Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Gups]

Matthew Syed was pushing a land tax in the Sunday Times replacing income and corporation. Annoyingly he doesn't provide any details.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting - and why we shouldn't read too much into Sunderland just because they're quick


Especially striking as, in the Guardian, Labour are also planning to target southern seats/the Blue Wall. As the election approaches, Labour will need to choose where it wants to fight (and the Tories will need to choose where they want to defend). But at this point Labour can, plausibly, be aiming to target everywhere basically.

[Jacob]

I don't understand how to read that graph.

[Sheilbh]

I don't understand how to read that graph.

Swing to or from Tories and Labour based on the Leave % in the Brexit vote.

Basically Tories are losing more in more Leave-y areas and Labour are winning more there (which rather vindicates Starmer's strategy).

Another argument is that Labour's vote has become efficient again. Under Corbyn (and Miliband), Labour basically piled up votes in certain areas - which were very remain-y universities, graduates, public sector workers, cities - but lost them everywhere else. Now Labour are losing a few votes in those areas where they have a massive majority (to the Greens) while winning back a lot more votes in the rest of the country.

It changes the map. The stuff about Labour need 12% lead to get to a majority only really applies if you're working with a Corbyn/Miliband style coalition - if you add back in working class voters in England and Scotland then that's a lot, lot lower. They've broadened their appeal so don't need to go as high (though, at the minute, they're doing both).

[Sheilbh]

Incredible that when Galloway is trying to defend himself from people calling him homophobic, he still somehow does it in a tankie way: "I have been in a gay bar with the Village People throbbing out Y-M-C-A within earshot of Lenin's tomb. It was massively enjoyable. I really enjoyed it"

[Josquius]

Lenin - gay icon.

[HVC]

This is why British Cops need guns

man chased police officers with a chainsaw

[Sheilbh]

Very long and damning article on SAS war crimes in Afghanistan. This is obviously very, very bad:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sas-murders-war-crime-british-special-forces-vbcnmpkm8

Striking similarities with similar reports in the Australian and US military. Particularly in the case of the US as here it looks like the SBS in the region wanted nothing to do with this unit and clearly thought they'd gone wrong, I believe I've read of a similar dynamic in the US between Navy SEALs and Army special forces.

Some key points:

The SAS murders: how a senior officer exposed a war crime cover-up
British special forces are accused of holding killing contests and planting weapons on their Afghan victims. Previously classified files show how one of their own is trying to bring them to justice
Insight |
Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott, David Collins
Sunday May 05 2024, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

One of the most senior special forces officers in the British Army broke ranks and reported to police that SAS soldiers under his command committed war crimes by murdering prisoners in Afghanistan, The Sunday Times can reveal.

The officer — who oversaw all special forces operations — told detectives from the Royal Military Police (RMP) that a "cancer had infected" a rogue SAS squadron that had murdered dozens of unarmed detainees.

He came forward despite his fears that SAS soldiers would inflict violent reprisals against his family if they knew he was blowing the whistle. He alleged their crimes were so serious that the entire regiment needed a "complete overhaul".

The officer, known only by the cipher N1466, revealed to police the location of a safe containing a typed report detailing a disclosure from an SAS soldier that his unit had routinely murdered Afghan prisoners in their homes and planted weapons on their dead bodies.

His intervention prompted one of Britain's biggest murder inquiries and is now revealed in 6,000 top-secret documents, which the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has been forced to disclose.

Emails show that several other senior special forces commanders were aware that war crimes had been committed, but failed to report the killings.

[...]

Internal emails between detectives investigating SAS killings show how their inquiries were thwarted after being reported to Downing Street. The prime minister was David Cameron, who is now foreign secretary.

According to one email, the chief police investigator complained he was put under "political pressure" to drop inquiries into senior SAS commanders.

[...]

When the inquiry was eventually shut down, emails show that the defence minister, Johnny Mercer, a veteran of the Afghan war, told the MoD he believed the SAS was guilty of wrongdoing and the allegations had not been properly investigated. But a civil servant toned down his comments for the official record. "Bland is best," he wrote.

The Sunday Times revealed in 2017 that a rogue SAS unit was alleged to have murdered unarmed Afghan civilians and falsified mission reports. At the time, the MoD said there was no evidence to support the story, no soldiers had been arrested and only one case of unlawful killing in Afghanistan was being investigated. All of this has proved to be untrue.

Our subsequent stories, a BBC Panorama documentary and a legal case brought by the law firm Leigh Day on behalf of the bereaved families led to the creation of the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan, chaired by Lord Justice Haddon-Cave, a senior appeal court judge. The inquiry's remit is to establish: whether there is credible evidence that the British Army unlawfully killed people in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013; whether the military police carried out a proper investigation; and whether there was an attempt to cover up war crimes. It is looking at 80 killings and began taking evidence in July.

This has forced the release of the previously secret documents and correspondence, and has led to hours of testimony being given by soldiers and ministers. It has enabled The Sunday Times to tell, for the first time, the story of the SAS whistleblowers and how the investigation into their allegations was stopped in its tracks.

[...]

Martin attended confidential "board meetings" where the SAS identified targets. He says he repeatedly expressed severe misgivings about the "flawed" intelligence used to justify the raids, which often resulted in innocent people being killed. The SAS soldiers were said to have begun killing their captives out of frustration that so many were being released.

By February 2011, N1466 and other senior commanders had become extremely concerned about one particular SAS squadron that was nine weeks into a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan. The squadron's post-mission reports from the raids showed that large numbers of Afghan citizens were being killed rather than captured.

They had received a complaint from Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, about one of the killings: the shooting of Mohammed Ibrahim, a civilian former district governor, in Nawroz, Helmand province.

