Is the utterly wayward, indeed bumptious Starmer, about to be caught in the quick-sand of of the unamed Peter Mandelson? The fact that Mandelson is not ever mentioned in political essay leades the …

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Feb 16, 2026

Editor: Since the assent of Zanny Minton Beddoes, that old boys club that once consisted of Wooldridge & Micklethwait is gone.

Headline: How to oust a prime minister

Sub-headline: History offers useful lessons for those plotting to get rid of Sir Keir Starmer

https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/02/14/how-to-oust-a-prime-minister

Editor: The Oxbridgers that populate this ‘News Magazine’ bring with themselves that patina of an education, that reekes of the old school tie and carefully managed references, to their academic achievments! In the use of quotations, references, and a well execised self-belief ! The two well wrought paragraphs below offer?

It is haunting season in Westminster. As ever when the mood is mutinous, its denizens are on the lookout for a posse of phantom ministers, sometimes known as the men in grey suits. Rumour holds that in the coming months they may glide into Number 10 and tell Sir Keir Starmer that his time is up. If the past is a guide, though, this ghostly group will not materialise.

History offers lessons for Labour MPs still hoping to oust Sir Keir. They apply across parties and time, from the deferential era of yore to today, when British political leaders have the shelf-life of smartphone models. A big takeaway for plotters concerns those men (or women) in grey suits. It is no use waiting for some spectral figure to do the dirty work discreetly. You have to grip the axe, openly and together.

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Editor: Look to this illustration that frames the above.

Reader compair the above illustartion to this from September 19th 2015

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/09/19/backwards-comrades

Editor : Compair and contrast the styles of these presentations- which is the more effective propagnda tool?

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Editor: Below the Oxbridgers offer a political strategy:

The first lesson for mutineers is: pick the right moment. The wake of a chastening by-election—like that in Gorton and Denton on February 26th—could be propitious; more so a humbling for the ruling party in local or regional elections, such as those on May 7th. But plotters must have an eye on the wider chronology. Deposing a leader in the middle of a parliament invites pressure to hold a general election, which a party in the doldrums may lose. Wait much longer, and it can seem too late to change the public’s mind.

This “goldilocks problem”, as Philip Cowley of Queen Mary University of London, terms it, applies to the state of the nation too. It makes no sense to ditch a leader if everything is tickety-boo. But assailing one in an emergency may look self-indulgent (unless, like Liz Truss, she obviously caused it). “No time for a novice,” proclaimed Gordon Brown, the embattled Labour prime minister during the financial crisis of 2007-09—a gibe partly directed at pretenders on his own side. Today the jittery bond market discourages upheaval.

Time their ambush wisely, and insurgents enjoy natural advantages. For starters, prime ministers are distracted by the need to keep running the country: facing a leadership challenge in 1990, Margaret Thatcher flew off to a summit that marked the end of the cold war. Next, as both she and (in 2022) Boris Johnson learned, leaders can be too cocooned or aloof to grasp their peril. “They’re hard-headed enough to know that their colleagues would all kill them if they could,” says Sir Vernon Bogdanor of King’s College London. “But they tend to think they’re invulnerable, and that’s what gets them in the end.”

…

Editor: From The Econmist of Feb 11th 2026
…

Sir Keir is dead. Long live Sir Keir!

Britain is in the midst of a constitutional experiment. The prime minister does not command a majority; the majority commands him. Labour’s backbenchers—that mix of former trade-union officials, lobbyists and people who attend seminars on The Third Sector best labelled the “soft left”—now run the country. To govern is to choose and Labour mps have to pick who will be the face of this new government.

Herein lies the problem. Labour’s mps have proved incapable of taking any tricky decision voluntarily. They faint at modest reforms to welfare and wince at spending restraint. When it comes to the prime minister, external circumstances will, eventually, force a choice. Perhaps a mortifying by-election defeat to the Green Party in a Manchester suburb later this month will jolt them, or a May massacre in Scotland, Wales and London. Maybe the remorseless prospect of defeat in 2029 will foist action upon them. Until then, they can grumble, brief and watch videos of Mr Carns doing pull-ups while wondering what could be.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/02/11/the-alternatives-to-sir-keir

Editor: If only The Economist could offer a coherent critique of Starmer !

