Peter OBORNE

Four days after the terrorist atrocity at the Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017, which killed 22 people, Jeremy Corbyn made the bravest speech of his career.

The then Labour leader went much further than the pro forma condemnations of terrorist barbarity customary in the wake of such attacks.

He raised the forbidden subject of British foreign policy. Corbyn highlighted a connection between “wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.”

This intervention was all the more remarkable because he made it in the middle of a general election campaign. At first Conservative strategists could not believe their luck.

Thinking that Corbyn had gifted them the election, Ben Wallace, then security minister (and today defence secretary), went on the offensive. He declared: “We have to be unequivocal that no amount of excuses, no amount of twisted reasoning about a foreign policy here or a foreign policy there can be an excuse.”

But the Conservative strategists were wrong. Corbyn probably rose rather than fell in the polls after his speech.

Former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn campaigning in Glasgow, December 2019. (Jeremy Corbyn, Flickr)

The British public could see the Labour leader had a point. He was echoing the explicit warning given by British intelligence to then Prime Minister Tony Blair ahead of the Iraq war in 2003:

“The threat from al-Qaeda will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq.”

In other words, there is an undeniable link between foreign adventurism and so-called blowback at home.

Politicians rarely admit this connection. Indeed, Blair refused to accept the relevance of the Iraq invasion in the aftermath of the London terrorist attacks in July 2005, which killed 56 people.

Neither Blair nor David Cameron allowed a full, independent public inquiry into the London bombings, so links to British foreign policy were never properly investigated.

Headlines outside Waterloo station after the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks on London. (CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedai Commons)

I am beginning to wonder whether the current inquiry into the Manchester Arena atrocity will duck the issue as well.

Elephant in Room

The inquiry was launched on 15 June this year. Since then Sir John Saunders, the chairman, has devoted his time to a minute examination of the response of the emergency services and security arrangements at the Manchester Arena.

But he has side-stepped the elephant in the room: Britain’s role in the downfall of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in the war of 2011.

Yet the facts are hard to ignore.

The Manchester bomber was Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old with a Libyan background whose family had fled and settled in Manchester to escape Gaddafi’s regime.

Abedi’s father, Ramadan, was a long-standing member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which was founded to overthrow Gaddafi. The primary opposition force to Gaddafi, the LIFG was until 2009 an affiliate of al-Qaeda.

In 2011, both Ramadan and a young Salman Abedi returned to Libya to fight in the civil war that toppled Gaddafi, partly thanks to a Nato bombing campaign in which the U.K. played a key role.

Salman was later known to have made repeated trips to Libya, including one shortly before his attack in Manchester.

Perhaps Salman Abedi’s links to Libya are irrelevant. It would be wrong to rule out the idea that Abedi was “radicalized” in Britain.

Yet questions abound. Questions which scream out to be asked. Questions which Saunders has so far shown little sign of examining.

Manchester Arena in 2019, two years after the bombing. (G-13114, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The first concerns Britain’s “open door policy,” which allowed Libyan exiles and British Libyan citizens, most of whom lived in Manchester, to join the 2011 uprising.

Some of these British Libyans had previously been under control orders, which subjected them to electronic tagging and required them to remain at a registered address for 16 hours a day.

Control orders are designed for the purpose of “protecting members of the public from a risk of terrorism.”

Yet in advance of the Libyan intervention, the British government had decided that the Manchester Libyans no longer posed a terrorist threat.

An article by Middle East Eye interviewed Libyans who claimed strings were pulled by Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, to allow them to travel to Libya and fight with “no questions asked.”

In other words, the U.K. was allowing individuals they suspected of involvement in terrorist activity to travel to Libya and join up with radical Islamist groups, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Why were these control orders lifted and on whose advice? What caused the government to change its mind? Were the control orders lifted in connection with the Libyan conflict – or is there some other explanation?

CCTV of Salman Abedi, the Islamist terrorist who killed 22 people in the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017.

Ministerial Accountability

Saunders has the power to call then Home Secretary Theresa May and probably her immediate predecessor Alan Johnson and ask them. He should do so.

He also needs to call Cameron, the prime minister who ordered Britain’s military intervention in 2011. We need to know whether he was advised that domestic consequences might flow from his Libyan mission.

MI5 warned in advance about the danger of bloodshed on British streets as a result of the Iraq invasion. Was a similar warning issued in private ahead of British meddling in Libya?

The inquiry also needs to hear about Britain’s relations with the LIFG, which in the 1990s seems to have been in hock with MI6, and paid by the agency to carry out an assassination attempt against Gaddafi.

When their attempts at regime change failed, the Libyan radicals fled to Manchester – sometimes called the “second capital” of Libya.

June 2010: British Prime Minister David Cameron, left, with U.S. President Barack Obama, during G-20 Summit in Toronto. (White House, Pete Souza)

After 9/11, the British state changed its approach and Gaddafi became an unexpected ally. Now, LIFG exiles in Britain were deprived of their passports.

In 2011 the LIFG came back into favor as Cameron ordered airstrikes and secretly deployed some ground troops to help local forces remove Gaddafi.

This has rarely been acknowledged. But General David Richards, then chief of the defence staff, told a parliamentary inquiry in 2016 that Britain “had a few people embedded” with rebel forces in Libya, saying that they were “in the rear areas” and “would go forward and back”.

Shouldn’t we be able to know more details about this? Who exactly did they work with? What support did they provide? Did it include armed support or training to Islamist forces?

These questions are supremely important since Abedi and his father were among those rebel forces at the time. I cannot establish whether they had been under control orders.

The questions are especially relevant because of the circumstances which applied during the British military action in Libya.

The terms of the United Nations resolution, which authorized British and French intervention, specifically prohibited sending in ground troops.

Britain mainly seems to have thrown our weight behind Islamist fighters, including the LIFG, who had a long-standing hatred of Gaddafi.

2010: Libyan President Muammar al-Gaddafi, at right, with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. (Government of Spain, Wikimedia Commons)

Some LIFG fighters in Libya in 2011 had earlier fought alongside the Islamic State of Iraq – the al-Qaeda entity which went on to establish a presence in Syria and then became Islamic State.

Put another way, Qaeda-connected forces were Britain’s boots on the ground in the war against Gaddafi.

In 2018, then Foreign Minister Alastair Burt admitted to parliament that the U.K. “likely” had contacts with “former members” of the LIFG and another Islamist group, the 17 February Martyrs Brigade, in Libya in 2011. What were these contacts?

Following the 2011 war, there are grounds for assuming that Abedi came into contact with other militant Islamist groups on his trips to Libya. There are suggestions, for example, that Abedi was trained in a camp complex run by Islamic State in Sabratha, near the border with Tunisia.

After the Gaddafi regime fell, Libya became a largely lawless country and a base for terrorism, including a launch pad for terrorist attacks in Europe.

We need to know what groups Abedi met, whether they trained him, and whether they were a danger to Britain.

And what were the true circumstances of Abedi being “rescued” by the British military in 2014, when he and other British citizens in Libya at the time were brought back to the U.K.? Why was Abedi allowed to return to Britain unhindered?

The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) should be able to shed light on this, making it frankly odd and absurd that no SIS officer seems to have been called to give evidence (an MI5 witness has been scheduled). Saunders’ inquiry will have limited credibility without SIS testimony.

What did they know about Abedi’s visits to Libya? Did SIS press for control orders to be relaxed? And the key question – what role did SIS play, exactly, in Libya in 2011?

Floral tributes to the victims of the attack in St Ann’s Square in Manchester city center. (Tomasz “odder” Kozlowski via Wikimedia Commons)

Blood Price?

Did innocent Manchester citizens pay a blood price for Britain’s cynical policy six years earlier? Was the British state itself ultimately part of the apparatus of terror which killed innocent people in Manchester?

This is why Saunders also needs to call William Hague, foreign secretary in 2011, to face forensic questioning about the relationship between the LIFG and the British state.

Did Hague understand what he was doing?

Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee later concluded he didn’t: “We have seen no evidence that the UK government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya. It may be that the UK government was unable to analyse the nature of the rebellion in Libya due to incomplete intelligence and insufficient institutional insight.”

It added: “It failed to identify the militant Islamist extremist element in the rebellion.”

But was the Foreign Office really that naïve? Did Britain blindly stumble into an alliance with terrorist forces which might later turn on it? Or did we know exactly who we were getting involved with?

Since the hearings began in September, Saunders has spent three months interrogating the emergency services, and those responsible for Arena security. I have no doubt that there are important lessons to be learnt.

However, the purpose of the Manchester inquiry is to ensure a similar catastrophe can be averted in future. That’s why Saunders should spend at least the same amount of time interrogating British foreign policy.

There is no point in his inquiry unless it asks the difficult questions the British establishment would rather avoid, and look into the underlying causes.

Some might feel that this is unfair to Saunders. These questions would have been answered if there had been a formal inquiry, as there should have been, into Cameron’s calamitous decision to intervene in Libya.

In the absence of such an inquiry it’s up to Saunders.

consortiumnews.com

Ever since at least the time of Thucydides in the 5th century BC, the wealthiest have ruled, and did it by conquest and plunder. The acquisition of exceptional wealth was by theft: it was coercion, which could be either physical against the body (violence), or mental against the mind (deception). Exceptional wealth was acquired by some form of theft. The wealthiest controlled the government, which then enforced that theft as legal “ownership.” That’s how the economy worked. The government is the ultimate authority on who owns what. None of this has changed over the millennia. However, the technologies today are different, depending less on the wielding of steely weapons, and more on the statement of stealthy words, than in the ancient past. Increasingly, control is being achieved by deceiving the public. (For example, America’s leading liberal politician, Joe Biden, was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists and back-room opponents of the NAACP, but claims to be a supporter of “civil rights”, and is thus voted for by the overwhelming majority of America’s Blacks — but America’s press hides his segregationist record, and so they don’t know about it. Those voters’ ignorance is that politician’s strength, and it all comes from America’s billionaires.) Today’s methods of deceiving (and thus controlling) the public are considerably more sophisticated and professional than in the past. The aristocracy (the billionaires) do it nowadays mainly by means of their buying and selling, and hiring and firing, of the news-media, which thus have far more importance than in ancient times, because deceit is today’s main way to control the public.

