition has purged its membership of peace activists. At the next election, we will choose between two pro-war parties willing to play brinksmanship with nuclear Armageddon.
The latest round of our impoverishment was labeled “Putin’s price hike” by Prime Minister Liz Truss. The surreal concept that China is a “threat” is being normalised, as it was with Russia, with no explanation of what exactly the “threat” is to the population. The Psy-Op’s media talk as if it is self-evidently true. With the “threat” of China, they pretend that all British people share the same values. But when it comes to these values being practiced in our daily lives, in our economy, they vanish – it’s then survival of the fittest, and if you can’t feed your children, that’s your problem.
From 2014, the United States turned Ukraine into a client state and a proxy. Nine years on and the proxy is fulfilling its role as a suicidal guarantor of endless war (endless war being preferable to successful war of course). We have heard stories about Ukrainian men who don’t believe in the war, who know their government has been conned for nine years with the promise of EU and NATO membership and they don’t want to die for it. They hide at home all day to avoid getting picked up by army recruitment officers. At night they scurry out and buy what they need as quickly as possible, hoping to wait out the carnage. What will be left of their country by the time Western states decide Ukraine has given enough for their anti-Russian cause?
If you disagree vehemently with my point of view yet managed to read this far, you deserve credit. Even if you believe that Ukraine really does represent Western liberal values that must be protected, we can surely still agree that the war needs to end. Anybody who cares about Ukrainians should be calling for peace talks as soon as possible, while Zelenskyy still has a bit of leverage.
But the Psy-Op doesn’t want you to think that deeply or logically, even at this stage when Ukraine seems to have no future as a unified country and the permanent displacement of the millions of refugees is a real prospect. If you can see this and still insist that Ukraine should fight to the last man, then maybe you don’t really care about Ukrainians. Maybe you never really did.
by Tom Charles @tomhcharles
image from twitter / keir_starmerSenior Labour Party officials repeatedly lied about antisemitism in the ranks of Kensington Labour Party, generating fear in Jewish communities and defaming the party’s local members to neuter democracy in the constituency. Under the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer and General Secretary David Evans, unelected bureaucrats have been afforded dictatorial powers to subvert party rules, supplant local candidates and silence members. In Kensington, they have been ruthlessly effective.
In late 2022 we reported on senior Labour Party officials’ interventions in the democratic processes of Kensington Constituency Labour Party (CLP) to prevent local councillors from gaining the nomination to become the party’s candidate to challenge Conservative MP Felicity Buchan at the next general election. The National Executive Committee (NEC) and Greater London Region Labour Party both made interventions to ensure a candidate more aligned with the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer prevailed.
General Secretary David Evans, image from twitter / labtowinNEC blocked Cllr Emma Dent Coad
In October, the NEC unilaterally removed Emma Dent Coad, the constituency’s only ever Labour MP, from the longlist of candidates. As part of a purge by Starmer’s leadership team of left-wing politicians and members, the NEC summoned Dent Coad to a “due diligence” interview. The three-person interview panel was chaired by a prominent NEC member who alone had the power to decide that Dent Coad should be excluded from the longlist for “bad judgement.” The former MP said that she had effectively been accused of “thoughtcrime”. Read full details and our interview with Emma Dent Coad here.
London Region took out Cllr Kasim Ali
In November, Councillor Kasim Ali led the CLP’s longlist branch votes when London Region suddenly intervened to prevent him from securing his place on the shortlist. The previous month, Pearleen Sangha, Director of London Region Labour Party, had accused two selection committee members of openly supporting a candidate. Sangha used the accusation as a pretext to take personal control of every aspect of the CLP’s selection process.
Ali had won the first of the three branch selection votes, requiring just one more branch victory to secure his place on the shortlist. This was when Sangha took over the remaining two branch meetings and votes.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that London Region’s move against Ali was pre-planned. First, Sangha postponed the North West branch (his home branch) vote, creating time for the concoction of a means to sabotage Kasim Ali. On the day of the North West vote, a dubious-looking email was circulated to CLP members attacking another candidate as a supporter of Israel. The email was immediately picked up by a local blog and Jewish News, with both publications using it to attack Ali and his supporters as antisemites, despite there being no evidence of a connection between them and the email.