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UK’s Top Civil Servant Quits in Fresh Upheaval for Starmer

The UK’s top civil servant quit his post after just 14 months, adding to the churn in Keir Starmer’s government that had already seen him lose two of his most senior aides this week.

Chris Wormald is standing down as cabinet secretary with immediate effect, the government said on Thursday in a statement that didn’t elaborate a reason for the resignation. The decision was reached “by mutual agreement” with the prime minister, it said.

Wormald’s departure underscores the instability in Starmer’s administration after his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, on Sunday, and his communications chief, Tim Allan, a day later. The now former cabinet secretary becomes the shortest-serving holder of the post since its inception 110 years ago.

Nevertheless, the move will likely be welcomed by those in the governing Labour Party who perceived Wormald — a veteran of the civil service — to have been a block on change, government officials told Bloomberg earlier this week.

When he appointed Wormald in 2024, Starmer demanded “the fundamental re-wiring of the British state.” The hire provoked some internal opposition because Wormald had worked in Whitehall for three decades and was not seen as someone who was likely to shake up the system.

…

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-12/uk-s-top-civil-servant-quits-in-fresh-upheaval-for-starmer

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Feb 15, 2026

Life & Arts

Liberals should mourn the passing world

Why apologise for what was the most successful international order in history?

Best regards!

StephenKMackSD

(A bold leap is what we need)

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Feb 15, 2026

Headline: A bold leap is what we need. We’d take the pain for the promise of growth.

Sub-headline: Wes Streeting’s criticism still rings true — growth is the most fundamental task of this or any government.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/labour-economy-bold-leap-growth-g6xcjg505

Editor: Colvile’ opening paragraphs can easily be called ‘chatter’!

Say what you will about Keir Starmer. No, there isn’t a “but” to follow. It’s just the order of the day in Westminster. With the prime minister’s authority in shreds, his colleagues are happily venting all of their frustrations with his performance and personality, often with only the thinnest veil of anonymity.

Editor: Are the following paragraph’s something like a replacement for actual political thought, or its burlesque?

But the most salient criticism is one that was never intended to become public. In his text message exchanges with Peter Mandelson, released last week, Wes Streeting laments: “There isn’t a clear answer to the question: why Labour?” Mandelson replies: “The government doesn’t have an economic philosophy which is then followed through in a programme of policies.” Seconds later Streeting concurs: “No growth strategy at all.”

Editor: Let me offer The Reader some telling quotations from the body of Colevile’s political interventions.

…

The UK economy ended last year with growth of 0.1 per cent in the final quarter. On a per capita basis, we are already in recession.

Housing, which was meant to be one of the core priorities of the government, is moribund outside London, and collapsing within it. Energy prices are still hideously high. Unemployment is rising. If boosting growth is the core mission of this government, then it definitely gets a failing grade.

…

Now, I’m going to do something hugely unfashionable, and point out that by no means all of this is Labour’s fault. Growth per head has been falling since the 1980s. Productivity has flatlined since the financial crisis, especially in the public sector. Nor is this a uniquely British problem: throughout Europe stagnant growth and surging populism are going hand in hand.

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On this front Labour’s original plan was, essentially, to not be the Tories. The theory was that businesses and investors would prize certainty and stability over a few measly tax rises. But it didn’t work out like that, to put it mildly. So what now?

…

The problem is that politics is not about good intentions, but trade-offs and results. Everyone wants growth. But will Labour’s new masters on the soft left really prioritise business over the voracious spending demands of the NHS and welfare system?

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The first is to retreat to the soft left comfort zone of Rayner and Ed Miliband.

