[mattomac]

Government carries out core function of government, and gets it in the neck anyway.

Nearly 60,000 unauthorised migrants and convicted criminals have been removed or deported from the UK since Labour took office, the Home Office has said.

The announcement came amid claims that the government was promoting “harmful stereotypes” by equating migration with criminality.

Officials said the figure was the highest number in a decade.

The department said 15,200 people who were in the UK illegally were removed since the 2024 election – a 45% increase on the previous 19 months.

A statement said 43,000 people left voluntarily after being told they were in the UK illegally. Deportations of foreign national offenders have risen by 32%, with more than 8,700 deported under this Labour government.

The Home Office also released footage showing a recent removals flight, with detainees, their faces blurred, being escorted on to a plane destined for eastern Europe.

The figures have been released as the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said she would “scale up” the number of deportations even further.

Right Media- Labour is soft on foreign criminals. Don't vote Labour!
Labour- we're actually deporting many more of them than the Tories could be bothered to do.
Another part of the media- Labour is being disgraceful, it says that migrants are all criminals. Don't vote Labour!

The Right Media must laugh its arse off at the way this works.

I don't like at all that they're making citizenship much harder to get, especially changing rules for people already here, and hope that this gets amended. But most of the stuff is what Government should have been doing for ages.

I know our University has been a lot harder on student visas, I assume it’s across the board, I do find these photos a bit OTT.

[davidjay]

The great irony is that one of the biggest attractions for illegals is the Daily Mail. They run headlines about four star hotels and free money, the gang leaders show them to desperate refugees and next thing they're in a dinghy.

[The Weeping Angel]

Good thread here. Plenty of pundits said it was a good appointment at the time.

[davidjay]

As I saw on of all places Facebook, so many men named but the only one in prison is a woman.

[Youngian]

Good thread here. Plenty of pundits said it was a good appointment at the time.

Trying to remember what I wrote, prefer a professional diplomat but kinda trusted the logic of appointing a connected schmoozer and political operator as Trump isn't a normal leader. And as an EU trade commissioner, Mandelson settled down to a new role and was very effective.

[Oboogie]

Excellent interview with Gordon Brown about Mandelson on The Today programme this morning, just after 8am.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002r38v

[Tubby Isaacs]

Professional diplomats can schmooze.
I credited Mandelson with a relatively good result on tariffs. But someone pointed out that Trump was probably inclined to hit the EU harder anyway. So perhaps I was too kind.

[Youngian]

Trump's tariff levels were decided on the size of the deficit. So the UK had a smaller surplus with the US than the EU so the tariff was lower. The aim is to have balanced trade; the value of exports + imports tariffs = the value of imports. If Starmer and Mandelson want to claim the lower tariff was a result of their masterful negotiation why not? there's little media who will check.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Weren't there negotiations afterwards where the UK got relatively quick relief?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Excellent interview with Gordon Brown about Mandelson on The Today programme this morning, just after 8am.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002r38v

Haven't heard it, but I think Gordo is generally helpful. He came straight out when the revelations about 2010 came out. Others might have hid.

[The Weeping Angel]

Dark Money

https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p ... r/comments

Why would a political operation on the cusp of power spend a small fortune investigating journalists? This is the question I’ve asked myself ever since I first learned that Labour Together had hired a PR firm to identify the sources of journalists writing critical stories about its finances.

When Labour Together hired APCO Worldwide in November 2023, it was ascendant. Their man, Keir Starmer, was a shoe-in for prime minister. The think tank’s architect, Morgan McSweeney, was Starmer’s all-powerful right-hand man.

So why risk all this by doing something so beyond the pale - so anti-democratic, frankly - as to put private investigators onto journalists?

The answer, I think, is because these journalists were onto a crucial part of the Labour Together story - one that had gone almost unnoticed but was absolutely central to its mission and its success: hundreds of thousands of pounds in undeclared political donation

[Tubby Isaacs]

When they put it like that, it sounds less bad, identify sources of leaks. But I agree, this is a bad thing to have done.