This was the pretext Sangha needed. With no checks and balances against her, the Regional Director blocked whomever she decided not to admit to the Zoom meetings, including up to 20 British Somali members at the North West Kensington Branch meeting. Sangha then kept the nomination results secret and declared the winners without reference to the members’ votes, keeping Kasim Ali off the shortlist.
image from linkedin / pearleensanghaSangha’s Lies
On the day of the North West vote, following the antisemitism smear against Ali and the local membership, Sangha emailed CLP members regarding her “serious concerns” over apparent antisemitism in Kensington Labour Party. She stated that members had been suspended and that there would be a “serious investigation” into the antisemitism that had forced her to take over of the process.
In December we contacted Sangha to ask about her role. A press officer replied to confirm Labour “had to” commence a “serious investigation” into antisemitism in Kensington CLP and that local members had been suspended “due to antisemitism”.
Multiple sources have told to us that, to date, no party members in Kensington have been for suspected antisemitism. These sources include people with access to the members’ database.
Our sources also confirm that there has been no investigation of any type, let alone a “serious investigation” into antisemitism. Many Kensington Labour members have also separately stated to us that they have heard no gossip or news about suspensions or investigations.
Nothing to add
We contacted London Region, asking how many Kensington members had been suspended and if there had been an investigation into antisemitism. A press officer replied that he had “nothing further to add” to the claims made against the CLP membership.
We understand that members have not yet raised any concerns at Kensington CLP meetings regarding the conduct of the NEC; the lies of London Region officials; the treatment of local Jewish communities; the disenfranchisement of a score of British Somalis; the subversion of local democratic procedures and the character assassinations of elected local politicians by unelected officials.
By Tom Charles
@tomhcharles
On Friday, Kensington MP Felicity Buchan attended a series of events locally to commemorate the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Dressed in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, Buchan smiled like a friend to refugee children and their parents, but the words she spoke revealed a simplistic view of the conflict and no appetite for doing anything to stop the death and destruction.
Virtually all 650 MPs in parliament have been in lockstep to prolong the Ukrainians’ agony as they lose both territory and population in the war against their far stronger neighbour. As Ukraine is crushed, our politicians virtue signal from a safe distance. Diplomacy is a dirty word, and we’re repeatedly told that peace is impossible. Sir Keir Starmer has banned Labour MPs from questioning NATO’s provocation of the war and Boris Johnson intervened to prevent Presidents Zelensky and Putin from holding peace talks last April, as reported in Ukrainian media (the British press ignored it).
From 2014 to February 2022, over 14,000 were killed in Ukraine’s civil war following the US-backed coup that overthrew a president who favoured close ties to Russia. In the coup, the ensuing civil war and now the war with Russia, Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups and army battalions have played a prominent role.
The situation is intensely complex and dangerous, yet Buchan pledged Kensington’s and the UK’s unwavering support for the people of Ukraine. Her platitudes and clichés masked the ugly reality: Britain will support the Ukrainians on the condition that they keep fighting the Russians in an unwinnable war.
Slava
Buchan wrote about her experience of the anniversary: “I was honoured to attend the very moving remembrance service at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. Tragically, more than 450 children have died in the conflict. Paper angels were suspended from the ceiling in their honour. Ukraine will prevail. Slava Ukraini.”
Slava Ukraini – Glory to Ukraine. But where is the glory? And what right does a British politician have to declare glory to a country they are, knowingly or unknowingly, sacrificing?
Outside the Ukrainian embassy, Buchan declared “We will not tire, we will be there to the end.”
These words are almost unfathomably vacuous. But soundbites are all we hear from our leaders as they mindlessly provoke Russia and China, two countries that needn’t be enemies of Britain.