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Politicians tend to close their minds as long as they can … because they believe that decisive action must inevitably bring political calamity upon their governments.”

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“Political survival depends on making quality decisions; compromised policies lead to voter dissatisfaction; letting things drift is political suicide.”.

…

There is a deep well of realism and common sense among the ordinary people of the community. They want politicians to have the guts and the vision to deliver sustainable gains in living standards.”

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They look for policies with instant appeal to create continuous public bliss”).

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Starmer’s Labour came to power by taking the opposite of Douglas’s advice. It told the public that spending would rise, growth would rise but taxes and borrowing would not.

…

But I believe — I have to believe — that the public will still reward politicians who are honest about our country’s problems and visibly try their damnedest to fix them. Because if not, what hope have we got?

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Editor: What eludes Colvile’s thought processes is that Starmer, the political creature of Tony Blair, who defamed Jeremy Corbyn, that lead inexorably to the current political collapse? Starmer is the natural successor of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak!

American Observer.

Newspaper Reader .

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Feb 14, 2026

The Atlantic hires David Brooks as a staff writer

New home for his writing, and to launch a video podcast

The Atlantic is announcing that David Brooks, who for years has contributed memorable Atlantic cover stories and essays on political and societal issues, is joining the magazine as a staff writer beginning next month. The Atlantic will be the home for all of David’s writing, and he will also host a new weekly video podcast that will launch later this spring. David worked as an opinion columnist at The New York Times for 22 years.

In a note to staff, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes: “David’s work––his columns, his stories for us, and his many books––have made him known and acclaimed around the world. He is, among other things, America’s best pop sociologist, someone with a reporter’s curiosity and a writer’s grace. He is an unparalleled diagnostician of the faults and weaknesses of governments, institutions, and social structures, as our readers know from such stories as “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” “Confessions of a Republican Exile,” and “How the Ivy League Broke America.”

Newspaper Reader.

February 9, 2026

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Feb 14, 2026

The Buenos Aires Herald!

Bad Bunny’s Nuestra América

The singer’s Super Bowl Halftime Show showed that, regardless of any particular flag, artistic sensitivity is Latin culture’s true identity

For twenty years, I taught a course on Latin American political thought. Bad Bunny may have taught many of the same ideas in ten minutes to millions of people in Sunday’s Super Bowl Halftime Show.

Diego von Vacano

To the untrained ear or eye, the show may have appeared as incongruous gibberish, especially to those of us over 50 who don’t really listen to contemporary urban latin music, especially reggaeton.

But that is besides the point. What really matters are the ideas behind the spectacle.

The show took place in the middle of the United States’ best-known yearly bellicose event, the Super Bowl. Every year, a miniature war takes place between two teams in a sport that even president Trump called a misnomer, “American football,” when comparing it to “football” — or fútbol, in Spanish — which is played with feet and a round ball.

An egg-shaped ball is thrown around or carried with the hands to gain territory with brutal force. This show of violence was interrupted by someone who just wants to dance.

Right now, winter is roaring in the Northern Hemisphere. In Washington, DC, the Potomac river is gelid. In northern Italy, the winter Olympics are taking place after mass protests, while cold winds blow over upheavals in Minneapolis.

Maybe Hell has frozen over. But the singer, real name Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, who had already protested the U.S.’ immigration crackdown at the Grammys, once again said no to ice — in more ways than one — and chose the sun of his native Puerto Rico.

What is the significance of Bad Bunny’s show? It is a break, literally and figuratively, from this long political winter.

For Mexican political philosopher José Vasconcelos, who lived many years as an immigrant in Texas, aesthetics trumps politics. His posited that Latin people, from Tierra del Fuego all the way up to Northern California, are united by a common essential rhythm.

Latin culture is fundamentally an artistic sensibility. We may not all share Benito’s particular kind of beat, but we recognize it as ours when we see it and feel it.

For Vasconcelos, this sensibility is not just for enjoyment. It is something Latin people can teach to others around the globe.