The 55-year-old had worked alongside British forces and was not the target of the raid. However, the SAS claimed he had grabbed a grenade from behind a curtain after being taken into his home at gunpoint to help the soldiers search the premises. He was shot dead at close range before he could pull the pin, according to the soldiers' account.

This was one of several similar incidents involving the squadron and the newly disclosed MoD documents reveal that N1466 was growing increasingly suspicious about the death toll. Then there were two more incidents.

On the nights of February 7 and 9, the squadron had shot dead 17 people — including two children — in their homes during two raids but only recovered seven weapons from the scenes. Since the SAS was his responsibility, N1466 assessed the numbers and believed them to be "disproportionate", which reinforced his view the unit was "out of control". Page's chief of staff received an email from another worried officer, a lieutenant colonel who was a special forces operations director.

He wrote: "I find it quite incredible the amount of Bs [Afghan males, Bravos] that [the SAS unit] send back into a building who then decide to get weapons/grenades and engage the [SAS unit] knowing that it will achieve nothing.

"Why come out — why not wait for the [SAS unit] to come into the room and engage them in a confined space where there is a greater chance of causing cas[ualties]? Whilst murder and the UKAF [special forces] have oft been regular bedfellows, this is beginning to look bone."

The chief of staff, who is the second-highest ranking commander in special forces, emailed back making reference to a recent boast by the SAS that it had killed more "insurgents" than a similar unit from another country. "I find it depressing that it has come to this," he wrote. "Ultimately a massive failure of leadership."

He did not think the SAS's explanations for the killings were credible. "If we don't believe this, then no one else will and when the next WikiLeaks occurs then we will be dragged down with them," he wrote.

On February 14, 2011, the operations director observed in an email that the SAS appeared to be deliberately "setting the conditions for the Afghans' execution" by sending the detainees back into their home to help the search.

The chief of staff replied: "There appears to be a casual disregard for life, [military] principles and credible reporting."

On February 16, another raid took place in which two Afghan prisoners were taken back into their home and were shot after the SAS claimed they had grabbed weapons from behind a curtain and a table.

Emails exchanged between special forces commanders at the directorate in London that day ceased calling the unit's victims EKIA, an acronym for enemy killed in action. Instead, they were given the initials EJK, which stands for extra-judicial killings or, in other words, murder.

At the end of March 2011, N1466 attended a dinner at the headquarters of the Special Boat Service (SBS) — sister service of the SAS — in |Poole for the regiment's commanding officer Colonel Gwyn Jenkins.

In the bar after the dinner, Jenkins, who was leaving the role to take command of special forces in Afghanistan, took N1466 to one side to share a problem that was troubling him.

SBS troops in Afghanistan were reporting that SAS soldiers had confessed to operating a "deliberate policy" of murdering all "fighting age males". An SBS officer had been asked to type out a statement reporting what he had been told.

The statement, which has been revealed in legal submissions to the inquiry, said: "During conversations with a soldier from [the SAS unit] ... it was said that 'all fighting age males are killed on target' regardless of the threat they posed, this included those not holding weapons.

"It was also indicated that fighting-age males were being murdered on target inside compounds, using a variety of methods after they had been restrained. In one case it was mentioned a pillow was put over the head of an individual being killed with a pistol.

"It was implied that photos would be taken of the deceased alongside weapons that the 'fighting age male' may not have had in their position [sic] when they were killed."

The claim was that SAS soldiers had placed a 'drop weapon' next to the corpses of their victims to make it look as if they had been armed and the soldiers had been shot in self-defence.

[...]

Jenkins decided to write to Page repeating what he had told N1466. He said the allegations about the SAS were "of a nature which makes me seriously concerned for the reputation of [UK armed forces]" and should be formally investigated.

[...]

N1466 also emailed Page calling for a "deeper investigation" to make a clear statement to special forces or "at worst put a stop to criminal behaviour". He feared the SAS may have "strayed into indefensible ethical and legal behaviour".

[...]

N1466 commissioned an analysis of some of the SAS unit's recent raids which found that 43 Afghan men had been killed in nine missions — while only 26 weapons were said to have been recovered. He found there were 11 incidents where Afghan men had been shot dead after being captured and sent back into their homes at gunpoint.

When he was shown the findings, Page ordered an internal review of the incidents rather than report the matter to the military police. The review took a week and was ultimately written by the overall commander of the SAS unit in Afghanistan that was under investigation. He accepted his own soldiers' claims that the killings were in self-defence and claimed the insurgents were provoking suicidal confrontations that could be used as propaganda against the British Army.

The matter was closed. "In hindsight," N1466 later told the military police, "I should have made it clear to [Page] that the issue should be taken to the service police."

The SBS officer's statement about the SAS's "deliberate policy" of killing fighting age males was placed in a safe at the SBS headquarters by Jenkins because, he later explained to military police, Page had been "unhappy about the nature of the information".

Today, Jenkins is a general and last week was named Britain's national security adviser.

[...]

Two months later, another SAS unit shot dead three youngsters — aged 12, 14, 16 — and a youth aged 18 while they were drinking tea in a room during a night raid in Loi Bagh, Helmand.

The shootings caused such an outcry that news reached the UK and the families of the victims were taken on by British lawyers. This prompted the RMP to investigate an SAS night raid killing for the first time.

Submissions to the inquiry show that the SAS mission report falsely claimed that Afghan soldiers had shot the victims after coming under fire. The SAS produced mission report photographs showing weapons beside the corpses.

But the military police established that the young men were killed by a single SAS soldier who had burst into their room. The victims had not fired a shot.

