A plurality of Londoners think Jeremy Corbyn should run to be their city’s mayor, a new poll has found. According to new figures from Redfield and Wilton, 43% of Londoners think Corbyn should run for mayor of London next year, compared to 34% who think he shouldn’t.
Redfield and Wilton also asked London’s voters whether they think he would make a good mayor. 37% said he would, compared to 27% who thought he wouldn’t.
The data is the second set of numbers from Redfield and Wilton’s polling on the London Mayoral election. Earlier today, the firm published its latest voting intention polling on the election, which found that Sadiq Khan has just a one point lead over his Tory rival Susan Hall.
However, the same poll also found that if Corbyn were to stand as an independent, Hall would win with just 30% of the vote.
Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
Rishi Sunak’s government gives of the strong odour of failure. From the cost of living crisis to collapsing school buildings and from high interest whacking mortgage holders to shocking NHS waiting lists, there’s a growing sense that Britain under the Tories just isn’t working.
…
The poll, reported first by Byline Times shows that the public think the Tories are failing on almost every major issue. It’s damning stuff. Here are the results:
61% of voters say public services overall have got worse under the Tories
67% say the NHS has got worse under the Tories
54% say schools have got worse under the Tories
49% think crime has increased under the Tories (with just 8% thinking it’s gone down)
53% think the UK is doing worse than other similar countries economically
A new report from the National Federation for Education Research (NFER) has exposed the shocking scale of child poverty in England. The NFER surveyed senior leaders and teachers at state funded primary and secondary schools, and the results were staggering:
90 per cent of all schools were found to be providing uniforms and clothing to pupils
70 per cent of schools were found to be providing food through parcels, food banks, food vouchers or subsidised breakfasts.
84 per cent of senior school leaders report that the cost of living crisis has increased the numbers of pupils requiring additional support and the level of need they have.
More than a quarter of pupils in mainstream school require additional support for mental health and wellbeing.
80 per cent of school leaders agree that cost of living pressures have increased safeguarding concerns and/or incidents in their schools.
More than three fifths of mainstream school leaders report that 50 per cent or more of pupils receiving additional support are not eligible for pupil premium (a scheme that provides additional funding for disadvantaged pupils).
Image of Labour leader Keir Starmer and party chair Anneliese Dodds. A staffer in Starmer’s office works for consultancy firm Grant Thornton, while a Weber Shandwick lobbyist had a six-month stint in Dodds’ office
A staff member in Keir Starmer’s office is selling his knowledge of “politics, government and public policy issues” to corporate clients through a major consultancy firm, openDemocracy can reveal.
The staffer, who joined Starmer’s team in the summer, is listed as an associate director of Grant Thornton. The arrangement does not breach any regulations because Labour is not in power, though equivalent roles advising government ministers come with an obligation that holders must not “misuse your official position, for example by using information acquired in the course of your official duties to further your private interests or those of others”.
Corporate lobbying firms have started expanding their offerings to clients who are looking to influence a likely Labour government next year. In November, it was reported that two major lobbying outfits had set up ‘Labour Units’ to help clients influence the party.
Over the past year, three other corporate lobbyists have had roles advising the shadow cabinet while still employed by their corporate bosses, and another ten former corporate lobbyists are now working in the offices of members of the shadow cabinet, analysis by this website has found.
Nick Dearden, director of the campaign group Global Justice Now, called it “yet more evidence that there’s a revolving door between big business and the top layers of the Labour Party”.
While Starmer’s staffer appears to work for Grant Thornton and Labour simultaneously, the other three had jobs in the offices of shadow cabinet members that were directly funded by lobbying firms in the form of secondments. One of these was placed in the office of Labour’s chair and equalities chief Anneliese Dodds for six months, while two more have been placed with shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds. Throughout their time in Parliament, their salaries were paid by the lobbying firms, none of which would disclose to openDemocracy whether any of their clients had funded the work.
Starmer’s staffer was formerly head of Grant Thornton’s Brexit advisory team. A page on the firm’s website advertises his knowledge of “politics, government and public policy issues” to corporate clients. He says he can “help our clients make sense of the current macroeconomic and political environment, providing insight and practical advice on what it means for them and their business”.
With a revenue of more than $7bn last year, Grant Thornton is one of the world’s largest professional services networks, offering clients a range of consultancy services. Its clients and partners in recent years have included the arms company BAE Systems, coal miners Adani and a range of oil and gas firms. In 2021, the firm was fined £2.3m for its involvement in the collapse of the bakery chain Patisserie Valerie. And last year, the company was found guilty of bribing officials in Western Australia.
