​A Manchester MP, Andrew Gywnne it seems is standing down for health reasons. Thus attention is newly focused on Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester (nick-named the ‘King of The North’) to see whether he will throw his hat into the ring to fight the by-election. Will Labour’s hierarchy (Morgan McSweeney) allow this? Do they want the possibility of the King of the North gaining a parliamentary seat and thus being in a position to challenge our leader? My suspicion is that any rumpus about denying Burnham a place on the shortlist for the by-election candidacy will be somewhat shorter than the consequences of allowing a clear challenger to Starmer stalking the backbenches. A few protests about a stitch up will quickly fade. To stop the Burnham bandwagon gathering pace the party hierarchy (Morgan McSweeney) needs to advise everyone very early on that the shortlist will be women only or reserved for BAME candidates or indeed as is so common these days, parachutists from Starmer’s gang of cronies on the National Executive Committee.  I will watch with interest to see how the party’s brain boxes (Morgan McSweeney) deal with this one.
 
By the way, I am not sure that Manchester is really ‘North’ per se. More North West. Old divisions die hard. Ask any Leeds fan.

​A new Starmer has been born. Mark this date and celebrate! Winston Starmer to be precise, the man who fearlessly told Trump where to get off—and succeeded. That will be the narrative, and perhaps I shouldn’t be too cynical—he did after all say Trump’s plan for Greenland was ‘completely wrong’ and his immediate reward the day after was Trump in effect calling our leader as thick as two short planks because of the Chagos Islands deal. Hopefully everything has now been patched up. World War Three can revert back to its previous trajectory. How interesting and significant that the solution, if such it is, was found at the Davos World Economic Summit and not in the United Nations. Apparently Trump took fright (again) when the bond markets turned sour and stock prices plummeted. Now they’ve more or less recovered. It seems ‘the markets’ are our force for peace. A collective Nobel Peace Prize for Wall Street, perhaps?

Richard Rorty (1931-2007) is described by Wikipedia as an American philosopher, historian of ideas and a public intellectual. The last title probably wouldn’t go down very well in The White House (well none of the titles would). Such things are outwith the mental capacity of the self-declared Great Genius in the Oval Office.  But Rorty saw things coming (this is where philosophers triumph). Canada’s Globe and Mail ran a piece on Rorty’s prescient thoughts on the U.S. Here’s some of them:
 
“Members of labour unions and unorganized unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking and to prevent jobs from being exported,” the late Mr. Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country, a book based on lectures he’d given at Harvard in 1997. “Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers – themselves desperately afraid of being downsized – are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

“At that point something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”

Mr. Rorty imagined the gains made by Black and brown Americans would be wiped out. “Jocular contempt” for women would come back in fashion. “All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. He [this strongman] will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there is so little resistance to his inevitable rise.”

Mr. Rorty argued that this phenomenon would be the fault of many on the Left, who would become increasingly less interested in the real-world concerns of the white middle class in favour of identity politics, diversity and inclusion and culture wars. “Outside the academy [leftist intellectuals],” Mr. Rorty wrote, “Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place.”
 
I confess to not having read anything by Rorty, so I don’t know whether he also considered how techbro oligarchs would begin to replace elected government. It could be that he may have predicted how in a more fascistic state the oligarchs might find themselves thrown into prison or otherwise contained. Think Putin, or indeed Hitler, both of whom cowed big business into submission. Before then I imagine the public intellectuals will have had first dibs on the cells.

There are some things in which the Beeb still excels and a Radio Four series examining the concept of progress ‘Whatever happened to progress,’ presented by Matthew Sweet was a case in point—it is well worth listening to. It asked very pertinent questions and heard from a wide range of contributors, current and from the archives. It does feel of course that ‘Progress’ has stalled, what with Trump, Putin and other bad actors stalking the international scene. Oh, and not to mention climate change. But what was meant by ‘progress?’