The RMP detectives knew nothing about the regiment's series of night raid killings the previous year or the allegations about photographing "drop weapons". But they found the initial evidence sufficiently compelling to begin a full murder inquiry.

It proved to be a tough investigation. One Afghan soldier who witnessed the shootings was said to be dead and another brain damaged. The special forces' reconnaissance footage of the scene had been overwritten and a "hard drive error" flashed up when the investigators tried to retrieve it.

One frustrated investigator commented: "How could so many things go wrong with one aspect?"

Newly disclosed diary entries and emails show how in February 2014, the senior investigating officer, Major Morag Sheather, was interviewing an Afghan soldier about the killings when a senior British special forces officer intervened to stop him talking.

As a result, Sheather's immediate superior formally recorded his concerns that "we are being obstructed in our investigation". Weeks later, the locks were changed around the perimeter of the SAS's base in Afghanistan which stopped the RMP entering.

Sheather had also been seeking to obtain a machinegun and an AK47 assault rifle that had been retrieved from the victims' bodies so that they could be forensically examined. She was finally told she could collect the weapons in late March 2014.

But the guns were missing when she travelled to pick them up in Afghanistan. She wrote in her diary on March 29 that the person with the weapons "does not have the items due to 'confusion'. Hmm!"

She was then told the weapons would be made available the next week but a few days later they had gone. It was claimed the guns had been recycled or sold for parts. "Unbelievable," she wrote in her diary.

Despite the setbacks and after a two-year investigation, the RMP referred the SAS soldier to military prosecutors on four counts of murder. Both the senior officer, who had falsified the mission report, and the SAS commander, who stopped the interview with the Afghan witness, were also referred for the offences of misconduct in public office and perverting the course of justice, respectively.
Then in October 2014, Leigh Day raised the case of Saifullah Yar and his uncle Mohammed Bang. They claimed the British Army had murdered four members of their family during the night raid on their home on February 16, 2011.

The SAS claimed the killings were in self-defence and that Saifullah's father had reached behind the curtain for a grenade after being taken back into his home at gunpoint. The family alleged he had been taken back in the building to be murdered. A new RMP investigation began.

N1466 knew all about the incident in which Saifullah's family were killed. Emails show his colleagues had referred to it as "the latest massacre". Three months after the new investigation started, N1466 decided to approach the RMP and tell them what he knew.

Suddenly, the RMP had one of the most senior figures in the special forces willing to talk to them about the SAS's night raids. He was taking a big risk. An RMP captain noted in his log that N1466 feared SAS soldiers might inflict violent reprisals against his family if they knew he was talking to the police.

Nevertheless, he met the RMP chief, Brigadier Bill Warren, and told him that "a cancer had infected" the SAS and there were dozens of other murders they should be investigating.

He alerted the detectives to a practice of "blooding-in" SAS recruits by ordering them to shoot prisoners and alleged there was a competition between the regiment's squadrons over how many people they killed.

[...]

N1466 gave the RMP the breakthrough it needed. Soon afterwards, the military police began investigating ten of the night raids that had been part of the review by the special forces headquarters four years earlier. The investigating team were moved to a new base at RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall for security and a £7 million computer system was ordered so that the SAS's servers could be downloaded and searched.

The investigation was now called Operation Northmoor. In February 2016, plans were made to arrest two suspects: the commanding officer of the SAS unit and the soldier who had allegedly confessed.

News of the rapidly expanding investigation filtered through to the top of government. Soon after the suspects were identified, the parliamentary private secretary to the defence minister, Michael Fallon, wrote an email warning Cameron's Downing Street office about the inquiry and copying in the cabinet secretary and the attorney-general.

"Information from highly credible armed forces sources," the note dated February 19, 2016, began. "The RMP are now investigating a number of cases of suspected murder of Afghans by members of [UK special forces]."

Alarm bells rang in government. Not long after, a Whitehall source tipped off The Sunday Times that the RMP was investigating "credible and extremely serious" accusations of war crimes by the SAS and the government was "trying to reduce the scale of the investigation".

Internal emails from the RMP show that within months, the inquiry's lead detective was complaining that his team were under "political pressure" to focus its investigation on junior SAS soldiers rather than their commanders.

An opportunity arose that summer for the MoD to shake up the investigation as both the provost marshal and its lead detective, the "gold commander", were retiring. In summer 2016, Brigadier David Neal became provost marshal and John Harvey took over as gold commander.

Neal's appointment was controversial internally. At the time, he was fending off accusations from a fellow RMP officer that he had attempted to improperly close down an unlawful killing allegation against a British soldier. He was also a friend of the SAS officer who had commanded the squadron at the centre of the investigation, according to MoD documents.

[...]

The RMP could have simply seized the server but the lead investigator's log dated August 15, 2016, notes that the gold commander wanted him to "recover the data set amicably without ... using our prerogative powers".

Eventually special forces relented but the investigators were furious when they turned up to copy the server in December. All the previously deleted data, which would have been accessible on the server, had been permanently expunged when contractors installed a new system that summer.

The contractors say they warned special forces they were destroying the deleted data but there were no objections or attempts to prevent them.

[...]

The SAS then reneged on its agreement to provide access to the remaining data on the server.

The senior investigator urged the gold commander to use the force's prerogative powers. "Any delay in recovery risks the loss of evidence and the ability to conduct a prompt and effective investigation, leaving the enquiry and the RMP open to criticism," he wrote.

The gold commander declined the request. In the end, the server was never obtained by the military police.

[...]

Then the RMP investigators were ordered to cut ties with advisers from the National Crime Agency and Greater Manchester police whose greater experience in killings had helped to guide their previous inquiries.

