Putin’s London oligarchs: the dishonouring of Britain’s ‘elite’
This morning’s Sunday Times front page reports that MI5 and MI6 – Britain’s security and intelligence services – objected to the peerage awarded 18 months ago to Evgeny Lebedev, Russian owner of London’s Evening Standard.
Lebedev owes his fortune to his father Alexander, a prominent oligarch and former KGB officer who was in charge of the KGB’s station in London at the end of the Soviet era in the late 1980s, the period when a young Vladimir Putin was number two in the equivalent station in Dresden. As is often the case in the complex politics of post-Soviet Russia, Alexander Lebedev was briefly an enemy of Putin’s but then changed sides and became what one former MI6 officer has called “a craven supporter” of the Kremlin godfather.
Lebedev junior has been a good friend of Prime Minister Boris Johnson for more than a decade, ever since his strong support for Johnson first term as Mayor of London and his re-election campaign in 2012.
According to this morning’s Sunday Times, Johnson exerted pressure on MI5 and MI6 to withdraw their objections to Lebedev’s peerage, and they duly did so. His elevation was announced in July 2020 and he officially took his seat as Lord Lebedev in November that year.
The blatant sale of honours (up to and including knighthoods and peerages) has been an intermittent feature of British political life since the early 1920s, when Prime Minister David Lloyd George marketed such baubles to political donors via a shady coterie of corrupt businessmen including Maundy Gregory, a theatrical producer and newspaper owner who used his network of homosexual associates to obtain blackmail opportunities for British intelligence.
These schemes became so notoriously disgraceful that a special law was brought in to criminalise such behaviour: the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. Maundy Gregory himself is the only person to have been convicted under this law – he was jailed for two months in 1933. Gregory’s death remains mysterious. He was reportedly captured by German forces after the French surrender in 1940, and possibly died in an internment camp the following year, but there has never been any official confirmation.
For forty years after Lloyd George there were few if any scandals surrounding honours, until the arrival of Britain’s most pro-Zionist Prime Minister, Labour’s Harold Wilson and his notorious political secretary Marcia Williams (herself ennobled as Lady Falkender).
Wilson and Falkender lavished honours upon corrupt Jewish businessmen who had either donated money to the Labour Party or provided them with personal favours. Many of the beneficiaries had ties to Israel’s intelligence service Mossad, and at least two of those elevated to the Lords – Joseph Kagan and Rudy Sternberg – were suspected of links to the KGB or other Soviet bloc services.
Heritage and Destiny has carried out extensive investigations into the Wilson-Falkender ties to Israeli interests, as readers will learn in a forthcoming book by our assistant editor.
In one important respect, Johnson’s government is even worse than Wilson’s, whose most notorious apparent sales of honours followed his still-mysterious resignation in 1976 – known as the “Lavender List” because Lady Falkender supposedly compiled it on her personal notepaper.
Despite their corruption, Wilson and Falkender did give in to pressure from the honours scrutiny committee and removed three names. One of those removed was the boxing promoter Jarvis Astaire, who was one of many Jews with shady connections who had donated to Wilson’s party coffers and had been suggested for a knighthood. A later pro-Zionist Labour Prime Minister – Tony Blair – eventually gave Astaire a slightly lesser honour, an OBE, in 2003.
Blair’s own government was for some time embroiled in allegations surrounding the sale of honours, involving several prominent Zionist lobbyists close to Labour’s then-leader.
Another name that Wilson agreed to remove was Illtyd Harrington, deputy leader of the Greater London Council, whom he had suggested for a peerage. In Harrington’s case there were probably two problems: first he was openly homosexual (which in those days was considered more scandalous than it would be today), and secondly his father had been an active communist who fought with the communist-controlled International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and would certainly have had an MI5 file.
Lord Lebedev is also widely assumed to be a homosexual, but in today’s world MI5 and MI6 objections would not have been related to his private life, unless they were concerned that his famously lavish parties had been used to promote Vladimir Putin’s interests.
When Lebedev’s ex-KGB father first purchased the London Evening Standard in 2009, then Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson turned down requests for the British government to intervene. Mandelson is a close associate of another Putin oligarch, Oleg Deripaska.
Now that the Sunday Times has made these allegations, and given that ordinary Britons will inevitably pay a heavy price in their shopping and utility bills for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, it is surely imperative for the Johnson Government to publish all relevant documents about the Lebedev peerage and be completely open about the Prime Minister’s friendship with the Standard owner and fellow oligarchs.
