Turkey’s slide into authoritarianism was facilitated by collaborators, enablers, and an inept opposition.
This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.
If Keir Starmer has had one success, it’s killing democracy in the Labour Party. Following the latest reshuffle, it’s clear that Starmer has no intention of tolerating dissent, even though his MPs clearly have a better read of the public mood than him – and his head honcho Morgan McSweeney:
Labour source points out that the government whips office now contains the wife of Morgan McSweeney, the No10 chief of staff, and the husband and brother of Amy Richards, No10's new political director.
"I'm sure that will reassure the PLP," the source says.
— Kevin Schofield (@KevinASchofield) September 8, 2025
As described by the Institute for Government:
Whips are MPs and peers affiliated to a political party appointed to ensure their party colleagues vote according to the leader’s agenda
Reading that, you might think a bit of Morgan McSweeney-style nepotism is actually the most sensible means of whipping the party into shape. After all, it’s going to feel pretty awkward slagging off the abysmal operation in Number 10 when you’re talking to one of the abysmal operators’ wives.
The first problem for Starmer is that Britain is superficially dedicated to democracy and meritocracy. Can Starmer pretend to be in favour of either of those things when he’s employing the spouses of his meritless lackeys to enforce his ill-thought out bidding?
The second problem for Starmer is that everyone knows he’s becoming increasingly authoritarian because his rank incompetence and public unpopularity demand it. A key example of this was Starmer’s recent attempt to gut benefits for sick and disabled people. Because the plan was blatantly cruel and demonstrably at odds with why people voted Labour, it was wildly unpopular with the public. Many Labour MPs picked up how unpopular the cuts would be, and whether or not they actually cared about their constituents, they did take a stand against the government.
As a result of the rebellion, Starmer was forced to climb down. This was embarrassing for Labour, but ultimately it was less of a clusterfuck than it would have been if they’d actually succeeded in forcing the cuts through.
Instead of reflecting on his dreadful instincts and lacking humanity, Starmer quietly seethed for a few weeks then suspended four key rebels. Starmer justified the suspensions as follows:
I am determined we will change this country for the better for millions of working people – and I’m not going to be deflected from that.
Therefore, we have to deal with people who repeatedly break the whip.
Everyone was elected as a Labour on a Labour manifesto of change and everybody needs to deliver as a Labour government.
The word ‘change’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Yes, it’s unarguable that the British public wanted change; it’s equally clear that Starmer’s election campaign revolved around monotonously repeating the word ‘change’ like a busted chatbot.
It’s equally clear, however, that the people implicitly understood ‘change’ to mean ‘change for the better’; not ‘change for the worse’.
You could make the case that the previous Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was too soft on MPs. He sought to strengthen democracy wherever he could, and his MPs repaid him by stabbing him the back at best and stabbing him in the front more often.
Now, the same MPs who shat and pissed at the thought of re-nationalising the NHS are upset because they’re being bullied into torching their careers by a political idiot.
What a shame.
The problem Corbyn faced wasn’t that democracy doesn’t work; it was that it’s too late to reintroduce it to the Labour Party. At this point, Labour is really just three lobbyists in a trench coat.
These people were never going to disembark the gravy train of their own free will, but it’s good that Corbyn attempted it, because now we can all see that the concept of ‘Labour democracy’ is an oxymoron.
Once again, real democracy must be built from the ground up.
This time, let’s try not to let the sell outs take it over.
Featured image via BBC (re-upload)
By Willem Moore
This post was originally published on Canary.
While many once wondered what Keir Starmer stood for, it’s become increasingly clear that the three pillars of Starmerism are:
The problem with Starmerism is that it’s politically illiterate; it’s doomed to failure, and it’s comprehensively unpopular with the wider electorate, and as such the Labour Party went into the summer recess facing some of the worst polling it’s ever experienced:
Labour approval hits all-time low
Approve – 12% (-1)
Disapprove – 66% (-1)
Net rating of -54 (record low)
Via @YouGov, 15 Jul (+/- vs 5-7 Jul) pic.twitter.com/1N7mCxJPnN
— Stats for Lefties
(@LeftieStats) July 15, 2025
With parliament taking a break, some wondered if Starmer would rethink his political project and point the party in a direction other than ‘straight down the shitter’. Instead, Labour have started week 1 of the new term by tripling down on everything that the country hates about them.
Welcome to Starmerism Phase 2.
Starmer infamously became Labour leader on the back of 10 pledges; pledges he slowly abandoned at best and did-the-exact-opposite-of at worst. He’s continued to make promises since then, but the problem is we have this story in the UK called ‘the boy who cried wolf’, and as a result you can only lie to a British person 5 to 10 times before they become suspicious.
