STARMERISM is an attempt to turn the clock back. It isn’t working, cannot work and tolerating it risks disaster for the working-class movement.
It has always been an attempt to turn the clock back. The entire Starmer project was, from his election as Labour leader on a false prospectus, an attempt to undo Corbyn: to drag the unruly Labour Party back to a supposed “middle ground” of support for neoliberal economics and imperialist war.
It has been a project pursued with total ruthlessness: Labour members were, and are, broadly supportive of Corbyn’s manifesto commitments to greater public ownership and redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, and certainly weren’t happy with the former leader being portrayed as the devil incarnate and cast out of the party, so Starmer had to smash Labour democracy.
His regime has banned debate in constituency parties, suspended those in their entirety when they wouldn’t play ball, and expelled anyone who dared to object. Since coming to power, MPs have found themselves excluded from the parliamentary party for backbench rebellion against child poverty — an authoritarian intolerance for dissent far harsher than anything Tony Blair ever expressed.
The paranoia reflects an underlying reality: Starmer and his acolytes know the majority are against them and must coerce because they cannot persuade. In this sense, the project is about much more than exorcising Corbyn.
It is part of a wider ruling-class effort to reboot the British system so we are back where we were in 2015 or even 2007 — pre-Corbyn, pre-Brexit, pre-bankers’ crash: when the world was one the liberal elite understood and had mastery over.
It is an impossible task. In foreign policy, the “unipolar moment” is gone: the West is no longer economically strong enough to dictate to the world, and its attempts to do so merely alienate.
In domestic policy, the consensus for privatisation and unfettered corporate domination of the economy can only continue to deliver what it delivers already: worsening services and falling living standards.
The two come together because Establishment liberalism is collapsing in the cockpit of imperialism, the United States. It is already defeated there by hard-right nationalism of the Farage type, but the nature of the US-led “free world” forces the ostensibly liberal leaders of Europe to fawn on the demagogic leader of the counter-revolution, Donald Trump.
Labour members fooled into voting for Starmer on the grounds he might be a polished, media-savvy version of Corbyn misunderstood Establishment hatred of the Corbyn project: it was about content, not form, and any leader threatening real reform would have met the same vitriol.
Similarly, the angst now expressed by liberal commentators from the Guardian to Channel 4 about Starmer not having what it takes to see off Farage is off-piste. Starmer is bad at politics, but that is not the root of a problem that engulfs Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden too. Liberalism has nothing to offer and populations across the West can no longer be duped.
The labour movement needs to wake up to this. Without a radical change of direction from Labour, Britain will soon be ruled by nasties of the Donald Trump sort, whose hostility to trade unions (see Elon Musk) equals their viciousness towards immigrants.
The Jonathan Freedlands and Robert Pestons wonder if Starmer needs to be replaced. He does, but not because he is incompetent: because his zombie-Blair politics are anachronistic. The political consensus of the 1990s is not coming back.
It’s over a century since Rosa Luxemburg defined the choice facing humanity as socialism or barbarism. It is the choice now, for sure. We can break with Starmer-Labour or we can resign ourselves to Reform UK: there is no middle ground.
Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefitting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity causing suffering and death.
Jeremy Clarkson spreads well-worn conspiracy theory that casts inheritance farm tax policy as plot to “replace farmers with migrants”.
A network of conspiracy theorists has jumped on the inheritance tax debate to fuel an anti-green “culture war”, experts say.
Thousands of farmers demonstrated in Westminster on Tuesday against the Labour government’s plans to remove an inheritance tax exemption on agricultural assets, with tractors blocking roads outside parliament.
The policy, which raises inheritance tax on farms worth more than £1 million to 20 percent from April 2026, has been criticised by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, The Green Party and others, with disputes about how many farms will be affected.
But social media analysis by DeSmog shows how the protests have also been exploited by a number of high-profile individuals and groups, spreading conspiracy theories about a left-wing government plot to take away people’s freedoms under the guise of climate action.
These include TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who has repeatedly cast doubt on the role of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions on climate change. The campaign group ‘No Farmers, No Food’, which has spread false claims about governments forcing people to “eat bugs”; the Together Declaration, which has cast doubt on the safety of life-saving Covid-19 vaccines; and Reform UK, the anti-immigration party which campaigns to “scrap net zero” and open new coal mines, were all active at the protest.
The protests have also attracted the attention of international commentators, among them Donald Trump ally Elon Musk, who shared a Guardian column defending the policy, adding: “Britain is going full Stalin.” Musk is increasingly commenting on UK politics, posting during the summer’s far-right riots: “Civil war is inevitable.”