And to show that this is a matter that transcends party politics, we are sure that the Labour Party will support the formal request that H&D is now making under the Freedom of Information Act for similar release of all relevant files concerning the Wilson government and its donors. One such file is catalogued as PREM 19/589/1 – due to be released to us at the National Archives in January this year but withheld, “closed while access is under review” for unexplained reasons.
A formal request for release of this and other documents will be submitted at the start of office hours tomorrow.
We shall of course inform H&D readers of any progress in this long overdue forensic examination of the British state’s decline into dishonour.
Blair’s unusual silence explained
Many readers have wondered why Tony Blair has been remarkably quiet so far about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Look no further than Blair’s very close relationship with one of Putin’s favourite billionaire Jewish oligarchs, Moshe Kantor. Among many prominent positions in international Zionism, Kantor is President of the European Jewish Congress and Chairman of the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress.
Since 2015 Blair has been chairman of Kantor’s ‘European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation’, which campaigns for ‘tougher laws against extremism’.
Naturally the extremism Blair and Kantor wish to criminalise involves such things as publishing a magazine or running a bookshop. For this type of extremism the likes of Blair and Kantor endorse the approach of Spanish prosecutors, who wish to jail Pedro Varela for twelve years, or German prosecutors who wish again to jail the 93-year-old Ursula Haverbeck.
Invading a neighbouring country is, by contrast, not ‘extreme’: not if the invader is Moshe Kantor’s close friend Vladimir Putin.
Moshe Kantor also funded the World Holocaust Forum, which provided a platform for Putin to indulge his now familiar ‘anti-Nazi’ posturing.
Israel’s ‘Holocaust museum’ Yad Vashem has repeatedly accepted major donations from Putin’s favourite oligarchs, including not only Kantor but also Roman Abramovich who now faces ostracism in the UK for his close Kremlin ties but is still very welcome in Jerusalem.
Latest woke insanity sees Shakespeare’s theatre issue ‘anti-semitism’ warning
In the latest pathetic display of woke ‘sensitivity’, Shakespeare’s Globe has issued a warning to theatre-goers that The Merchant of Venice – currently being staged by candlelight at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – “contains antisemitism, colourism, and racism”.
We aren’t quite sure what “colourism” means, but we can be sure it isn’t an apology for the Globe having cast two black men and one Asian women among characters meant to portray 16th century Venetians.
As for “anti-semitism” – can anyone planning to see The Merchant of Venice really be unaware that its central character – the moneylender Shylock – is perhaps the most archetypal Jewish villain in literary history?
If the Globe were really concerned about whether the Shylock image is fair or not, then instead of this pathetic cringe perhaps they would care to sponsor a conference or study day to accompany the production? H&D would be very happy to provide a speaker.
For example we could discuss two statements by one of the greatest figures in British political history, Ernest Bevin, who founded Britain’s largest trade union, took charge of labour relations in Churchill’s government during the Second World War, and was Foreign Secretary for almost six years after the war, when he was the co-architect of NATO.
Bevin told the Trade Union Congress during the 1931 economic crisis: “It is a game of Shylock versus the people, with Shylock getting the pound of flesh every time.”
And at an emergency Cabinet meeting soon after the Second World War, by which time war debt had tightened Shylock’s grip. Bevin said in Cabinet (!) that “we [the British government and by extension the British people] are in Shylock’s hands”. This observation was so incendiary that it was not typed into the official Cabinet minutes, but appears in the handwritten notes of that meeting taken by a senior civil servant.
This was at a time when British soldiers and police were fighting Jewish terrorists in Palestine, and although it took almost three years, ‘American’ pressure eventually forced the British government into acquiescence in the creation of Israel in 1948.
So if the Globe really wants to discuss the question of ‘anti-semitism’ and Shylock in a British context, let’s start with Ernest Bevin and discuss whether his views reflected ‘racism’ or reality.
Or is the Globe interested only in woke posturing rather than scholarship?
Happy New Year to all our readers – 2022 presents an open goal for nationalists
All at H&D wish our readers (whether online, in print, or preferably both!) a very happy new year in 2022.
In this week’s Spectator, former UKIP MEP Patrick O’Flynn points out that the present ‘Conservative’ government is failing to take advantage of the opposition Labour Party’s extremist pro-immigration policy.