As a replacement, the MoD appointed an advisory group, consisting of a former chief constable and a criminal barrister, who enlisted two former police detectives to do a paper review of the state of the investigation in January 2017.

The inquiry now involved at least 50 murders but the former detectives were given only eight days for their review. They could not examine all the material but concluded nonetheless that the evidence was "untested, untried and without provenance".

Crucially, they decided that the chief suspects — the SAS soldier who made the confession and his commander — should not be arrested because it would be "profoundly unhelpful" to the investigation.

[...]

The result was that the two prime suspects were never even interviewed because they had left the army.

[...]

Behind the scenes, later that day, Peter Ryan, the director of judicial engagement at the MoD, wrote to Stephen Lovegrove, the MoD's permanent secretary, assuring him that the investigation had already been brought under control.

"Focus is now on one incident with the several others on the back burner in case anything emerges," he explained. "RMP now have no suspects ... Prospects for successful prosecutions look slim. In turn that conditions the investigative strategy and expectations about when this may be wrapped up. Did bad things happen? Quite possibly."

[...]

A full transcript of the tape-recorded conversation with the SAS soldier was provided to the Afghan war crimes inquiry. In the interview, he said his unit had killed more than 300 people in its six-month tour, relentlessly "whacking them every day, non-stop" to clear Helmand of suspected insurgents. "I was like a f***ing kid in a sweet shop to be honest," he said.

He said it was futile to take prisoners because they would be released days after being handed over to the Afghan police. So he admitted that he and his colleagues had routinely shot dead unarmed Afghan captives and planted weapons on their corpses.

"The OC's [officer commanding] opening brief is 'kill, capture', it's not the other way round. It's kill, capture ... and that's how we worked," he said. "It was like Northern Ireland, mate, if they're not armed there and then, it's a little bit of a grey area but we managed. Obviously we get smart. We know how to deal with these people and that's what we did."

[...]

When the RMP interviewed serving members of the rogue SAS unit and their support staff they claimed to have little to no recollection of the incidents. A judge would later question this "collective amnesia".

However, the investigators did receive important new evidence. An Afghan officer who had served alongside the SAS alleged the unit regularly carried an old AK47 with them which they planted on dead bodies to pretend their victims had been armed.

A British Army weapons expert, who had regularly attended SAS mission debriefs, then said he had seen photographs where the same AK47 was placed next to different Afghan corpses.

Nonetheless, Neal closed down the Northmoor investigation in July 2019. No charges had been brought against any SAS soldier. He left the RMP just three days later and would become the chief inspector of borders and immigration, earning £130,000 a year.

That summer Johnny Mercer MP was appointed veterans' minister and given the task of introducing a law to give British soldiers protection from prosecution.

While supporting the bill, Mercer also believed soldiers should be brought to book if there was genuine evidence of war crimes. A special forces veteran of the Afghan war, Mercer had heard stories about the SAS killing unarmed people. He was also friends with an SBS soldier who claimed he had been asked to carry a weapon to plant on corpses when he worked alongside the SAS in Afghanistan. The soldier had refused.

Mercer was concerned by the closure of Northmoor and gained permission from Ben Wallace, the defence secretary at the time, to get to the bottom of what had happened. He says Carleton-Smith, who was now chief of the general staff and the de facto head of the army, assured him the allegations were of no substance.

But the explanations for the killings did not ring true to Mercer. "To suggest that an individual, who knows the game is up, then pulls out a grenade or steps behind a curtain and pulls out a weapon and starts taking on an entire sub-unit 14 times is not plausible," he later told the Afghan war crimes inquiry. "I've never seen that behaviour myself, I've never heard of that behaviour myself, and to be asked to believe it time and again is, frankly, a bit of an insult to those of us who operated in the same way."

He found the lack of footage from the missions particularly suspicious. Filming the night raids, he said, was a statutory requirement and the operations would not be given approval if video was unavailable.

Mercer raised his concerns with Ryan, the MoD's director of judicial engagement. However, Ryan later edited the minutes of their conversation to tone down the minister's comments.

"Among the challenges that we share is the need to protect ministers and the department from the perils of disclosure," Ryan wrote in an email explaining the edits. "Given the ongoing and prospective legal challenges on a wide range of issues, it is quite possible that ministerial records will be put into the public domain. So bland is best."

In the end, Mercer decided to adopt the MoD position and made a statement in the House of Commons in January 2020 denying that the SAS had operated death squads.

He was then furious when he read an article in The Sunday Times a few months later revealing that his department had disclosed emails — which he had been previously unaware of — to the High Court showing that the SAS's own commanders believed the killings were illegal at the time.

In a letter to Wallace, Mercer asked to correct the record in parliament by withdrawing his statement. He never did and says Wallace talked him out of it.

[...]

Last week The Sunday Times contacted the soldiers and civil servants mentioned in this article. Most declined to comment and Page was uncontactable. Carleton-Smith said that "none of my senior commanders expressed any concerns to me or produced any evidence of unlawful killings in Afghanistan" before and during his tenure as director of special forces.

An MoD spokeswoman said: "It is not appropriate for us to comment on allegations which may be within the scope of the statutory inquiry."

Mercer gave evidence to the SAS inquiry but refused to hand over the names of the soldiers who told him about the regiment's murders and use of drop weapons. He is challenging an order from the inquiry judge to reveal the names and could face a possible prison sentence.

Since becoming veterans' minister, Mercer has been working to find homes in the UK for the Afghan special forces soldiers who served alongside the SAS. Their lives are under threat because of the Taliban control over their country.

Mercer says the Afghan soldiers have confirmed his "worst fears" by providing first-hand witness testimony of how the SAS killed unarmed men and children after they had been detained. The minister's verdict on the SAS soldiers is damning. "They're criminals that I have no traction with," he told the inquiry.