DeSmog has contacted Clarkson, NFNF and Together for comment.
Conspiracy Theories
Jeremy Clarkson, who presents the “Clarkson’s Farm” documentary series, was a celebrity speaker at the protests, calling for Labour to “back down” on the policy and receiving widespread media attention. In a column for The Sun newspaper on 8 November, Clarkson described Labour’s centre-left chancellor Rachel Reeves as “an admirer of communists”.
He wrote: “I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan. They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms. But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.”
The comments echo alarmist claims made in the Netherlands since 2019 that the government is using green policies to take land from farmers in order to house asylum seekers. Far-right parties have won major election victories in the country in part thanks to the public anger expressed in farmers’ protests.
Clarkson has commented on farmers’ protests in the Netherlands and Germany. In January he wrote a piece for The Times titled: “Apparently it’s far-right to grow food.” DeSmog has reported on how farmers’ protests on a range of issues have been “hijacked” and blamed on green policies.
Clarkson’s claims also echo the “Great Reset”, a post-Covid conspiracy theory which claims that the World Economic Forum (WEF) and other international “elites” are using green policies to impose a socialist dictatorship on the world.
These claims have also been promoted by ‘No Farmers, No Food’ (NFNF), a campaign group which had a significant presence at Tuesday’s protests.
As DeSmog reported in February, the group is run by PR executive and GB News pundit James Melville and backed by the Together Declaration, a climate denial and conspiracy theory group set up in 2021 to oppose Covid-19 lockdowns.
In January, NFNF shared a post on X which said: “Farmers stand between us and WEF’s desire for us to ‘EAT BUGS, own nothing and be happy’.” The same month, Melville shared a post which read: “Farmers across Europe are mass protesting the globalists trying to crush them. Between Bill Gates, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] & the WEF, we’re going to have no private farmland left. They want you eating bugs.”
Earlier this week Melville posted that “farmers are the lightning rod in so many key battles that determine our way of life”, including “the net zero debate”. He added: “It’s probably the most important fight for the very fabric of British society right now.”
Clarkson has also written columns in The Sun this month attacking Labour’s energy policies and mocking prime minister Keir Starmer’s attendance at COP29, the UN climate summit taking place in Azerbaijan, as “virtue signalling” and “a complete waste of time”.
In 2021, Clarkson told the Sunday Times that he bought his £4.25 million farm, Diddly Squat, in order to avoid paying inheritance tax. When asked about this by the BBC at the protest on Tuesday, he said the question was “classic BBC”, and that the real reason was that he wanted to “shoot pheasants”.
Anti-Net Zero Agenda
Attending the protests was Alan D Miller, a businessman who founded the Together Declaration in August 2021. At Tuesday’s protest he was photographed alongside Clarkson, who was holding a placard which read: “With Our Farmers #Together”.
Miller posted a video of himself on GB News on X with the caption: “the obsession with net zero has far too much virtue signalling & far too little open honest transparent debate.”
As DeSmog reported in May, research by the cross-party think tank Demos found that Together was responsible for all online posts attacking low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) in 2023. In the same year, the group published an open letter which said, “We have no confidence in the process for ensuring ongoing safety of the Covid-19 vaccines”.
In 2023, Together also launched its “No to Net Zero” campaign which attacked the premise and implementation of net zero, saying that the targets are based on “wildly exaggerated fears about the future” and that “modern industry and farming are not what is killing us, it is what is keeping us alive.”
The farmers’ protest was supported by Ben Pile, Together’s “cabinet member for net zero”, who posted on X that farmers should “please remember that no part of the UK’s green agenda is your friend. All of it is intended to deprive you of your livelihood, one way or another. That is its design.”
Pile is a climate crisis denial blogger who has falsely claimed that “the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is neither as strong nor as demanding of action as is widely claimed”.
This wing of the farmers’ protest was also supported by Reform UK, the right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage MP. In a post on X, the party’s official account, used the NFNF slogan: “All the Reform MPs are at today’s farmers protest in Westminster. We are sending a message. No farmers, no food.”
A YouGov poll published this week found that just one in three Reform voters believe in man-made climate change.
Farage was also interviewed by Miller at the demonstration. In a video posted on X by Together, Farage called for similar farmers’ protests “in every market town in the country” and warned that these policies could cost Labour 100 seats in parliament.