As a result of his flagrant wolf crying, the public trust Starmerism about as much as they trust gone-off milk:

You know what might win back people’s trust, though?
That’s right – another empty slogan that he has no chance of delivering on, and this latest one is the greatest yet. As the Guardian reported on Monday 1 September:
His internal No 10 reshuffle, which also covered the communications team and the policy unit, comes alongside a new economic pledge to deliver growth that “people can feel in their pockets”, a nod to the millions who are still struggling with the cost of living.
Growth.
That people can feel.
In their pockets.
I’m sorry, but unless this was written by Action Men dolls, there’s no way they can’t have thought: “wow, this sounds an awful lot like we’re talking about pocket wanking“.
People online certainly noticed this:
“Growth people can feel in their pockets” https://t.co/3iOqxJxo1y pic.twitter.com/3bTo715xkI
— M
F
G
H (@hanlemic) September 1, 2025
Ignoring the should-have-been-obvious innuendo, what does ‘growth you can feel in your pockets’ actually mean?
As you’d expect, Labour haven’t fleshed out what we’ll get in practice, but seemingly they’re saying they’ll achieve GDP growth at the same time that people’s personal spending power increases. The reason why they’d need to point this out is because GDP – our primary indicator of how well the economy is doing – often tells us fuck all about how the economy is doing.
As Top Traders Unplugged note:
It starts with a strange paradox: You read the headlines: “GDP is up.” You look around: wages stagnant, housing unaffordable, services crumbling, your groceries cost 30% more than two years ago. Something doesn’t add up.
For decades, GDP has been the scoreboard of economic success. A rising GDP was supposed to mean progress, prosperity, and security. But more and more, it feels like GDP is running victory laps while the rest of us are stuck in traffic. Why? According to economist Diane Coyle, it’s because we’re still measuring the 2025 economy with tools built for 1945.
People have been getting wise to this for some time, and now Labour are getting wise to us getting wise. The problem is they’re not getting wise to actually fixing the problem, as their solution is to do more of what brought us here. This is why the above reshuffle saw Starmer employing Minouche Shafik, who economist Richard J Murphy described as a ‘neoliberal technocrat’. It’s also why Starmer’s second reshuffle on Friday 5 September mostly just swapped loyalists from one ministerial position to another, like the church moving a bad priest to the next town over.
Ever since Starmer took power and the country erupted in race riots, he’s been bending over backwards to appease the far-right. Guess how that pillar of Starmerism turned out:
The number of Reform UK, Conservative and Green voters saying they would never vote Labour has risen notably since last July
% of 2024 voters saying they would never consider voting Labour
Reform UK: 79% (+29 from 20-29 July 2024)
Conservative: 60% (+21)
Green: 27% (+17)
Lib… pic.twitter.com/YFsNQMSsjQ— YouGov (@YouGov) May 21, 2025
2025 brought more far-right uprisings which were followed by Operation Raise the Colours – a campaign to erect flags all over the place (an operation organised by ‘well-known far-right extremists’ according to HOPE not Hate). In response to this current wave of flag mania, many media outlets began asking ‘are flags racist?’


The obvious answer to this is that it depends on the context. Consider the following two examples:
Example 1 is usually going to be non-problematic because football has largely cleaned itself up since the 1970s.
Example 2 is quite clearly racist, though, and it’s not because the flag is woven from racism particles or because all flags are inherently xenophobic; it’s because the dipshit waving it is crudely making the argument that England is solely for people like him.
While the people engaging in this current ‘Raise the Colours‘ movement have maintained some degree of anonymity, we’ve seen enough to know who’s behind all this:

It’s clear then that the issue isn’t the flags themselves; it’s that legions of goons are once again conducting a wave of racially-motivated goonery.
UKIP’s Nick Tenconi bravely re-enacts history’s worst moments outside a hotel housing asylum seekers. Nothing says “patriot” like a Nazi salute on the streets of a country that fought and defeated fascism. pic.twitter.com/qmxFaB0RM4
— The Rev. Anton Mittens
(@MittensOff) August 9, 2025
Turns my stomach that @NickTenconi feels able to throw a Nazi salute on an English street without consequences.
The one suit wonder then shows the world who he really is by posting the video on Twitter with the title 'We are sending them home' pic.twitter.com/QN2t0LpFJz
— Woke Lefty
(@SalfordMe2023) August 9, 2025
So how did Labour react to this latest wave of flag shagging?
