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No 1669 24th February 2026

The real depravity of imperialist world control is not just Epstein however sleazy the revelations but genocidal WW3 blitzing and bombing terror destruction of country after country, to rescue capitalism from its great Catastrophe and keep the monopoly foot on the throat of the ruthlessly exploited billions. True concern for exploited and damaged women and children should be first for 10,000s blown apart and maimed in Gaza, Yemen and Sudan etc, or terrorised in Syria, Iran, Africa and Latin America, ruthlessly starved in Cuba or nuclear intimidated by the West in North Korea. However, scandalous skulduggery is a crucial story too of ruling class cynicism, duplicity & gross hypocrisy and above all, like Rasputin in the Tsarist court, shows weakness & feeble degeneracy in an out of time, hated system. None more exposed than has-been British imperialism’s parasitical “royal” pomposity and not-so-clever Mandelson manipulation. Bankrupt UK now weakest link in the imperialist chain, ripe for revolution. But Leninist theory is vital

It remains hard to call whether the US military buildup against Iran’s ayatollahs will go through to an allout attack or if the Trumpites will baulk at its terrifying consequences.

A slick raid like the “easy” Venezuela kidnap of Nicolás Maduro is not on the cards and fears of total disaster can only be eating away Washington’s confidence after imperialist rebuffs and debacles against much less powerful opponents like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen and now even less digestible Russia.

The memory of humiliation at the hands of Vietnam’s sometimes barefoot peasant and worker army still festers.

And for all its showy long-distance B2 air-raid boasting an “end” to last summer’s 12-day war, that was actually an expensive rescue operation, to save the overstretched Zionist stooge’s belligerence from emerging defeat as Tehran’s missiles began to cause havoc in Tel Aviv.

But endless imperialist crisis is pushing the US ruling class ever harder into outright terrorising war and intimidation abroad, and murderous fascist repression at home.

There is no other answer the continuing degeneration of the sleazy, outmoded and bankrupt monopoly capitalist system has to its actually unsolvable meltdown Catastrophe except brute force and destruction.

And its contempt for all “legality” and fair dealing is now so glaring even some TV voxpops in the privileged and long-brainwashed anti-communist West throw up the odd “revolution is needed”.

But still the fake-“left” avoids serious mention of the question.

None, from the “official” (opportunist) trade union movement, the revisionist (Stalinist) “left”, to the petty bourgeois Trots will give the real answer to why this is happening – explaining the historic inevitability of unstoppable crisis collapse and its war destruction psychotic bourgeois “solution” in a contradiction-ridden profit system (see Marx box) – nor how it is to be ended, necessarily by revolution (stirring everywhere in anti-imperialist upheaval, “terrorism” and explosive revolts, and no more than in the Middle East).

But despite shallow posturing claims to “revolutionism” and endless squabbling over procedures and academic programmes the “left” evade the vital conclusion, the need to build a leadership party of Marxist science, to guide ever deepening spontaneously erupting class war all the way to proletarian dictatorship rule, the only path out of war collapsem, building socialism and a rational society.

It requires the fight for an agreed understanding on the solid foundations established by giants like Marx, Engels and Lenin but constantly updated and advanced by disciplined polemical struggle as the concrete realities of the world class struggle emerge.

Until that happens the disgusting and tyrannical US Empire will continue its destructive and planet threatening domination, trampling across all “protest”, “legality”, “democracy” and “freedom”; across all piecemeal revolt; and across as much of the remaining revisionist socialist world as it can, (Cuba, Vietnam, Korea and including even giant China) especially if they drop their guard as Gorbachevism did in the former Soviet Union, abandoning its workers state class dictatorship authority).

The tumult of capitalist world events, heading ever further into now three decades of deliberately inflamed World War Three and growing eruptions against it makes the fight for this conscious understanding ever more crucial.

And there have never been more lessons to draw and real developments to assess, in the stream of invasions, torture, blitzings, and killings; of revealed corruption and cynical depravity around the Epstein scandals; domestic repression now reaching murderous fascist intimidation; of election bending and coups worldwide; and of ecological disaster, all coming dizzyingly faster.

Just since the new year, the sick reality of US Empire-dominated capitalism’s barbaric but failing rule is spelt out by: stepping-up the already 60-year inhuman siege and attempted strangulation of tiny communist Cuba (via the mafia kidnap bullying of its left-nationalist ally Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and intimidation of Colombia, Mexico and all Latin America to cut it off from oil and resources); by the military terrorising of anti-Western Iran dementedly “justified” with ever more grotesque lies, psyops distortions and outright Goebbels fabrications about “tens of thousands killed by repressive rule”; total blanket suppression of all protest or even news about, let alone commentary against, the Zionists’ real horrifying 2½-year genocide and blitzing in Palestine’s Gaza, in its “illegally” (!!) occupied West Bank and outside into Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, all still underway despite supposed “ceasefire” and risibly designated peace agreements and the “Board of Peace”; by the insane psyops nonsense about “frog poison” and “Novichok” and “polonium teapots” to further demonise the non-existent “Russian threat” excuse for Europe’s own ever more hysterical crisis wamongering; in the wave of utterly bent, stitched up and manipulated “elections” bullied into (mostly) pro-America votes by crude bribery and blackmail interventions, from Honduras and Argentina and throughout Latin America, to Thailand, Uganda and Bangladesh, to Poland, Moldova and attempted on Georgia and Serbia and now even giant Japan (and South Korea too if the recent coup attempt had not fallen flat on its face with near revolutionary stirring against it, forcing imprisonment for the reactionary perpetrators to head it off).

And right at home there is the near meltdown humiliation of the stooge Labour Party, and the parasitic chinless aristocrat/royal ruling establishment too, both mired in sleaze and corruption from the Epstein scandal in America and demonstrating the fraud of “democracy” as well as the utter weakness and hollowness not only of the British ruling class, but more widely the entire Anglo-Saxon world domination.

The universal handwringing condemnation by bourgeois journalists, bishops and feminists and politicians of all shades, – and especially the venal and slippery lying opportunist Gollums of the Labour party – goes so far beyond mere hypocrisy in its cries of “betrayal” and “concern for the victims” it makes even the barefaced cynicism of the corrupt police chief in the film Casablanca, – “shocked, shocked I tell you, to find gambling going on” as the croupier brings “your winnings sir” – look like principle.

This writhing and squirming backstabbing and foot-in-the-face careerist climbing, – always the norm for bourgeois politics and the lying parliamentary racket – is not a “moral breakdown” at all but reflects the rabbit-in-the-headlights panic of a ruling class in free fall, plunging into the abyss of history’s greatest ever economic Catastrophe – and taking its disgusting Labour stooges with it.

Far more than the reactionary “Starmer leadership” is finished – so is the entire “New Labour” racket.

And so too is the British imperialism it grovellingly serves.

“New Labour” itself was invented in the 1990s to rescue the moribund ruling class because the old parliamentary democracy fraud, pacifying the “people” with its reformist delusions and bamboozling promises of “freedom to have a say” and steady improvements in wages, welfare and living conditions, was itself already shot to pieces. It was no longer affordable in the postwar remnants of the British Empire, more hollowed out and pathetic even than all the rest of the floundering imperialist powers.

Britain was already looking like the weakest link in the whole blood-soaked imperialist world domination racket as the temporary “boomtime” of the fifties and sixties faltered and trade war pressures began to ramp up, as the first great tremors of inevitable capitalist crisis shook the world (1970s oil-price inflation, 1987 Black Monday crash, Latin American credit failures, the 1990s “Asian Tiger” currency collapses, Japan’s endless, tariff-hammered stagnation, US Enron bankruptcy, 1998 Russia debt implosion, the dotcom crash).

Thatcherism failed in its quest to solve Britain’s problems by a return to repression, privatisation fire-sales of national resources, wagecuts and welfare savagery despite the vicious civil war on the miners in 1984-5, and she had to go (in the face of potentially revolutionary stirrings like the Poll Tax eruption, and growing momentum of the national liberation struggle in the occupied north of Ireland).

The Tory brown envelope sleaze, and economic incompetence that followed could not hold the line; so along came shiny new Blairism, desperately stretching the increasingly despised parliamentary racket with nothing but spin and soundbite hype but no substance bar some trivial tinkering reforms paid for by mortgaging or selling the economy to private finance initiatives, profit-racking foreign monopolies, future debt and the Blairite-lauded fatcat equity funds.

As some of the self-justifying bourgeois press accounts spell out, Peter Mandelson was at the heart of this vacuous, self-righteous, petty bourgeois PR front for imperialism, and its “Cool Britannia” philistine shallowness covering over quite vicious “disciplining” and “scrounger” scapegoating of the working class, no different to Toryism (and in some ways worse ultimately, at the forefront of renewed slump warmongering stooging for the US, making up the degenerate Goebbels lies to justify blitzing first the former socialist Yugoslavia remnant in Serbia, the mercenary suppression of Sierra Leone, the SAS deathsquad terrorising of Afghanistan and most of all the savage bomb and torture occupation of Iraq). What Private Eye calls “reverse ferrets” are in full swing:

When I worked alongside Mandelson 40 years ago, he had one of the sharpest minds I have ever come across. The Labour party was still reeling from a catastrophic general election when he took over as its director of communications on his 32nd birthday. It was dominated by trade unions. It looked out of date and steeped in industrial conflict. Its communications strategy amounted to little more than announcing policies via press releases, and hoping the voters appreciated them.