The staff member appears to work part time on Keir Starmer’s team, and part time selling his political insights through Grant Thornton. Last year, before he took the role, he wrote a blog on Grant Thornton’s website discussing the likely priorities of a future Labour government.
A spokesperson for Grant Thornton would not disclose which clients their associate director had been advising since he started working for Starmer, or how he managed any conflict of interest.
They said: “As a leading provider of professional services in the UK, Grant Thornton has deep expertise in the public sector and has worked with a variety of government bodies and institutions over the years where our nonpartisan input has been of value. Whilst any such engagements will be a matter of public record, it would be inappropriate for us to comment on any specifics.”
In recent years, Grant Thornton has benefited from more than 300 public sector contracts in the UK. It also supports hundreds of major corporations on a range of projects, from the private healthcare sector to the oil and gas industry.
Two other staff members in Starmer’s office are former lobbyists who worked at the firm InHouse Communications, whose clients have included Google, e-cigarette company Juul, and a number of major alcohol brands. Starmer’s press officer worked for the firm until August last year, while one of Labour’s communications chiefs was previously a director at the firm.
Dodds, the Labour Party chair and equalities spokesperson, had a senior Weber Shandwick London staffer seconded to work in her office from September 2022 to March 2023. The staffer’s roles at the firm’s London office have included senior vice president and team director for corporate enterprise. Since her secondment ended, she has been heading up another team at Weber Shandwick. The company would not say whether she now has any involvement in lobbying Labour.
Weber Shandwick is perhaps most controversial for its historic role lobbying on behalf of the tobacco industry, and was recently linked to at least eight oil and gas companies, some of which have been accused of opposing or seeking to delay net zero policies. The firm also lobbies on behalf of the UK’s offshore oil and gas industry as a whole.
Former clients of Dodds’ staffer before her secondment to Labour include the snacks giant Mondelez, which owns brands including Cadbury’s chocolate. In recent years, Mondelez has been involved in opposing health measures like a sugar tax, faced legal action over alleged child slavery, and been accused of involvement in illegal rainforest deforestation. Mondelez has said it has “been working relentlessly to take a stand against” child labour, which it claims to prohibit, and says it has taken steps to ensure its chocolate doesn’t come from illegally deforested national parks.
The staffer’s other previous clients have included the estate and letting agency Knight Frank, the French spirits giant Pernod Ricard, which has been battling India’s alcohol tax over the last year and is a sponsor of the Labour Party conference, and the takeaway Just Eat, which has also given free events tickets to a number of Labour figures over the last year.
openDemocracy asked Dodds’s office what it thought Weber Shandwick had to gain by funding a staff member for six months and was told: “You’d have to ask Weber Shandwick.” Weber Shandwick did not respond to our request for comment.
From September to October 2022, a staffer was seconded from the PR and lobbying firm the Lowick Group to work in the office of shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds. Immediately before the secondment, he had worked as a lobbyist for another firm, Westminster Digital, best known for running Boris Johnson’s online campaign during the 2019 election, though he did not work there at the time.
Another one of Reynolds’ seconded staffers is a senior policy manager at HSBC, which was forced by US regulators in 2013 to pay then-record fines of more than a billion dollars after being found to be the “preferred financial institution” of Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
Before working for HSBC, she was registered as a lobbyist for Portland Communications, a major lobbying agency.
As well as shadow cabinet staffers currently working as corporate lobbyists or political advisers, openDemocracy has found ten staffers for shadow cabinet members who previously worked as corporate lobbyists.
‘Worrying’
Responding to the revelations, the Green MP Caroline Lucas said: “Under this Conservative government we’ve seen the endless revolving door between MPs, Ministers and big business reach new heights. It’s deeply worrying that Labour already look set to follow in their footsteps.
“If they form the next government, they mustn’t be in the back pocket of any industry – we urgently need policies and legislation that consistently prioritise the greater public good over letting big corporations trouser ever bigger profits.”
Tommy Sheppard, MP for Edinburgh East and SNP constitutional affairs spokesperson said: “This is shocking and quite extraordinary news. I’ve not been aware of this before – I’ve known special advisers who went to work for Weber Shandwick, but I’ve never known people ride both horses at once.