Umm:
Starmer has said he hangs the English flag in his home and 'always sits in front of a Union Jack'
He told the BBC: 'I'm very encouraging of flags. I think they're patriotic and a great symbol of our nation pic.twitter.com/oAkrbydQTx
— Peter #Socialist #COYS @woolhead on bsky.social (@CoysPeter) September 1, 2025
Asked if she's got a flag on display in her home, the Home Secretary says she has Union Jack bunting, St Georges flags, St Georges bunting, and Union Jack flags and tablecloths. pic.twitter.com/gvYsfMqOrf
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) September 2, 2025
That’s right, Starmer came out to proclaim:
I’m very encouraging of flags.
The people he’s trying to appeal to think he’s a treacherous paedophile who should get the guillotine; does he really think he can undo all that by pretending to enjoy a good flag?
A charitable reading of all this would be that Starmer is trying to put people off the flag by associating himself with it. A less than charitable view would be that things are only going to get more desperate from here on out.
Remember that episode of Black Mirror in which the prime minister was blackmailed into fucking a pig? Imagine that, but instead of a pig it’s a flag, and instead of being forced into it Starmer is voluntarily broadcasting the scenario to a queasy nation of regretful voters.
It’s an unpleasant scene to imagine, but is it any worse than what we’re getting from him already?
On the fifth day of Labour Phase 2, Angela Rayner – the deputy prime minister and housing minister – resigned from her positions. She’d embroiled herself in a housing scandal after paying a lower rate of tax on a property. While her housing situation was admittedly very confusing (involving a trust; a disabled child, and a co-sharing arrangement with a former partner), the situation reflected poorly on her because she was the housing minister, and she allegedly took bad advice on matters relating to housing. This made people think one of two things:
Her position became completely untenable after the source of her legal advice said they’d advised she get specialist legal advice. Rayner later resigned after Starmer’s independent ethics adviser found “she had broken the ministerial code by not seeking specialist tax advice”.
The problem is that Phase 1 Labour experienced some very similar cases of incompetence and/or corruption, including:
As such, it seems like ironic scandals are a load-bearing pillar of Starmerism, and that they will continue to happen no matter how many phases the party advances through.
At this point, there really is no question as to what ‘Starmerism’ is in practice. There are many questions around how long we can tolerate such politics, however, as they’re clearly not doing the country any favours.
Featured image via Number 10
By Willem Moore
This post was originally published on Canary.
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The Trump administration is facing growing criticism for suspending visas for Palestinian passport holders, including for Palestinian officials set to attend the annual U.N. General Assembly this month. When the U.S. denied a visa to Yasser Arafat to address the U.N. in 1988, the General Assembly was moved to Geneva — the U.N. faces similar calls now. The move by the U.S. is “an indication of the unprecedented degree to which the U.S. government has handed the levers of its foreign policy over to the Israeli regime,” says Craig Mokhiber, an international human rights lawyer who formerly served as the director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He resigned in October 2023 over the U.N.’s failure to adequately address large-scale atrocities in Palestine and Israel.
Mokhiber also says there is more the U.N. could do to stop the genocide in Gaza. The General Assembly has the ability to circumvent the Security Council with a “United for Peace” resolution that could force “concrete action” in Gaza.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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Jeffrey Epstein survivors rallied in front of Congress on Wednesday, detailing their experiences of abuse and calling for the release of all Epstein files. “We cannot heal without justice,” says one Epstein survivor, Chauntae Davies. “We cannot protect the future if we refuse to confront the past.” Survivors also announced that some victims would work to confidentially compile their own list of individuals implicated in Epstein’s crimes. This comes as lawmakers seek to force a House floor vote compelling the Justice Department to release all the files from the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Lauren Hersh, the national director of the anti-trafficking organization World Without Exploitation, is a former sex-trafficking prosecutor in New York who joined survivors for their press conference just steps from the Capitol on Wednesday. “Courage is contagious,” says Hersh, adding that “we were approached by several other Epstein survivors who we didn’t even know.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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If you vandalise innocent mini-roundabouts with red paint, politicians don’t care. But if you do the same with machinery that helps wanted war criminals commit genocide, politicians will call you terrorists and put you in jail.
That’s Britain today. It’s absurd. But at least it makes it clearer for anyone in doubt that most of our politicians don’t serve ordinary people – they serve the rich and powerful.
My area is currently full of mini-roundabouts which suddenly have the cross of St George on them. Local people aren’t all ultra-nationalists, though. I’ve probably seen just two houses – out of hundreds – that have put an English flag in their window in recent weeks. But it only takes a small number to have an impact. Because there’s no sign the council has any interest in un-vandalising the road markings.