Mandelson understood [..]the party needed a drastic visual makeover. Under his supervision, it gained a shadow communications agency, a team of advertisers and other professionals who gave their services for free; it used focus groups to test which messages actually resonated with the public, the party’s red flag logo was scrapped in favour of a red rose, and press conferences were staged in front of soft pastel colours. There was a celebrated party political broadcast, directed by Hugh Hudson, which contained no policies but projected the leader, Neil Kinnock, as someone the voters could trust.

In retrospect, his fatal character flaws were apparent even in those early days. He could not resist playing power games, using his influence to undermine those who had crossed him. This made him deeply distrusted and disliked. The late Tessa Jowell told me that after Mandelson’s election to parliament, in 1992, he was sitting alone on the green benches when another Labour MP came in and ostentatiously refused to go near him, saying, loudly enough for Mandelson to hear: “I don’t want to sit next to the most hated man in the Labour party.”

[..]It appears to be a common fault of people who live by plotting and manoeuvring that they assume that everyone else is up to the same tricks. Every major setback in Mandelson’s bumpy career came about when a dubious association he had formed with someone rich came to light. His first resignation from the cabinet was over a secret loan from a wealthy Labour MP. The second was over a favour he did for an Indian billionaire. He also attracted a slew of bad headlines after sunning himself on a luxury yacht belonging to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch now sanctioned by the UK government. Each disaster was his own fault, but not in his own mind. Anyone interested can watch his acceptance speech after he was re-elected MP for Hartlepool in 2001, in which he memorably declared that he was “a fighter not a quitter”. It was a denunciation of those who had “underestimated” him. The fury with which he spat out the word “quitter” suggests to me that, in his mind, he was a wronged man – a victim. I believe he always felt like a victim, and as a victim felt he deserved to be recompensed by all the good things that rich men’s money can buy.[..]

something that will puzzle people who knew Peter Mandelson is: how could he be so stupid?

Should you be thinking of stabbing a colleague in the back, and betraying your country, your government and your party – to paraphrase the prime minister – a basic precaution is not to leave an email trail. During the 2008 expenses scandal, it was the MPs who left proof of their dishonesty in emails who went to jail. I suspect many others got away with it for want of written evidence. You might think a politician so deviously clever that they call him the Prince of Darkness would know that, and not end up with police searching two of his houses.

[..]Furthermore, if you are freeloading off a manipulative sleazebag, it is better not to wander about his house in your underpants, in case there are hidden cameras. And yet this highly intelligent political operator created a trove of self-incriminating evidence and left it all in the care of a convicted paedophile.

[] But he is not the victim in this story, of course. The victims are poor, dead Virginia Giuffre and the other women and girls who were trafficked and abused by Epstein and his associates. Mandelson is a clumsy machiavellian who brought disaster on himself.

Andy McSmith was chief press officer for the Labour party in the 1980s, and spent almost 30 years as a political journalist

We now know that Mandelson was leaking sensitive inside information about British government decisions to his financier friend Jeffrey Epstein, one of the most repulsive criminals of the 21st century – a criminal, moreover, who had recently been convicted in a Florida court for procuring a child for prostitution.

The depravity is beyond belief.

At the time, Mandelson was business secretary (and effective deputy prime minister) in the Gordon Brown government as it weighed up how to confront a financial crisis. On the evidence of the Epstein emails, Mandelson may well be guilty of misconduct in public office - an offence that carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

To make matters worse for Starmer, his decision to despatch Mandelson to Washington breached historic foreign office conventions.

In the US, ambassadors are often political appointments. This is not the case in Britain. Karen Pierce, a career diplomat, preceded Mandelson in Washington, and after Mandelson was sacked, another British diplomat, Christian Turner, succeeded him.

Bear in mind therefore that Starmer was making a personal intervention when he sent Mandelson to the White House. This makes the prime minister directly responsible for the most reprehensible and disastrous appointment in the postwar history of the British diplomatic service - an appointment that blew up in his face, humiliating Britain in the process.

Starmer knew that Mandelson had been twice forced to resign from the Tony Blair government - first for failing to declare a loan from fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson, and then after being accused of seeking to influence a passport application for Indian tycoon Srichand Hinduja.

Starmer would also have known about Mandelson’s longstanding friendship with Epstein - sustained after the disgraced financier was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor.

As the Guardian has reported, this was a matter of public record before Mandelson’s appointment to the ambassadorship. It was also publicly known that Mandelson stayed at Epstein’s flat in Manhattan in 2009, the year after Epstein was sentenced to prison.

[..]Mandelson’s fundamental values have long dominated the British political and media establishment.

When Starmer sent Mandelson to Washington, it was widely hailed as a masterstroke, on the basis that only Mandelson could handle US President Donald Trump.

Remember Starmer’s cringemaking tribute when Mandelson was appointed: “You can sense that there’s a new leader. He’s a true one-off, a pioneer in business, in politics. Many people love him. Others love to hate him. But to us, he’s just … Peter.”

Yet everybody knew that Mandelson was a liar and a cheat.

[He..]has been celebrated - one might almost say loved - by the political and media classes for nearly half a century.

During this period, more than any other politician, he has shaped the modern Labour Party, exercising hypnotic influence over four leaders: Neil Kinnock, Blair, Brown and Starmer.

The scale of the latest political scandal cannot be understood outside of this background.

As a young man, Mandelson flirted with communism, reportedly selling copies of the Morning Star outside Kilburn underground station. In the late 1970s, as chairman of the British Youth Council, he attended a Soviet-sponsored event in Cuba.

But he then signed up to Labour. In the early 1980s, the party boasted a social democratic heritage that could be traced to its founding fathers, Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald.

The party he resigned from on Sunday is a husk. It is no longer a vehicle of the left. It has broken its relations with the trade unions, becoming a vehicle for the billionaires who today own British (and world) politics.

Ideologically and practically, Starmer’s Labour is closer to Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform than to Harold Wilson’s Labour Party of the 1960s.

Though others bear a share of responsibility, Mandelson can claim with justification that he, more than anyone else, has turned Labour into what it has become today.

Through charm and force of personality, he hypnotised three Labour prime ministers: Blair, Brown and now Starmer. Through them, he turned Labour from the party of the working class into a party of the rich.

This meant forging alliances with the big newspaper groups, especially the Murdoch media, while taking Labour’s traditional supporters for granted. This strategy worked in the short term by securing three victories in the polls for Blair - hence Mandelson’s reputation as a political genius.

Yet over time, Mandelson hollowed out the party, causing millions of voters to defect to Reform or to insurgent groups on the left.

This was a strategy that left Labour infatuated by power, obsessed with money and bereft of values. Hence the fundamental Mandelson paradox: an individual who loved billionaires joined the party of the working class.

Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, is a Mandelson protégée. “I don’t know who and how and when he was invented, but whoever it was,” sighed Mandelson,“they will find their place in heaven.” McSweeney repaid the compliment by pressing for Mandelson to be given the Washington job.

Will Hutton, a respected old Labour thinker, now judges that McSweeney’s emails and mobile “should be examined by the police”, noting that Starmer’s chief of staff spoke with Mandelson “almost daily”.

But it is not simply Starmer and McSweeney who bought Mandelson’s greedy and self-interested politics. If Starmer goes, remember that his likely successor, Wes Streeting, is another Mandelson protégé.

The Labour Party’s decision to bar Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from standing in the forthcoming Gorton by-election now looks like a mortal error. It can be compared to a dying man refusing to call an ambulance.

Meanwhile, Farage’s Reform has been mysteriously silent over the Epstein scandal. Farage, more at home in Dubai or Washington than in Britain, reveres money too.

Indeed, vanishingly few politicians have stood outside this corrupt system. The most notable was Jeremy Corbyn. In 2017, Mandelson said he was working “every single day” to undermine or bring him down.

We are very lucky to have the Epstein files. They shed light on a deeply corrupt system of government that functions in the interests of criminal elites, who believe that they have no obligation to obey the laws that constrain ordinary voters.

Starmer’s Labour, Kemi Badenoch’s Tories, and the oligarch media are all part of the system. Eyes have been opened. Let us hope that the future belongs to those who can confront the billionaire class, which has taken control of democratic politics on both sides of the Atlantic. (Peter Oborne)

These moralising and chauvinistic pieces only reflect petty bourgeois dismay and hasty arse-covering of course, not least by the reference to “respected Will Hutton” (!!) a major proselytiser for Blairism.

There may be some sincere petty bourgeois disgust from the likes of Oborne at the sheer degeneracy but laced with illusions in some mythical “real Labour” or “old Labour” in a once-upstanding Britain all supposedly “hypnotised” out of its “principles”.

“Old” Labour was always as devious, opportunist and craven as any of the Blairite period, and running a quite vicious British imperialism of world exploitation – not that the fake-“left” was saying so then (or even now) as the EPSR pointed out as the “project” got going, here against the “Leninist” revisionists, (now the Trot-leaning Weekly Worker CPGB) but applicable across the trot and revisionist board:

The latest trailing behind bourgeois ideology by these poseurs concerns Blair’s ‘New Labour’ charlatanism, which one might have thought could hardly bamboozle a newborn infant.

They describe Blairism as “the revival of the Labour Party” and as producing “a viable alternative bourgeois party of government”. Blair will probably send them a donation for such favourable publicity. More thoughtful workers will be more sceptical. Labourism was part of the successful imperialist epoch, its permanent shadow. With British imperialism at death’s door, certain to have the international position of its class standing utterly destroyed in the coming maelstrom of warmongering trade-war crisis, – the position of its bogus ‘parliamentary-democracy Opposition’ is bound to be undermined too.