Culture War
Labour has staunchly defended the inheritance tax plans, which it says will affect only 500 of the UK’s 209,000 farms.
Environment secretary Steve Reed said it was “only right” to ask the “wealthiest landowners and the biggest farms to pay their fair share”, citing the “£22 billion fiscal hole” inherited from the Conservative government.
However, Tom Lancaster, a land, food and farming analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), argues that the policy is likely to do more harm than good.
“The risk of this tax reform is that it distracts from the government’s climate and nature objectives, angering the very farmers we need to deliver these goals,” he told DeSmog.
“It’s hard to argue that the long-term costs of damaging their relationship with farmers to such an extent is worth the relatively small amount of money that it will raise, and it is also clear that in rushing the reform, they have missed an opportunity to use APR [Agricultural Property Relief] to further wider aims on the environment and tenancy reform.”
He added that the policy had been helpful for political opportunists. “The way these reforms have been handled – sprung on farmers after all the signals were to leave the reliefs alone – is also a gift to those who would seek to ferment a culture war in farming,” he said.
“There is nothing so appealing to a culture warrior as a betrayal narrative, and this gives them that on a plate.”
Major Tory donor Lord Michael Hintze, one of the few known funders of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Credit: Sir Michael Hintze(CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Funders and directors of the UK’s leading climate science denial group have donated more than £7 million to the Conservative Party over the past two decades, DeSmog can reveal.
Its current director Benny Peiser has claimed it is “extraordinary that anyone should think there is a climate crisis” and the group suggested in a 2015 report that carbon dioxide pollution is “a benefit to the planet”.
In reality, the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.
The GWPF doesn’t publish a full list of its donors, but several have been outed over the years, while its directors – which include former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott and Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson – are publicly declared.
Electoral Commission records show that these individuals have donated more than £7.4 million to right-wing political parties in just over two decades, including £7.2 million to the Conservatives, and £230,000 to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Almost half a million pounds of those donations were made in the last year.
The single biggest donor on the list was asset manager billionaireLord Michael Hintze, who has donated over £5.2 million to the Conservative Party since 2002, including £257,400 in the last year.
Lord Hintze was revealed as one of the GWPF’s financial backers in 2012 by The Guardian, while DeSmog revealed in early September that he is one of the main donors in the ongoing Conservative leadership race, donating £10,000 each to James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, and Priti Patel.
Lord Hintze has previously said he believes “there is climate change” caused “in part due to human activity” but that he wants to ensure “all sides” are heard on climate change “to reach the right conclusion for society as a whole”.
More than 99.9 percent of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans.
Lord Hintze isn’t the only figure linked to the GWPF currently bankrolling the Conservative Party leadership contest.
One of the race’s frontrunners – Kemi Badenoch – received £10,000 from Neil Record, the chair of Net Zero Watch, which is the campaigning arm of the GWPF. In total, Record has donated over £510,000 to the Conservative Party and its MPs since 2008, and has also given money to the GWPF.
As recently as July, Record wrote a column for The Telegraph claiming it was “debatable in detail” if fossil fuels cause dangerous levels of global warming. Net Zero Watch has called for “rapid” new North Sea oil and gas exploration, and for wind and solar power to be “wound down completely”.
Authors working for the IPCC have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.
During the leadership contest, Badenoch has questioned the decision made in 2019 by Theresa May’s Conservative government to introduce the UK’s 2050 net zero target.
When asked previously about his GWPF donations, Record said: “I personally regard the continuing contribution of the GWPF to the climate change debate as very positive in assisting balance and rationality in this contentious area.”
The Tories have also received £620,000 since 2001 from Lord Jon Moynihan, another GWPF donor. As revealed by Democracy for Sale, Conservative peer Lord Moynihan donated £25,000 to the GWPF between 2018 to 2023. The peer also has fossil fuel interests, holding shares in oil and gas majors BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies each worth more than £100,000.
Between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, the Conservatives received £8.4 million from fossil fuel interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers.
Prior to its defeat at the 2024 election, the Conservative Party made a series of U-turns on its own net zero policies, attacked Labour’s green spending plans, and doubled down on its support for new fossil fuel projects, approving more than 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences.
The party gathers in Birmingham this weekend for its annual conference, which will act as a post mortem for the party’s worst general election defeat in its history on 4 July.
“There is no doubt that public mistrust of politics is fuelled by parties accepting major donations from big companies like those whose lobbying efforts make it clear they want to frustrate the urgent need to tackle the climate crisis,” Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski told DeSmog.