There are many things we can point to, and for me the invention of anaesthetics would come near top. All those people having legs sawn off with nothing more than a glug of whiskey and a leather thing to bite into is not something I would wish to contemplate. Medical progress is probably one of the most significant features of modern life which underpins the concept that progress has happened and will continue, all to be aided by AI and gene analysis of course. Against that, I believe that if human beings still exist in 500 or 1,000 years’ time they will look upon our period as at the very best ‘late medieval.’ Medicine may have been refined but other things have not. The ‘atomic clock’ of doom is as close as it ever was to midnight. Invasions real and threatened, accompanied by genocide are commonplace. Nation states which have bucked the current trend of new primitivism are being overwhelmed by the amorality of global oligarchs. It feels like something of a reversal is taking place. Oh, and the Untied (sic) States has resiled from its role as the world’s greatest—most biggest and beautiful ever- peacekeeper. A new era of exploitation beckons, as naked and violent as it ever was.

The programme reminded us that after the fall of the Berlin Wall it was announced or at least suggested that we were on the verge of ‘the end of history.’ At the very least that was an oxymoron, but what we can see now is that were the phrase ever to become true in human terms it would be the disappearance of the colours blue and green from the surface of planet Earth. But we may still have plenty of time left yet to discover that there were once life forms on the brown surface of Mars. In a quiet scientific way that would be progress even if the lessons may come a bit late.

Nevertheless I do hope that humans will exist in 500 or 1,000 years’ time, and that they have their equivalent of glossy art books, looking at the virtues of our post-modern art movement. Will they say ‘that can’t be improved upon?’ (I know I’m digressing here, but who could say Bach could be improved upon? When does the idea of ‘progress’ become redundant? With ‘post-modernism’ perhaps?)

Two Labour backbench MPs, Chris Hinchliff and Neil Duncan-Jordan have written on the PoliticsHome website of their discontent with the leadership’s approach to its backbenchers:
 
‘Time and again, only organised opposition and the threat of a backbench rebellion have succeeded in correcting the government’s course to a more sensible position. In the end, with U-turns only coming at the eleventh hour, after months of ministers asserting their unshakeable determination to proceed regardless, we appear stuck in a cycle of chaos and self-inflicted errors. The Prime Minister’s position would be far more secure if we stopped pretending that party loyalty in Parliament means accepting an unspoken doctrine of cabinet infallibility. A more open, mature and constructive approach that takes the concerns and proposals raised by backbench MPs seriously would serve far better than the hunched, tetchy and defensive response to challenge often exhibited by the government so far.’

Plus ça change! I can hear now the (albeit unspoken) response: ‘Do you not realise why I’m a minister and you’re a mere backbencher? I was chosen for my wisdom. You were chosen for canon fodder, so do your job and leave me to do mine.’ This mindset might be described as ‘Red Box Syndrome’ which comes with associated perks. After all, cream rises does it not? There is a natural order to things, and part of the discipline is about preventing anarchy in the Parliamentary Labour Party. And as we have seen it has produced a very stable government, as Starmer keeps repeating, we don’t want to go back to the days of Truss! He has set himself a very low bar.
​
I seem to recall blogging on the occasion of Labour’s landslide that winning such a large majority would eventually be a bane for the leadership. Starmer has wasted no time in making it so.

A weary groan was surely heard across the land when it was announced that Tony Blair was to be appointed to President Trump’s ‘Board of Peace,’ which has been given the daunting task of rebuilding Gaza. The dismay will not just have been because of Blair’s enthusiastic support for the Iraq war, but also for his notable failure as the envoy of the Quartet intended to build working relationships between Israel and Palestine.