What's also striking to me is the failing upwards/moving sideways within institutions - again in the UK those sort of appointments are not really in the gift of politicians, it's an internal process within the institutions themselves. And I find the institutional reaction from within the army, special forces and MoD very alarming - if, sadly, not entirely surprising.

[Josquius]

The MOD has been hacked.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/06/uk-military-personnels-data-hacked-in-mod-payroll-breach

I've had it pointed out to me...were they not recruiting for the position to defend against this, head of cyber or somesuch, and offering a very low salary?


SAS stuff....shocking yet not shocking. I do wonder about the problem of the military and police heavily recruiting from those of a kind of fucked up inclination. I know some ex soldiers and a policeman or two who are decent guys but thinking to the kids I knew way back when who were heading that way... I wonder how much "Are you a psycho" controls go on during recruitment.

[Sheilbh]

Really interesting piece on the ideological project behind Starmer - and arguments within the British centre-left since Blair. I hadn't realised but it basically totally overlaps with what I've been saying and thinking

The McSweeney Project Starmer's campaign director has gone to war on Blairism

Tom McTague
May 7, 2024  14 mins

Walk into Labour's strangely anonymous new office block home down a side street in Southwark, and you can't help but notice who sits where. Keir Starmer's office is to the right, along with his closest aides: chief of staff, Sue Gray, and private secretary, Jill Cuthbertson. Next to these gatekeepers sit the New Labour veterans Matthew Doyle, Peter Hyman and Deborah Mattinson, all of whom worked for the party when Tony Blair was prime minister. And beside them are the new generation: policy chief Stuart Ingham, speechwriter Alan Lockey, political director Luke Sullivan, and media man Paul Ovenden. These people will soon be running No. 10, if the polls are to be believed.

And yet the first thing to catch your eye as you walk into this chic, open-plan room that will be the nerve centre of Labour's general election campaign, are the desks right in the middle of the room: those of Morgan McSweeney and Pat McFadden, the party's campaign director and coordinator respectively. Labour's election generalissimos.

Both are slight-but-steely men of distinctly Irish extraction: McSweeney born and brought up outside Cork; McFadden the Glaswegian son of parents who emigrated from Donegal. Add Sue Gray, the daughter of Belfast parents who moved to London in the Fifties, and Starmer's top team is strikingly Irish. Softly spoken but hard at the same time, each of them is expected to play a significant role in the coming Labour government.

Of these three, though, it is McSweeney who has the aura of power. He is the architect and owner of the Starmer operation. "This is his project," as one senior Labour figure put it. "He designed it; he did the research; he drew the conclusions; and he delivered Starmer." As such, McSweeney remains the untouchable adviser at the heart of today's Labour party, the well-source of Starmerism.

McSweeney's influence has become a source of much speculation in Westminster — and, of course, bitterness on the Left, much of which sees him as a kind of ruthless Machiavel who has delivered the party into the hands of the Labour Right through force of cunning and deception. And, it should be said, there is some truth to this analysis. In the immediate aftermath of the 2017 general election campaign, McSweeney took over as director of "Labour Together", an organisation whose original intention was to shore up the Labour coalition, only to turn it into a tool to defeat the Corbynite Left as a first step on the route back to power. Even in the days after the Grenfell tower disaster, when it looked as though the Conservative government might fall, McSweeney did not waver in his commitment to remove Corbyn as leader.

In the two years that followed, McSweeney canvassed party members to identify what they needed from a Corbyn replacement, revealing a party membership that was not lost to a militant army of infiltrators, as some believed, but one that could be persuaded to back a figure from outside the Corbynite Left as long as they were not advocating a return to the failures of the past. It was from this research that McSweeney alighted on Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary who had returned  to Corbyn's shadow cabinet after his reelection as Labour leader in 2016 and remained with him until the defeat in 2020. With McSweeney's guidance, Starmer offered Labour members a carefully constructed set of promises: to increase taxes on the rich, abolish universal credit, scrap tuition fees, defend free movement of people and initiate a green energy revolution.

Starmer has ditched many of them since becoming leader. Taxes will not rise, freedom of movement will not return, and green investment will have to wait until there is the money to pay for it. In the meantime, Jeremy Corbyn has been kicked out of the party, the Left has lost almost all its influence and the old Right has prospered. So, is New Labour on its way back? Pat McFadden's elevation certainly suggests the Blairites are back at the heart of today's Labour party. McFadden was Tony Blair's Political Secretary in No. 10. and remains a committed devotee of the old master. His wife Marianna, meanwhile, is now McSweeney's deputy, having moved over from the Tony Blair Institute, which Starmer has praised as "the very best of public policy innovation". Is this, then, a Blairite reconquista?

No — and to see the McSweeney-Starmer project as a return to Blairism is to miss the point entirely. Over the past few months I have spoken to many leading figures in the party who have worked with and know McSweeney, Starmer and Blair well. Not only does McSweeney reject Tony Blair's central analysis of politics and what Labour should do as a result, but for much of his time trying to retake the Labour Party, McSweeney was not just battling the Corbynite Left, who were determined to maintain control of the party, but the Blairite Right, many of whom had concluded it was already dead and were determined to create something new in its place.

The core of the McSweeney project, in other words, is not a restoration of Blairism, but a rejection of it.

***

In 2017, the year Morgan McSweeney became director of Labour Together, Tony Blair created his Institute for Global Change. The TBI, as it became known, merged the various charities, businesses and other assorted organisations that the former prime minister had built since leaving office into one giant not-for-profit. Central to this venture was a new policy unit whose stated purpose was to "renew the centre".