Whereas conservative media rely unashamedly upon the existing popular mythology, liberal media need to rely upon that but to pretend not to, and to be instead ‘humanitarian’ and ‘enlightened’ in a more tolerant and open-minded sense: they specialize in hypocrisy — it’s liberal aristocrats’ particular style of art-form; they’re the ‘not conservative’ type of aristocrats. They pretend to be what they aren’t (champions of democracy — which they actually despise and crave to overcome, if it exists at all).

Progressive media (to the extent they exist at all, which is only very slight, anywhere) avoid both hypocrisy and mythology: they are openly anti-aristocratic, and rejecting also any mythology — they are populist, while not affirming the popular (or any) mythology. (By contrast: conservative ‘populists’ are committed to the existing popular mythology, and can therefore be manipulated by openly conservative aristocrats — they can be “Tories,” or even “Nazis,” and they can therefore vote against their own “class interests.” It’s stupid, but conservative ‘populists’ nonetheless do it routinely.)

As a result of this (since the progressives’ appeal — rejecting both the aristocracy and the mythology — is so small), politics almost invariably pits conservatives against liberals, and therefore promotes dictatorship (rule of the nation by its aristocracy), either way.

This means that, almost invariably, it’s either the conservative aristocrats, or else the liberal aristocrats, who rule a country. (Democracy — rule by the public — is thus very rare.)

Perhaps the most famous of all liberal news-media during the Twentieth Century was Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which was anti-imperialist — and that’s a core component of progressivism, because the aristocracy derive wealth not only by exploiting their domestic public, but also (if they are internationally successful, meaning control vassal-nations) by exploiting foreign publics. These aristocrats exploit foreign publics by controlling foreign governments. That’s called “imperialism.”

The Guardian newspaper was widely considered, until recently, to be not only liberal, but even progressive. It promoted government-expenditures for the benefit of the people, instead of for international conquest (which billionaires much prefer). Consequently, the aristocracy hated it, and wanted to take it over.

Tragically, that newspaper was, in fact, taken over, culminating in 2016, by American billionaires’ ‘charities’, and promptly it became perhaps the world’s most-rabidly pro-imperialistic propaganda-sheet (even worse than America’s own Washington Post and New York Times, both of which were infamous villains, which had, for example, helped to promote George W. Bush’s lies to invade and destroy Iraq for WMD that didn’t even exist except in their own lies about the matter — and those were definitely lies, not mere errors such as the liars and their propaganda-media claimed afterward). They are constantly whipping up hatred against Russia’s Government and against any nations (like Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012, Ukraine 2014, and Venezuela 2015, were, and like China and Iran are now) that were friendly toward Russia — because Russia is the main country that America’s billionaires want to conquer and control that they don’t yet control. So, they constantly propagandize against Russia, where they all want “regime change” (meaning, actually, conquest).

Just as for at least the past 2,500 years, conquest is the aristocracy’s chief goal. All aristocrats support imperialism. (Any who would oppose it would no longer be accepted within the aristocracy. It would hurt them in their business-dealings with other aristocrats. Amongst their fellow aristocrats, they would be rejected.)

This journalistic transformation at the Guardian, from anti-imperialist, to becoming a champion of the Military-Industrial Complex (which is owned and controlled by the billionaires), is typical.

Understanding this transformation toward pure propaganda is helpful in order to understand the functioning of today’s most destructive Government, the U.S. Government — the country (whose Government is controlled by its billionaires — no democracy) that has perpetrated far more invasions and coups, and done far more damage in and to the world, than all other Governments in the world combined, ever since the end of World War II. It has mass-murdered tens of millions of people, not only via invasions, but by coups that were followed by U.S.-imposed brutal dictatorships (which served the U.S. aristocracy) — and all the while with the U.S. regime pretending to advance ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ (such as in Iraq 2003-, Libya 2011-, and Syria 2012-). (After all: it’s liberal; it is hypocritical — it pretends to be progressive but isn’t.)

Though this incredibly hypocritical global-tyrannical U.S. regime is accepted world-wide, as if it weren’t today’s equivalent of Nazi Germany (only bigger than that), it is by far the world’s most evil Government, much as Nazi Germany’s Government was, in its time. Whereas America under President FDR (who was sincerely an enemy of Nazi Germany) was largely a democracy, America is now an aristocracy of its billionaires — a dictatorship by its own super-rich (and they are vicious, comparable to what Germany’s Nazis were, though using far more-liberal rhetoric).

A typical example of today’s Guardian (which is no longer a newspaper but just an online propaganda-site funded by those billionaires’ ‘charities’, and by readers who are stupid enough to donate and pay in order to be deceived by ‘news’ they read there) is two ‘news’-reports that were published in the Guardian on the same day, and unconnected with one-another except that they were both fact-less, undocumented, and rabidly hateful against Russia’s Government — that’s to say, against the bête noire of American-and-allied (such as UK) billionaires.

On 16 July 2020, the Guardian headlined both “Russian state-sponsored hackers target Covid-19 vaccine researchers” and “UK says Russia sought to interfere in 2019 election by spreading documents online”. Both were probably lies, but certainly unverified by any clear facts — totally uninformative, and just strings of allegations, pure war-propaganda — much of it stenographically citing from official government sources in the U.S. and UK dictatorships (just like the “WMD in Iraq” lie was).

The Guardian is now a typical liberal ‘news’-medium, which means that it is at least as imperialistic as the openly conservative ‘news’-media (such as Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London) are.

To show how such propaganda is created and spread, and has been used with enormous success by the millions of hired agents (including publicly elected governmental officials) of the U.S. aristocracy, a few examples will be cited here that have already been sufficiently studied and exposed to be frauds — such as those two ‘news’-stories in the July 16th Guardian have not yet been exposed, but (based on that ‘news’-medium’s record) probably also are frauds.

On August 7th, I headlined “‘Russiagate’ Hoax Unravels, but Their Anti-Russia Sanctions Don’t,” and documented, in considerable detail, the fraudulence of the main U.S. Government hoax against Russia, a hoax that was promulgated in the Mueller Report and in all of the Democratic-Party-created “Russiagate” case against America’s current atrocious (Republican-Party-billionaire-representing) President, Donald Trump (accusing him of being ‘a puppet of Putin’).

What’s stunning there is that, with such a horrid President as Trump, the Democrats selected this hoaxed case to bring against him, in order to force him out of office — as if there weren’t authentic crimes that he had been perpetrating during his Presidency (and even before). They refused to bring any of the authentic cases against him, because they — the Democratic Party itself, its own Senators and Representatives and the Democratic National Committee — were themselves participating in those crimes (such as this and this and this and this). So, they instead brought this “Russiagate” case (which had been manufactured by the prior, Democratic Party, President’s Administration, in conjunction with MI6; and, so, Democratic Party officials could bring it), which is entirely disprovable. All of their ‘news’-media (such as the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and even the formerly British Guardian) therefore hid the hoaxiness of the charges, so as to sucker the Democratic Party’s voters (their readers) into supporting their own Democratic-Party-billionaire-serving politicians, instead of the Republican Party ones, who instead represented Republican Party billionaires. The villain was Russia (their bête noire), instead of Hillary Clinton and their own controlling aristocracy.

That “Russiagate” case in the United States was co-created by America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6; so, not only was it a real crime by the (traitorous) U.S. Government against its own American public, but it was a fictitious crime also by a foreign Government (Russia, ‘the enemy’), against the American people. And, as I have also documented, there are many such governmental crimes. And the more that they can be blamed against countries that America’s aristocracy wants to conquer (such as “Russiagate” was), the better it is for America’s aristocrats. So, this is the routine reality now (and under Trump it has increasingly been also against Iran and China), so as to pump up the Military-Industrial Complex, which is virtually owned by the aristocracy.

I document many things that are consistently denied in America’s mainstream ‘news’-media, and therefore none of those media will publish these articles (though all of my articles are submitted to all of them); but, just today as I am writing, a webmaster at a non-mainstream site objected because I provide “too many” links. Even though he operates an online news-site, he fails to know or respect the fact that ONLY online text-articles possess even the ability to enable their readers to check out easily — just by the reader’s clicking onto a link — the evidence for any reasonably questionable allegation that is being made in the given article (such as this one). Broadcast journalism doesn’t do that. Paper-and-ink journalism also doesn’t. Therefore, all of the traditional ‘news’-media don’t empower their audiences to be intelligently skeptical, and to have easy access to the actual evidence behind any reasonably questionable assertion that is being put forth by them.

Furthermore, even when traditional ‘news’-media establish online sites, any links there are often uninformative, such as to that site’s own archive of references to a given term that is being linked in their article. They assume that you trust one Party or the other, and they provide no easy means of digging deeper — because they don’t want their audience to be able to understand. Those are all billionaire-controlled ‘news’-media. So, all of them lie routinely, in order to advance the business-interests of those owners and control their audience. It’s like they are just nonstop advertisements instead of real news-media. And, since there are no links to their ultimate sources, those audiences would have to become investigators, themselves, in order to separate out which allegations are facts and which allegations are frauds. Readers don’t have the time to do that; and listeners don’t have any way in which they can do it, even if they did have the time. In other words: those audiences will choose to believe and to disbelieve whatever they want. This is the reason for the increasing political-Party polarization. It has become so bad in America now, so that the current U.S. Presidential election is between two rabidly racist contenders: the openly conservative one, Donald Trump, who hardly even tries to hide his racism, versus the other, Joe Biden, who does try to hide the fact that he was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists and was even allied on segregation-issues with the Senate’s leading segregationist, the Republican Party’s Senator Jesse Helms. Only by means of the ‘news’-media’s hiding Biden’s White-supremacist background, can they pretend that the two Parties are offering the electorate a ‘progressive’ option, in the billionaires’ 2020 Presidential (s)‘election’. Non-racist Americans are offered, by the billionaires’ two Parties, only White-supremacist options (the overtly segregationist Trump, or else the covertly segregationist Biden) to vote for to become the next President.