On the latter account, his position was compromised by his clear lack of impartiality. As the authors of Blair Inc: The Man Behind The Mask wrote ten years ago:

Getting the trust of the Palestinians will be made even harder now it is known that one of the main funders of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation is Haim Saban, an American Israeli billionaire, and one of the most prominent pro-Israeli lobbyists in America. ‘I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel,’ Saban told the New York Times. He joins several other campaigners for Israel among the Faith Foundation’s donors, but there are no Muslims as far as anyone knows. [1]

What the authors of Blair Inc concluded all those years ago was that Blair was able to use his position as Quartet envoy to tout for his own business in the Arab world by building closer relationships with local authoritarian rulers. As is well known, Blair was not terribly choosy whom he saddled up with to make his fortune. But now his fortune is made, he still wants to be a significant political player, and Trump has offered him that chance, appointing him to be his leading member or deputy on his UN-approved ‘Board of Peace,’ charged with rebuilding Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, a new police force, a 20,000 ‘peace force’ and disarming Hamas to boot. Given his record, how did Blair so elegantly slide into this role?

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) is central to Blair’s post prime ministerial career, and according to a report produced by Lighthouse Reports has lately shifted its focus from being a wide ranging think tank to a technology advocacy consultancy following the arrival of a significant funder, Larry Ellison, whose fortune is based on his data company Oracle (and which recently made him briefly richer than Elon Musk). Lighthouse Reports investigators spoke to many ex-TBI employees and have exposed what is driving the business’s overwhelming enthusiasm for technology.

Ellison invested $130 million in the TBI between 2021 and 2023, with a further $218 million pledged since then. The scale of funding took the TBI from a headcount of 200 to approaching 1,000. Blair himself takes no salary from TBI but over this time the institute has been able to recruit from bluechip firms like McKinsey and Silicon Valley giants Meta. In 2018 before the Oracle founder’s funding surge, TBI’s best-paid director earned $400,000. In 2023, the last year where accounts are available, the top earner took home $1.26 million.
Blair and Ellison have a relationship that goes back to the former’s time in office. In 2003 Ellison and Blair, then in his pomp, had a photo opportunity at Downing Street to mark a gift of supplies to 40 specialist schools. In tech circles this is known as “land and expand”. Oracle has since been contracted hundreds of times by the British government and earned £1.1 billion in public sector revenue since the start of 2022, according to data collected by procurement analysts Tussell.[2]

What the Lighthouse Reports article didn’t mention is Ellison’s devoted Zionist philosophy. This is revealed in a report in The Dissident on Substack:

‘Oracle has signed multiple lucrative contracts with the Israeli national security state’ and ‘Oracle sees itself as an activist organization, one whose goal is the advancement of the Israeli colonization project.’ [3]

In this regard, given his actual leanings as opposed to his rhetorical support for Palestine, Blair makes a perfect fit for promoting Ellison’s agenda. A certain degree of whitewashing is called for and is delivered when Zionists (like Blair and Starmer) regurgitate their ‘two state’ homilies. To some extent big money, such as that from Ellison, seeks to obfuscate its thoroughgoing colonialist tracks. An old Quartet Envoy surely fits the bill.

In the same Dissident article we learn that in a leaked email to former Israeli PM Ehud Barak
‘Safra Catz [Oracle’s Israeli CEO] explicitly expressed a commitment to influencing U.S. public opinion in favour of Israel, “Asking Barak to sign on as a consulting producer for a reality TV show about ‘Women of the IDF’ with the goal of humanizing the IDF in the eyes of the American public.’ [4]

Given that Blair and Barak served for some time concurrently as prime ministers it is not surprising that they knew each other, but it is said that they were ‘old friends.’
In 1997, Barak had arrived in London as the leader of Israel’s beleaguered Labour Party, seeking help to win the 1999 election. With the aid of Blair’s experts in Millbank, he won and remained prime minister for two years. After losing the next election to Benjamin Netanyahu, he became a successful businessman.[5]

Later, according to Tom Bower:

In 2012 Barak resigned as defence minister and resumed life as a consultant for Israeli companies across the world. The two former prime ministers forged a profitable alliance, even as Blair’s position as the Quartet’s envoy became discredited and Barak, despite his military heroism was criticised within Israel for using his experience of office to become rich. It appeared no coincidence that Barak would be consulted by Nazarbeyev in Kazakhstan and by various West African presidents, and that Blair mentioned Israeli drones to President Buhari of Nigeria.[6]