“It’s time to implement strict rules on funding political parties, including a cap on how much any individual or business can donate.
“Elections should be won by the people with the best ideas, not the parties influenced by the biggest donors.”
Reform UK
The Conservative Party has not been the only right-wing party to benefit from funding from those with ties to the GWPF.
Terence Mordaunt has been a prolific political donor to right-wing parties – giving £412,000 to the Conservatives and £230,000 to Reform since January 2023.
He was the chair of the GWPF between 2019 and 2021, sitting on its board until August this year, and told the investigative news site openDemocracy in 2019 that “no one has proved yet that CO2 is the culprit (of climate change). It may not be.”
The GWPF’s replacement for Mordaunt as chair, Jerome Booth, has also donated £50,000 to the Tories between 2007 and 2013.
Reform, which campaigns to scrap the UK’s net zero targets, has extensive ties to climate science deniers and those with financial interests in oil and gas.
Between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, the party received £2.3 million from fossil fuel interests, major polluters, and those who cast doubt on the climate crisis.
On 13 September, party leader Nigel Farage headlined a fundraiser in Chicago, Illinois, for the Heartland Institute – a group that has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change – and urged the U.S. to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels.
The IPCC has warned that “keeping warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels requires deep, rapid and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions across all sectors”, led by the energy industry. The group has also stated that “climate change impacts will put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”
All of the donors named in this piece, the Reform Party, Conservative Party and the GWPF were contacted for comment, but none replied.
The fuse may have been set alight by online disinformation and secretive social media channels, but this explosion of far-right violence has been decades in the making. And while Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) and his mob of far-right agitators are its immediate instigators, much of Britain’s political and media class is complicit in laying the groundwork for this eruption of hate.
This truth of how we reached this point flips the normal classist narrative about racism in Britain. The reality is that racism isn’t a bottom-up expression of popular discontent, but a top-down project propagated by people in positions of power.
Or think how Conservative politicians normalise far-right rhetoric, dehumanising people and spreading hate. From “one nation” Conservatives such as David Cameron who as prime minister described migrants as a “swarm”, to the likes of Suella Braverman who as home secretary said there was a migrant “invasion”. Rishi Sunak’s “Stop the boats” slogan is now a far-right chant andjust this week the Tory party leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick said the police should “immediately arrest” people shouting “Allahu Akbar” on the street, the Arabic phrase meaning “God is great” – the equivalent of a Christian saying “hallelujah”.
This rhetoric was propagated further by the privately educated, former City trader Nigel Farage, who claims to be a man of the people. In the general election campaign, he said many Muslims didn’t share “British values” and this week promoted the “two-tier policing” conspiracy.
But it’s not just rightwing politicians, pundits and publications at fault. So-called centrists too often refuse to push back against this hate as well, sometimes peddling the same dangerous tropes or dismissing the concerns of those subject to this hatred.
I was confronted by this painful reality just this week. On Monday morning I was invited on to ITV’s Good Morning Britain to talk about the recent racist riots, only to be interrogated – and it did feel like an interrogation – about why I, a Muslim MP, thought it was important to call the recent racist violence Islamophobic. “Why is it important to use that specific word?” Kate Garraway repeatedly questioned me.
Almost before I could answer, and behaving with the same sneering condescension he did throughout the segment, the former Labour shadow chancellor and now broadcaster Ed Balls repeatedly interrupted me, seemingly incredulous that I thought this hate should be called by its proper name. The show has now been hit with more than 8,200 Ofcom complaints about that morning’s episode, many of them about his handling of my interview.
People clean up debris outside a Holiday Inn Express whose walls bear graffiti reading “Get Out England” and a racial epithet on August 5, 2024 in Tamworth, England.
“There are politicians and there are journalists who have played an active role in fanning the flames of hate and division, and we are seeing that play out,” said Zarah Sultana.
As British Prime Minister Keir Starmer covened an emergency security meeting on Monday to respond to violent attacks on immigrant and Muslim communities that have spread across the United Kingdom in recent days, progressive MP Zarah Sultana said the crisis—fueled by rampant disinformation and xenophobia—must serve as a reckoning for politicians and journalists who have “fanned the flames” of hatred for years.
Sultana, who represents Coventry South in the House of Commons, appeared on ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” to discuss the violent riots that have taken place in at least a dozen cities across the U.K. in recent days, mostly in England, with far-right protesters attacking mosques, libraries, and a hotel housing asylum-seekers.