The entire national public then increasingly consists of people who are prejudiced in whatever ways that they are — increasingly set in their existing false beliefs — their existing myths. To allow billionaires to place their heavy thumbs upon the scales of truth and justice that they own, by means of their control over ‘news’-media, is a sure way for any democracy to degenerate into dictatorship, so that the public are fighting more against each other than against the aristocracy. This is what billionaires want and what has happened. Some things change, but others remain the same. And rule-by-the-richest seems to be in the latter category.

So: this is how one of the very few remaining progressive news-media became switched, in just the past few years, to being whored to the liberal aristocracy. The Guardian, RIP, was almost the opposite of today’s Guardian.

On August 10th, Jonathan Cook, who used to be a Guardian journalist when it was its previous, progressive newspaper, headlined “How the Guardian betrayed not only Corbyn but the last vestiges of British democracy”, and he exposed his former employer as the opposite of what it had been and as having become perhaps even the chief tool by billionaires to destroy the post-Tony-Blair Labour Party which had been led by the progressive Jeremy Corbyn, and as having reflected the Labour Party billionaires’ preference instead to defeat Corby’s Labour Party, in order to help to install as Prime Minister the far-right Tory Boris Johnson so as to restore, as being that Conservative Party’s opposition, the pro-imperialist Labour Party that had joined itself full-force to George W. Bush’s lie-based invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Racism was endemic in the language and behaviours of Labour’s senior, rightwing officials,” whom today’s Guardian had helped to make the Labour Party’s current leaders. This new Guardian was the opposite of the old Guardian, which had given a voice “for control of the Labour party so that it might really represent the poor and vulnerable against rule by the rich.” Today’s Guardian was instead instrumental in killing–off that Labour Party, and thereby leaving UK with no progressive party at all, and without even a single Party that has any actually functioning progressive wing to it, at all.

The way that billionaires took over liberalism and destroyed it is by their having taken control over non-conservative media (most of which were liberal, but a few of which were even progressive, as the Guardian used to be) and stripped out of them any opposition that those media previously had had toward imperialism, and replaced that by championing imperialism, so long it’s of the ‘right’ kind, namely sanctions and coups and invasions by ‘our’ country, against countries that never even threatened one’s own country (but that are friendly toward Russia). By definition, attempting to conquer a country that isn’t attempting to conquer that aggressor-country is the biggest of all international war-crimes; it’s “aggressive war” — and Nazi leaders were hanged for it at Nuremberg — but it’s entirely unpunished when the world’s most powerful country (and its allies) are doing it, such as now. A popular term for it (i.e., for the supreme crime that was being prosecuted at the Nuremberg Tribunals) today is “neoconservatism,” and the only way in which it differs from the Nazi Party is that America’s aggressions are aiming at different targets to destroy.

The easiest way to end democracy is to take control over the news-media so as to make them instead ‘news’-media; and, therefore, that’s the way it has been done.

It is simply astonishing that the first attempt by the Guardian – the only major British newspaper styling itself as on the liberal-left – to properly examine the contents of a devastating internal Labour party report leaked in April is taking place nearly four months after the 860-page report first came to light.

If you are a Labour party member, the Guardian is the only “serious”, big-circulation paper claiming to represent your values and concerns.

One might therefore have assumed that anything that touches deeply on Labour party affairs – on issues of transparency and probity, on the subversion of the party’s democratic structures, on abuses or fraud by its officials – would be of endless interest to the paper. One might have assumed it would wish both to dedicate significant resources to investigating such matters for itself and to air all sides of the ensuing debate to weigh their respective merits.

My latest: Labour’s explosive leaked report, showing how party officials plotted to destroy Corbyn, including by weaponising antisemitism, is being quietly swept under the carpet by the media and Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer https://t.co/1m7WfRobhn

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) April 16, 2020

Not a bit of it. For months, the leaked report and its implications have barely registered in the Guardian’s pages. When they have, the coverage has been superficial and largely one-sided – the side that is deeply hostile to its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

That very much fits a pattern of coverage of the Corbyn years by the paper, as I have tried to document. It echoes the paper’s treatment of an earlier scandal, back in early 2017, when an undercover Al-Jazeera reporter filmed pro-Israel Labour activists working with the Israeli embassy to damage Corbyn from within. A series of shocking reports by Al-Jazeera merited minimal coverage from the Guardian at the time they were aired and then immediately sank without trace, as though they were of no relevance to later developments – most especially, of course, the claims by these same groups of a supposed “antisemitism crisis” in Labour.

Sadly, the latest reports by the Guardian on the leaked report –presented as an “exclusive” – do not fundamentally change its long-running approach.

Kicked into the long grass

In fact, what the paper means by an “exclusive” is that it has seen documents responding to the leaked report that were submitted by Corbyn and his team to the Forde inquiry – Labour’s official investigation into that report and the circumstances of its leaking. The deadline for submissions to Martin Forde QC arrived last week.

Setting up the Forde inquiry was the method by which Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, hoped to kick the leaked report into the long grass till next year. Doubtless Starmer believes that by then the report will be stale news and that he will have had time to purge from the party, or at least intimidate into silence, the most outspoken remnants of Corbyn’s supporters.

Corbyn’s submission on the leaked report is an “exclusive” for the Guardian only because no one in the corporate media bothered till now to cover the debates raging in Labour since the leak four months ago. The arguments made by Corbyn and his supporters, so prominent on social media, have been entirely absent from the so-called “mainstream”.

When Corbyn finally got a chance to air the issues raised by the leaked report in a series of articles on the Middle East Eye website, its coverage went viral, underscoring how much interest there is in this matter among Labour members.

Nonetheless, despite desperately needing clicks and revenue in this especially difficult time for the corporate media, the Guardian is still spurning revelatory accounts of Corbyn’s time in office by his former team.

One published last week – disclosing that, after winning the leadership election, Corbyn arrived to find the leader’s offices gutted, that Labour HQ staff refused to approve the hiring of even basic staff for him, and that disinformation was constantly leaked to the media – was relegated to the OpenDemocracy website.

That Joe Ryle, a Corbyn team insider, either could not find a home for his insights in the Guardian or didn’t even try says it all – because much of the disinformation he laments being peddled to the media ended up in the Guardian, which was only too happy to amplify it as long as it was harming Corbyn.

A political coup

Meanwhile, everything in the Guardian’s latest “exclusive” confirms what has long been in the public realm, via the leaked report.

Through its extensive documentation of WhatsApp messages and emails, the report shows conclusively that senior Labour officials who had dominated the party machine since the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eras – and were still loyal to the party’s centre-right incarnation as New Labour – worked at every turn to oust Corbyn from the leadership. They even tried to invent ways to bar him from standing in a rerun leadership election a year later, in 2016, after Owen Smith, the Labour right’s preferred candidate, challenged him.

Corbyn and his supporters were viewed as dangerous “Trots” – to use a derisive term that dominates those exchanges.

The messages show these same officials did their level best to sabotage Labour’s 2017 general election campaign – an election that Corbyn was less than 3,000 votes from winning. Party officials starved marginal seats Corbyn hoped to win of money and instead focused resources on MPs hostile to Corbyn. It seems they preferred a Tory win if it gave momentum to their efforts to rid the party of Corbyn.

Or, as the submission notes: “It’s not impossible that Jeremy Corbyn might now be in his third year as a Labour prime minister were it not for the unauthorised, unilateral action taken by a handful of senior party officials.”

The exchanges in the report also show that these officials on the party’s right privately gave voice to horrifying racism towards other party members, especially black members of the party loyal to Corbyn.

And the leaked report confirms the long-running claims of Corbyn and his team that the impression of “institutional antisemitism” in Labour – a narrative promoted in the corporate media without any actual evidence beyond the anecdotal – had been stoked by the party’s rightwing, Blairite officials.

They appear to have delayed and obstructed the handling of the small number of antisemitism complaints – usually found by trawling through old social media posts – to embarrass Corbyn and make the “antisemitism crisis” narrative appear more credible.

Corbyn’s team have pointed out that these officials – whose salaries were paid by the membership, which elected Corbyn as party leader – cheated those members of their dues and their rights, as well as, of course, subverting the entire democratic process. The submission rightly asks the inquiry to consider whether the money spent by Labour officials to undermine Corbyn “constituted fraudulent activity”.

One might go even further and argue that what they did amounted to a political coup.

The bogus ‘whistleblower’ narrative

Even now, as the Guardian reports on Corbyn’s submission to the Forde inquiry, it has downplayed the evidence underpinning his case, especially on the antisemitism issue – which the Guardian played such a key role in weaponising in the first place.

The paper’s latest coverage treats the Corbyn “claims” sceptically, as though the leaked report exists in a political vacuum and there are no other yardsticks by which the truth of its evidence or the plausibility of its claims can be measured.

Let’s start with one illustrative matter. The Guardian, as with the rest of the corporate media, even now avoids drawing the most obvious conclusion from the leaked report.

Racism was endemic in the language and behaviours of Labour’s senior, rightwing officials, as shown time and again in the WhatsApp messages and emails.

And yet it is these very same officials – those who oversaw the complaints procedure as well as the organisation of party headquarters – who, according to the corporate media narrative, were so troubled by one specific kind of racism, antisemitism, that they turned it into the biggest, most enduring crisis facing Corbyn during his five-year tenure as leader.

To accept the corporate media narrative on this supposed “antisemitism crisis”, we must ignore several things:

• the lack of any statistical evidence of a specific antisemitism problem in Labour;
• the vehement racism expressed by Labour officials, as well as their overt and abiding hostility to Corbyn;
• moves by party officials forcing Corbyn to accept a new definition of antisemitism that shifted the focus from a hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel;
• and the fact that the handling of antisemitism complaints dramatically improved once these rightwing officials were removed from their positions.

And yet in its latest reporting, as with its earlier coverage, the Guardian simply ignores all this confirmatory evidence.