Far from “the revival of the Labour Party”, Blairism surely represents a desperate petty-bourgeois dash towards the trivial froth of ‘new politics’ as the old imperialist two-party racket becomes thoroughly discredited. It is a contemporary twitch echoing Labour leader (Oswald) Mosley’s turn to the ‘New Movement’ in the equally-troubled 1930s crisis for imperialism, but abandoning Old Labour far more comprehensively than did Mosleyism or Ramsay MacDonald’s desertion to the National Government, – because now the game really is up totally for British imperialism, and not a trace of petty-bourgeois ‘socialist’ posturing (like Clause 4) is safe to be left in place any more. (EPSR No800 02-05-95)

Mandelson did not create New Labour and its PR trickery, he was simply better at the devious manipulations required to make it “work” for a period, in fact appointed for just that.

Now far more is unravelling than just Mandelson’s “dark arts”, and the undertone of quite nasty fascism is much more sharply apparent as some of the other accounts in the independent “left” bourgeois press battle to explain, particularly around the massive Jewish/Zionist freemasonry influence on Labour and its use to suppress the tepid fake-“leftism” of the Corbyn surge – details of which are simply ignored or calculatedly suppressed by the mainstream press, itself either controlled by or sympathetic to imperialism’s Zionist tool (and virtually blanking out reports on the endless genocidal butchery and repression in Gaza and the West Bank):

Three years ago Al Jazeera’s series The Labour Files laid bare the ruthlessness, racism and maniacal factionalism of the Labour right and its cynical exploitation of the antisemitism issue to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.

It was resolutely ignored by the British media.

Since then a body of literature has built up not just supporting this narrative but amplifying it.

Martin Forde KC’s report on bullying and racism in the Labour Party, commissioned by Keir Starmer, echoed many of its points. Forde himself said he was “fascinated” by the Al Jazeera series.

In their remarkable book “Get In”, Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire told much the same story, describing Starmer’s elevation to power as “the great deception … a plot without precedent in Labour history.”

And now Paul Holden’s new book “The Fraud” offers the most damning portrayal yet of a political project at once proudly Machiavellian but entirely devoid of moral and intellectual substance.

It comes as Starmerism unravels and denouement approaches, with Holden exposing it as a cruel hoax on a nation desperate for mature, responsible government following the chaos of the Johnson/Truss years.

Holden had access to internal Labour Party documents others did not and casual readers may find the mass of detail daunting.

But this is the definitive case for the prosecution. Advance reporting has already led to the resignation of Starmer’s strategy director Paul Ovenden.

As with “Get In”, the central focus is on Morgan McSweeney, protégé of the disgraced Peter Mandelson and now Starmer’s chief of staff [now forced to resign too - ed].

Before 2020 McSweeney was head of Labour Together, a think tank which posed as an innocent forum for debate while working assiduously behind the scenes to undermine Corbyn and replace him as leader with Starmer.

It did so using hundreds of thousands of pounds in undeclared donations from hedge fund managers and supporters of Israel.

The Electoral Commission fined Labour Together just £14,250, apparently accepting the omission was accidental. Holden argues convincingly that this is unlikely.

The failure to declare funding enabled Labour Together to fly beneath the radar as it conducted polling and established the astroturf organisations that were used to destroy Corbyn.

The story of how Labour Together and others encouraged and covertly exploited what, for many, was genuine confusion between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is now painfully familiar to victims of it.

[...]What emerges as particularly distasteful is the frequency with which [some] Jews were targets.

The Labour Files exposed Euan Philipps, head of media at Labour Against Antisemitism, who adopted the Jewish sounding name David Gordstein to file antisemitism complaints to the Labour Party.

The activities of this faux Jewish activist, revealed by Holden for the first time, encapsulate the surreal absurdity of the antisemitism hysteria.

In 2019 the celebrated London School of Economics professor David Graeber wrote an article complaining non-Jews were spreading “rancour, panic and resentment” in the Jewish community with unfounded allegations of antisemitism.

The actor Miriam Margolyes shared this on her Facebook page. Unlike Philipps/Gordstein both Margolyes and Graeber are Jewish.

Holden reveals that, with no apparent sense of irony, “David Gordstein” immediately fired off a complaint to the Labour Party accusing Margolyes of antisemitism.

On this occasion no action was taken. Other targets were not so fortunate.

In September 2020 “Gordstein” was one of three complainants against Riva Joffe, an 80-year-old Jewish veteran of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa.

Her sin was to have described Israel as an Apartheid state (a view shared by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organisation B’tselem) and to have urged Jeremy Corbyn to stand up to the “Zionist lobby.”

The Labour Party opened a formal investigation and Joffe spent the closing days of her life penning an immensely dignified response from her death bed. “This frenzy of purging you are driven to – it’s not the behaviour of mature adults. It smacks of desperation, fear and panic,” she wrote.

Joffe lived in Starmer’s constituency and knew him personally. But a direct request on behalf of her son that the charges against her be posthumously dropped did not even elicit a response.

In his report Martin Forde KC identified a “hierarchy of racism” in the Labour Party, with antisemitism taken far more seriously than other forms of racism.

Diane Abbott was identified as a particular target of racist abuse and the gross Paul Ovenden texts revealed by Holden echo the toxicity and infantilism of internal texts exposed by The Labour Files.

For all the talk of “grown ups in the room” what emerges here is an adolescent political culture where the dark arts are prized above all else – the protagonists consciously scripting and acting out a sub-par episode of The Thick of It.

In an incident Malcolm Tucker would have been proud of Holden reveals that in April 2022 Alex Barros-Curtis, then Labour’s executive director of legal affairs, wrote to the Party’s former general secretary Jennie Formby regarding legal action being taken against five ex-staffers accused of leaking an internal report that pushed back on the prevailing narrative about the Party’s handling of antisemitism.

The five former staffers “allege that the leak of the report was in fact authorised by the party’s leadership at the time, and that they were acting under those instructions,” Barros-Curtis told Formby, who had been appointed by Corbyn.

“This was entirely false,” writes Holden. In fact the five completely denied any knowledge of the leak and the party would eventually drop its legal action against them.

Where Blair managed to win over his party and then the country through charm and persuasion, the Starmer project has relied from the beginning on back room maneuvering, smears, stitch ups and ruthless exploitation of the party’s disciplinary procedures. All facilitated by a compliant media.

The result is a soulless, empty husk of a political project. [...]Starmer and his team come across as a bad tribute band that has learned the chords and the lyrics but, try as it might, is simply unable to recreate the music.

Morgan McSweeney and those around him detested the left. But that appears to have been the beginning and end of their political philosophy.

Less “charm and persuasion” and more “slickly sold cynical PC vacuity, dishonesty and hype” would better describe Blair but the “bad tribute band” Blairism of the Starmerites is about right.

Even stronger Zionist links emerge around Mandelson’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein and his network in dozens of reports (but not in the heavily censored mainstream media) such as this:

Jeffrey Epstein discussed the UAE invading Qatar, obtained intelligence on a €500bn bailout to save the Euro before it happened, and appeared to have information that Russia tipped off Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about a failed coup d’etat in 2016.

These snippets into the conversations of the disgraced paedophile, who mysteriously died in his New York City jail cell in 2019, raise new questions about his ties to intelligence agencies.

Millions of newly released files do not show Epstein clocking into a Mossad, MI6, or CIA office building. But he did not need to.

Current and former ambassadors, world leaders, and moguls came to him, and his Caribbean island, where he trafficked young women for sexual abuse. The reality is that Epstein floated in a world that was unreachable and more elite than that of intelligence case officers and desk analysts.

If current observers trying to make sense of Epstein’s links to intelligence agencies need an example, the closest might be The Night Manager, a mini-series based on the novel by John Le Carre. The main antagonist of the show is Richard Onslow Roper - a cut-glass, arms-dealing businessman who is an asset for members of British Intelligence and global corporations, even as he is hounded by other factions of MI6.

Of course, Epstein’s emails to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack reveal such close and continued contact with Israel that even Epstein had to implore Barack to “make clear that i dont work for mossad”.

But Epstein’s murky ties to intelligence circles go back much farther.

The earliest known connection Epstein had to the world of intelligence goes back to Donald Barr. This is also the weakest link.

Barr was a former member of the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services, the WWII forerunner to the CIA. Barr hired Epstein, who did not have a college degree, to work as a math and physics teacher at one of New York City’s most elite schools, The Dalton School.

Ironically, Barr wrote pornographic science fiction novels in his spare time. His son Bill was working for the CIA when Epstein was hired by his father. Bill worked in the Reagan and George HW Bush administrations before serving as attorney general during the first Trump administration.

Epstein left the Dalton School in 1976 and took a job with the now-defunct Bear Stearns investment bank, trading options and advising wealthy clients. Epstein’s real links to figures in the world of weapons, the ultra-rich and intrigue started in full force in 1981 when he made a trip to the UK with a former girlfriend.

There, Epstein met Douglas Leese, an aristocratic British arms dealer who would play a key role in introducing Epstein to Mossad agent Robert Maxwell and high-rolling Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.

Leese made a fortune brokering the UK’s largest-ever arms deal –the sale of British fighter jets to the Royal Saudi Air Force. According to the New York Times, Leese “mentored” Epstein and “let him tag along for meetings with British and international elites”.