Blair recruited a group of smart, young politicos to come up with the ideas he believed were necessary to save the liberal order. He headed up his team with the German-American academic and writer, Yascha Mounk, who had written a series of polemical warnings about the state of Western democracy and how to save it.

The central idea of the new unit was to promote Blair's brand of "radical centrism": the view that the real divide in British politics is no longer between Left and Right, but between those who are open to the modern world (the centrists) and those who are closed to its reality and only want to exploit people's grievances about it (the populists). In this world, George Osborne and David Cameron are potential fellow centrists, while Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn are populists.

Blair, I'm told, believes that the Labour Party is essentially a product of the industrial revolution and must dramatically reform itself to survive the technological upheaval now taking place. Radical centrism, then, is not just a tactic for winning, but an idea built on a belief in irresistible technological and social change in an era of globalisation that is eroding the very idea of a working class which Labour was created to represent.

Blair has long thought this. When he came to power in 1997, he called for a new progressive alliance with the Liberal Democrats. This, he believed, would usher in a new century dominated by what he called the "radicals", much as the 20th century had been dominated by the conservatives. Ironically, this progressive alliance died because Blair was too strong to need it. Yet, the idea was brought back to life in the wake of the 2017 general election when Blairism seemed at its weakest — with Corbyn in control of Labour, the Conservative government struggling to enact Brexit, and only Emmanuel Macron lighting up an alternative path in France.

In public, Blair insisted that he was not in any way "advocating a new party, organising one, or wanting to vote for one". However, he had concluded that the Labour Party was finished, according to someone who shared his views, and was involved in discussions about a new party. "He would tell those who thought otherwise that they were being nostalgic," said the same associate. "He felt that too many in the party could not reconcile themselves to the reality that Labour was simply irrecoverable, passed its sell-by date."

And there were attempts to set up new parties at this time. In 2018, one alternative centrist party emerged called United For Change, backed by the Labour donor Simon Franks, which briefly held onto the notion that it could find success by capitalising on the anti-politics sentiment of the moment. It reportedly contacted political figures as divergent as Nick Clegg and Dominic Cummings to see if they were interested (they weren't). One of its founders was Ryan Wain, now an Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute. At the same time, there was a breakaway faction of MPs from across the political spectrum, many of whom would go on to form Change UK, another short-lived centrist movement trying to slay the old political divide.

McSweeney found himself competing for donations with another group yet trying to raise money for a new "En Marche" style movement. Some Labour donors were even presented with a formal proposal for a new party, written in September 2018, which was leaked to Labour Together and various Labour MPs. Those now close to Starmer believe it came from figures connected to Blair (though not from Blair himself).

I was recently handed a copy of this authorless, 72-page "Political Movement, Planning Document" calling for the creation of a new party that was being shared with Labour donors in 2018. In its "executive summary", the anonymous author declares: "Britain is stuck. The promise that the next generation will be better off than their parents is broken. Inequality is tearing the country apart. Housing is too expensive, earnings are static, and the quality of work is too poor for too many. The world is changing fast and we're retreating from it. The old Left-Right binary divide can no longer provide a platform that meets the challenges of today or the future."

Such failure offered an opportunity for something new, the author argued. "The old parties cannot face the future because they have run out of answers, energy and leadership. Now is the time for Britain to move on and face the future." A new "movement" to bring forward "a new political class" was needed. This new political class would then "scale the social innovation that is already happening in our communities" while "incubating solutions not ideology".

Such solutions are then set out in distinctly New Labour language: early years education to reduce inequality; universal child care to help people back to work; a strong NHS and affordable housing. Planning reform is also mentioned, or what the author calls "rezoning land up, out and in". Taxes should be on land, not work; the economy remain open; and "meaningless immigration caps" removed. Britain must also reclaim its role "as a global leader" by tackling international challenges such as climate change. "We can move on to this future, but only if we have the courage to face it." As worthy as these policies may or may not be, they seem unlikely to form the basis of a great new popular uprising.

McSweeney's view, according to those who know him well, is even harsher, seeing the document as everything that is wrong with progressive politics today, attempting to tap into an anti-political sentiment with a clarion call for a new political class wrapped in language seemingly from another era. At the core of his disagreement, however, is the document's attitude to class. "Every century in Britain, a new force in politics has emerged as a result of big shifts in society," the document declares. "These shifts create the new coalitions upon which a new politics can be built." And the big shift in the 21st century?"The growing dominance of the middle classes and university graduates". Among these "rising social groups" as the document calls them — "graduates, middle-class professionals, and ethnic minorities" — there is an openness to the world not found among those from "the once-dominant but now fast-declining groups" listed as "older white voters, the working classes, and school leavers".

The central argument for the proposed new political party, therefore, is that class is no longer the central divide in democratic politics. "A voter's views on multiculturalism, diversity, immigration and the internet are now a better predictor of political allegiance than economic interests," the document argues. A majority of "open" voters in every region of the UK believe "multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism, environmental sustainability, immigration, globalisation and technology" are positive. As such "for the first time in a century, a new national force in British politics could thrive". To get such a movement off the ground, a charismatic leader was needed and an army of new supporters. Oh, and money — hence the proposal. The document suggested offering free membership to all with a higher £5.99-a-month "founder" tier with the offer: "Found the new politics for the same price as a Netflix subscription."

For much of late 2018 and 2019, as parliament ground to a halt over Brexit and Tony Blair became ever more outspoken in his call for a second referendum to break the deadlock, McSweeney was fighting to persuade donors to boycott this proposed new party: not just because it posed an existential threat to his own attempt to take control of the Labour Party — but because he thought its political analysis was useless. McSweeney and Starmer fundamentally do not accept the idea that there is an ever greater number of "open" liberal graduates who can or should replace the working classes.