There are several reasons for this, as I have documented before, but one very obvious one is this: the Guardian, like the rest of the British media, had worked hard to present former officials on the right of the party as brave “whistleblowers” long before they were exposed by the leaked report.

Like the BBC’s much-criticised Panorama “investigation” last year into Labour’s alleged “antisemitism crisis”, the Guardian took the claims of these former staff – of their supposed selfless sacrifice to save the party from anti-Jewish bigots – at face value.

My latest: With last night’s Panorama programme on supposed ‘institutional anti-semitism’ in Labour, the BBC demonstrated that it has become a media attack dog in the hands of the ruling Conservative party https://t.co/dSDaaLBY0S

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 11, 2019

In fact, it was likely even worse than that. The Guardian and BBC weren’t just passive, neutral recipients of the disinformation offered by these supposed “whistleblowers”. They shared the Labour right’s deep antipathy to Corbyn and everything he stood for, and as a result almost certainly served as willing, even enthusiastic channels for that disinformation.

The Guardian hardly bothers to conceal where its sympathies lie. It continues to laud Blair from beyond the political grave and, while Corbyn was leader, gave him slots in its pages to regularly lambast Corbyn and scaremonger about Labour’s “takeover” by the supposedly “extreme” and “hard” left. The paper did so despite the fact that Blair had grown ever more discredited as evidence amassed that his actions in invading Iraq in 2003 were crimes against humanity.

Were the Guardian to now question the narrative it promoted about Corbyn – a narrative demolished by the leaked report – the paper would have to admit several uncomfortable things:

• that for years it was either gulled by, or cooperated with, the Blairites’ campaign of disinformation;
• that it took no serious steps to investigate the Labour right’s claims or to find out for itself what was really going on in Labour HQ;
• that it avoided cultivating a relationship with Corbyn’s team while he was in office that would have helped it to ascertain more effectively what was happening inside the party;
• or that, if it did cultivate such a relationship (and, after all, Seumas Milne took up his post as Corbyn’s chief adviser immediately after leaving the Guardian), it consistently and intentionally excluded the Corbyn team’s account of events in its reporting.

To now question the narrative it invested so much energy in crafting would risk Guardian readers drawing the most plausible conclusion for their paper’s consistent reporting failures: that the Guardian was profoundly opposed to Corbyn becoming prime minister and allowed itself, along with the rest of the corporate media, to be used as channel for the Labour right’s disinformation.

Stabbed in the back

None of that has changed in the latest coverage of Corbyn’s submission to Forde concerning the leaked report.

The Guardian could not realistically ignore that submission by the party’s former leader and his team. But the paper could – and does – strip out the context on which the submission was based so as not to undermine or discredit its previous reporting against Corbyn.

Its main article on the Corbyn team’s submission becomes a claim and counter-claim story, with an emphasis on an unnamed former official arguing that criticism of him and other former staff at Labour HQ is nothing more than a “mythical ‘stab in the back’ conspiracy theory”.

The problem is that there are acres of evidence in the leaked report that these officials did stab Corbyn and his team in the back – and, helpfully for the rest of us, recorded some of their subversive, anti-democratic activities in private internal correspondence between themselves. Anyone examining those message chains would find it hard not to conclude that these officials were actively plotting against Corbyn.

To discredit the Corbyn team’s submission, the Labour right would need to show that these messages were invented. They don’t try to do that because those messages are very obviously only too real.

Instead they have tried two different, inconsistent strategies. First, they have argued that their messages were presented in a way that was misleading or misrepresented what they said. This claim does not hold water, given that the leaked report includes very lengthy, back-and-forth exchanges between senior staff. The context of those exchanges is included – context the officials themselves provided in their messages to each other.

Second, the self-styled “whistleblowers” now claim that publication of their messages – documenting efforts to undermine Corbyn – violates their right to privacy and breaches data protection laws. They can apparently see no public interest in publishing information that exposes their attempts to subvert the party’s internal democratic processes.

It seems that these “whistleblowers” are more committed to data concealment than exposure – despite the title they have bestowed on themselves. This is a strange breed of whistleblower indeed, one that seeks to prevent transparency and accountability.

In a telling move, despite claiming that their messages have been misrepresented, these former officials want the Forde inquiry to be shut down rather than given the chance to investigate their claims and, assuming they are right, exonerate them.

Further, they are trying to intimidate the party into abandoning the investigation by threatening to bankrupt it through legal actions for breaching their privacy. The last thing they appear to want is openness and a proper accounting of the Corbyn era.

Shrugging its shoulders

In its latest reporting, the Guardian frames the leaked report as “clearly intended to present a pro-Corbyn narrative for posterity” – as though the antisemitism narrative the Guardian and the rest of the corporate media spent nearly five years crafting and promoting  was not clearly intended to do the precise opposite: to present an anti-Corbyn narrative for posterity.

Peter Walker, the paper’s political correspondent, describes the messages of former, rightwing Labour officials as “straying” into “apparent” racism and misogyny, as though the relentless efforts revealed in these exchanges to damage and undermine prominent black MPs like Diane Abbott are open to a different interpretation.

Officials at the very top of @UKLabour said stuff like “Abbott is truly repulsive” “Abbott literally makes me sick” and conspired with media against me. Now claiming remarks taken out of context. So let’s have full publication of all communications #LabourLeaks

— Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) August 7, 2020

According to Walker, the report’s evidence of election-scuppering in 2017 is “circumstantial” and “there is seemingly no proof of active obstruction”. Even assuming that were true, such a deficiency could easily be remedied had the Guardian, with all its staff and resources, made even the most cursory effort to investigate the leaked report’s claims since April – or in the years before, when the Corbyn team were trying to counter the disinformation spread by the Labour right.

The Guardian largely shrugs its shoulders, repeatedly insinuating that all this constitutes little more than Labour playground bickering. Starmer is presented as school principal – the one responsible adult in the party – who, we are told, is “no stranger to managing Labour factions”.

The Guardian ignores the enormous stakes in play both for Labour members who expected to be able to shape the party’s future using its supposedly democratic processes and for the very functioning of British democracy itself. Because if the leaked report is right, the British political system looks deeply rigged: there to ensure that only the establishment-loving right and centre-right ever get to hold power.

The Guardian’s approach suggests that the paper has abdicated all responsibility for either doing real journalism on its Westminster doorstep or for acting as a watchdog on the British political system.

Guardian hypocrisy

Typifying the hypocrisy of the Guardian and its continuing efforts to present itself a hapless bystander rather than active participant in efforts to disrupt the Labour party’s internal democratic processes and sabotage the 2017 and 2019 elections is its lead columnist Jonathan Freedland.

Outside of the Guardian’s editorials, Freedland’s columns represent the closest we have to a window on the ideological soul of the paper. He is a barometer of the political mood there.

Freedland was among the loudest and most hostile opponents of Corbyn throughout his time as leader. Freedland was also one of the chief purveyors and justifiers of the fabled antisemitism narrative against Corbyn.

He, and the rightwing Jewish Chronicle he also writes for, gave these claims an official Jewish seal of approval. They trumpeted the narrow, self-serving perspective of Jewish organisations like the Board of Deputies, whose leaders are nowadays closely allied with the Conservative party.

They amplified the bogus claims of the Jewish Labour Movement, a tiny, pro-Israel organisation inside Labour that was exposed – though the Guardian, of course, never mentions it – as effectively an entryist group, and one working closely with the Israeli embassy, in that detailed undercover investigation filmed by Al-Jazeera.

Freedland and the Chronicle endlessly derided Jewish groups that supported Corbyn, such as Jewish Voice for Labour, Just Jews and Jewdas, with antisemitic insinuations that they were the “wrong kind of Jews”. Freedland argued that strenuous criticism of Israel was antisemitic by definition because Israel lay at the heart of any proper Jew’s identity.

New video from #JustJews: Jews have never spoken with just one voice. #BoardofDeputies #ManyJewishVoices pic.twitter.com/KSpyy8Sqcw

— Just Jews (@JustJewsUK) August 6, 2020

It did not therefore matter whether critics could show that Israel was constitutionally racist – a state similar to apartheid South Africa – as many scholars have done. Freedland argued that Jews and Israel were all but indistinguishable, and to call Israel racist was to malign Jews who identified with it. (Apparently unaware of the Pandora’s box such a conflation opened up, he rightly – if inconsistently – claimed that it was antisemitic for anyone to make the same argument in reverse: blaming Jews for Israel’s actions.)

Freedland pushed hard for Labour to be forced to adopt that new, troubling definition of antisemitism, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that shifted the focus away from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel. Under this new definition, claims that Israel was “a racist endeavour” – a view shared by some prominent Israeli scholars – was treated as definitive proof of antisemitism.

One-party politics

If anyone gave the weaponisation of antisemitism against Corbyn an air of bipartisan respectability it was Freedland and his newspaper, the Guardian. They made sure Corbyn was hounded by the antisemitism claims while he was Labour leader, overshadowing everything else he did. That confected narrative neutralised his lifelong activism as an anti-racist, it polluted his claims to be a principled politician fighting for the underdog.

Freedland and the Guardian not only helped to breathe life into the antisemitism allegations but they made them sound credible to large sections of the Labour membership too.

The rightwing media presented the Corbyn project as a traitorous, hard-left move, in cahoots with Putin’s Russia, to undermine Britain. Meanwhile, Freedland and the Guardian destroyed Corbyn from his liberal-left flank by portraying him and his supporters as a mob of leftwing Nazis-in-waiting.

Corbynism, in Freedland’s telling, became a “sect”, a cult of dangerous leftists divorced from political realities. And then, with astonishing chutzpah, Freedland blamed Corbyn’s failure at the ballot box – a failure Freedland and the Guardian had helped to engineer – as a betrayal of the poor and the vulnerable.

This isn’t just a defeat, it’s a repudiation of Corbynism. Now Labour needs to ditch the politics of the sect. My column https://t.co/cV3LlRMyED

— Jonathan Freedland (@Freedland) December 13, 2019

Remember, Corbyn lost by less than 3,000 votes in a handful of Labour marginals in 2017. Despite all this, Freedland and the Guardian now pretend that they played no role in destroying Corbyn, they behave as if their hands are clean.