Epstein was fired from Bear Stearns around the time he met Leese. Epstein then started a short-lived partnership with J Stanley Pottinger, a former US Department of Justice official who was investigated for his role in dealing arms to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Iran-Contra affair appears to be a pivotal moment in Epstein’s life. Between 1981 and 1986, the Reagan administration covertly sold arms to Iran, which was at war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Israel, which was also selling arms to Iran separately, served as the US’s intermediary and broker. The profits from illegal US weapons sales were used to fund anti-communist militias in Nicaragua.

Epstein and Pottinger began working together when the latter was involved in a plot to ship US-made weapons to Iran with arms dealer Cyrus Hashemi. Ostensibly, Epstein and Pottinger’s business was advising wealthy clients on “tax-avoidance strategies”.

[...]Leese had his own side gig on arms sales to Iran. He is alleged to have had a role in facilitating a $1.3bn arms sale that China signed with Iran in 1983.

As arms sales to Iran increased in the mid 1980s, bigger players stepped in. The ultimate “whale” was Saudi arms dealer Khashoggi, who was listed as a “client” of Epstein’s consulting firm, Intercontinental Assets Group.

A fraudulent Austrian passport with Epstein’s residence listed in Saudi Arabia was found in a safe in his Manhattan mansion.

Had Epstein just appeared as a financial fixer for men like Leese and Khashoggi, he would have been more forgettable.

But Epstein was intimately tied to Israeli intelligence and lobbying circles.

Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for recruiting and trafficking minors for sex with Epstein, is the daughter of Robert Maxwell.

The beefy, bombastic, jet-setting, press baron was born poor in 1923 to a Hasidic Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. He escaped the Nazi Holocaust and served in the British Army as an intelligence officer.

Robert was a billionaire and an ardent defender of Israel. He was also known to have links with MI6, Mossad and the KGB.

In his book, Profits of War: Inside the Secret US-Israeli Arms Network, former Israeli intelligence officer turned lobbyist, Ari Ben-Menashe, writes that Robert used his newspaper, The Daily Mirror, to facilitate Israeli arms sales to Iran and that he funnelled those profits into banks in the Soviet bloc for safekeeping.

Maxwell died mysteriously in 1991 after going overboard from his yacht in the Canary Islands following the collapse of Iranian arms sales. Epstein met Ghislaine around 1990, according to The New York Times.

Epstein wrote in an email that Robert Maxwell worked for the Mossad and threatened to disclose the spy agency’s operations unless he was paid hundreds of millions of dollars to save his crumbling media empire.

In an October 2005 email to Epstein, Ghislaine said she met a CIA operative who “worked” with her father and could “find all, and reveal all (for a price)”.

Epstein’s life was defined by his relationship with another billionaire and arch-defender of Israel. Les Wexner is an 88-year-old Jewish-American billionaire and owner of L Brands, a retail empire that included Victoria’s Secret, PINK and Bath & Body Works at its height. Epstein would go on to manage practically all of Wexner’s vast fortune.

Drop Site news reported that some of Epstein’s earliest work with Wexner was repurposing aeroplanes used by the CIA during the Iran-Contra affair to ship clothing for Wexner’s fashion empire based in Columbus, Ohio.

Millions of newly released files show that Epstein’s murky world of business, intelligence and networking continued right through the 2000s, after he was convicted of the sexual trafficking of a child.

He helped facilitate a security deal between Israel and Mongolia. He also worked as a fixer for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He arranged meetings between Barak and his friend, UAE billionaire Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the CEO of Dubai’s international port operator, DP World.

Esptein also tried to facilitate backchannel talks between Barak and Russia during the outbreak of Syria’s civil war. Epstein’s focus on the Middle East appeared to continue right up until his death.

In 2018, in an email, he speculates with a man named Anas al-Rashid that UAE ruler Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) “set up” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the brutal killing of the Middle East Eye contributor and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.

************

The flood of three million documents released by the US Department of Justice over the weekend confirm that Epstein spent an inordinate amount of time corresponding with the huge network of powerful acquaintances he had developed.

[]His address book was a who’s who of those who shape our sense of how the world ought to be run. But it was also critical to how he drew some of these same powerful figures deeper into his orbit, and into a world of debauched and exploitative private parties in New York and on his Caribbean island.

Apparently there are another three million documents still being withheld. Their contents, we must presume, are even more damning to the global elite cultivated by Epstein. [...]

His abuse of young women and girls was not just a personal crime. After all, for whom were he and his procurer-in-chief, Ghislaine Maxwell, doing all this sex trafficking?

This is precisely why so many of the millions of documents released have been carefully redacted - not chiefly to protect his victims, who are apparently too often identified, but to protect the predatory circles he serviced. [...]

The same elite that once prized Epstein as its ringmaster is now trying to draw our attention away from its complicity in his crimes

The glue that appears to have bound many of these figures together was their abusive treatment of vulnerable young women and girls.

Similarly, the photos of rich men with young women suggest that Epstein accumulated, either formally or informally, kompromat - incriminating evidence - that presumably served as potential leverage over them.

In true Masonic style, his circle of peers appear to have protected each other. Epstein himself certainly benefited from a “sweetheart deal” in Florida in 2008. He ended up being jailed on only two charges of soliciting prostitution - the least serious among a raft of sex trafficking charges - and served a short term, much of it on work release.

And the mystery of how Epstein, a glorified accountant, financed his fantastically lavish lifestyle - when his schedule seems to have been dominated by emailing chores and hosting sex parties - grows a little less mysterious with every fresh disclosure.

[...] Most likely, Epstein wasn’t financing all of this himself.

That should be no surprise. Once again, the fingerprints of intelligence services - particularly Israel’s - are to be found in the latest dump of files. But the clues were there long before.

There was, of course, his intimate, preternatural bond with Maxwell, whose media tycoon father was exposed after his death as an Israeli agent. And Epstein’s long-standing best buddy, Ehud Barak, a former head of Israeli military intelligence who later served as prime minister, should have been another red flag.

That partnership featured prominently in a flurry of stories published by Drop Site News last autumn, from an earlier release of the Epstein files. They showed Epstein helping Israel to broker security deals with countries such as Mongolia, Cote d’Ivoire and Russia.

An active Israeli military intelligence officer, Yoni Koren, was a repeated houseguest at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment between 2013 and 2015. An email also shows Barak asking Epstein to wire funds to Koren’s account.

But the latest release offers additional clues. A declassified FBI document quotes a confidential source as saying Epstein was “close” to Barak and “trained as a spy under him”.

In an email exchange between the pair in 2018, ahead of a meeting with a Qatari investment fund, Epstein asks Barak to allay potential concerns about their relationship: “you should make clear that i dont work for mossad. :)”

And in newly released, undated audio, Epstein advises Barak to find out more about US data analysis firm Palantir and meet its founder, Peter Thiel (major near-trillionaire supporter of Israel - ed).

In 2024, Israel signed a deal with Palantir for AI services to help the Israeli military select targets in Gaza.

Predictably, these revelations are gaining almost no traction in the establishment media - the very same media whose billionaire owners and career-minded editors once courted Epstein.

Instead, the media seem much more engrossed by weaker leads that suggest Epstein might have also had connections with Russian security services.

There is a reason why the demand for the Epstein files has been so clamorous that even US President Donald Trump had to give in, despite embarrassing revelations for him too. Much of what we see happening in our ever-more debased, corrupt politics appears to defy rational, let alone moral, explanation.

Western elites have spent two years actively colluding in mass slaughter in Gaza - widely identified by experts as a genocide - and then labelling any opposition to it as antisemitism or terrorism.

Those same elites twiddle their thumbs as the planet burns, refusing to give up their enriching addiction to fossil fuels, even as survey after survey shows global temperatures relentlessly climbing to the point where climate breakdown is inevitable.

A series of reckless, illegal western wars of aggression in the Middle East, as well as Nato’s long-term goading of Russia into invading Ukraine, have not only destabilised the world, but risk provoking nuclear conflagration.

[...]The same elite that once prized Epstein as its ringmaster is now trying to draw our attention away from its complicity in his crimes, to direct it to a few select individuals – notably in the UK, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson.

The pair hardly count as sacrificial lambs. Nonetheless, they serve the same purpose: to satiate the growing public appetite for retribution.

[...]The powerful figures who took Epstein’s Lolita Express to his island; who got “massages” from young, trafficked women and girls; and who casually joked about the abuse these youngsters suffered, are the very same people who quietly helped Israel commit mass slaughter in Gaza - and in some cases, noisily defended its right to do so[..]who raised not a whisper of opposition to the murder and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands more.

These are the people who required anyone hoping to raise their voice in defence of Gaza’s children to spend their time instead condemning Hamas. These are the people who sought at every turn to discredit the mounting death toll of children by attributing it to Gaza’s “Hamas-run health ministry”.

These are the people who denied Israel’s targeting of hospitals needed to treat Gaza’s wounded and sick children - and ignored Israel’s mass starvation of the entire population. And these are the people now pretending that Israel’s continuing murder and torture of Gaza’s children amounts to a “peace plan”. [..]

Zionism gained ever-more legitimacy in the aftermath of the Second World War, even as it brashly preserved through the postwar era the depraved logic of the very European ethnic nationalisms that had earlier culminated in Nazism. Israel, Zionism’s bastard child, not only mirrored Aryan supremacy, but made its own version - Jewish supremacy - respectable. Zionism, like other ugly ethnic nationalisms, demands tribal unity against the Other, values militarism above all else, and constantly seeks territorial expansion, or Lebensraum.

But while all these accounts usefully detail some of the ways the multiple international ruling class freemasonries (the Jewish lobby among them) all operate behind the scenes pulling the strings to safeguard their monopoly interests (as Lenin and Engels long ago pointed out was the hidden fraudulent class dictatorship reality of bourgeois “democracy” and the thousands of connections linking parliament to the Stock Exchange and banking), they do not really get to the nub of what it means.