I’ve seen a “standard response” on behalf of the local council. And while it points out that it’s “an offence to paint or make any unauthorised markings on the highway”, it says it will base any assessment on whether to act or not depending on “risk to the asset and risk to road users”. So if there’s “an immediate risk to assets or road safety they will be removed”. But in reality, of course, there’s no such risk. As a result, the response clarifies, the council will only un-vandalise the road markings “as part of our routine highways maintenance subject to funding”. In other words, it’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
I’ll be honest. It’s not exactly high on my list of priorities either. (I’d prefer for Britain’s participation in and support for the Gaza genocide to end first, and then for the government to fund the NHS, education system, and public housing properly.) But because Keir Starmer’s Labour government has decided to prioritise cracking down on vandalism of machinery with links to genocide, it’s hard to ignore the hypocrisy.
The pro-Israel lobby is not the only lobby group in Britain. But it probably is the most prominent and aggressive lobby group that acts on behalf of a foreign state. (Ask the artificial intelligence bots of the corporations complicit in Israel’s genocide, and they’ll say the same thing.) As Declassified UK reported in 2024, a quarter of all MPs had received funding from the Israel lobby. And Starmer’s top team in particular is positively rolling in money from Israel supporters. In other words, it pays to support settler-colonial crimes.
So it’s clear that proscribing activists who dared to paint genocide-complicit machinery wasn’t about the vandalism. It was about what they were vandalising and who that annoyed. If it just annoyed local residents, there would be no real action. But because it annoyed influential lobbyists with the ear of our corrupt ruling class, politicians mobilised the full power of the state to try and harass non-violent opponents of genocide into silence.
The UK’s elites may cosplay democracy for appearances’ sake. But when a small number of people’s voices matter more than the majority’s, that’s not democracy. And the simple story of where you can – and can’t – put red paint sums that up perfectly.
Featured image via the Canary
By Ed Sykes
This post was originally published on Canary.
By Susana Suisuiki, RNZ Pacific Waves presenter/producer
A West Papuan activist says the transfer of four political prisoners by Indonesian authorities is a breach of human rights.
In April, the men were arrested on charges of treason after requesting peace talks in the city of Sorong in southwest Papua. They were then transferred to Makassar city in Eastern Indonesia and are awaiting trial.
Last week, protesters gathered in front of Sorong City Municipal Police HQ opposing the transferral, but the demonstrations turned violent. as protests about civil rights swept across Indonesia.
Police had reportedly used “heavy-handed” attempts to disrupt the protest but was met with riotous responses, with tyres set on fire and government buildings being attacked.
A 28-year-old man was seriously injured when police shot him in the abdomen.
Seventeen people were arrested for property damage, while police are still search for former political prisoner Sayan Mandabayan accused of being the “organiser” of the protest.
West Papuan activist Ronny Kareni told RNZ Pacific Waves the protest was initially meant to be peaceful.
He said the four political prisoners being far from their home city had raised concerns.
‘Raises many concerns’
“What the transfer really transpired, is it raises many concerns from human rights defenders and many of us arguing that the transfer violates the principles of the Article 85 of the Indonesian Procedure Code which requires trials to be held where the alleged offence occured.”
Kareni said the transfer isolated prisoners from their families, community support and legal counsel.
Indonesian authorities say the group were transferred due to security concerns for the trial.
Kareni said the movement to liberate West Papua from Indonesia would continue to be seen as “treason”, even if there was peaceful dialogue.
“There is no space for exercising your right to determine your future or determine what you feel that matters to you,” he said.
“Just talking peace, just to kind of like come to the table to offer peace talks, is seen as treason.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
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We speak to journalist Jean Guerrero about the Trump administration’s ongoing anti-immigrant crackdown and the bipartisan roots of “anti-immigrant cruelty” in the United States. Guerrero’s latest opinion piece in The New York Times is titled “The Border Is Invading America” and traces the development of U.S. border policies since the Clinton administration. “The brute force that the border once unleashed out of sight, in the desert or behind the locked doors of detention centers, is now erupting on our streets,” says Guerrero. “We desperately need a reckoning with the structural abuses embedded in our immigration system and with how both parties have played a role in sustaining them, because, otherwise, the border is going to continue to coil inward and to destroy our collective rights.”
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, recaps and responds to the latest legal news on the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown. We cover judicial decisions that the Trump administration cannot deport alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process, that it broke the law by sending National Guard troops to put down protests in Los Angeles, as well as its attempts to deport hundreds of Guatemalan children currently in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and deputize military lawyers with no experience in immigration law to serve as immigration judges, and more.
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President Trump is preparing to send National Guard troops into Chicago and Baltimore, right after a judge in California ruled that he broke the law by deploying troops to Los Angeles against anti-ICE protesters. “This is not about public safety, and it’s not about law and order. It’s a show of force meant to intimidate, to create fear and send troops to occupy cities, because people in those cities largely and overwhelmingly oppose Donald Trump and his policies,” says Jesús “Chuy” García, who grew up in Chicago and now represents the Chicagoland area in Congress.
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Democracy Now! Wednesday, September 3, 2025
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