The attacks have been in response to disinformation that has pinned the blame for a deadly stabbing attack on a children’s dance class in Southport, England last week on undocumented immigrants. The suspect was born and raised in the U.K., according to police.
“Rather than saying, this is the result of political decisions made by consecutive governments, people have blamed and scapegoated minorities.”
Sultana said that the violent attacks in cities including Blackpool, Leeds, and Manchester “shouldn’t be a surprise,” considering the years the British government—led for 14 years by the Conservative Party until the Labour Party won last month’s elections—has spent pushing anti-immigration policies and demonizing asylum-seekers, with the help of national news outlets.
“There is decades of work by the right-wing press and by politicians who have fanned the flames of this hate,” said Sultana in a panel discussion that also included journalists from The Daily Mail. “When we look at the role that media outlets like GB News has played, that The Daily Mail has played… There are politicians and there are journalists who have played an active role in fanning the flames of hate and division, and we are seeing that play out.”
The media and political class is complicit in the far right, racist and Islamophobic violence we’re seeing across our country.
Andrew Pierce of The Daily Mail took issue with Sultana’s remarks, demanding that she provide examples of anti-Muslim news stories in the paper.
The lawmaker did so after the broadcast, posting an image of 16 front pages from the outlet, including ones that asked “how many more” migrants the U.K. can take, referred to asylum-seekers as “illegals,” and claimed that migrants are taking the majority of jobs in the U.K. and sparking a “housing crisis.”
Here’s just a few examples of Daily Mail headlines that have fanned the flames of hate and normalised Islamophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric #GMBpic.twitter.com/kqzQqewnGk
Sultana added that former Home Secretary Suella Braverman referred to refugees arriving in the U.K. as an “invasion” and far-right Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said in May that British Muslims do not share “British values.”
“So when we look at the complicity,” said Sultana, “there’s a lot of mirrors that people have to be looking into.”
Sultana also implored politicians and the British media to explicitly refer to the riots over the weekend as Islamophobic, noting that Prime Minister Keir Starmer and others have denounced the attacks as racist but have not clearly expressed solidarity with the Muslim communities that have been targeted.
“Naming it as Islamophobia is really important because that allows us to shape our response,” said Sultana. “If we’re not identifying what is happening, the language that is being used and what this is about, we’re not going to be able to address this fundamentally.”
“Why is there such controversy around calling it Islamophobia?” asked Sultana after “Good Morning Britain” host Ed Balls dismissed her concerns, displaying what the lawmaker called “sneering contempt.”
The sneering contempt of ‘journalists’ will never stop me from calling out racism and Islamophobic hate. pic.twitter.com/cQoNKDzJ78
The interview took place a week after three children were killed and 10 were injured in a knife attack in Southport. The 17-year-old suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was born and raised in Britain, according to authorities, who took the unusual step of making his identity public to counter disinformation that quickly spread online and fueled riots that first began in Southport the day after the crime.
The first riot included anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant demonstrators throwing bricks at a mosque in the town, setting cars on fire, and damaging a convenience store.
The authorities’ decision to disclose the suspect’s identity did not stop the violence from escalating over the weekend, with rioters setting a library on fire in Liverpool, burning books, and attempting to block firefighters from putting out the flames on Saturday.
In Rotherham, an anti-immigration mob broke into a hotel housing asylum-seekers and attempted to set the building on fire while blocking exits.
Nearly 150 people were arrested for taking part in the attacks, and Starmer warned Sunday that “those who have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law.”
“This is not protest. It is organized, violent thuggery,” said Starmer.
BJ Harrington, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for public order, said in a statement Sunday that “disinformation is a huge driver of this appalling violence and we know a lot of those attending these so-called protests are doing so in direct response to what they’ve read online.”
“Often posts are being shared and amplified by high profile accounts. We’re working hard to counteract this,” added Harrington. “They won’t win.”
While calling on the government and media to directly confront the Islamophobia that has been fomented in the U.K. in recent decades, Sultana said the new Labour government should also correct the austerity policies that have caused unrest and scapegoating of immigrants and Muslim communities.
“The economic system which has allowed inequality to exacerbate in this country, has brought down living standards,” said Sultana. “Our communities have faced the brunt of Tory austerity, and what has happened on the right-wing side of politics, in the media and in politics, is that migrants, Muslims, and trans people have been blamed for people not being able to access council housing, not being able to get [National Health Service] appointments, not being able to find school places for their kids. Rather than saying, this is the result of political decisions made by consecutive governments, people have blamed and scapegoated minorities.”