But Freedland’s actions, like those of his newspaper, had one inevitable outcome. They ushered in the only alternative to Corbyn: a government of the hard right led by Boris Johnson.

Freedland’s choice to assist Johnson by undermining Corbyn – and, worse, to do so on the basis of a disinformation campaign – makes him culpable, as it does the Guardian, in everything that flowed from his decision. But Freedland, like the Guardian, still pontificates on the horrors of the Johnson government, as if they share no blame for helping Johnson win power.

In his latest column, Freedland writes: “The guiding principle [of the Johnson government] seems to be brazen cronyism, coupled with the arrogance of those who believe they are untouchable and that rules are for little people.”

Why should the Tories under Johnson be so “arrogant”, so sure they are “untouchable”, that “rules are for little people”, and that there is no political price to be paid for “cronyism”?

Might it not have much to do with seeing Freedland and the Guardian assist so willingly in the corporate media’s efforts to destroy the only political alternative to “rule by the rich” Toryism? Might the Johnson government have grown more confident knowing that the ostensibly liberal-left media were just as determined as the rightwing media to undermine the only politician on offer who stood for precisely the opposite political values they did?

Might it not reflect an understanding by Johnson and his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, that Freedland and the Guardian have played a hugely significant part in ensuring that Britain effectively has a one-party state – and that when it returns to being a formal two-party state, as it seems to be doing once again now that Starmer is running the Labour party, both those parties will offer the same establishment-worshipping agenda, even if in two mildly different flavours?

The Guardian, like the rest of the corporate media, has derided and vilified as “populism” the emergence of any real political alternative.

The leaked report offered a brief peek behind the curtain at how politics in Britain – and elsewhere – really works. It showed that, during Corbyn’s time as leader, the political battle lines became intensely real. They were no longer the charade of a phoney fight between left and right, between Labour and Conservative.

Instead, the battle shifted to where it mattered, to where it might finally make change possible: for control of the Labour party so that it might really represent the poor and vulnerable against rule by the rich. Labour became the battleground, and the Guardian made all too clear where its true loyalties lie.

jonathan-cook.net

Labour Party officials undermined Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership by trying to lose races and exploiting an anti-Semitism smear campaign, an internal report shows.

An internal investigation has found that top Labour Party officials sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, including by trying to lose the 2017 UK election. The report also suggests that the same people who tried to undermine Corbyn were themselves the ones who were slow to respond to allegations of anti-Semitism — another weapon that was used against Corbyn’s leadership.

Guest: Asa Winstanley, journalist with The Electronic Intifada.

thegrayzone.com

Johnson has transformed the Conservative Party into one that follows him in virtual lockstep. A similar situation has occurred with the Republican Party in the United States. It has been transformed into a party that worships Donald Trump as a cult leader. Traditional Republicans like former governors John Kasich, William Weld, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Ridge, Christine Todd Whitman, and other former governors, senators, and US House members no longer have a political home in what has become the “Trump Party,” one that eschews the policies of past Republican presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and George H. W. Bush.

Britain’s other major party, Labor, returned to its traditional socialist roots under leader Jeremy Corbyn. A series of “New Labor” leaders, including Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Ed Milliband, transformed Labor into a pro-multinational corporation and free trade party barely distinguishable from the traditional Tories. After being elected leader of Labor in 2015, Corbyn faced a media and political disinformation onslaught that called him everything from a Communist to an anti-Semite. That barrage of lies resulted in Labor suffering its worst defeat since 1935 in the December 12 general election. Chomping at the bit to restore Labor to its pro-corporate/pro-Israel past, former Prime Minister Blair warned against the “hard left” policies of “Corbynism.”

Blair drove additional knives into Corbyn in stating that Corbyn “personified an idea, a brand of quasi-revolutionary socialism, mixing far left economic policy with deep hostility to western foreign policy, which never has appealed to traditional Labor voters, never will appeal and represented for them a combination of misguided ideology and terminal ineptitude that they found insulting.

No sentient political party goes into an election with a leader who has a net approval rating of -40 percent.”

Yet, it was Blair who was behind the concerted media and propaganda campaign against Corbyn. Corbyn suffered from the same sort of insidious attack from Labor’s right-wing tendency as that suffered by past traditional baseline socialist Labor politicians like Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson, Michael Foot, and Tony Benn. Individuals like Blair and his ilk conveniently forget that the Labor Party was formed at the turn of the last century by colleagues of Karl Marx, someone who definitely saw no place in a workers’ party for those that sought their exploitation.

After the end of World War II, Labor’s right-wing faction saw to it that any Labor leader that voiced opposition to NATO and American foreign policy was drummed out of the party’s leadership ranks. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s opposition to the Vietnam War helped seal his fate, as did Bevan’s initial opposition to Britain’s nuclear weapons. Foot favored unilateral disarmament, resulting in Kinnock taking over as Labor leader after the party’s electoral defeat in 1983. Benn always remembered Labor’s socialist past and it prevented him from ever becoming prime minister. Not only did Britain’s MI-5 and MI-6 intelligence services constantly place Benn under surveillance, but the US Central Intelligence Agency propaganda, distributed in British media, made false allegations that Benn was a Soviet KGB agent. The same sort of CIA disinformation targeted Wilson, Foot, and Bevan.

When Corbyn attempted to restore Labor’s former mayor of London Ken Livingstone to Labor party ranks, Corbyn was accused of being an anti-Semite, merely because Livingstone compared some of Israel’s policies against the Palestinians to those of the Nazis in occupied nations. Livingstone, nicknamed “Red Ken” by his detractors, was seen as part of the same Labor left faction as Corbyn. There are a number of Labor officials vying to succeed Corbyn. Although they have been part of Corbyn’s team, most of these heirs apparent are negotiating for support from the Blairite faction. Chief among them is Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s Shadow Brexit Secretary, who the anti-Corbyn faction favors as the new Labor leader.

Benn’s recognition of Labor’s Marxist roots was demonstrated by the following passage:

“The Communist Manifesto, and many other works of Marxist philosophy, have always profoundly influenced the British labor movement and the British Labor Party, and have strengthened our understanding and enriched our thinking. It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labor Party without Marx as it would be to establish university faculties of astronomy, anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously.”

Australia’s governing Liberal-National Coalition has steadily moved to the extremist right under two fundamentalist Christian prime ministers – Tony Abbott and the current prime minister, Scott Morrison. Similar to the leadership of the US Republican Party and the Conservative Party of Canada, the “Coalition,” as it is known, has become a home for xenophobes and climate change deniers. Morrison’s ignorance of the dangers of climate change were recently on full display as the hottest temperatures in recorded meteorological history were registered in Australia. As Australians with respiratory and other health issues suffered from the extreme heat and as a massive outbreak of brush fires swept Australia, Morrison decided to cut short his mid-December family vacation in Hawaii. Unlike past Coalition prime ministers, including Malcolm Fraser and Malcolm Turnbull, Morrison is totally beholden to Australia’s mining interests, including the coal industry. As far as Morrison is concerned, there is no climate change and Australians suffering from its effects can be damned.

As for the Australian Labor Party, it has not exercised a socialist mandate since 1975, when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was ousted in a constitutional coup brought about by the CIA, Australia’s security services, and the Australian Governor-General. Never again would there be a Labor government like that of postwar Prime Minister Ben Chifley, who attempted to nationalize Australia’s banks, or Whitlam, who moved Australia into a more non-aligned foreign policy. Today, Australia’s Labor and Coalition parties differ only slightly in foreign policy and seek campaign donations from the same vested business interests and consortiums.

The steady drift of traditional conservative parties to the far right and neo-fascism and the insistence by traditional social democratic and working-class parties to adopt pro-business and anti-labor positions is why large blocs of voters feel abandoned. It is precisely because labor and social democratic parties have purged from their dogma any mention of state control of utilities, transit, health care, and other key public sectors that they are now at their lowest electoral strength in recent history in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, and Finland. And it is because traditional conservative parties have eschewed bedrock principles of conservation and environmental protection; multilateralism as practiced by postwar conservative leaders; and inflation-free economic stability that has many conservatives wandering aimlessly between the neo-fascists who have taken over conservative parties and progressive parties that do not seem to stand for anything.

There’s a wildly under-appreciated clip of news footage from Thursday’s general election in the UK that, now that everyone’s had some time to emotionally process the emotional fallout from that depressing night, needs more attention.

Labour MP and chronic left-puncher Jess Phillips appeared on Channel 4 to talk about how devastated she was about the news of exit polls showing her party’s crushing defeat, except the cameras switched on before she was prepared and caught her in the middle of a joyful chuckle. It took several seconds and the overt reminders from the show’s hosts to put on a “straight face” and act emotional before she could conceal her cheery mood as Corbyn’s Labour leadership was trampled underfoot by odious empire lackey Boris Johnson.

“Good evening Jess,” said the program’s host Krishnan Guru-Murthy. “How are you feeling as these results unfold?”

Watching the stumbling improvisation that came next feels like walking into a room full of awkward silence when your supposed friends had just been saying mean things about you, or seeing your spouse conspicuously jump away from an attractive coworker when you drop by the office.

Phillips, still unaware that the cameras were now rolling, did not interrupt the delighted guffaw she’d been enjoying.

“Can you hear me Jess Phillips?” the host asked over nervous tittering from the audience. “It’s Krishnan.”

“I can hear you, sorry,” Phillips said after a moment, literally putting her hand over her mouth for a few seconds to hide her giant shit-eating grin.

“Straight face,” said Guru-Murthy, who then apparently realized that this was a bizarre thing to say and added “Actually you don’t have to have a straight face, umm, on this show. Umm… what are you thinking?”

“Oh are you talking to me now? Sorry that wasn’t clear,” said Phillips after a pause, her face now finally somewhat straightened out. “Sorry, I’m really tired. What I’m thinking is… it’s, it’s just totally devastating isn’t it? It’s totally devastating that all the people that I see every day, they’re gonna have nowhere to turn. I mean, I should probably do that thing where we all pretend that we’re gonna wait and see if the results are better than we thought, but it feels like a kick in the stomach.”