[The Weeping Angel]

It was a bad thing to have done, but I think some of it is overblown,

What there was, instead, was evidence - and plenty of it - that Labour Together, on McSweeney’s watch, had systematically failed to declare £730,000 in political donations from a handful of wealthy donors. The Electoral Commission fined Labour Together £14,250 in 2021 for breaking electoral law.

But there was more to this story. This is what the journalists that Labour Together were so worried about were digging into.

Labour Together presented McSweeney’s failure to declare all these donations as an “admin error”. Friends of the Corkman explained that record-keeping was not his strong suit.

This might all be accurate. But what is certainly true is that this undeclared funding was critical to Starmer’s rise. It paid for polls and clandestine campaigning that paved the way for Starmer to become Labour leader - and then prime minister.

Publicly, Labour Together was presented as a grassroots movement - a bipartisan initiative to unite a fractured Labour party. Privately, McSweeney was building a highly organised political operation in the shadows.

Had the funding been declared, the press, the public and - crucially - Labour party members would have seen that Labour Together’s kumbaya vibe was all an act. It was being bankrolled by the kind of big money that had fled under Corbyn - businessman Trevor Chinn, hedge funder Martin Taylor and others - who wanted to take the party back.

This is what the journalists that Labour Together targeted were investigating. This is why Labour Together was so concerned that it paid a controversial PR firm £30,000 to intervene.

The fantastical story about a foreign hack was very effective. Other media outlets spiked further reporting on Labour Together’s finances at a crucial moment leading up to the general election.

The involvement of Paul Holden should make people wary considering he is the author of a book called The Fraud.

https://www.politicshome.com/opinion/ar ... ed-nothing

Paul Holden’s The Fraud poses as fearless investigation. In truth, it is denial: distortion, omission and conspiracy-minded wish-thinking aimed at a left still unwilling to face the Corbyn years.

The thesis is simple: a “lawless” Labour faction conspired to destroy Jeremy Corbyn and install Keir Starmer. Pages of insinuation never rise above hearsay. One breathless section ends with the coy admission that the claims are merely “plausible”. Crucially, the core allegations were tested by independent authorities like the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and Electoral Commission before publication and failed. The book shows how easily narrative replaces fact when ideology demands it.

The decisive omission collapses the entire structure. The only bodies with full access to the evidence, the EHRC and the lawyers who ran Labour’s internal cases, found that Labour under Corbyn broke the law by discriminating against Jewish members. That ruling, not gossip or leaks, is the definitive account of the crisis. Across more than 500 pages, Holden barely acknowledges it, because doing so detonates his thesis.

The Jewish Labour Movement’s dossier to the EHRC set out incidents that should shame any party. With sworn statements, JLM members described: a membership secretary in Tottenham demanding home visits for 25 Orthodox Jews before allowing them to join. It recorded a whistleblower told to move antisemitism complaint files to the Leader’s Office on USB sticks so friends’ cases could be reviewed, with a personal email used to hide the trail. JLM has statements claiming senior figures waved away action against Ken Livingstone as a “Jewish conspiracy”. The dossier described a party culture “profoundly hostile to Jewish members”.

[Oboogie]

Excellent interview with Gordon Brown about Mandelson on The Today programme this morning, just after 8am.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002r38v

Haven't heard it, but I think Gordo is generally helpful. He came straight out when the revelations about 2010 came out. Others might have hid.

He put his own hands up for appointing Mandelson 17 years ago whilst also defending Starmer's integrity.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Paul Holden is also a Stop The War crank.

https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/list ... r-ukraine/

They actually say there that Ukraine has no right to join NATO. The absolute contempt these "anti-racists" have for Eastern and Central Europeans because is, well, racist.

[The Weeping Angel]

Paul Holden is also a Stop The War crank.

https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/list ... r-ukraine/

They actually say there that Ukraine has no right to join NATO. The absolute contempt these "anti-racists" have for Eastern and Central Europeans because is, well, racist.

He's also an associate of Andrew Feinstein. Is Holden's name near the top or the bottom of the letter?

[Tubby Isaacs]

He's the third Holden.

[The Weeping Angel]

He's the third Holden.