One of the companies Barak was involved with was the data company Carbyne, ‘founded by former members of Israeli military intelligence’ and was seen as useful during the Covid pandemic for its ability to locate individual patients. ‘It was backed by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, billionaire investor Peter Thiel, and a small investment from (now deceased) pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.’[7]
​
I am not about to suggest that Tony Blair came to befriend or still less work with Jeffrey Epstein, but he did consent to meet the fixer in 2002 after lobbying by Peter Mandelson who at that time was nothing more than a backbench MP, having twice left Blair’s cabinet in disgrace. But what we do have is evidence of how connections are made when networkers are working at full throttle. This account comes courtesy of a report in Metro regarding a meeting set up by Mandelson with Blair to introduce Epstein:

In an email to Sir Tony’s chief of staff at the time, Jonathan Powell, Lord Mandelson refers to Epstein as ‘safe’.

Sent on May 7, 2002, it said:

​‘Do you remember when Clinton saw TB [Tony Blair] he said he wanted to introduce his travelling friend, Jeffrey Epstein, to TB?
‘This was frustrated – TB said at the time – in the office for reasons (he says) he was unclear about.
‘I think TB would be interested in meeting Jeffrey, who is also a friend of mine, because Jeffrey is an active scientific catalyst/entrepreneur as well as someone who has his finger on the pulse of many worldwide markets and currencies.
‘He is young and vibrant. He is safe (whatever that means) and Clinton is now doing a lot of travelling with him.
‘I mentioned to TB that Jeffrey is in London next week and he said he would like to meet him.
‘I have ascertained from Jeffrey that he is flexible – he could be here any time from Tuesday onwards to fit round the diary – but would obviously need to know reasonably quickly so as to re-schedule accordingly. Can you let me know?’
A further memo, written on May 14, 2002, briefed Sir Tony about Epstein ahead of a meeting scheduled for 5pm on that day.
The memo was written by senior civil servant Matthew Rycroft and marked ‘R’, which is believed to stand for ‘restricted’.
It read: ‘Jeffrey Epstein is seeing you at 5pm today.
‘He is a financial adviser to the super-rich and a property developer. He is a friend of Bill Clinton and Peter Mandelson.
‘The background on Epstein is that he is very rich and close to the Duke of York.
‘Peter says that Epstein now travels with Clinton and Clinton wants you to meet him.
‘He thinks you would find worthwhile a conversation with him about a) science and b) international economic and monetary trends.’[8]
 
What, one wonders was discussed at that meeting, arranged by Mandelson (but first suggested by Bill Clinton) at which no minutes were taken, apparently? We now know from the extensive release of Epstein emails that he was frequently in contact with Barak regarding various deals, so it is safe to assume that if Blair and Barak were indeed ‘old friends’ that Blair may well have traded insights on Barak’s commercial ventures. It is hard to conceive that the discussion did not, with Epstein’s ‘scientific’ bent touch upon developing information technologies, one of Blair’s professed remedies for fixing the UK economy. The idea that the meeting was going to look at ‘international economic and monetary trends’ stretches credulity. Somebody else in Blair’s government at that time would have had a much greater interest in that subject – not that Mandelson would want to introduce his best mate to him. (i.e. Gordon Brown).
 
After leaving parliament both Blair and Mandelson went on to building their own political consultancies, respectively what became the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and Mandelson’s Global Counsel (which as a result of the Epstein affair has completely distanced itself from him). Both outfits secured significant contracts with Zionist techbros, in Blair’s case as referred to above.
 
These morsels of information all point in the same direction.