“We will be there to the end” of what? Ukraine as a functioning state? Or are our rulers really set on decades of existential wars to impoverish and terrify us as they play brinkmanship over nuclear annihilation?
Outside the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain on Holland Park Avenue, Buchan told the assembled refugee children that the war against Russia “isn’t just about Ukraine. It’s about western values, good values.”
We emailed Felicity Buchan asking her to clarify what she meant, given that Ukraine is an eastern country, but at the time of writing, she had not replied.
Complicity
Dubbed “Complicity Felicity” in North Kensington due to her part in voting down the fire safety recommendations of the Grenfell Inquiry, Buchan enjoyed her moment posing as a liberal humanitarian. But her words were loaded with the complacency, fanaticism and racism of the British political establishment. Ukrainian lives mean so little that Britain sends enough weapons to keep them hanging on in the war, guaranteeing humanitarian catastrophe. This is justified through profound Russophobia and the puerile demonisation of Putin as the epitome of evil. It’s a familiar tactic, most recently used against Bashar al-Assad in Syria, a country illegally occupied by both the United States and Israel – western values? Before Assad, it was Gaddafi, sodomised to death by our allies in Libya. “We came, we conquered, he died!” squealed Hillary Clinton in delight – western values.
All this recent history, including Russia’s intervention in Syria to prevent its fall to ISIS and al Qaeda; the Ukrainian government’s role in persecuting ethnic Russians in the Donbas; the Ukrainians’ own values, traditions and their intrinsic value as humans, is all swept away with simplistic concepts like “Western values…good values.”
Like most MPs, Kensington’s “Complicity Felicity” frames the war in babyish terms, Good West v Bad East. By shunning diplomacy but acting as a friend of the Ukrainian people, Buchan is adding duplicity to her complicity and simplicity.
By Tom Charles
@tomhcharles
Labour’s National Executive Committee torpedoed local party democracy to prevent local candidates from being chosen in the marginal seat of Kensington for the next general election. Here’s what we know about how they did it…
Former MP barred
October 17th: Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) excludes Labour’s only ever Kensington MP Emma Dent Coad from the candidate longlist. Read about it here.
The three-person NEC panel that excludes Dent Coad includes two influential figures committed to Sir Keir Starmer’s purge of socialists: Luke Akehurst, director of the lobbying organisation We Believe in Israel. And Shama Tatler, co-chair of Labour to Win, a right-wing campaigning group.
NEC & London Region usurp local officers
October 20th: Regional Director of Greater London Labour Party Pearleen Sangha dismisses two Kensington Selection Committee members for “openly supporting” a candidate. Sangha speculates about “a blatant attempt to undermine the process” – the two members reject the accusation.
A more right-wing member of the Committee remains in post, despite openly campaigning for candidate Joe Powell, even appearing in his campaign video. Complaints from party members to London Region about the double standard go unanswered.
Local candidate would have been shortlisted
October 27th: Councillor Kasim Ali wins every round in the South Branch vote, meaning he needs to be selected by just one of the remaining two branches to make the shortlist. Afsana Lachaux is also nominated.
Results from the South Branch vote are circulated to members in accordance with Labour’s democratic procedures. Sangha declares that this constitutes a “leak” and runs all subsequent meetings and votes herself, keeping the results secret.
In a statement, senior Kensington Labour officers say: “In all three Kensington branch selection meetings, Sangha overruled local elected role-holders and chaired the Zoom call herself…muting all attendees. She has been unprofessional, hostile, and insulting to local role holders, often making threats and rarely responding to messages”.
Intervention over Black History Month
October 31st: A Constituency Labour Party (CLP) ‘All Members’ meeting with a Black History Month theme is scheduled, but on the day of the meeting, London Region informs the CLP Secretary the meeting cannot take place during the selection process. The CLP Secretary asks if the meeting can go ahead if the discussion is limited to the Black history theme and presented by a local campaigner. London Region agrees but states that no candidates can attend. Continue reading
In an unashamed assault on party democracy last month, Keir Starmer’s Labour targeted and excluded significant numbers of British Somalis from the shortlisting process for candidates hoping to become Kensington’s next member of parliament. Urban Dandy has been given details of how the party’s bureaucracy was mobilised to guarantee a result favourable to the party’s right wing.