When one donor asked McSweeney why he should not support the proposal as a "lifeboat" in case Labour Together failed, McSweeney responded that, if Labour Together succeeded, the first thing he would do would be to blow the lifeboat out of the water.

***

The formative moment in Morgan McSweeney's career came long before he took over Labour Together. It was 2008, and he had been tasked by Barking and Dagenham Borough Council with promoting community relations. Under the Race Relations Act of 2000, public authorities had a duty to "promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different racial groups". In 2008, the Labour-run council concluded that this meant defeating the British National Party, which had gained a foothold in the area.

McSweeney found a place failed both by its Labour council and its Labour government. At the centre of the borough was Becontree, once the biggest council estate in the world, supported by the Ford car plant in nearby Dagenham. By the time Blair became prime minister in 1997, however, deindustrialisation and right-to-buy had undermined its social fabric. Homes had been bought by landlords, divided up and rented out, often to new immigrant families attracted to the cheapest housing in London. As the area became more transient, it became less maintained. As tenants came and went, landlords would simply dump their unwanted belongings in front gardens. When residents complained, the council produced pamphlets disproving this "disinformation", and emphasising how much they had spent cleaning up the area. Enter the BNP, who simply blamed the foreigners.

For McSweeney the problem was not one of communication, but of reality. The area had got worse. Families who had lived here for generations were embarrassed that the houses next to them were suddenly a mess. They were also angry that absentee landlords from Hackney, Islington, Essex and beyond were able to act with impunity, while they could barely change the colour of their front door without council permission. In response, McSweeney encouraged the removal of the existing council leader and helped deliver one of the most popular policies in local government history: the "eyesore gardens policy", proposed by the new council leader Liam Smith, whereby the local council sent in workers to remove the rubbish outside people's homes — and then charged the landlords for the trouble. In 2006, the BNP had stood 13 candidates in the local elections and won 12 seats. In 2010, they lost them all as Labour swept the board winning every single seat in the borough.

McSweeney's lesson from Barking was not just that voters should be listened to because that was good politics, but that voters should be listened to because they knew what they were talking about. They were right about Barking and the council had been wrong. Nationally, however, a similar story was playing out, McSweeney believed. In 2010, the Labour Party had gone into the election telling voters the recession wasn't their fault because it was caused by a global crisis; they were acting like a giant Barking Borough Council. Voters had every right to blame the Labour government for the reality of falling living standards. Something new was needed, but Labour wasn't offering it.

McSweeney carried this analysis into his job at Labour Together. And so, while he was battling the separatists trying to create a new movement to replace the Labour Party, he was also pushing away the advances of Labour's deputy leader, Tom Watson, who had set up the "Future Britain Group" to stop wavering Labour MPs from leaving the party. Though Watson's aims seemed aligned with Labour Together, McSweeney concluded that his group looked too much like an attempt to resuscitate New Labour by uniting the old Blairite and Brownite tribes which had been bickering with each other ever since the party's defeat in 2010. And New Labour, in McSweeney's view, was not a solution to Corbynism, but a barrier to its defeat.

If anything, according to those who know him, McSweeney believes Blair has only become more removed from the reality of people's lives in the years since he has left power. Instead of trying to improve the living standards of the ordinary poor in places like Barking, the radical centrism he proposes now seems to be based on an idea that progressive parties would be better off if they simply assembled a new coalition of voters who were not so poor. Forget the council house tenants who voted Leave; target the landlords who voted Remain.

As director of Labour Together, McSweeney advised Starmer that the only way to win over the party membership and the wider electorate was to reject such an analysis and move beyond New Labour. This was necessary politically, if Labour was to stand a chance of winning again. But it was also a reflection of reality. Even before the financial crisis, ordinary people were not seeing the benefits from the national economic growth in the way they should, McSweeney argued. The BNP was growing in Barking before 2008.

The Labour MP for Dagenham, Jon Cruddas, told me that Barking was the canary in the coal mine of British politics — and it took a man from Cork to find it.

***

The radicalism at the heart of the McSweeney-Starmer project is that it is, in effect, trying to prove Blair wrong — but using many of the tools Blair mastered to do so. When Starmer appeared alongside Blair on stage at the TBI's Future of Britain conference last year — widely reported as their coming together — Starmer actually delivered a subtle rebuke of his predecessor's political argument. "The project," he declared, speaking of his own designs on power "is to return Labour to the service of working people, to become once again the natural vehicle for their hopes and aspirations."

There were other projects available, he admitted. One alternative was what he called the "rabbit hole of identity politics". But the other was more pointed. "You could even completely unmoor from the concerns of working people," Starmer said as Blair watched on. "That sounds ridiculous to me, but some people did seriously suggest it after the Brexit referendum." Starmer here, is of course conveniently skating over his own support for a second referendum at this time, but there is little doubt where his remarks were pointing. Starmer then went on to add that, while he agreed with Blair that the technological revolution would be game-changing, there was "one place where I do take issue with Tony: the idea that this is somehow beyond Left and Right. No, for me, this is a progressive moment."

For Starmer,the lessons of recent history are not really Blairite at all. The Left won elections, he said, when it persuaded voters that it would "deliver, no matter how volatile the external world, security for your family, your community and our country." This, in fact, is exactly what Labour had failed to do in 2008.

Perhaps this is why Blair has never been entirely sold. Peter Mandelson, who remained close and talked to him during this period, believes that Blair was at first not convinced Starmer or indeed McSweeney, the architect of the project, could succeed. For much of Starmer's first year, Blair thought Starmer could not possibly turn things round. Mandelson, in contrast, saw in McSweeney a version of himself. Those who know McSweeney well say he has a healthy respect for Blair, and sees him as a gifted politician who was at his best in his early years when he had a clear sense of ordinary people's concerns. Yet, McSweeney also believes Blair has since lost touch.

