Apologies, I have withdrawn this article because I consider that it was misleading. It referred to a YouGov poll of 3 March 2026 [ed: 2nd March] instead of a more recent one.
Members of the National Education Union (NEU) hold a rally at Old Palace Yard, in Westminster, London, January 29, 2025…
It is no exaggeration to say, as National Education Union (NEU) leader Daniel Kebede does, that “the classroom has become the front line of every unresolved crisis in our society… hunger walks in with the children. Anxiety takes a seat at the back of the room.”
Schools are community hubs, and their intrinsic links across each community make teachers both receptive to local feeling and persuasive local voices.
So if a union the size of the NEU finds 65 per cent of its members who voted Labour less than two years ago would not do so again, MPs need to take note — especially since every opinion poll confirms this collapse in support for the party is general.
That it also found the most popular party among NEU members is now the Greens is another warning.
The conceit that the working class has nowhere else to go, that Labour can offend every one of its natural constituencies in turn while exclusively courting Tory — and more recently Reform UK — votes, should have died with the Scottish election wipeout of 2015, but remains the default setting of the zombie Blairites — whose long domination of the party has seen a steady decline in its vote, concealed at first by the initial size of the majorities that were shrinking but now threatening its future as a party of government. Peter Mandelson, a key author of that strategy, is gone: can the party escape his influence, and listen again to working-class people instead of the filthy rich?
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Original article at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/labour-cant-afford-ignore-anger-across-our-education-workforce
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mcsweeneys-missing-phone-reeks-establishment-cover
Prime Minister Keir Starmer (R) and then British ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson during a welcome reception at the ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC., February 26, 2025… Parliament determined last month that all government communications relating to Peter Mandelson’s disastrous appointment as ambassador to Washington in December 2024 be made public.
That is to allow voters to understand how this first-order misjudgement, naming to the country’s most prestigious diplomatic post a man famous for his overaffection for the rich, twice dismissed from government amid scandal, and most importantly known for his prolonged intimacy with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
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No communications are likely to have been more relevant to the appointment than those from and to McSweeney, then Downing Street chief of staff, effectively running the government as top aide to the ineffectual Keir Starmer.
McSweeney was mentored by Mandelson as a close associate in Labour’s unending factional wars, with the younger man carrying forward the latter’s obsessive hatred of the left and socialism.
It is clear that he was instrumental in pushing Keir Starmer to name Mandelson to Washington. It is believed that he was charged with asking the now-disgraced New Labour grandee about his relationship with Epstein.
While the Prime Minister bears the responsibility, it appears that this was a calamity engineered largely by McSweeney, whose messages on the subject would therefore be central to any understanding of it.
Yet it is now unclear if we will ever read them. Now, McSweeney announces that his mobile phone was stolen in London last year, a month after Mandelson’s enforced departure from Washington and when it was already highly likely that some form of public accounting for the misjudgement would follow.
The police concur that McSweeney reported the theft at the time it apparently occurred. Giving an incorrect location, and then asserting that he was near a park in east London when he was in fact miles away in Westminster may perhaps be attributable to the stress of the moment.
Failing to advise the police that he was the No 10 chief of staff, and that his device held any number of secret communications of state significance is far less comprehensible, since that omission must have downgraded the police response.
Still odder, No 10 is unable to confirm that the contents of McSweeney’s phone have been fully backed up in line with government regulations for handling official business.
So on this occasion, the stench of cover-up is powerful, however much Starmer may deny it.
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Read the original article at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mcsweeneys-missing-phone-reeks-establishment-cover
NHS staff blockade the entrance to NHS England’s headquarters in central London demanding the cancellation of its contract with Palantir, which supplies advanced technology to Israel’s military, April 3, 2024PALANTIR has been awarded a contract to analyse the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) internal intelligence data, sparking concerns over possible leaks.
The FCA confirmed on Sunday that the US tech company will aim to help tackle financial crime and identify risks to consumers and markets.
A spokesman added: “We ran an open, competitive procurement process and have strict controls in place to ensure data is protected.”
But Cardiff University’s Professor Michael Levi, an internationally recognised expert in money laundering, told the Guardian that it was “a relevant question as to whether Palantir’s owners might tip off their friends about methodologies.”
He asked: “What are the protocols agreed between the FCA and Palantir about the onward use of things that they have learned in that process?”
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Amnesty International UK’s business and human rights director Peter Frankental said: “Companies linked to human rights abuses should not be given access to sensitive UK public data full stop. First it was our health data, now it’s financial intelligence.
“The UK government is taking an unacceptable risk by allowing Palantir Technologies to embed itself in systems handling the public’s most sensitive information and profit from it at the expense of our privacy, integrity and values. We are calling for a full review into whether it is appropriate to grant this level of access to a company so closely associated with some of the most serious human rights concerns of our time.”
Senior British military and intelligence figures including two former UK security ministers and a head of special forces are advising a US organisation that has long supported military action against Iran and is now congratulating Donald Trump for his war on the country.
United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is led by neoconservative hawks and has close ties to US and Israeli intelligence.
When the US started bombing the country, UANI’s two leading figures wrote: “We applaud President Trump for his courageous decision to launch this military operation.”
They added: “UANI salutes the courage and professionalism of American and Israeli service members carrying out this historic mission against the Iranian regime.”
UANI’s chair Jeb Bush – younger brother of former US president George W Bush, who invaded Iraq – and the group’s CEO, Mark Wallace – a former US ambassador under Bush – had long urged the US to strike Iran.
Their US-based organisation says it “educates the public, policymakers, and businesses about the danger posed by the Iranian regime… including its desire and intent to possess nuclear weapons”.
Founded in 2008, UANI does not divulge where its funding comes from.
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