The English-speaking world, mired in materialism and rigid logic, could particularly benefit from absorbing this sensibility: a different kind of aesthetic judgment that yields a more complete form of humanity. Vasconcelos thought it could lead us past the overly rational and bellicose periods of human history.

Bad Bunny’s show began with images of what may have been his barrio in Puerto Rico — or what, based on nostalgia, he may think it was. This idea echoes the work of another famous Caribbean immigrant, Cuba’s Jose Martí.

Martí was also an immigrant — and exile. In New York, he wrote his seminal essay Nuestra América (Our America) in 1891. For him, the word America is all of the Western Hemisphere, especially the Spanish-speaking areas. It is not synonymous with the United States, which is more of a description than a proper name.

In Bad Bunny’s show, the choice to define America as the variegated flags of the American continent’s nations is almost a direct reference to Martí.

Vasconcelos and Martí were not only national figures in their own countries. As immigrants in the U.S. — the former in Texas, the latter in New York — they became part of a transnational notion of identity.

A panethnic Latinidad

As such, they shaped U.S. identity through Chicano culture and Cuban-American sensibilities. They are as American as Emerson or Thoreau.

Many may deride Bad Bunny’s style of singing, but this is beside the point. He wants to meld language into musical rhythm, just as reggaeton is a mix of Jamaican beats and Latin pounding. Reason takes a back seat to pure aesthetic sensation, emotion, and form. All he wants to do is dance. And make romance.

In all the countries he mentioned, from Argentina and Bolivia to the U.S. and his native Puerto Rico, the ludic culture that he presented in the halftime show is in stark contrast to the martial gridiron. His all-white uniform is replicated in the show’s wedding scene, where love takes center stage.

Vasconcelos and Martí would easily recognize this sensibility as their own.

Newspaper Reader.

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Feb 14, 2026

Editor: Wooldridge begins with these paragraphs and a quote of form Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” .

Rudyard Kipling has gone far out of fashion. Born in Bombay, in British India, in 1865, he was an unapologetic imperialist; he even coined the phrase “take up the white man’s burden” to mark the symbolic passage of global power from Britain to the US. Yet his 1919 poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” should be compulsory reading today because it goes to the heart of our contemporary troubles — and suggests a way out.

Kipling wrote “The Gods” in 1919, after a war that had killed as many as 22 million people (including his only son, John) and amid a pandemic that eventually claimed at least another 50 million. The poem contrasts the “gods of the marketplace” — faddish ideas that periodically grip the public — with the “gods of the copybook headings” — pieces of popular wisdom that were printed on the top line of every page in school exercise books. Children were expected to copy them out, learning basic moral lessons while they improved their handwriting.

The end of the Great War released a flock of optimistic ideas about ending war forever, abolishing private property and downgrading nation-states. The Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar in 1917, and Western policymakers birthed the League of Nations in 1920. Kipling thought that such naive optimism would lead not just to disappointment but to the destruction of civilization. The poem concludes by contrasting humanity’s weakness for self-deception with the stern truths of the copybook headings:

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As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things that are certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit, and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

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After the Kipling quotation Wooldridge begins his diatribe, that then gathers steam.

The end of the Cold War gave flight to another flock of optimistic ideas on the world. Many of them, like the ones that infuriated Kipling, came from the left. University departments devoted themselves to presenting Western capitalism as a racist project. (Kipling himself has been “cancelled” in many literature departments.) Progressive NGOs made the case for universal basic income or giving drug addicts free drugs. But a significant difference between our time and Kipling’s is that many of the most naïve ideas have come from the right. Neoliberals argued for linking CEO pay to their company’s stock price, or for abolishing borders or reducing inheritance tax, all in the name of market efficiency. The tech titans waxed lyrical about abolishing death, colonizing Mars and discovering “superintelligence.”