[1] Francis Beckett, David Hencke, Nick Kochan, Blair Inc: The Man Behind The Mask, John Blake, 2015, p.19)

[2] https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/blair-and-the-billionaire/

[3] https://the307.substack.com/p/how-larry-ellison-is-using-his-wealth

[4] ibid

[5] Broken Vows, Tom Bower, Faber and Faber, 2016 p550

[6] ibid

[7] The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, Antony Loewenstein, Verso 2023 p 94

[8] https://metro.co.uk/2025/10/11/tony-blair-met-jeffrey-epstein-downing-street-prime-minister-24398519/

It’s a hard choice: which tyrant to appease, Putin or Trump? European leaders don’t seem to know which way to look. A pledge from the ‘coalition of the willing’ to commit troops on the ground in Ukraine should there be a peace agreement will have to get over one of Putin’s red lines, namely absolutely no agreement with such a commitment built in to it. Right now, Putin can simply wait for the West’s divisions to tear it apart. He may have heard Denmark saying that if Trump invades Greenland, NATO is finished. Why rush to agree anything? As for Trump, his foreign policy—such as it is—is swagger. He knows that there would be no military impediment to him taking over Greenland tomorrow. His belief is clearly that the ‘international rules based system’ with its dollar-sucking institutions doesn’t earn the U.S. the respect it deserves. So he’ll act accordingly, following the dictates of his diminishing brain cells.
 
I have a theory that the reason Trump doesn’t want the Nobel Prize winning Venezuelan opposition leader taking the reins is precisely that: she won the prize when he thought it should be his. This is her punishment. Yes it’s that simple, the man’s that petty. 

I recently joined a Palestinian Solidarity Campaign e-mailing to MPs regarding the appalling situation faced by Palestinians. My MP, Alison Hume, has replied although I think she has probably used a standard reply prepared by the PLP—Parliamentary Labour Party. I can’t complain about that, I did it myself when responding to (some) email campaigns. Nobody expects that scores or even hundreds of identical emails are going to each receive an individual and different response. So I take it that my MP’s reply is standard government issue. Its contents are not untypically disappointing. Take this for example:
 
We have now seen the hugely welcome agreement of President Trump’s peace plan, and it is vital that the UK now plays its part – alongside our international partners – in supporting the implementation of that plan, an objective recently affirmed by a UN Security Council Resolution, supported by the UK, our European allies and Arab states.
 
So far the ‘peace plan’ has not come into effect and Israel has continued to terrorise and kill Palestinians (not just in Gaza). The Israeli government says it wants the last remaining hostage corpse returned before they will enact their side of the bargain. Hamas claim they cannot find it. Given the destruction and chaos the Israelis inflicted on Gaza this doesn’t surprise me. No mention here though of UK government pressure to find a solution. Instead they are looking the other way:
 
The immediate priority must be to maintain (sic) the ceasefire, secure safe and unrestricted access to Gaza for the UN relief teams and other humanitarian organisations and get aid flooding into Gaza at the pace and volume that is required to match the scale of the current crisis. The Prime Minister announced at the Egypt peace summit that the UK will allocate an extra £20 million of humanitarian support to provide water and sanitation to those in need, taking the total last year to £100 million. 
 
This begs the question who will deliver this essential aid. Israel has potentially ordered 50 or so aid organisations out of Gaza unless they comply with a whole raft of preposterous new conditions. They don’t want the suffering to end. This much seems to have been acknowledged:
 
On 30th December, the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland signed a joint statement on the Gaza Humanitarian Response, expressing serious concerns about the renewed deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza which remains catastrophic. The letter called the Government of Israel to take the following urgent and essential steps:
 
·            Ensure that international NGOs are able to operate in Gaza in a sustained and
              predictable way. 
·            Ensure the UN and its partners can continue their vital work.
·            Lift unreasonable restrictions on imports considered to have a dual use. This includes
             urgently needed medical and shelter equipment.
Open crossings and boost the flows of humanitarian aid into Gaza. 
 
No mention of how ‘serious concerns’ will be translated into action! When, I wonder, did ‘serious concerns’ ever bother the Israeli government? Perhaps an official governmental BDS movement might have a greater impact . . .
 