Just why are these scandals being (partially) uncovered now?

The answer has to be, because the ruling class is losing its grip in the teeth of its greatest ever unavoidable “overproduction” crisis (see box), undermining its confidence and capabilities in all directions as it fails to find any answers at all to its gobsmackingly huge economic crisis (still yet to hit in its full starvation/unemployment fury).

And that is because there are no answers to be found in a monopoly capitalist system riddled with contradictions which will always drag the whole world into ever greater overproduction crisis, and the breakdown with it of all supposedly established social relations at all levels from the individual to the great competing monopoly blocs and their ever more concentrated holdings.

These are already now not only taking great trade war chunks out of each other and “preparing for war” (as the insane NATO leaders in Europe keep insisting must be done, demanding massive arms spending from a still, as yet, boom-bemused population which has not caught up with quite how seriously this crisis is to be taken) but are actually at war.

That is still partially obscured behind the pretence of a “supporting ‘plucky little’ Ukraine” (as once it was to “support the self-determination rights” of the Albanian mafia gangsters in Kosovo allegedly or even “defend little Belgium” in 1914) in a “heroic” fight against the bogeyman Russia.

It was in fact initiated and manoeuvred by the West’s subversion and bribery in Ukraine (costing $5bn as US envoy Victoria Nuland admitted) and the violent fascist coup it succeeded in pushing through in the Maidan, followed by brutal fascist suppression of the Russian minority, forcing their fightback, and eventually a (too slow) backing from Moscow.

But the bigger reality is that it is primarily between the great imperialist powers of the US and Europe.

Inter-imperialist conflict has been the real purpose and target of the war on Russia from the start, as the EPSR has struggled to make clear, and particularly once the NordStream pipeline was sabotaged by specially trained American divers (and perhaps the British too), hamstringing German-led European industrial competition and its ever more damaging impact on American industry and commerce.

Conflict between the imperialists was already emerging in 2003 as the Europeans refused their allout support for the UK/US Iraq war (long before Zelensky’s ludicrous lie that “Putin has started WW3”).

It is now more obvious, with the Trump ascendancy and its bullying demands to be given Greenland, and insistence that Europe adopt the same kind of demented jingoism and racist scapegoating being whipped up in near civil war conditions inside the US; the aim is clearly to push the Europeans into the same kind of aggressive nationalisms against each other, just as they have three times in the last 160 years.

And the propaganda is reaching quite demented levels from the unelected generals and admirals who are constantly given free rein on the reactionary BBC etc:

Britain and Germany’s highest ranking military leaders have made an unprecedented joint appeal to the public to accept the “moral” case for rearmament and prepare for the threat of war with Russia.

The pair said they were making the plea not just as the military leaders of two of Europe’s largest military spenders, but “as voices for a Europe that must now confront uncomfortable truths about its security”.

Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton, the UK’s chief of the defence staff, and Gen Carsten Breuer, Germany’s chief of defence, said Russia’s military stance had “shifted decisively westward” and a “step change” was needed in Europe’s defence and security.

In a joint article published in the Guardian and the German newspaper Die Welt, in the wake of the Munich Security Conference, the soldiers said they had a duty “to explain what is at stake so that the public could understand why the UK and Germany have committed to the biggest sustained increases in defence spending since the end of the cold war”.

“There is a moral dimension to this endeavour. Rearmament is not warmongering; it is the responsible action of nations determined to protect their people and preserve peace,” they write.

There is significant reluctance among voters in Britain and Germany to accept economic pain in return for rearmament, even while majorities in both countries believe the outbreak of a third world war is more likely than not in the next five years.

German and French voters are also now less likely than they were last year to support increased defence budgets if it meant a trade-off with other investment, according to a poll for Politico this month.

How apposite that such “warnings”, pure fascist propaganda from these unelected monstrosities, should be publicised in the “liberal” (Trot saturated) Guardian, clarifying further how the petty bourgeois “left” is right at the front of all this gung-ho jingoist reaction (which is also bolstered by the little Englander chauvinism saturating class collaborating “trade union” mentalities and much of the fake-“left” which clamoured for “Brexit” – as well as the Reform backwardness obviously.)

Building up the German military, now rapidly reestablishing itself as the largest on the continent under the command of a Chancellor with a family history firmly rooted in the Nazi party, does not bode well.

It is the underlying crisis driving these demented war moves which accounts for the extraordinary re-appointment four times of the mountebank Mandelson and his clever but risk-taking scandal-prone personality (not unadjacent to his homosexuality as explored in some depth by the bourgeois press at the time of the Hinduja passport resignation – his second scandal. See EPSR 1074 30-01-01).

The hollow Blairism prop for the moribund British ruling class was already in trouble then, and dragged down even further once its Bush/Blair “let’s pray together” commitment to the US Iraq war was hammered by the unexpected resistance of the Arab masses and the huge surge of recruitment into the “terrorist” and “jihadist” ranks whose bloody suicide bombing rebellion pushed back on the occupation and eventually drove out imperialism.

The damage that defeat did to imperialism not only took down the George W Bush presidency (and forced the WMD-lying gurning Blair to resign) but almost the whole “presidential democracy” racket itself, only rescued by hastily playing the Barak Obama “black-man-in-the-White House” anti-racism card to mobilise some remaining civil rights “democracy” illusions (aided by the reformist fraud Jesse Jackson, currently being eulogised, who sold out the whole revolutionary direction Martin Luther King’s black equality movement was heading into, an anti-imperialist turn, initially against the Vietnam war, that got him assassinated).

That Mandelson was brought back again by the Gordon Brown government after Blair was not a “mistake” but a result of British imperialist bankruptcy and lack of ideas, forced to resort to the same discredited PR tricks even as the whole world banking system crashed into the 2009 global credit meltdown.

The Labourites refused to take the reins again in 2010, rejecting a possible LibDem pact because they feared the need to impose crisis “austerity” in potentially revolutionary conditions (which did almost immediately see wave of riots in 2012).

But the forced return to “direct” Tory rule (propped up by the reserve LibDem treachery initially) failed too, with government after government collapsing just as they did in the paralysed Depression capitalism of the 1920-30s in France, Weimar Germany, Spain and would have too in Britain save for Labourite treachery stepping in to form slump imposing “coalitions” all the way up to the Second World War.

The fourth time for Mandelson is beyond desperation, just like the so-called “landslide” Labour election result he allegedly “cleverly” mentored through the McSweeney cabal, which was nothing more than a husk of a pretend “victory” produced with a ridiculously tiny minority vote of a ridiculously low turnout in the burnt-out hulk of a “democratic system” where almost noone, and certainly not the working class, actually votes for anyone any more if they vote at all.

Revelations continue on just how sinister the skulduggery and manipulations have been to create this utterly farcical but vicious “government” which immediately started falling apart:

A Labour minister who claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” at a PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf had been personally involved in naming them to British intelligence officials and falsely linking them to pro-Russian propaganda, the Guardian can reveal.

Josh Simons, who was running the thinktank Labour Together at the time, was also involved in telling security officials that another journalist was “living with” the daughter of a former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Officials were told by Simons’ team that the former adviser was “suspected of links to Russian intelligence”.

The extraordinary disclosures are contained in emails that Simons and his chief of staff at Labour Together sent to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a division of the spy agency GCHQ, in 2024. A spokesperson for Simons, a Cabinet Office minister, said: “These claims are untrue.”

The emails, seen by the Guardian, lay out in detail what Simons and his team wrote to intelligence officials in an effort to get them to investigate the sourcing behind a story in the Sunday Times about Labour Together’s failure to disclose political donations.

[..]Simons commissioned an American lobbying and public affairs agency, APCO Worldwide, in late 2023 to investigate the “sourcing, funding and origin” behind the story.

He has in recent days claimed he was disturbed to find the APCO report had delved into unnecessary information about one of the Sunday Times journalists. But the emails show how, weeks after receiving the report, he was involved in naming the same journalist in an email to intelligence officials.

[..]Simons has been facing calls to resign over his decision to commission the APCO report into the story, which revealed fresh details about the £730,000 of undeclared donations to Labour Together.

The Electoral Commission had fined the thinktank more than £14,000 for failing to declare the donations. At the time of the undeclared donations, Labour Together was run by McSweeney. He used it ...to defeat Corbyn’s leftwing faction of the party and propel Starmer to power.

Simons is under investigation by the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team, which is looking into his role in commissioning and disseminating the APCO report.

Facing growing pressure in recent days, Simons has said in statements to the press that he was “surprised”, “shocked”, “distressed” and “furious” to discover the report he commissioned had “extended beyond the contract by including unnecessary information about Gabriel Pogrund”, a journalist at the Sunday Times. He added that the information relating to Pogrund had been “immediately removed” by Labour Together before the report was passed on to intelligence officials.

However, the emails seen by the Guardian show that when Simons and Szreter passed the report to intelligence officials, they named Pogrund and his Sunday Times colleague Harry Yorke and suggested their story could be linked to a Russian disinformation campaign.

They also passed on highly personal information about Paul Holden, a freelance reporter who was credited in the Sunday Times report. In one email, Simons told officials that material published by the Sunday Times may be linked to “people known to be operating in a pro-Kremlin propaganda network with links to Russian intelligence”.

There is no credible evidence any of the journalists were involved in a pro-Russian campaign, or that their story, published in November 2023, was anything other than a public interest report on the prominent thinktank’s breach of electoral law.