Thanks. Here's another review of Holden's book

https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/ros-taylo ... dge-match/

In the perhaps unlikely event that anyone out there is currently pondering whether to join the Labour Party, Paul Holden’s The Fraud is out to change your mind. This book about Keir Starmer’s ascent to power is a straightforward hit job, written by a man who believes Jeremy Corbyn would have eventually won a general election. But in the course of a rummage through the entrails of the far left, we do learn some useful lessons about Labour as a whole – and perhaps a better understanding of why Starmer is so disliked among the public.

The Fraud has nothing original to say about policy – at least, not the kind that can be discussed and debated, rather than functioning as a purity test. This is a story of investigations, dossiers, nominations, de-nominations, suspensions; all the Latinate panoply of party management, alien to anyone who has never been a Labour member. Reports are forever being compiled, published, rejected, sidelined, their findings feeding the endless appetite for rancour and betrayal.

Holden’s key charge against Starmer is that he deceived party members by committing to left wing policies that he later abandoned. He is particularly furious about Labour Together, the think tank set up by Starmer’s current chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.

One of its less successful initiatives was a podcast, Changing Politics, which was presented by comedian Gráinne Maguire and Marie Le Conte of this parish. You can find a far more entertaining account of McSweeney’s editorial and financial incompetence on Marie’s Substack than the one Holden gives us. Suffice to say that two of the names he mooted for the podcast were Podding The World To Rights and Generation Why Not.

It does help to explain why McSweeney failed to declare Labour Together donations to the Electoral Commission, an omission Holden describes as LT’s “original sin” and for which he was fined. McSweeney just wasn’t very good at running things. Not much change there.

The Fraud is also appalled that the public were not made more fully aware that Labour Together was freelancing to “destroy Corbynism”. But anyone with a pulse who followed British politics knew exactly what it was doing.

This perpetual indignation does Holden no favours. Starmer is, inevitably, “complicit in genocide”, as if Benjamin Netanyahu spares a moment’s thought for what Labour thinks about the killing in Gaza.

The loathing often veers into petty sniping. When the MP for Holborn and St Pancras sees his vote has fallen at the count in 2024, in part because the independent Corbynite Andrew Feinstein stood against him, Feinstein laughs. Starmer “had a face like thunder… I saw his fury turn into a fixed grin for the cameras.” What exactly is being criticised here? The ability of a politician to conceal his disappointment?

And yet, as Labour’s dire poll ratings show, the book has a point. Starmer was ruthless in his drive to purge the left/make the party electable (delete according to preference). In the process, the people deemed to be in the way were mercilessly removed. Sometimes all it took was to have long ago “liked” a tweet by a non-Labour politician.

The line between antisemitism and disgust with Israel was often unclear, but still deployed with impunity. Members who had campaigned for decades were expelled on the flimsiest of grounds. Corbyn’s own removal was unprecedented, unless you count the very different circumstances of Ramsay MacDonald’s expulsion in 1931.

Starmer made enemies, and in making it clear what Labour was not, he failed to either set out a compelling vision for what it now was, or to endear himself to the rest of the country. Neil Kinnock always understood his own party deeply and did a better job of removing Militant as a result. Starmer, a latecomer to party politics, sees it as an instrument rather than a movement.

It is tempting, for those of us who looked on despairingly as Labour lost elections under Corbyn, to watch the chaos unfolding in Your Party with amusement. However unsatisfactory Starmer may be, he is at least running a government. He has the power to change Britain for the better, even if he hesitates to use it.

Corbyn, on the other hand, finds himself outwitted by Zarah Sultana and unable to bring together the far left factions fighting for influence. But in truth, there is no vindication to be had anywhere in this miserable tale, and that is what makes The Fraud such a dismaying read, no matter what faction of the Labour Party you identify with.

Starmer grasped a losing party, installed ruthless and probably unnecessary discipline, got Labour into power, and is now extremely unpopular. Holden’s book is an elegy to the people who tried to get in his way and the unpleasant tactics that removed them. In the end, a line from WB Yeats comes to mind: great hatred, little room.