Jess Phillips had not been acting like a woman who felt devastated, and she had certainly not been acting like a woman who felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach. Jess Phillips had been acting like a woman on her third strawberry daiquiri down at the pub with a couple of hilarious mates.

“I’m just waiting actually, I mean, for your thoughts,” Guru-Murthy said after an awkward pause. “I mean, you look emotional, and upset, and that’s understandable.”

Guru-Murthy was lying. At no time did Phillips look either emotional or upset.

“Jess it’s just that you look very emotional, and we know you, we know you’re a normal, sane person, so it’s very confusing,” host Katherine Ryan bullshitted when Phillips struggled to hear what Guru-Murthy had said.

“I am very emotional,” Phillips lied. “But not just for me or for the Labour Party. I’m emotional for the people that the Labour Party was invented to help.”

The audience, probably relieved to have a taste of something that isn’t intensely awkward and disturbing, erupted in applause.

“Enter Jess Phillips. She backs Trident, austerity and Israel. She hates Corbyn, Williamson and Leftists in general. She doesn’t believe in class politics or ideology, but she does talk about gender all the time, and says ‘fuck’ a lot…” https://t.co/oSj7kNytVm via @offguardian0

— Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush (@WarmongerHodges) 16 марта 2019 г.

For months the imperial media have been loudly anointing Phillips as the establishment choice to replace the unabashedly socialism-minded Corbyn, as Kit Knightly described for Off-Guardian back in March. This coronation-by-media continues today with outlets ranging from The Guardian to Daily Mail to Telegraph placing her on the short list to assume leadership of the Labour Party over the last couple of days.

After an anti-imperialist, pro-Palestinian socialist was magically thrown into role of Opposition leader by an extraordinary accident in 2015, Phillips leapt into her role as outspoken Corbyn critic by publicly telling him “I won’t knife you in the back, I’ll knife you in the front.” Despite this vow, Phillips proceeded to steadfastly knife Corbyn in the back by fanning the flames of incredibly disingenuous smears against his leadership, elevating the imaginary Labour antisemitism crisis to such a cartoonish extent that earlier this year she proclaimed that a tweet saying “Palestine Lives” from Young Labour “is antisemitic and it has to stop.” This malicious termiting continued into the final days before the general election, with Phillips criticizing Corbyn for not responding adequately to claims about antisemitism in the Labour Party by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis.

Phillips’ hot mic moment, and the mad scramble of the show’s perception-managing pundits to clean it up, provides us with a brief glimpse behind the phony persona that the empire’s political/media class put on for us. Should Bernie Sanders by some Corbyn-like miracle overcome the rigged primaries and receive the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, we may be absolutely certain we’ll see a campaign to sabotage his run and force a loss to Trump in the US elections next year. And we may be absolutely certain they’ll cackle about it just as Jess Phillips did when she thought the cameras were off.

These people aren’t like you and me. They don’t care about truth, and they don’t care about human beings. They rose to the positions they occupy within media and politics by consistently demonstrating that they’ll do whatever it takes to advance the interests of the oligarchic empire while giving the people the bare minimum possible to prevent an insurrection. They’re where they’re at precisely because they don’t care about truth or people. They care about their own dominance within our sick dominator culture, and when they achieve it, they smile, and they celebrate, and they laugh.

Sometimes the guardians of empire make little mistakes. Sometimes they accidentally allow an anti-imperialist to lead one of their major parties. Sometimes they accidentally get caught in mid-guffaw when they’re meant to be pretending to be heartbroken. Whenever those holes appear it’s important to pay attention to them, and to shove as many rays of light through them as possible before they are closed.

medium.com

A measure of just how tumultuous and fast moving politics has now become in the U.K. is that a Labour Party conference in Brighton that had taken on the character of a Shakespearean drama — complete with a challenge to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership over Brexit and an aborted attempt to unseat his deputy, Tom Watson, over his unending plotting and scheming – was quickly overshadowed by the Greek tragedy that unfolded at the same time in the country’s Supreme Court in London.

Johnson’s Judicial Caning

For it was here that Boris Johnson, who’d flounced into Downing Street with no mandate and a Churchillian flourish just a few weeks ago, pledging to “finally deliver Brexit” for the British people and free them of their EU chains, received a judicial caning that has placed him on course to being the shortest serving prime minister in the country’s history.

Euripides himself could not have imagined such a vertiginous fall from grace.

Presiding Judge Lady Hall, Sept. 24, 2019. (YouTube)

With the astoundingly unanimous approval of all 11 Supreme Court justices, presiding Judge Lady Hale described Johnson’s actions in suspending (proroguing) Parliament for five weeks with the consent of the Queen as “unlawful, void and of no effect.”

Not since Oliver Cromwell went toe to toe with King Charles I in the mid-17^thcentury has there been such a hard-fought constitutional battle in Britain over whether, in the last analysis, the country is to be ruled by executive fiat or by parliamentary democracy.

We all know how Cromwell’s struggle with Charles I turned out, but if they should ever forget (hard Brexiteers here take note) all they need do is go down to Westminster in the heart of London and find Cromwell’s statue outside the House of Commons.

In upholding the primacy of Parliament over the executive, Lady Hale with her Supreme Court did what Cromwell did with a sword and an axe. She did so much to the consternation of Johnson and his hard Brexit acolytes, whose response was on a par with Kenneth Williams’ immortal line in the 1964 British comedy romp Carry On Cleo. To wit: “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”

Johnson’s Defiance

Boris Johnson. (EPA-EFE/MAXIM SHIPENKOV)

Johnson and company responded with stridency and defiance to the ruling, continuing their People vs the Establishment shtick as a way to try and force through a hard, no-deal Brexit with destination disaster capitalism in mind. In New York for the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Johnson spoke glowingly of a U.S.-U.K. trade deal to replace EU membership.  Johnson’s ability to leave the EU at the current Oct. 31 deadline, with or without a deal with the EU, is anybody’s guess.

Leaving without a deal would be in defiance of a law passed earlier this month requiring Britain seek an extended deadline if no deal is in place. However, Johnson’s willingness to even try to leave without a deal reflects the extent to which democracy in Britain is undergoing a stress test of mammoth scale.

The Supreme Court ruling was also met with rage by Britain’s populist right wing press. The  Daily Mail’s  front page ton Wednesday would not have been out of place in the Nazi Party newspaper,Völkischer Beobachter, effectively declaring the 11 Supreme Court judges “enemies of the people.”

Statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the House of Commons in Westminster, London. (Eluveitie, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The immediate consequence of the ruling was Parliament being resumed on Wednesday by Speaker of the House John Bercow. He bore witness to a bravura performance by Attorney General Geoffrey Cox who had signed off on the legalities of Johnson’s prorogation and who took center stage to explain himself to the House.

Rather than fight the rear-guard action of a man whose resignation had, along with that of the prime minister, been anticipated by many in light of the Supreme Court ruling, Cox went on the attack with the force of the Red Army at the gates of Berlin, fighting off wave after wave of attack at the despatch box. It was parliamentary oratory at its finest, and will have done much to restore confidence to the Brexit ranks.

During his opening address to the Commons, Cox announced that the government intends to hold another vote on staging a snap general election, safe in the knowledge that unless a no deal Brexit is taken off the table by Johnson beforehand (and with it an  extension beyond Oct. 31), neither Labour nor the other opposition parties can possibly support it.

This is a crucial precondition given that Johnson, in his capacity as prime minister, enjoys the privilege of setting the date of any such election. With this in mind, clearly it would be in his interests to set that date after Oct. 31 and thus take the U.K. out of the EU without a deal by default.

Johnson appeared later in the evening of this first session of Parliament after the Supreme Court ruling. And just like his attorney general he was in no mind to utter words of contrition despite having been judged to have acted unlawfully. He went on the attack against Corbyn and the other opposition parties, accusing them of cowardice, of blocking the will of the British people, while challenging them to table a motion of no confidence and trigger a snap early general election.

Corbyn’s studied excoriation of Johnson’s conduct and integrity in response, which was only superseded by his chilling vocal exegesis of the Government’s Operation Yellowhammer document, which war-gamed the likely economic consequences of a no deal Brexit. It makes grim reading, predicting chaos at the ports, rising energy prices, shortages of some medicines and medical supplies, and the admission that the those on low incomes will be disproportionately impacted.

Corbyn Survives at Labour Conference

Jeremy Corbyn. (David Holt via Flickr)

Compared to the drama that unfolded in the Supreme Court and the first session of Parliament upon its resumption, the Labour Party’s annual conference was a decidedly benign affair, despite the ructions and political skulduggery that ensued.

The attempt by his allies on the party ruling’s National Executive Council (NEC) to abolish the position of deputy leader, thus rendering Tom Watson powerless, backfired spectacularly; with the outpouring of protest from the Blairite wing of the party and the media compelling Corbyn to intervene to get the NEC to row back tabling such a controversial motion.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, it was quickly followed by the publication of a damning memo recently sent to Corbyn and his team by one of his former’s key aides, setting out his intention to leave his post by the end of the year, while mounting withering criticism of the leadership team.

The Watson imbroglio and the Fisher memo, made it appear that the final Labour Party conference prior to one of the most important general elections in modern British history was destined to go down as one of the party’s most schismatic and shambolic. This was before the attempt by the Remain wing of the party to push through a motion that would have committed the party to a clear remain position on Brexit going into that election.

It amounted to a challenge to Corbyn’s authority, given that he and the party had up till then embraced a position on Brexit of first a general election, followed by a special conference (in the event that Labour won said election) to thrash out the party’s official policy on Brexit as it entered negotiations with the EU. This alongside the pledge to put any deal reached with Brussels to the British people in the form of a second referendum.