“We understand that Paul Holden, the pro-Corbyn investigative journalist who obtained the documents, is currently living with Jessica Murray,” Szreter wrote. “Jessica Murray is daughter of Andrew Murray, a political adviser to Corbyn during his leadership of the Labour party. Andrew Murray is a highly controversial figure who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence by MI5.”

[...]“It is hugely disturbing [that] this investigation even found out where I lived and with whom,” Holden said. He accused Simons of seeking to smear him in an “absurd and chilling” episode {...].

In his emails, Simons also alleged that Holden, who is a member of the National Union of Journalists, was “part of a far-left network … which disseminates pro-Russian propaganda”.

[...]Holden told the Guardian the claims were absurd, saying he and his colleagues had “faced legal and extra-legal threats” as a result of their investigations into Russian oligarchs. He added: “[I think] it shows just how scared Labour Together were about my investigations into what really mattered: the deeply suspect circumstances around the failure to declare £730k in donations in violation of the law.”

[..]Andrew Murray said: “The allegation that I have or have ever had any links with Russian intelligence is a lie.”

It is a bit rich for the pro-Starmerite anti-communist Guardian to suddenly find its conscience (allegedly) on these questions, – and it only does so because the exposés themselves (dogged enough) nevertheless remain strictly within the parliamentary framework – but it does emphasise how the whole capitalist fabric is breaking apart.

Collapse of such dirty sabotage to hold back even the limp Corbynites, themselves a fake-“left” fraud which will always tie the working class back to capitalist “democracy” and useless pacifist protest, combined with the implosion of the “untouchable” British parasitical royal institution – (with its own dirty secrets covering far more than just scapegoated Andrew – not least Charles’ own weird background mentored by figures like the known paedophile Lord Louis Mountbatten, the just-as depraved 14-year-old-impregnating “aesthete” Laurens van der Post, and the even worse necrophiliac freak Jimmy Saville who gave marriage guidance and other advice!!!!)– should be the last straw in exposing this British bourgeois dictatorship and its stupid monarchical has-been pomposity, opening up workers’ understanding that only a revolutionary solution is now possible to the crisis.

Build Leninism.

Brendan Jameston

Back to the top

Democracy delusions still block the way

The bourgeois world’s unstoppable collapse into sleaze, societal collapse and warmongering barbarity confirms the impossibility of “improving” or reforming this system of exploitation and profiteering.

The need to end it, only possible by class war overthrow of the old order grows ever more urgent.

What still holds that grasp back is a century of anti-communist brainwashing by the bourgeoisie, reinforced by fake-“left” revisionist delusions in “peace struggle”, and “democratic parliamentary paths” (as led to such disasters as the 1973 torture-coup overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile for example or more recently of the Arab Spring “democratic” Muslim Brotherhood presidency by the bloody 2013 counter-revolutionary military coup under General Sisi).

The “strategy” of defensively containing imperialism, and “maintaining stability” while steadily outgrowing it in a “multipolar world” (as seems to be the world view in Beijing for example), is nothing but the modern form of Stalin’s major class collaborating retreat from revolutionary understanding emerging in retreats from Lenin’s perspectives starting in the 1920s and finding full form in his Economic Problems book post-WW2 (see EPSR Book 21 Unanswered Polemics).

Let China and others outfox and outcompete capitalism by playing it at its own game of entrepreneurship (under firm workers state direction) by all means, as it is doing with astonishing success, dazzling the world, but let it also be done only within an overall perspective that there can be no “balance” with imperialism nor long term peaceful world.

However firmly the “other poles” to tyrannical imperialism are able to defend themselves – and China for example is clearly building military technological capacities which equal and probably outdo the US – imperialism nevertheless will unstoppably drive to frenzied war as its only solution as Lenin correctly insisted.

“Democracy” in capitalism is nothing but the dictatorship of the billionaire class, the bourgeoisie – which can only be countered with a different class dictatorship, that of the working class.

Only such a party-led worker majority imposing its “authoritarianism” (as the philistine and fearful petty bourgeois is deluded into calling proletarian authority by Western ideology) can counter the reactionary authoritarianism of the bourgeoisie, and thereby create the conditions for all of humanity to move forwards, by lifting the burden of fascist repression.

Through such an “authoritarianism” alone can true democracy – of the great majority – gradually come about as socialism is built, and then steadily wither away as rational self-disciplined dialectical science based society is educated and developed to an advanced maturity that makes even democracy unnecessary for the full flourishing of all.

To get there only the rising tide of anti-imperialist hostility (in whatever forms, from crude jihadism to organised mass military struggle), through defeats imposed on imperialism’s increasingly barbaric rule, will open up space for a conscious revolutionary struggle to finish this parasitic degeneracy.

Meanwhile with nothing but far worse bilious Trotskyite hostility to all workers state discipline and achievement to challenge complacent revisionist brainrot, workers remain disarmed in the face of imperialism’s non-stop warmongering, swallowing its risible “democracy” lies and lying “fights for freedom” and self-determination.

So it is that public opinion continues to be stampeded by the ever more lurid lies about the Russian bogeyman and its fight against the Kiev nazis, worshippers of anti-semite, anti-communist, Hitler-collaborator Stepan Bandera (as expressed by the openly fascist Azov brigade but saturating all the Ukrainian nationalism).

Helped by poisonous anti-Russian chauvinism from the Trots and much of the revisionist “left” (rooted in past anti-Sovietism) mass sentiment remains bamboozled and oblivious to the reactionary nature of the Western war and its line up of bourgeois support (and in fact controllers and operators).

Manipulated public opinion (TV, press, social media, lying politicians etc etc etc) ends up alongside Boris Johnson and the MI6/CIA, most of the European Union and the NATO war machine, the clutch of Pentagon generals working out of the joint US/NATO/Ukraine military and intelligence command base in Wiesbaden (directing the “war”), much of the “Democrat” side of the billionaire US ruling class, and a large part of the Republicans overtly, and the rest in practice, including the Trump White House, still backing the war and providing arms (at Europe’s cost).

Trump’s “negotiations” meanwhile are nothing to do with supporting or “siding with” Putin, (cited by shallow petty bourgeois impressionism as a “reason” to “stand with the Ukrainians”) but solely concerned with playing for US imperialism’s perceived best interests.

To make sense of that is possible only with a Marxist perspective, the biggest widest picture of world crisis and its historical class war origins, which pins down the contradictions driving the Ukraine war developments as primarily those of inter-imperialist conflict against the European rivals.

These are a far bigger problem for slump ridden America than Moscow, particularly if the idiot bonarpartist Putin can be lulled into a “deal” with America for the moment (dropping his guard against its ultimate ambition to demolish the still widespread lingering remnants of pro-Sovietism and further undermine the “multipolar world”).

The Europeans meanwhile need the war to go on, as distraction and a means to keep their own populations in line as the great slump unravels and they ramp up their own war plans and arms spending at the expense of welfare and basics.

Courtesy of petty bourgeois “leftism’s” confusion the bourgeoisie continues to throw dust in petty bourgeois eyes elsewhere too, even as its own corruption and lies unravels.

China continues to be a target precisely because it does it does stand (relatively) firmly behind its workers state.

So the justified prison sentence for the counter-revolutionary publishing conspirator Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong has been driving the West into a frenzy of hatred, and a tirade of nonsense about “freedom”.

But the hypocrisy is staggering around this arch anti-communist (who fled the Mao-led socialist revolution in the early 1950s to British exploited Hong Kong to rise up as a ruthless textiles sweatshop owner and then newspaper owner) as spelled out by pro-Beijing commentator Arnaud Bertrand:

If someone had done the same thing as Lai did in any Western country, there is absolutely zero doubt he would rot in prison too.

The most shameful part is that it was all extremely transparent: it was an open trial (meaning anyone could attend) and the verdict - running 855 pages with detailed reasoning on every evidentiary point - is publicly available for anyone to read here: hongkongfp.com/2025/12/… Lai himself testified for 52 days in his own defense, assisted by world-class lawyers, all publicly in court.

Meaning that those qualifying Jimmy Lai’s trial as a “sham”, “an affront to freedom of speech” or even calling him a hero, have no excuse: they have all the elements to know that what Lai did, yet they deliberately choose not to (or, more likely, lie through their teeth).

So what was he condemned for? 3 things:

1) Lobbying foreign governments to impose sanctions on his own country, including personally meeting the US Vice President, Secretary of State, and National Security Advisor to request sanctions.

2) Coordinating campaigns aimed at achieving - in his own words - “China’s implosion,” meaning the collapse of his own country.

3) Using his media empire as an instrument of that campaign.

How would the U.S. government react if the owner of the New York Times personally met with senior Russian or Chinese officials, lobbying them actively to bring down the U.S. government, coordinating active campaigns to achieve “U.S. implosion” and using the NYT as an institutional tool for all this - all clearly documented in his own messages? Does anyone seriously believe he wouldn’t rot for the rest of his life in a federal prison?

Lai flew in and out of America for years meeting all kinds of CIA and intelligence to help coordinate the ultra-violent so-called “democracy protests” by the reactionary students and petty bourgeoisie against the Chinese proletarian rule – an “umbrella” variant this time of the usual “colour revolution” taking advantage of the former colony’s large corrupted pro-Western youth and middle-class (though still a small minority relative to the large pro-Beijing population).