The “gods of the marketplace” all have clever arguments on their side. Derrick Bell, one of the founders of identitarian thinking, rightly pointed out that different forms of disadvantage compound each other. Michael Jensen, one of the founders of “agency theory,” produced elegant arguments about how CEOs (“agents”) will work harder for their “principals” (shareholders) if they have a share in the upside of success (share options). Tech titans such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are, in purely IQ terms, some of the planet’s cleverest people. Yet all this cleverness is as nothing compared with the common wisdom of the copybook headings.

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Editor: To add emphasis to my quotation: Wooldridge first provides chock-a-block a series of diagnoses, followed by his role call of present miscreants! And this : Consider three generic maxims and the price that we have paid for ignoring them:

First: Pride comes before a fall.

Second: A tree without roots cannot thrive.

Third: No civilization can survive without virtue.

…

Plato argued that too much popular self-indulgence leads inexorably to demand for a dictator who can restore order. The Founding Fathers believed that “parchment” barriers to tyranny would fail if the people lacked character. Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell warned that the greatest danger to capitalism comes not from without but from within, from a failure to control the appetites that it generates.

…

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York suggests that Trump’s extremism is empowering the left of the Democratic Party. But there are nevertheless reasons for hope.

…

The Epstein scandal is so toxic that it is likely to discredit not just the people who moved in his circles but a wider culture of entitlement. A growing number of universities, particularly in the American South, are establishing courses on Western civilization and civic virtue. And a growing number of young people, exhausted by digital distraction, are looking for meaning in great books or traditional culture. There is even a revival of old-fashioned religion in secular Britain. Kipling warned that, if we neglected the gods of the copybook headings, they would return with terror and slaughter. We still have time to appease them with moderation and wisdom.

Editor: The University of Austin (UATX) was founded in 2021 by Joe Lonsdale, Pano Kanelos (President), Niall Ferguson, and Bari Weiss!

Newspaper Reader.

Fri 18 Mar 2016 16.09 EDT

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Feb 13, 2026

As the Conservative party divides its time between running the country and tearing itself apart over Europe, Labour has been consumed with a rather different problem. In the past two weeks, it has had to expel two activists for overt racism. That follows the creation of an inquiry into the Labour club at Oxford University, after the co-chair resigned saying the club was riddled with racism. The racism in question is hatred of Jews.

I suspect many in Labour and on the wider left dearly wish three things to be true of this problem. That these are just a few bad apples in an otherwise pristine barrel; that these incidents aren’t actually about racism at all but concern only opposition to Israel; and that none of this reflects negatively on Jeremy Corbyn.

Start with the bad apples. The cases of Gerry Downing and Vicki Kirby certainly look pretty rotten. The former said it was time to wrestle with the “Jewish Question”, the latter hailed Hitler as a “Zionist God” and tweeted a line about Jews having “big noses”, complete with a “lol”.

It’d be so much easier if these were just two rogue cases. But when Alex Chalmers quit his post at Oxford’s Labour club, he said he’d concluded that many had “some kind of problem with Jews”. He cited the case of one club member who organised a group to shout “filthy Zionist” at a Jewish student whenever they saw her. Former Labour MP Tom Harris wrote this week that the party “does indeed have a problem with Jews”. And there is, of course, the word of Jews themselves. They have been warning of this phenomenon for years, lamenting that parts of the left were succumbing to views of Jews drenched in prejudice.

I hope many on the left will pause next time Jews raise the alarm about antisemitism

But this is the brick wall Jews keep running into: the belief that what Jews are complaining about is not antisemitism at all, but criticism of Israel. Jews hear this often. They’re told the problem arises from their own unpleasant habit of identifying any and all criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish racism. Some go further, alleging that Jews’ real purpose in raising the subject of antisemitism is to stifle criticism of Israel.

You can see the appeal of such an argument to those who use it. It means all accusations of antisemitism can be dismissed as mere Israel-boosting propaganda. But Downing and Kirby make that harder. Their explicit targets were Jews.