The Kensington Constituency Labour Party (CLP) is made up of three branches: South, North East and North West. Labour members in each branch were to vote to narrow down their choice of candidates from a longlist to a shortlist of three, then to vote for one candidate to take on Conservative incumbent Felicity Buchan at the next general election. Former Kensington MP Emma Dent Coad had already been barred from standing by the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) in a factional right-wing intervention.
South Branch
Next in the NEC’s sights was Councillor Kasim Ali, a prominent local politician and a British Somali with a history of community activism in North Kensington. From several Kensington Labour insiders we have heard that, with Dent Coad removed, the NEC hoped that one of their preferred candidates would secure the candidacy. But at the South Branch’s 27th October selection vote, Cllr Ali eased to a comfortable victory, winning every round.
With Cllr Ali needing a nomination from just one of the two North Kensington branches to secure a place on the shortlist, the NEC took over, overriding the CLP’s democratic procedures and fixing the result. Here’s how they did it…
North East Branch
The North East vote scheduled for 1st November was postponed on the pretext of the branch not having the correct Zoom license to accommodate the number of members wishing to attend. Local Labour sources told us that a new license was hastily purchased but Labour’s London Region Executive postponed the vote until 9th November, giving the NEC time to create the chaotic circumstances in which they could guarantee victory for one of their preferred candidates.
By the day of the North West selection on 3rd November, a familiar tactic from the Corbyn era had been put in play to prevent Cllr Ali from securing a nomination at his home branch vote. A vitriolic message about one of the candidates, Mete Coban, was sent to all CLP members from an email address named ‘Danger in Kensington.’ Access to the membership mailing list is strictly limited so the email is likely to have been circulated by somebody holding a senior position within Labour at local, regional or NEC level. Two local Labour sources told Urban Dandy that the NEC’s two preferred candidates had also been provided with the membership’s contact data “months before”.
The highly dubious message was unquestioningly amplified in a vicious attack piece on Kasim Ali in a local blog, while Jewish News blamed “a group of activists” in North Kensington. There was no evidence that the councillor or any of his associates had a connection to the message and no explanation was offered as to how they could have circulated it or what their motivation to sabotage the process might have been. Labour bureaucrats seized upon the story to torpedo the CLP’s democracy, taking control of the selection process and barring Cllr Ali from standing.
Senior Kensington Labour members issued a statement that included the line “there is evidence that the racist message was written by a local known not be (sic) a Labour Party member and was initially posted on a Kensington Community Facebook page.”
There will be more on what Cllr Ali describes as a “fake antisemitism” smear in a later article.
North West Branch
On the day of the ‘Danger in Kensington’ email, Labour members in the North West branch were set to vote on who to shortlist. However, a significant number were prevented from doing so. A Labour councillor told Urban Dandy that “14 to 16 members” were blocked. Another councillor informed us that the number was closer to 20. Both told us that all the excluded members had one thing in common, they were British Somali.
By this point, the selection meetings, held on Zoom, were being chaired by Labour’s London Region Director, Parleen Sangha. According to a local councillor, Sangha told some of the British Somali members “we can’t hear you” before removing them from the meeting and not readmitting them as they attempted to re-join the meeting for an hour and a half. Others simply saw the image below when they clicked on the meeting link.
We have been informed that an elected Labour councillor for Golborne ward (part of the North West branch and one of the most impoverished wards in Britain) received a text message from a London Region representative as voting commenced telling them ‘I don’t have the correct email for you’ as a justification for cancelling their access to the ballot. The councillor is also British Somali and was using the same email address used when registering as a party member and used to log in to all subsequent meetings and votes.