Staggeringly even as the bourgeois press was filling its pages with misrepresentations* of a supposed “vibrant democratic tradition being suppressed” (*read – gross lies: Hong Kong was violently seized as a harbour for British opium exports and run for more than 150 years as a brutal British colony where “no dogs, no Chinese” signs marked off privileged areas), the heir to the throne was grovelling to one of the least democratic most thuggishly murderous feudal regimes on the planet (though only “briefly so” according to this bourgeois report):

Prince William traveled to Saudi Arabia on Monday for his first diplomatic trip to the country, in a visit intended to strengthen relations between Britain and the Arab kingdom.

The trip came at the request of the British government, according to Kensington Palace, a sign of Britain’s confidence that a visit from the heir to the throne will help burnish ties with Saudi Arabia, seen as a strategically important partner.

William met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country, who was briefly (!!) an international pariah after the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

In recent years, the crown prince has cultivated business and diplomatic ties around the world, refurbishing his image and becoming a major geopolitical power player.

William’s visit to the country, which is led by an authoritarian monarchy with a poor human rights record, will test his diplomatic skills.

It also signals the increasingly prominent public role that the prince has played for his family following the death of his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, and the ascension of his father, King Charles III, to the throne.

Deploying William to court the Saudis is the British government’s latest use of the royal family to expand bilateral relationships.

That would be to replace the former degenerate “trade envoy” no-longer-Prince Andrew presumably?????

And if this is written off, there is a stream of other bent and twisted “elections” worldwide to demonstrate the point from the brutal suppression of the opposition leader Bobi Wine and his party in Uganda last month to the twisting of the Honduras election by Trump’s interference:

The whereabouts of the opposition leader, Bobi Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi and who won 25% of the vote, were still uncertain after he said on Saturday that he had escaped a police raid on his home and was in hiding.

Police denied the raid and said Wine was still at home, but they blocked journalists from approaching the residence.

Wine has not posted on social media since Saturday when he denounced the “blatant theft of the presidential election”.

In his victory speech on Sunday, Museveni said Wine’s party, the National Unity Platform (NUP), had planned to attack polling stations in areas where they were losing.

“Some of the opposition are wrong and also terrorists,” said Museveni, who has ruled the east African country since 1986, when he seized power at the head of a rebel army. “They are working with some foreigners and some homosexual groups.”

[...]Analysts say the election was a formality, given Museveni’s total control over the state and security apparatus, though many Ugandans still praise him for bringing relative peace and prosperity.

He has taken no chances in trying to prevent the violent unrest that rocked neighbouring Tanzania during polls in October.

The most serious reports of violence on election day came from the Butambala area of central Uganda, where an opposition MP said security forces had killed at least 10 people at his home.

[..]Human Rights Watch accused the government of “brutal repression” of the opposition ahead of the vote.

Another key opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, who ran four times against Museveni, was abducted in Kenya in 2024 and brought back to a military court in Uganda for a treason trial that is ongoing.

Uganda, and next door Rwanda (where the thug president and friend of Tony Blair, Paul Kagame is routinely “elected” with 98% votes and the opposition equally lands in prison or mysteriously dies in various foreign or domestic locations), are crucial tools for imperialism in controlling central Africa and its rich mineral resources.

Both have been involved in the violent incursions into the Congo, backing groups like the M23 which is stealing particularly the coltan mineral, dug out in conditions of desperate poverty and risk (129 miners were killed recently in a mudslide). Meanwhile in Latin America:

This week, Honduras inaugurated a new president, Nasry Asfura, a construction magnate backed by seemingly strange bedfellows: members of the notorious MS-13 gang and President Trump. Mr. Trump had urged Hondurans to vote for Mr. Asfura days before MS-13 gang members posing as election observers threatened to kill anyone who didn’t vote for that candidate. Amid weeks of election uncertainty and protests, Mr. Trump warned Hondurans of “hell to pay” if they chose a different outcome. Mr. Asfura’s victory marks the success of Mr. Trump’s campaign to resuscitate a political party tainted by its widely known ties to cartels.

The story of how Mr. Trump came to intervene in Honduran politics and align himself with a foreign terrorist organization is essential for understanding the world he is trying to build. He has been meddling in multiple elections in Latin America, and recently captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a military operation to have him face federal drug trafficking charges here. He’s now threatening to arrest the president of Colombia on suspicion of drug trafficking and to bomb cartels in Mexico. His actions may seem contradictory. But there is a coherent logic to them: They expand territorial power for a class of transnational elites who believe they’re above the law.

Last month, Mr. Trump pardoned one of the country’s best-known convicted drug traffickers: Juan Orlando Hernández. Mr. Hernández was the president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022; in that time, there was a steep surge in migration from that country to the United States as families fled his narco-state. In 2024, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in what the U.S. Department of Justice called “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.” He was convicted of conspiring to distribute hundreds of tons of cocaine, reportedly boasting of plans to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” [..][

Mr. Trump’s real motivations are hidden in plain sight. Not long after his second inauguration, the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank in California, published a call for him to pardon Mr. Hernández. [..]the pardon would hurt President Xiomara Castro, a democratically elected progressive and the first woman to be president of Honduras. They wrote that it would re-empower the right-wing party, presumably by rehabilitating it.

Or consider Thailand and its non-stop history of brutal murderous military coups (see picture of 1976 coup lynchings) and reactionary monarchic repression, barely ever mentioned by the Western media and press journalists who cover the south-east Asian beat from its luxury apartments, while they rubbish the supposed “authoritarianism” of neighbours like anti-Western nationalist Myanmar, Cambodia and Bangladesh:

The party of the Thai prime minister Anutin Charnvirakul, a staunch royalist and shrewd political dealmaker, is on track to win the most seats in Sunday’s election after a disappointing night for his rivals in the youthful, pro-democracy People’s party.

“We are likely to take first place in the election,” the 59-year-old told reporters at the headquarters for his Bhumjaithai party in Bangkok. “The victory today belongs to all Thais, no matter whether you voted for us or not,” he said.

Bhumjaithai, which is seen as the preferred choice of Thailand’s powerful military royalist establishment, had taken a big lead with more than half of votes counted, and Thai TV channels projected it would be by far the largest in parliament.

Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut, 38, leader of the People’s party, conceded defeat, telling supporters at the party’s headquarters: “Even though we cannot establish a government today, I want everyone to keep walking, keep going and don’t give up. Let’s keep fighting. As long as we still have each other, the power will belong to the people, for sure.”

The People’s party had been leading polls ahead of the election, but with more than half of votes counted on Sunday night it was in second place, with Pheu Thai, the party linked to the now imprisoned former populist leader Thaksin Shinawatra, third.

The result is a major blow to Thailand’s pro-democracy camp, which won the most seats and votes in the last election but was blocked from power by rivals in the military royalist establishment. Two previous iterations of the party were dissolved and its leaders banned from politics in rulings by the constitutional court, which frequently intervenes in Thai politics.

The People’s party has a loyal support base among young and urban Thais who want reforms to make Thailand, which has a history of military coups, more democratic.

It is not so difficult to “win” an election when half the opposition is banned, has its leaders in prison, or is under heavy intimidation from a military with a history of stringing protesters and student democracy demonstrators from lampposts.

And similarly in Bangladesh:

When Tarique Rahman, who is set to become the prime minister of Bangladesh, went into exile in 2008 after being charged with bribery and corruption, many Bangladeshis wrote him off. He was the scion of a political dynasty and, in a country often described as a kleptocracy, it seemed he was finally being held to account.

Nearly two decades later, he has returned to seal a triumphant reversal of fortunes.

It was rarely in doubt that Mr. Rahman’s party would win, with the Awami League — the party of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, an autocratic leader who was ousted by the student revolution in 2024 — banned from participating in the election. The Awami League and the B.N.P. have traded power for much of the almost 55 years since Bangladesh split from Pakistan and became a nation. Ms. Hasina is a member of Bangladesh’s other political dynasty.

Mr. Rahman arrived in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, in December, as the country was gearing up for one of the most significant elections in its history. The vote follows a student revolution that demanded fundamental political change, and Mr. Rahman led his party to a landslide victory by positioning himself as a man of the people.

Mr. Rahman has promised to address the demands of the protest movement — a stronger democracy, less corruption, and more opportunity. But some students have expressed concerns that power in Bangladesh is just seesawing again between two entrenched families that have dominated its history since it gained independence from Pakistan in 1971.

After casting his vote on Thursday morning at a polling station in a wealthy enclave of Dhaka, Mr. Rahman, 60, delivered brief comments pledging that his Bangladesh Nationalist Party would deliver on the pledge for change.

“If we win, our next priority will be to improve the law and order situation so that people can feel safe,” Mr. Rahman said, as police officers and army troops shooed away those who got too close, part of a huge security net around the election.

“If we can form the government, we’ll start working on that from day one,” Mr. Rahman said, before he jumped into a waiting S.U.V. Policemen on toffee-colored horses kept the crowds at bay as the vehicle inched its way toward the B.N.P. office, about a block away.

On Friday, as votes were still being counted, it became clear that his party would lead the new government, most likely with a large majority.

The B.N.P.’s main opposition this time was Jamaat-e-Islami, which has long pushed for a society based on Islamic law but formed an alliance with 10 other parties, including the National Citizen Party, created last year by leaders of the student revolution. While it appeared to have picked up seats, it may not have won enough to exert much influence over the B.N.P.

The election is nothing but a cosmetic stitch-up to sanctify 2024’s reactionary coup, carried through against the Bangladesh anti-US nationalists by an initial petty bourgeois student movement reacting to the declining slump conditions and egged on by a carefully plotted conspiracy of violent chaos and intimidation, (see EPSR No 1649-50-51) backed by Western agencies as admitted by the current stooge president, Muhhamed Yunus.