“Labour ought to be aware that these companies are not doing this on behalf of the Labour Party – they are doing it because they want to influence [a potential future] government on behalf of corporate clients.”
He added: “Labour need to be more careful about where they take their staffers from.”
Dearden told openDemocracy: “Many parts of society with an alternative vision of the future are finding it really hard to even get a single meeting with shadow ministers.
“A Labour government in hock to corporate interests will be a very short-lived Labour government. The world has changed. Across the US, Europe and the emerging economies, the economic myths of the last 40 years are being punctured. Big business lobbyists do not have the answer to the problems we face. If Labour wants to govern successfully, they need to start listening to a much wider pool of people.”
A Labour spokesperson said: “Employment and secondment arrangements have been transparently declared in line with legal requirements and parliamentary rules.”
The UK Labour Party has hired a former Israeli spy to help manage its social media, The Electronic Intifada can reveal.
Assaf Kaplan will work in the office of Labour leader Keir Starmer, a source with knowledge of the hire said.
Kaplan was in Israeli military intelligence for nearly five years, an officer in Unit 8200, its cyberwarfare branch.
Unit 8200 specializes in spying, hacking and encryption. It carries out blackmail, mass surveillance and systematic discrimination against Palestinians.
‘Climate change is the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card,’ Peterson recently tweeted. Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC.
Fringe climate crisis deniers who claim that the earth is “cooling” and greenhouse emissions are good for “biological productivity” are getting exposed to millions more people than they normally would on YouTube thanks to conservative influencer Jordan Peterson.
That’s according to viewership data newly reviewed by DeSmog, which reveals a massive visibility boost for public figures who’ve been active in the climate denial movement for years but whose ideas — such as the claim that plants are growing much better due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — are now rarely taken seriously by most legacy media outlets.
They include climate crisis deniers like Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Richard Lindzen, Alex Epstein and Bjorn Lomborg. Despite having either a modest YouTube presence or none at all, these figures have collectively garnered nearly five million views after being interviewed on Peterson’s channel, which has 7.31 million subscribers. The New York Times, by comparison, has 4.33 million YouTube subscribers.
This is especially worrying to climate scientists and disinformation experts because Peterson for years has been actively courting alienated males in their 20s and younger. Traditionally, people who are “doubtful” or “dismissive” of climate change have tended to skew older. Peterson is now planting doubt via his podcast and social media posts about the severity and urgency of global warming in the minds of younger generations.
“‘Climate change,’” he tweeted in June, is “the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card.”
And he is now in the process of putting real political power behind the climate crisis denial movement. In late October and early November, a new group Peterson founded called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) will hold in London, England, its first ever meetings. It has on its advisory board Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who during GOP debates in August said that “the climate change agenda is a hoax.”
ARC advisor Ramaswamy: ‘the climate change agenda is a hoax.’ Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC.
Advisors to the group include Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who earlier this year argued on Peterson’s podcast that “climate change is a real problem, but it’s not this catastrophic end of the world.” Lomborg didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog. Other advisors are Texas Republican congressmember Dan Crenshaw; Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee; former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott; and dozens of conservative policymakers, financiers, activists and journalists from the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is being supported by founders and leaders of the Legatum Group, a Dubai-based investment firm behind The Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit think tank in London with close ties to the U.K. Conservative Party. The Legatum Group is a leading investor in the rightwing British television network GB News. Read DeSmog’s in-depth report on ARC’s U.K. links here.
Experts argue this makes Peterson a key organizer at the global level for efforts to oppose and delay action on climate change. “I would say that Jordan Peterson has become a central cog in the denial machine,” Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, told DeSmog.
“It’s concerning that he’s poisoning the minds of so many influenceable people with his pseudo-intellectual and pseudoscientific drivel, drivel that is being weaponized in the right-wing assault on science and reason,” Mann added, referring to Peterson’s frequent downplaying of climate risks, including the conservative influencer’s insistence that rising levels of carbon dioxide are good for the planet.
Spreading Denial, Making Money
Peterson’s influence depends to a significant degree on his gigantic YouTube following, which is larger than that of the liberal-leaning news network MSNBC. It also surpasses the following of The Daily Wire, a digital conservative outlet co-founded by Ben Shapiro that has a partnership with Peterson, which last year claimed a yearly revenue of $100 million.