Corbyn managed to prevail and defeat this motion, thus solidifying his leadership. It was a key moment – one that had the effect of breathing new morale-boosting energy into the conference as the party reunited around its leader and his nuanced efforts at straddling a most precarious Brexit-Remain divide. It is a divide that has driven a stake into the heart of social cohesion across the country’s regions and constituent nations.

Whither Brexit?

The crisis of neoliberalism (or market fundamentalism) that swept the world in 2008 was in the U.K. compounded by savage Tory austerity. In working class communities battered and bruised most by this mass experiment in human despair, the resulting anger went some way to producing Brexit in 2016. This in turn sparked a political crisis, which in its turn has given birth to the present constitutional crisis.

What can be said with certainty is that any celebration over the Supreme Court ruling as a portent of the end of Johnson’s government is as premature as the confidence of Johnson’s supporters that his hard Brexit stridency will ultimately prevail.

As Cromwell presciently warned: “Do not trust the cheering, for those persons would shout as much if you or I were going to be hanged.” Cromwell, of course, later went on to actually dissolve Parliament and install himself in power as a military dictator.

“History repeats, the first as tragedy, then as farce,” Karl Marx reminds us. Brexit has now taken the UK into the realms of tragedy. We are yet to find out what farce is going to look like.

consortiumnews.com

The point here is that the chaos in London is no parochial British, Brexit affair. It reflects something wider at work. Recognition of ‘plate’ movement already has been politically leveraged in the US (by Trump), and almost certainly the similar symptoms will present themselves across Europe too. These symptoms are here now (though they may not always be recognised as such, as one commentator already has noted – see later).

“The last Conservative MP in the seat of Newcastle-under-Lyme was Charles Donaldson-Hudson”, Daniel Capurro writes. “A JP [a local Judge] and member of the landed gentry, he held it from 1880 to 1885. Yet, when the autumn election finally arrives, Newcastle [a Labour bastion, ever since] will be one of the Tory party’s top target seats. The targeting of such seats is not the madness it might first appear. It is, in fact, part of Boris Johnson and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings’ masterplan for the future of the Conservative Party”.

A little back-context is required: In the late 1990s, the then leader of the Labour Party started to move the Party away from its roots in the Trade Union and labour rights movement, towards a ‘Washington Consensus’, neo-liberal stance, as epitomised by Tony Blair (who was drawing on the then Clinton winning experience). Labour had begun to understand that the endorsement of Wall Street and the City of London was a perquisite for any return to Office, and that in any case, the factory-based politics of the past, in this shiny, new cosmopolitan world of the urban and suburban élite, simply would not propel the movement into power.

Labour, at that moment, wished to become a typical Euro Centre-Left party, representing middle class voters who wanted to display their decency by voting for a party that espouses some, albeit quite restricted, notion of ‘social concern’.

But, as the preoccupations of the élite, metropolitan consciousness turned more and more ‘globalist’-espousing ‘disadvantaged’ groups, such as ethnic minorities, women, and gender non-conformists, rather than show empathy for the stresses of ordinary working men and women (whom they came to regard with contempt, as Ludite backwoodsmen and racists), so the Party’s internal gap opened wide.

This is the opening Cummings and Johnson have espied. The new demographics they believe, require rewriting the electoral landscape. Out is the Conservative electoral coalition of the recent past, which married urban and suburban social liberals with rural small-c conservatives (a marriage which was itself a cause of an internal tension, not dissimilar to that in the Labour Party – and as witnessed by the Tory 21 ‘Remainer’ rebels who were expelled from the Party). Centrism, in short, is no longer seen as advantageous. And, in comes a working-class, socially-conservative politics targeted at non-graduates in the Midlands and the North of England – i.e. at the Sixty-percenters as a whole.

“In this viewing, an extraordinary array of Labour seats [most of whom voted Leave] from Wrexham and Wakefield to Stoke-on-Trent Central and North could tumble into the Tory column on election night, and send Mr Johnson into Downing Street with a commanding majority”, Capurro suggests. Yes, the price may involve the loss of Conservative seats in London and the South East, but in practice the former electoral prize contested by both the main parties – the urban middle class – is itself suffering stress from globalist dynamics, as it bifurcates into the truly rich élite, and a struggling, belt-tightening Middle Class.

The Establishment élite sees the threat: This might – in the long game – end with the enthronement of the politics of the ‘deplorables’, and the eclipse (or ‘obsolescence’ in President Putin’s terminology) of liberalism.

Hence the bitter counter-revolution being mounted by the Establishment in the UK Parliament and the media. And hence the deep Establishment distrust of Johnson, for although he may represent the epitome of Establishment in one sense, he has always tried to position himself as the archetypical ‘outsider’.

The Northern working-class votes are those which Johnson wants to capture most dearly. Dominic Cummings knows from the ‘Leave’ campaign, and from Trump’s successes in US states not traditionally regarded as voting ‘Red’, that a focus on the culture ‘war’ – on issues such as transgender rights and ‘political correctness’ – can mobilise today’s voters, more than traditional family party affiliations. Cummings precisely intends to lever the toxicity of globalism not just with the ‘deplorables’, but with a Middle Class increasingly fearful of slipping into the abyss.

There are many problems to this evolving contestation of prevalent liberal millenarianism. A major problem is much more subtle, and less amenable to solution, than just the outbreak of ‘culture war’ – and it applies to all western economies: How – in this post-heavy-industry era – to maintain large-scale employment particularly for those with low (or no) skills.

Globalism unquestionably has contributed to the off-shoring of jobs to other parts of the globe, but the reality is that many of those jobs are not coming back ‘home’. They are assimilated elsewhere. They are lost for good.

The ‘new normal’ being touted by the US Administration is one that is not particularly concerned to re-capture, and bring home, mundane manufacturing processes. It wants for the US, the ultra high-tech end of manufacturing mainly, or only. This, it views, will represent the commanding heights of the new economics. And this view evidently is orientated more towards the objective to maintain US hegemony, than rather than for concern for the welfare of the US people. Such an economy – even if it were feasible to achieve – concentrated in the ultra high-tech, would face the issue of the 20% of Americans who then would become ‘unnecessary’ – surplus to needs, as it were. Do we really want to go there …?

Globalisation has had a great deal to do with this, but the decline of the factory-based economy in the West lies right at the very heart of our troubled political landscape (as Trump’s appeal to the ‘deplorables’ from a stance on the Nationalist-Right, rather than the globalist Left, strongly suggests).

Thibault Muzergues, European director of the International Republican Institute, warns that a structural divorce between the people and their representatives is in play. This happens once state institutions are viewed as a brake to preserve a status quo that is already in dispute, and in crisis. In other words, the Establishment counter action, and its rhetorical flourishes (i.e. describing the prorogation of the UK parliament as (literally) a coup d’état) in order to facilitate the crushing of the threat of ‘deplorablism’, precisely sets the ground for more bitter internal European strife.

“Some extol the unwavering will of the British leader [Johnson] to do what is necessary (within the limits of his constitutional rights, at least as long as the British courts will not block him) to put an end to the debate on Brexit by respecting the popular will … whilst others [in juxtaposition], praise the virtue of the [Italian] President for saving parliamentary democracy – in the face of the risk of a Salvini government … [coming to power].

“In both cases we are confronted with a conflict between direct democracy and parliamentary democracy, but this is not necessarily what is played out in the minds of actors, let alone citizens. For them, it is not so much a crisis of the institutions; but rather that of a crisis around Brexit, or in the person of Matteo Salvini.

“The problem is that the politicians in each camp (and with them their supporters) will be able to radically change their discourse on this question of legitimacy according to their own interests …

“This is a very dangerous game because it prepares the excessive politicization of institutions in a context of polarization of debates, and their use for partisan ends only – which undermines their legitimacy a little more. Without these institutions to manage or even settle our political conflicts, there is little that separates us from civil war or, as Hobbes described almost four centuries ago, from bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. The slope we are currently following is therefore necessarily dangerous.”

But in comparing Johnson to Viktor Orban —as Austrian newspaper Der Standard did, with its London correspondent writing “Johnson and his henchmen clearly think Brexit is more important than democracy and the rule of law”; with Germany’s international public broadcaster DW calling “Boris Johnson, the UK dictator,” and Yascha Mounk in France’s Le Monde newspaper writing that suspending Parliament constituted the “most flagrant attack on democracy that Britain has ever known”, there is a distinct whiff of that old Viet Nam axiom of ‘destroying a village to ‘save’ a village’ metamorphosing into one of having a constitutionally legitimate British government overturned and destroyed, in order ‘to save democracy itself’ (and to save Britain from elections which might not produce the ‘correct’ outcome’).

If populism blighted “the most entrenched of democracies,” said an editorial in Le Monde, it “would be terrible news for the entire continent.” Well … welcome to the new Grand Inquisition: Does the prisoner (Johnson) confess before the Holy Inquisition that Parliament was suspended for heretical motives; or will he deny it, and face being burnt at the stake?

Rachel SHABI

he BBC’s flagship current affairs program Newsnight described the challenge facing the British Parliament this week using footage from the Avengers: Endgame. Over the film’s rousing soundtrack, presenter Mark Urban proclaimed, “Whichever side you’re on, one thing’s clear: The final battle for Brexit begins when Parliament gathers its forces on Tuesday.”

Leaving aside the cheesy melodrama, or the questions this analogy raises—does that mean Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK Labour party, is Captain America in this scenario, with Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson as the evil Thanos?—it is undeniably true that Brexit, the issue that has paralyzed British politics for three years, is now hurtling towards an all-out showdown. On Tuesday Parliament returned from its summer break with only a week left to halt the Conservative government’s reckless drive towards a no-deal Brexit—which will happen by default if Britain and the EU don’t agree to an exit deal by October 31.

The full explanation of how Britain came up against this critical deadline is complicated, including both a badly led Conservative Party with no majority in Parliament, and a bitterly divisive referendum that ended with a narrow majority in favor of leaving the EU—but with no specific instruction as to how that would happen, leaving parliamentarians battling to define what Brexit should look like. Throw into the mix the fact that, according to grudgingly published government reports, every version of exiting the EU—from the hard “no deal” to the softest possible departure—will leave Britain worse off. Yet it’s also undeniable that 17.4 million people voted for Brexit on the understanding that the referendum result would be upheld.