The alleged high turnout and vote was laughable in the light of a complete ban on the Awami League and belt-and-braces stuffed ballots, according its own (here edited) statement:

On 12 February, the nation witnessed a pre-planned election of deception and farce - one that will be recorded as a disgraceful chapter in Bangladesh’s democratic history. This was not an election of public will; it was an industrial-scale administrative exercise in manipulating numbers.

[...]The overall vote count presented by the Election Commission does not match the reality reported across the country—empty polling stations, inactive booths, and absent voters. Among roughly 86,000 eligible prisoners, only about 5,000 voted (about 3%). Among an estimated 15 million expatriate voters, about 500,000 voted (around 7%). In this context, the claim of nearly 60% turnout is not just unrealistic but laughable.

State resources and government machinery were directly used to promote the “Yes” vote. The government itself openly assumed responsibility for campaigning in favour of “Yes.”

The total number of registered voters in this election was 127,711,793. Voting began at 7:30 a.m. and continued until 4:30 p.m. Serious irregularities were observed, both in the conduct of voting and in the turnout percentages released in stages by the Election Commission, many of which appeared inconsistent and unrealistic.

[..]According to various media reports, casting a vote at some centres took between 1.5 and 3 minutes. Yet the time-based statistics show that turnout increased at an unusually rapid rate between 11:00 a.m. and noon.

On the eve of voting, 11 February, incidents of violence and clashes occurred in various parts of the country between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami. Reports emerged of weapons recoveries, vote-buying, and arrests. That evening, there were reports of polling centres being seized, ballots being stamped in advance, and other irregularities. In several centres, presiding officers signed result sheets before voting even began. Many voters who went to cast their ballots found that their votes had already been cast. In some places, groups of four or five women were seen stamping ballots together inside private rooms; in others, men were doing so. Hundreds of pre-stamped ballots were recovered. Some centres had multiple polling agents representing the same candidate. Attempts were made the previous night to prepare result sheets and collect polling agents’ signatures in advance.

On election day itself, clashes, crude bomb explosions, centre seizures, ballot snatching, coercion to vote for specific symbols, fake voting, counting irregularities, and even presiding officers stamping ballots for particular candidates were reported nationwide.

During the tenure of the Awami League, the BNP voluntarily boycotted two elections and even announced efforts to resist them through arson and violence, causing loss of many lives. In contrast, the Awami League did not boycott elections; rather, it was illegally banned and forcibly excluded from this one. [..]

Under this illegal Yunus administration, this rigged and one-sided election has robbed people of their voting rights. Therefore, the demand of Bangladesh’s 180 million people today is to annul this voterless, illegal, and unconstitutional election; ensure the resignation of the murderous fascist Yunus; withdraw false cases and release all political prisoners, teachers, journalists, intellectuals, and professionals; lift the suspension imposed on the Awami League’s activities; and restore the people’s voting rights by holding a free, fair, and participatory election under a neutral caretaker government.

The Awami League’s own bourgeois nationalism and electoral illusions are not the answer to Bangladesh’s problems of course.

Like everywhere else that demands the ending of capitalism, possible only by building a conscious revolutionary movement.

But suppressing even such limited anti-imperialism reflects the fear of a ruling class which has hit the buffers historically.

It is right. Capitalism is tangled in unsolvable contradiction and will be brought down.

Build Leninism

Don Hoskins

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SWP’s sectarian anti-theory Trot philistinism exposed at Your Party meeting

The SWP’s sectarian anti-“sectarian”-ism was in full display at a Leeds meeting to promote the Grassroots Left slate of candidates to Your Party’s Central Executive Committee in early February when one of their members tried to prevent an EPSR supporter from asking the candidates this question:

“Will the Grassroots Left allow revolutionary theory to be argued openly in Your Party, by which I mean arguments for a communist revolution to end capitalist slump, climate catastrophe, fascism and inter-imperialist war, and for the building of the party-led proletarian dictatorship needed to end capitalist sabotage – like the Soviet Union but better –, or will it be stifled and blocked by “left” sectarianism and bureaucratic manoeuvring, which is the hallmark of the Trotskyist groups behind Grassroots Left, whose past socialist alliances failed because they could not agree on anything? Events in Venezuela show what happens when such discussions are avoided, as does Chile in 1973 when Allende’s grassroots democratic socialism was drowned in blood.”

Midway through the question the SWP disrupter started to jeer, “We can’t hear you?”, “Why have you got your back to us?” and such like in a very rude and aggressive manner, echoed by one or two others. Fortunately, as the questioner had written his question down, he was not thrown off balance and could oblige her “request” to speak up by repeating it, but this time slowly and more loudly.

You could almost hear the sound of the more seasoned Trots in the audience facepalming in exasperation at this sectarian attempt to sabotage a question opposing “left” sectarianism but thereby immediately proving the questioner’s point!!!

The disrupter persisted in her enthusiastic promotion of the SWP’s anti-theory philistinism by hollering, “Ask for a vote!” once the speaker had finished, – the meaning of which only became clear to the questioner at the end of the meeting when she said to another SWPer (deliberately loud enough for him to hear as he walked past her), “If you want revolutionary theory, all you have to do is go to a branch meeting and put it do a vote: Do you want to discuss revolutionary theory or not?”

This begs the question, “If it is so easy, why don’t you do it?”

The SWP were clearly stung as an allegedly “theoretical” article on sectarianism appeared in the “Teach Yourself Marxism” (!!!) section of their propaganda rag a couple of days later, in which they assert:

“Some organisations use the language of Marxism and revolution. But they do nothing but criticise actual social movements. These sectarians place excessive emphasis on propaganda. They only turn up to demonstrations to give lectures about some abstract idea of revolution.”

“Some” organisations??? This can only be a sneering reference to the EPSR, – but what a gross inversion of reality to accuse those arguing against “left” sectarianism whilst being open and transparent about their own political positions of being the sectarians for raising a question you have just tried to block!!

And, what a lying distortion of the EPSR’s battle for revolutionary theory (which they mislabel “propaganda” to mask their philistinism).

There is no “criticism of actual social movements”. Rather, the aim of going out with papers on demonstrations is to raise revolutionary consciousness by placing the demands of activists in a revolutionary perspective as outlined in the above question; to test the theory in practice through discussion to gauge the response, by encouraging criticism and debate; and most importantly, to assess individual cadres’ own understanding through the extent to which they have successfully explained the theory and responded to questions, comments and counter-arguments.

And there is no “abstract idea of revolution”. The question raised at the meeting linked the theoretical understanding, that capitalism needs to be overthrown by revolution and the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship, to live events in Venezuela, as well as the historical lessons of Chile in 1973. The SWP’s piece could not even bring itself to spell out who it is referring to because that would make its abstract notions of “sectarianism” more concrete.

But what the SWP really hates is the fact that the question raised had an impact.

Speaking for the GL slate were Zarah Sultana and two CEC candidates for Yorkshire, as well as a candidate from Coventry. The question got a positive response from the Yorkshire candidates. Sophie Wilson, a former Labour councillor in the Corbyn era who broke away to become an independent in response to the anti-Corbyn witch-hunts replied enthusiastically with some elaboration, “Revolutionary theory should not only be allowed but encouraged.” Chris Saltmarsh, a climate activist from Eco-Socialist Horizons argued that “the left should come together to analyse the world” and cited the concrete examples of Gaza, Venezuela and the cost of living.

These responses demonstrate the importance of raising the arguments for theory. The GL’s platform says nothing about how they propose to reach an agreed position in theory on real world events as they unfold. Instead they smother all discussion by fetishising “maximum members democracy” and “bottom-up organised sections” as the thing to be fighting for above all else.

Despite presenting the ending of capitalism as their goal, with some vague notions of socialism to be strived for, they also say nothing about the revolution needed to bring this about,- and none of their candidates even mention capitalism in their election statements.

The two candidates were, therefore, speaking as individuals when responding to the EPSR’s question, not the Grassroots Left, with an open-mindedness that stood in stark contrast to the sectarianism displayed on the floor. This demonstrates the pernicious role of the Trotskyism in holding back the working class with its endless defeatism and subjective petty-bourgeois hatred of a firm theoretical line built on material reality.

The platform was the outcome of tortured negotiations between assorted squabbling Trotskyist and other “left” and single-issue groups, factions, and factions-within-factions (eg. SWP, Counterfire, CPGB, SPEW, Socialist Alternative, Ken Loach’s Platform for a Democratic Party, Trans Liberation Group), which, true to petty-bourgeois-individualist form, would have fallen apart in acrimony if Sultana had not stepped in with a draft political platform that was inoffensive enough for most to line up behind, – but even this failed to stop some, apparently including Counterfire and Loach’s lot (whatever happened to his own “Left Unity” party???), from walking out almost as soon as it had been agreed!!

Tellingly, Sultana did not directly respond to the EPSR’s question despite past allusions to Lenin’s famous aphorism that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary practice” (but without elaborating on it – see EPSR No.1666 12-12-25). Instead, she declared that she has seen the least amount of sectarianism in her life whilst in Your Party, just after witnessing some crude sectarianism from a GL ally!!! She did make some comments about political education being very important, and the need for debate and discussion, but this is only because the Yorkshire candidates had taken the lead.

The EPSR’s question could have been improved with an added reference to Stalinism’s equally sectarian hostility to theory. It is all rotten and needs driving out of the workers’ movement through a struggle for Leninism in theory and practice. Phil Waincliffe

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