The piece de resistance in these sort of statements is always:
 
We remain steadfast in our belief that a two-state solution is the only path to justice for Palestinians and enduring security for Israelis. 75 years ago, we were rightly proud to recognise the State of Israel, and our commitment to the security of Israel and its people remains unwavering. Now, we recognise Palestinian statehood, as the inalienable right of the Palestinian people.
 
There’s never a mention of how the two state solution will be arrived at, there’s never a suggestion that Israel will be forced to remove all its illegal settlements in the West Bank. But the UK government will continue to support the supply of military equipment to the rogue state. And it goes without saying that you cannot believe a single ’steadfast promise’ Keir Starmer ever makes. 

The response from the left to Trump’s Venezuelan coup has been wearily predictable—and justified. At least this time round the U.S’s par for the course behaviour in what is sometimes condescendingly described in the media as ‘America’s backyard’ should not surprise us. It’s a continuation of a century or more of military interventions, subversions and coups, at least this time Trump has been open and honest about his motive: oil. Sadly all this has been met with the usual weasel words from our own ‘leader’ who, presumably after clarifying matters with his own military brass. has informed us that the UK was not involved in Trump’s latest war but beyond that refused to condemn it or even comment on it substantively. If the matter is discussed in the Security Council, as demanded by China and Russia will the UK sit on its hands? Or will Starmer demand the upholding of international law, he did after all mumble something about that principle? Even some Republican members of Congress are suggesting the action was illegal (but probably only referring to the constitutional requirement of the President to obtain Congressional approval before waging war) but they have at least demonstrated some resistance to their demented commander in chief. No such luck here.

Soooo . . . . here we are again, it’s that day when one wonders what will happen in the new year. Will it be a time of hope or despair? Well, that’s the hope bit sorted, now let’s look to the other side of the coin. Putting to one side the encroaching climate disaster which will not abate, two things (at least) come to mind. Russia’s war on Ukraine and a large section of the British public’s rejection of Keir Starmer. There will also be a mid-term test for Trump, but I’ll leave that to one side for now (but reproduced below is evidence that POTUS is truly deranged, and more of his fans are noticing).
 
To Russia, will 2026 be the year the Ukraine war ends? A theory is that the Russian economy will collapse under the strain of military spending, foreign sanctions and other forms of economic isolation. I asked ChatGTP what the chances of Russian economic collapse are and was told ‘not imminent’:
 
‘Russia still has: Strong energy revenues (even discounted); tight state control over the economy; a population accustomed to economic hardship; and a central bank that has proven competent at crisis management.’

For some reason I have been able to access the RT (Russia Today) website—it has been blocked for quite a while. An article there by someone called Henry Johnston echoes ChatGTP’s assessment:

‘The Russian economy has been remarkably resilient, but it is clearly operating under strain and with heavy government intervention. However, the conditions that typically trigger a sudden, acute crisis are nowhere to be found, and people who think otherwise misunderstand what actually causes financial crises.’ (RT accessed 1st January 2026)

Johnston describes at length why he has formed that conclusion, which isn’t all rosy for the Russian economy, but suggests it’s a long way from running on fumes. I get the impression though that it is busily spending its future and could end up something like a Ponzi scheme. Just no time soon.

With no sign of decisive Western intervention (even the EU’s 80 billion Euro loan to Ukraine is nothing more than a very large sticking plaster) the war is likely to drag on. Or will the second of ChatGTP’s comments—’a population accustomed to economic hardship’  - give way to rebellion? Which leaders who have relied on repression to maintain power have preserved their regimes? Can patriotism trump having no bread?

As to my second 2026 question, what will be the future for Project Keir? I’m afraid I can offer no alternative to the general punditry consensus: after disastrous local and devolved election results in May, our beloved leader will be toast.

To round off this new year’s day blog, here’s two screenshots of recent Trump stories. I mentioned a few blogs ago how dictators get to define ’enemies of the people.’ It wasn’t long before confirmation came. And secondly, what kind of person writes, presumably without irony, a post about the death of someone by making the story chiefly about himself?