But there is also a more immediate reason time has run out: Boris Johnson, currently playing the lead in the UK franchise of Trump-and-friends, is breaking all the nice, polite conventions upon which Britain’s unwritten constitution depends. He has prorogued Parliament—meaning he intends to shut it down from next week until mid-October—right smack in the middle of this huge political crisis. Johnson and his ministers have also suggested that his government would not abide by any legislation Parliament may speedily pass in response extending the Brexit deadline to avoid crashing out of the EU. In doing so, he has put his government above the law, setting a terrible precedent: In the future why should any politician play by the rules. And, like a Mafia boss—albeit an immensely privileged, privately educated version—he has threatened to deselect rebel Conservatives who seek to help block a damaging No Deal.

With Vote Leave’s dark-arts tactician Dominic Cummings installed as his chief strategist, perhaps Johnson is actually trying to goad politicians into defying him. He would then get to fight any ensuing snap election as the representative of the people’s wishes (to leave the EU come what may) against a Parliament determined to thwart him. Whether or not this is true, Johnson has succeeded in galvanizing a determined opposition, even among those previously locked in battle over the best way forward. House of Commons speaker John Bercow, who is supposed to be politically neutral, called Johnson’s suspension of Parliament a “constitutional outrage.” A cross-party group of politicians, including former Conservative prime minister John Major, is taking legal action against Johnson’s prorogation, seeking to reverse it. Rebel Conservative MPs seem set to vote against the government in support of an emergency bill proposed in Parliament today, which would compel the prime minister to delay Brexit.

And outside Parliament, protesters gathered within hours of Johnson’s prorogation last week, and has been a strong daily presence ever since. The prime minister struggled to speak over their chants of “stop the coup” in a speech he made on the steps of Downing Street yesterday. One source from inside the protest coordination said: “This has happened organically, all over the country. Campaigns…go to great lengths to mobilize people in this way—but when something changes in the political atmosphere and people are really worried, it just happens. There are not many moments like that and we are living one now.”

Labour leader Corbyn has described Johnson’s shut down as a “smash and grab on our democracy”—while encouraging his own party politicians to support the street protests. Labour has for months been divided over Brexit. The leadership’s commitment to honor the referendum result with a softer “jobs-first Brexit” put it at odds with both the membership and the party’s MPs—as well as the majority of its voters, who polls show wanted Labour to back a second referendum vote on any Brexit deal (which Corbyn has now committed to). But the party is now at one over the need to counter Johnson’s antidemocratic moves. Meanwhile, Corbyn last week convened a cross-party meeting of opposition leaders, which united around a legislative route to block Johnson—boosting the Labour leader’s credibility in the midst of a crisis. Since then, he has vowed to do whatever it takes to “pull our country back from the brink” and is repeatedly associating Johnson with Trump: The two are friends, naturally, and of course Trump has tweeted praise of the new British prime minister and attacked the Labour leader. Corbyn used a recent speech in the Northwestern city of Salford to accuse Johnson of “dancing to Trump’s tune.” The US president is overwhelmingly unpopular in the UK, while there are fears that a post-Brexit deal with Trump would undermine Britain’s food standards and its treasured National Health Service.

Meanwhile, the wheels are coming off Britain: The pound is now at its lowest rate against the dollar in decades, health and food industry professionals alike are warning of critical shortages in the event of a no-deal exit, EU citizens resident in the UK and businesses are in despair over the uncertainty—and the divisive mood in the country is darkening by the day. This is the Brexit endgame: the mother of all Parliaments locked into the mother of all battles. But at the same time, it is the British version of a now global struggle: facing down a regressive, authoritarian, oligarch-backed far-right political project—which in the UK iteration is using Brexit as its delivery mechanism.

thenation.com

Johnson, like Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, favors a no-deal “hard exit” for the United Kingdom from the European Union. It does not matter to Johnson, Farage, and their supporters how the rashness of this policy will affect the British economy, British workers, and the stability of Northern Ireland’s border with Ireland.

Like his political doppelganger in Washington – Donald Trump – Johnson is an inveterate liar and fabulist. Johnson was fired from The Times of London for fabricating a quote that appeared in a front-page story. Johnson also concocted stories for his second newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. In 2004, Johnson was fired by Conservative Party leader Michael Howard after he lied to Howard about an affair with a columnist for The Spectator. Johnson continued to lie while he served as the mayor of London.

Johnson’s purge of the Conservative Party hierarchy and his appointment of his sycophants to top Tory party and government positions is not much different than Trump’s own purge of “Never Trumpers” from the Republican Party.

Johnson also mirrors his political twin across the Atlantic in being an avowed racist. Johnson has called Africans “picaninnies,” stated that Africans have “watermelon smiles,” called a group of young black singers “AIDS-ridden choristers,” and sees centuries of British colonial rule in Africa has being governed by a series of “big white chiefs.” Johnson pines for the days of the British Empire and his post-EU strategy for Britain is to attempt an economic trading bloc recreation of a British-dominated Commonwealth of Nations.

Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament for five weeks was intended to forestall any move to put political brakes on the United Kingdom’s hard exit from the EU scheduled for October 31. Even if a majority of the House of Commons voted to curb Johnson’s government’s enthusiasm for a hard Brexit on October 31, chief Brexit minister Michael Gove suggested that Johnson’s government might simply ignore any legislation passed by Parliament.

Prorogations of Westminster have occurred in the past, but only for brief periods of time, usually less than a week, and normally before snap or scheduled general elections. Opposition Members of Parliament see Johnson’s move differently, with some calling it a “coup” and others likening it to the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany that spelled the end for the Weimar constitution and even King Charles I’s prorogation in 1628 that introduced Charles’s “Personal Rule.” Former British Prime Minister John Major, who opposes Brexit and prorogation, reminded Johnson of what befell Charles I for his act. After Oliver Cromwell’s republican forces defeated Charles I, the king was found guilty of treason and was beheaded.

While no one currently is demanding “off with his head” when it comes to Johnson’s prorogation, there are a number of court battles taking place throughout the UK to declare Johnson’s actions null and void. One argument is that Johnson and the Privy Council, led over by the pro-Brexit Lord President Jacob Rees-Mogg, lied to Queen Elizabeth II in receiving her Royal Assent for prorogation. Opponents of proroguing Parliament are arguing before the courts that Johnson and Rees-Mogg failed to inform the Queen of widespread cross-party opposition to prorogation by a majority of Parliament.

The prorogation order leading to a hard Brexit was condemned by Conservatives who favor remaining in the EU, as well as by officials of the Labor; Liberal Democrats; Green; Scottish, Welsh, Manx, and Cornish nationalist; Change UK, Northern Ireland Social Democratic and Labor, and Sinn Fein political parties. John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons stated, “We cannot have a situation in which Parliament is shut down. We are a democratic society and Parliament will be heard,” adding, “I will fight with every breath in my body to stop that happening.” Some opposition MPs toyed with the idea of Parliament locking themselves inside the houses of Westminster, while others called for Parliament reconvening in another location.

As Johnson and his allies dug in, it was more apparent that their “base” only consists of white nationalists in the south of England who followed the extremist policies of Johnson, Farage, and English Defense League neo-fascist founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as “Tommy Robinson.”

The political right-wing in British-style parliamentary governments are fond of proroguing parliament to achieve their objectives. In 2008, the Canadian Liberal Party and the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) decided to take advantage of the ruling Conservative Party’s minority status to announce a deal to form a coalition government and replace the Tories led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper after a successful no-confidence vote in parliament. Although the Tories had increased the number of their seats in the October 14, 2008 election and held a plurality in Parliament, they were still in a minority rule status. The proposed Liberal-NDP coalition had the parliamentary support of the Bloc Québécois and the political support of the Green Party.

Just prior to holding a no-confidence vote, Harper received Royal Assent from Governor General Michaëlle Jean to prorogue Parliament until late January 2009. Essentially, Harper did what Johnson decided to do – prorogue parliament prior to it holding a no-confidence vote in the government. In either case, the decisions by Jean and Queen Elizabeth were undemocratic moves by monarchical anachronisms. Opinion polls in Canada showed majority opposition to the prorogation with a majority also favoring a new national election. The Conservatives, under the leadership of Andrew Scheer, are attempting to oust the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau in the October 2019 general election. Scheer is seen as a political puppet of former Prime Minister Harper.

The political right in the nations of the Commonwealth have relied on “King’s contrivances” like prorogation and dismissals by Governors General acting with the authority of the British monarch. This was the case in 1975 in Australia when Governor General John Kerr dismissed Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and his entire government and appointed conservative leader Malcolm Fraser, whose coalition held a minority in the Australian House of Representatives, as prime minister. It was later discovered that Kerr had been on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency and that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger worked closely with CIA deputy director Vernon Walters to stage a “constitutional coup” against Whitlam, who Washington viewed as too friendly to the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and other socialist nations. In 1989, the CIA’s fingerprints were found on a New Zealand Labor Party internal rebellion against Labor Prime Minister David Lange. The George H. W. Bush administration had grown tired of Lange’s insistence on banning US nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed naval vessels from New Zealand waters, triggering a severance of intelligence links between Wellington and Washington. Lange was forced to resign as prime minister.

Along with Westminster style government, the legacy of the British Empire has also seen the power of prorogation of legislative assemblies being used in republican forms of government within the Commonwealth. Under successive governments, including the current government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, state legislatures have been prorogued, the latest being the prorogation of the legislature of Jammu and Kashmir. In fact, direct rule from New Delhi, along with prorogation of state legislative assemblies, has occurred in every Indian state, with the exception of Chhattisgarh and Telangana. In 2018, the president of Sri Lanka prorogued Parliament. On many occasions, Trump has stated that he has an “absolute right” to curb the constitutional powers of the US Congress.

Prorogation and other “King’s contrivances” practiced in the former realm of the British Empire have come back to haunt the “mother country,” Great Britain, in an extremely undemocratic way.