What of those who attack not Jews, but only Zionists? Defined narrowly, that can of course be legitimate. If one wants to criticise the historical movement that sought to re-establish Jewish self-determination in Palestine, Zionism is the right word.

But Zionism, as commonly used in angry left rhetoric, is rarely that historically precise. It has blended with another meaning, used as a codeword that bridges from Israel to the wider Jewish world, hinting at the age-old, antisemitic notion of a shadowy, global power, operating behind the scenes. For clarity’s sake, if you want to attack the Israeli government, the 50-year occupation or hawkish ultra-nationalism, then use those terms: they carry much less baggage.

To state the obvious, criticism of Israel and Zionism is not necessarily anti-Jewish: that’s why there are so many Jewish critics of Israel, inside and outside the country. But it doesn’t take a professor of logic to know that just because x is not always y, it does not follow that x can never be y. Of course opposition to Israel is not always antisemitic. But that does not mean that it is never and can never be antisemitic. As Downing and Kirby have helpfully illustrated.

I hope that, as a result, many on the left will pause next time Jews raise the alarm about antisemitism. I hope they’ll remember that, while most anti-Israel activists are acting in good faith, some are motivated more darkly, while others carelessly express their opposition to Israel in language or imagery that has a melancholy history.

There’s a deeper reason to pause. Many good people on the left want to make things neat and simple by saying that Israel and Zionism have nothing to do with Jews or Judaism. That they can deplore the former even while they protect and show solidarity with the latter. But it’s not quite as easy as that.

While many Jews – especially in conversations with each other – condemn Israeli government policy going back many years, they do identify strongly with Israel and its people. A recent survey found that 93% of British Jews said Israel formed some part of their identity. Through ties of family or history, they are bound up with it. When Jews pray they face east – towards Jerusalem. And they have done that for 2,000 years.

It’s inconvenient, I know, but that needs to be remembered by those who insist that there’s no connection between Israel and Jews, that it’s perfectly possible to loathe everything about Israel – the world’s only Jewish country – without showing any hostility to Jews.

Jews themselves usually don’t see it, or experience it, that way. That doesn’t mean no one should ever criticise Israel, for fear of treading on Jewish sensitivities. Of course it doesn’t. But it does mean that many Jews worry when they see a part of the left whose hatred of Israel is so intense, unmatched by the animus directed at any other state.

They wonder why the same degree of passion – the same willingness to take to the streets, to tweet night and day – is not stirred by, say, Russia, whose bombing of Syria killed at least 1,700 civilians; or the Assad regime itself, which has taken hundreds of thousands of Arab lives. They ask themselves, what exactly is it about the world’s only Jewish country that convinces its loudest opponents it represents a malignancy greater than any other on the planet?

Which brings us to Jeremy Corbyn. No one accuses him of being an antisemite. But many Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to overlook whatever nastiness they might have uttered about Jews, even when that extended to Holocaust denial or the blood libel – the medieval calumny that Jews baked bread using the blood of gentile children. (To be specific: Corbyn was a long-time backer of a pro-Palestinian group founded by Paul Eisen, attending its 2013 event even after Eisen had outed himself as a Holocaust denier years earlier. Similarly, Corbyn praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah even though, as a British court confirmed, Salah had deployed the blood libel.)

Thanks to Corbyn, the Labour party is expanding, attracting many leftists who would previously have rejected it or been rejected by it. Among those are people with hostile views of Jews. Two of them have been kicked out, but only after they had first been readmitted and once their cases attracted unwelcome external scrutiny.

The question for Labour now is whether any of this matters. To those at the top, maybe it doesn’t. But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews.

Fri 18 Mar 2016 16.09 EDT

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Feb 13, 2026

The Truth about Peter Mandelson | Jeremy Corbyn interview

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/fSRwknAXg0w?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

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Feb 13, 2026

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/v-qXCmKSLxA?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

UK Starmer coalition of the willing crumbles

The Duran

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Feb 12, 2026

Editor: Chris Norlund

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