p-funk

A free press is the oxygen of a free society. Yet efforts to silence the media are becoming disturbingly creative – and normalized. States must end the persecution of journalists and act to protect them. We must stand with those who stand for truth.   ohchr.org/en/statements-…

When Jewish people speak out against genocide, why are our voices dismissed? And smirking while I describe someone Nazi-saluting at me isn’t just disrespectful - it feels deeply antisemitic. youtu.be/7VkfYJgLljE?si…

KEIR STARMER IS ALL ALONE by @TomMcTague For much of the past year, British politics has been stuck in a state of fatal passivity. One of the privileges – if that is the right word – of my job is to speak with MPs, cabinet ministers, government officials and political advisers on a regular basis, usually in private, over lunch or dinner or a glass of wine. And when I do so, the same story has been repeated again and again. The Prime Minister is failing. He is not doing the job. He cannot do the job. The events of the past fortnight have cast this collective failure in a spotlight so glaring it is impossible to unsee the ugliness of what has been revealed. What we have seen this month is a demonstration of how Starmer practises politics, how he wields power, and how he holds everyone else to account but himself – a form of leadership not particular to one decision, but to one man. As one official who once worked closely with Starmer put it to me, “We are being asked to believe that, after being told a series of inconvenient truths about Mandelson and waving them away, [Starmer] would have acted differently if he had been told the same inconvenient truths a second time.” In summary, the Prime Minister got rid of Robbins for not blocking the appointment of the man he had already announced as ambassador, the man he had blessed by the King and whose appointment had been agreed by the US. It is hard to think of a more pathetic series of events. What makes this sorry saga even sorrier is how utterly familiar it now feels. Earlier this week, I spoke with a former senior government official who had worked under a series of prime ministers, including Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer. He said he was struck by just how quickly Starmer had taken on the traits of the man he loathed. “The behaviour is just so Boris,” he told me, wearily. “The decency is just a facade. Ask Chris. Ask Sue. Ask Morgan. Ask Olly. He will say he takes responsibility, but then he makes everyone else pay.” And so we come back to the same fundamentals that have held British politics in stasis for much of the past year. The same cabinet ministers who thought Starmer was not up to the job a year ago still think he is not up to it. The same MPs think the same too. And yet they cannot move because they do not know who to replace him with – how, when or why. But just as Starmer has fallen into the trap of blaming everyone around him for his own mistakes, the Labour Party cannot carry on blaming Starmer for failures of indecision and direction that it also shares. Cover art by Mona Eing and Michael Meissner.