No results from the North East or North West selection votes were published, and Joe Powell will stand for Labour at the general election having easily defeated the other shortlisted candidates, Mete Coban and Apsana Lachaux on 9th November.
Racial Profiling?
Labour councillors who spoke to Urban Dandy stopped just short of accusing Keir Starmer’s NEC and London Region of racism against British Somalis. They informed us that Labour members in the North East branch, mostly from ethnic minority communities, were also prevented from participating, while former party members with favourable views of Starmer were enabled by London Region to fast-track their re-joining on the day of the vote.
We asked London Region for clarity on why Cllr Ali’s bid for candidacy was undemocratically denied. They responded that they “had to” commence a “serious investigation” into antisemitism in Kensington CLP and that local members had been suspended “due to antisemitism”.
Their reply to Urban Dandy did not mention Kasim Ali or explain the prima facie racial profiling of British Somalis.
On 4th November Kasim Ali was interviewed by the NEC over the ‘Danger in Kensington’ email. They accepted that there was no connection between the councillor or his supporters and the message. However, his right to stand was not reinstated. It is not clear if this meeting was the “serious investigation” referred to by London Region.
A Labour source told Urban Dandy that they had searched the membership database and found that none had been suspended for suspected antisemitism.
Cllr Ali told us that he asked the Labour Party to investigate the circulation of the ‘Danger in Kensington’ email but, to date, the party has not done this.
We also understand that Cllr Ali was blocked from speaking at the CLP’s Black History Month event in October following a concern raised by a rival candidate that this would give Ali an unfair advantage in the constituency selection. London Region issued a ban on longlisted Kensington candidates attending the event. Cllr Ali complained to London Region about his exclusion but has not received a reply.
Starmer’s Labour
Under the leadership of Keir Starmer, Labour has purged its left-wing, often expelling or suspending members on spurious grounds, while many others who identify as left-wing have resigned their memberships in protest at Labour’s dramatic shift to the right.
When people rose up to protest racism in Summer 2020, Starmer dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as “Black Lives Matter moment” while the party has at times positioned itself to the right of Suella Braverman on migration.
The signs are that Labour in government would be pro-war, unreservedly pro-NATO and cement the UK’s role as junior partner and enabler of the United States’ constant war-making. US foreign policy currently includes bombing Somalia, humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and occupation of a significant proportion of Syria.
To fulfil this agenda, Starmer and his bureaucracy must minimise the number of potentially anti-war politicians in parliament. In Kensington, once the party members had indicated a preference for Kasim Ali, the NEC abandoned any pretence of a commitment to democracy.
It can be claimed that the removal of Cllr Ali and the disenfranchisement of British Somali members was about ensuring a preferred candidate would stand, rather than a case of racism. But would Labour have done this if Ali was not a Black, Muslim, African, working-class British Somali in North Kensington?
Would an antisemitic trope have been weaponised if the targeted candidate and party members came from a different demographic? And if so, would its use have passed without comment or investigation by the party and media?
Generating fear in our Jewish community and disenfranchising our British Somali community appear to be acceptable collateral damage to the fanatical clique that has control of Labour. Starmer’s party is liberal-fascist, uninterested in the cause of labour and intent on using power to advance the class interests of the British establishment and the economic elite.
By Tom Charles @tomhcharles
Emma Dent Coad, the only Labour politician to win Kensington in its true blue history, spoke to Urban Dandy about the Labour party’s decision to bar her from standing at the next general election.
Context
Architectural historian, author, activist, and local resident Emma Dent Coad was elected to Kensington and Chelsea council in 2006. She campaigned on the full range of issues impacting residents in the most inequitable local authority in Britain including housing rights, poverty, and air quality. Dent Coad’s background in housing made her an ideal choice to be Labour’s 2017 parliamentary candidate in a constituency home to oligarchs and royals yet has seen a dramatic life expectancy decline in the borough’s poorest wards once austerity economics was imposed in 2010.