Google, which owns YouTube, announced a policy in October 2021 prohibiting advertisements on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Elaborating on the policy in an email to DeSmog, a Google spokesperson wrote that “Debate or discussion of climate change topics is allowed, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”
Yet a Peterson interview from this year entitled “The Great Climate Con,” during which he framed rising greenhouse gas emissions as a positive for making the planet “green in the driest areas,” was accompanied by ads for Birch Gold and Masterworks. Climate scientists say that is a misleading argument because it doesn’t take into account the massively negative effects that intensified droughts, wildfires and heatwaves due to global warming have on plants and ecosystems.
“Debate or discussion of climate change topics is allowed, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”— Google spokesperson
“We’ve reviewed the videos,” the Google spokesperson wrote, “and did not take action on them.”
“What’s the point of having policies if you’re not going to enforce them?” Claire Atkin, co-founder of the anti-disinformation watchdog group Check My Ads, told DeSmog. “YouTube and its ecosystem of marketing tools allow Jordan Peterson to not only spread [misleading statements], but to make money off them.”
Peterson didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog about his current income nor his recent shift towards promoting climate crisis denial online.
‘Twisted Symbiotic Relationship’
One example of Peterson’s amplifying effect is his interview with Judith Curry, a former Georgia Institute of Technology climatologist who now does consulting work for clients including petroleum companies and natural gas traders. In testimony to Congress in 2015 she claimed incorrectly that recent data “calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.”
While appearing on Peterson’s podcast earlier this year she argued that due to “natural variability” the planet could grow cooler over the next three decades rather than warmer, a position with no credible scientific basis, especially considering that July was the hottest month in recorded human history. Posted to YouTube, where Curry has no official channel, the interview garnered more than 960,000 views. She didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog.
Conservative author and fossil fuel activist Alex Epstein had a modest YouTube following of 15.2 thousand subscribers when he was interviewed by Peterson. “It’s out!” he tweeted after the video was posted. It now has over 1.04 million views, a significant boost considering that the vast majority of videos on his page have under 500 views.
“I think Jordan Peterson has become more interested in humanistic thinking about fossil fuels,” Epstein wrote in an email to DeSmog. “He has become even more convinced, thanks to my work and others, that the popular movement to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use is based on invalid thinking methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values.”
During his interview with Peterson, Epstein claimed that “It’s kind of obvious if you have a warmer world with more CO2, it’s a more tropical world with more life. It’s a more green world in the life sense of green. And yet the green movement hates it.”
Peterson has echoed that statement frequently in his podcast, despite actual scientists saying that greening caused by rising greenhouse gases shouldn’t be celebrated. He claimed during his interview with Steven Koonin, author of a book on climate change science called Unsettled, that “since the year 2000 the world has greened by 15 percent … why the hell isn’t that good news?” That interview has since been viewed more than 1.1 million times. Koonin didn’t respond to a media request.
“Peterson—who doesn’t appear to know much at all about the science or politics of global warming—has become an influential promoter of illogical ideas,” Benjamin Franta, a senior research fellow in climate litigation at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, told DeSmog.
During an interview in 2022 on Joe Rogan’s podcast, for instance, Peterson argued that the climate is too complex a system to be modeled accurately, “and that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.” “He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong,” one climate scientist told the Guardian.
Though Peterson is among the most visible promoters of climate crisis denial, he’s also part of a wider digital network. Researchers with Climate Action Against Disinformation and the Center for Countering Digital Hate earlier this year found 200 videos on YouTube promoting delay or skepticism around measures to address the climate emergency, garnering nearly 74 million views altogether.
“[There’s] a twisted symbiotic relationship between these platforms and climate denial content,” Erika Seiber, a climate disinformation spokesperson at the nonprofit Friends of the Earth who is part of the disinfo coalition, told DeSmog. “YouTube runs ads on the content, incentivizing the creation of yet more misleading content, which allows deniers like Peterson to flourish and for their networks to grow.”
Enabled by Google and YouTube, climate crisis denial could be having real-world influence, disinformation experts say. A poll this summer suggested that 72 percent of U.S. Republican supporters think that the economy should be prioritized over addressing climate change, a 13 point increase from 2018, even as cities sweltered under record heat waves. Conservatives are opposing coastal wind turbines under the pretense of protecting whales. Republican Congressmembers in June passed bills protecting gas stoves in people’s homes.
“You can see how climate denial content from Peterson and others has informed policy discussions,” Seiber said. “It’s incredibly concerning.”