In September last year, McSweeney and Starmer flew to Montreal to attend the "Global Progress Action Summit" where the world's leading centre-left politicians met to discuss "bold new ideas and directions in progressive governance". The summit attracted some of the biggest names in centrist politics: Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ahern, Mark Carney, David Miliband, Tony Blair.

McSweeney hated it. According to those who spoke to him afterwards, McSweeney felt too many of the arguments on show were disconnected from reality. The world had moved on, but so much of the content appeared to be rehashed versions of Clintonism. During his session, Blair was joined onstage by the Canadian Liberal MP Anna Gainey, who claimed, almost as an aside, that populism was the product of "anxiety" — the opposite of McSweeney's view.

Blair, in turn, restated his case that the coming technological revolution was the central issue in the world today. "The mission for progressive politics now... is to understand this revolution, master it and harness it," he said. In essence, then, the mission is technocratic.

The analysis is Blairism applied to the modern world. Today, Blair sees the world from on high: great oceanic swells, tectonic movements, epochal changes and the like. Flying from capital to capital, talking to leaders and plutocratic billionaires, he sees trends way beyond national borders: countries rising and falling, populations changing, policies developing and technology upending everything. "He really does operate in a stratosphere no other British prime minister has ever operated in before," remarked one of his friends.

It is not hard to see how Blair might have grown frustrated at the parochialism of day-to-day British politics, unconvinced by the importance of "eyesore" policies. And perhaps he has a point. The challenge for Starmer and McSweeney, should they enter Downing Street later this year, will be to tell a convincing story about what they are trying to do that doesn't begin to feel small the moment they enter No. 10. They will need a project for governing, as well as for winning, taking into account the great global forces of the sort that fixates Blair today. If Starmer is to be a council leader at large, he needs to do so in imperial robes. How he does so will depend in large part on the role he finds for the keeper of "the project's" flame: Morgan McSweeney.

Tom McTague is UnHerd's Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.

I think this also captures the essence and problem of Blairism and what I think it got wrong and why it's not an answer now. For all the fact that he is very much in the centre, there is something determinist and teleological about Blair that is almost Marxist - a lot of his idea of politics is that the forces driving societies are broadly beyond political control. They are deep, structural shifts and the job of a "progressive" leader is to embrace those inevitable and progressive changes and place their country in the vanguard. In the 1990s and 2000s it was globalisation, increasingly in Blair's interviews it's now tech. Attempting to temper or adjust the course of history is Canute-ish - at best you'll fail and disappoint your voters, at worst you'll actively harm the country. As he points out the divide isn't left-right but, in Blair's phrasing, open or closed - or perhaps radical v conservative.

The problem with that is that I think in practice it created vulnerabilities with the crash and the combination o the global financial crisis and the war on terror (including Iraq) I think undermine Blair's "inevitability" analysis. I also think that in the last 15 years it has become even clearer the importance of contingency, the open-ness of the future which means trying to shape it rather than simply embracing and being the cutting edge of current trends - and I don't think Blair has really adjust/been able to adjust to that.

I also fundamentally think that any analysis of democratic decisions that just end up saying "voters were wrong/have been duped" is at best a dead end politically. And without getting too Marxist, you can't change the coalition of a party of the left to not include the working class without fundamentally changing the nature of that party and the politics it will pursue. I think Blair is fine with that - I'm less comfortable.

But interesting to see that it seems the guy at the heart of Labour's current project is broadly taking the same view (of course this may just reflect that, like a true Blairite, I've been reading and looking at the ideological currents and trends, embracing them and running into the vanguard - and maybe McSweeney has too? ).

Edit: Also interesting that the new post-left project based it's coalitions on "rising social groups" including minorities, especially because of the assumption that their voting patterns will be different than white voters which is starting to look less true in the UK. At the minute it looks like British Indians are basically starting to breakdown on party support in a similar way as white voters (i.e. if you look at education, income, age, home ownership etc) - it's early days but there are signs a similar shift is happening with British Bengalis and British Black African voters (v Caribbean). The other point is I think it signals that maybe it's not just the right who benefit from culture wars but also this strand of centrist, post-left progressive liberalism - it's a common argument of how the right wins white working class votes by stoking cultural divisions but it seems to me plausible here too just on the other side wanting to keep minorities from allying with the old, working class and non-graduates (even if that may be where their material interests are - especially if they're old, working class or not graduates).

[Admiral Yi]

Is this your way of signalling your pivot from sexy young pinko to stodgy middle aged centrist Shelf?

[Sheilbh]

In this thread I believe G and Tamas say I'm a closet Tory

But I've always been a stodgy centrist-ish. I was a big Blair fan at the time. Didn't like Miliband, got into many, many, many arguments over Corbyn (a tradition as my parents have family friends they can't discuss politics with because of arguments of Militant in Liverpool in the 80s ). I wasn't particularly keen on Starmer. In each case I pushed for a more centrist candidate: Burnham, Kendall, Smith, Nandy. I had ideological issues with Corbyn - with Miliband and Starmer I just wasn't convinced.

But that's also because I think the number 1 priority for Labour should always, always be beating the Tories and salting the earth after them

A Tory government doesn't really impact me - but it has children going hungry, people living on the streets, a cruelty to the disabled and unable to work. So I have very little time for people prizing their principles over winning. There's no point to the left (however it's organised) without power.

[Tamas]

There's no point to the left (however it's organised) without power.