The councillor’s 2014 report, updated after the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, The Most Unequal Borough in Britain, used incontestable data to lay bare the shocking inequity of the borough where at one end 51% of children live in poverty vs at the other only 6% suffer this indignity. Dent Coad’s 2022 book, One Kensington, cemented her reputation as an expert on the impact of neoliberal economics in the borough.
2017
On Friday, June 11th the final seat in the 2017 general election was declared and Dent Coad was elected MP for Kensington: a first-time Labour gain. Winning by 20 votes, Dent Coad joined the activist Labour MPs’ Socialist Campaign Group in parliament. The role of socialists diminished under New Labour, but backbenchers like Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, and Diane Abbott kept community-based democratic, internationalist socialist politics alive in parliament. Labour’s left-right, democrat-technocrat schism had widened under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, yet New Labour was confident enough in its political project to co-exist with anti-war backbenchers and their frequent rebellions.
Three days after the Kensington constituency victory, the fire at Grenfell Tower brought the local issues that Emma Dent Coad had campaigned on to national prominence, crystalizing her parliamentary priority: justice for Grenfell.
Party leader Corbyn and other Campaign Group members were supportive of North Kensington; but Labour’s bureaucracy was dominated by factional enemies, intent on sabotaging the leadership, and as came to be revealed, actively worked to deny Labour an election victory. The harassment of Diane Abbott, the diversion of funds from left-wing candidates in marginal seats to right-wingers in safe seats and smear campaigns were among the methods deployed by this group, which included Iain McNicol, Labour’s then General Secretary. In 2017, Labour finished just 2227 votes short of being able to form a government.
Internal Labour documents leaked in 2020 showed senior party bureaucrats favouring cronyism over Corbynism. They preferred Tory rule with all the misery that brings to their own party’s kinder, more equitable, leadership. As the leaks became public (albeit not reported in the mainstream news) Dent Coad revealed her campaign had received little support from Labour HQ even when it became clear that an historic win in Kensington was on the cards.
Dent Coad explained: “When the atrocity of the Grenfell Tower fire ripped through my neighbourhood, I was finally sent help from McNicol’s office. However, it quickly became clear that this was not the help requested; I needed assistance with my casework team, who were struggling to help those impacted by the fire, but instead the general secretary sent someone to police me. Continue reading
The latest propaganda from the Kensington and Chelsea Conservatives comes in the form of a glossy A3 publication with the tagline, Community News. The Spring 2022 edition of Kensington & Chelsea News has the look of a free local newspaper but is a campaigning leaflet for the Tories ahead of next month’s council election. Its mix of policy pledges and class-conscious signaling makes clear the council’s priorities five years on from the Grenfell Tower fire. We read and analysed it so you don’t have to.
Page One
‘K & C News’ bucks the trend in these dark times by starting with a feel-good story titled “Café Society is here to stay.” The article features reassurances that locals can still object to pavement licenses being granted if noise is an issue. Even more reassuringly, K & C News informs us that Café Society will operate “from Sloane Square to Westbourne Grove,” skidding to a halt just before it gets to North Kensington. This geographical description could be a mere rhetorical flourish to name two upscale streets popular with the rich Tory voter base. Or it could be more sinister; the first signal to K & C News’s readership that the north of the borough is of little concern to the council.
The next headline is also good news but comes as a bit of a shock: “South Kensington saved by local campaign.” In my ignorance, I hadn’t known that South Kensington, the richest area in the country, faced an existential threat. The detail is that London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, wanted there to be a big glass building there, but heroic local (Conservative) councillors thwarted his plan. South Kensington was rescued from the jaws of Khan back in November, but this newspaper is campaign propaganda to remind core Tory voters and donors that the council remains devoted to them. For those who follow the politics of RBKC, particularly its public relations approach to the five years since the Grenfell Tower fire, it is interesting to be able to read a document that sets out their true priorities, however dressed up in deceit they might be… Continue reading
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