He writes: “The Labour party’s bizarre attitude towards immigration policy ought to render it utterly incapable of depriving the Conservatives of a parliamentary majority. And yet the Conservatives are conspiring to undermine rather than underline their own natural advantage on this crucial issue.”
And adds: “pretty much all the Conservatives need to do is make a good fist of immigration control and they can cement in place their winning electoral coalition of traditionalist shire Tories and working class Red Wallers.”
Yet they fail to do so, and this failure is a repeat of exactly what the Tories (and their transatlantic equivalents, sometimes referred to as ‘Republicans in Name Only’ or RINOs) have been doing for decades.
As we have documented in previous H&D analyses, the Tories have repeatedly talked tough about immigration, then once in office continued to steer the ship of state onto the rocks of multiracialism.
This situation ought to be an open goal not so much for the Conservative Party (who are in some ways more responsible than Labour for our present situation, having been in power for 46 of the 76 years since the Second World War) as for racial nationalists.
Will 2022 be the year in which British racial nationalism gets its act together?
Future issues of H&D will debate the way forward.
Westminster Bubbles – can any politician cast the first stone?
Following the resignation of Health Secretary Matt Hancock over breaching Covid regulations in connection with an extra-marital affair, Westminster and Fleet Street rumour mills are working overtime.
The two frontbenchers most in the spotlight are Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner and Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove. Coincidentally Rayner has been responsible for shadowing Gove ever since Labour’s misfired reshuffle.
But the rumours have nothing to do with politics.
Rayner split up from her husband, union official Mark Rayner, last year and has for some time been very close to her former campaign manager, Ilford MP Sam Tarry – a former employee of the ‘anti-racist charity’ Hope not Hate. Both Tarry and Rayner are married with children: indeed Rayner (though only 41) is a grandmother.
Hope not Hate boss Nick Lowles sprang to Tarry’s defence before the 2019 election when his former aide was accused of having links to ‘antisemites’ in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
At least Rayner and Tarry are involved in a straightforward, old-fashioned, extramarital affair.
The Tory scandals are far more exotic, involving swingers’ parties, cocaine, and perhaps their very own Philip Schofield about to ‘out’ himself.
Covid regulations make this sort of thing much more complicated: at one time a Tory MP might have thought ‘lockdown’ had something to do with Miss Whiplash in a Shepherd Market flat. But now even the highest in the land are subjected to the Daily Mail‘s middle-class morality.
Fortunately for Michael Gove (who once shared a flat with gay businessman Ivan Massow and gay Tory Nick Boles) a large part of the British media belongs to Rupert Murdoch, who has always seen Gove as his man – so you can guarantee that whatever stories break this week, they won’t be Sun exclusives!
Mr Gove has in some respects always been proud of swinging both ways. In February this year he was challenged in the House of Commons about his claims to have sung The Sash, but professed that in addition to this loyalist anthem he also sang the republican favourite Fields of Athenry and the Scottish nationalist Flower of Scotland.
Labour councillor resigns after porn charges
A Labour councillor for the Hollinwood ward of Oldham Council has resigned and last week appeared in court facing charges of downloading child pornography.
Martin Judd, 25, entered not guilty pleas at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court to three charges that between February 2018 and Febriary 2020 he had downloaded fifteen Category A (the most serious) images of children, twenty-three Category B, and 48 Category C.
Judd was committed for trial in Manchester next January.
Born in New Zealand, Judd was elected as a Hollinwood ward councillor in 2018. A year earlier he had been elected in Manchester as the youngest every President of a Rotary Club. (He worked for Waitrose in Manchester city centre.)
Some H&D readers will remember Hollinwood ward from the early 2000s: Oldham BNP organiser Mick Treacy polled 24% in the ward at the 2002 elections.
Since those days of curse Oldham BNP has ceased to exist, and in any case there can be no by-elections for the time being due to Covid-19.
Corbyn in trouble again – media discovers Edwardian “anti-semite”
Jeremy Corbyn is again in trouble with Anglo-Jewry, after prominent Jewish journalist and Tory Lord Finkelstein (formerly Daniel Finkelstein) wrote an article for The Times this morning denouncing the Labour leader for having written a Foreword eight years ago to a book originally published in 1902!
This was the classic tome Imperialism by J.A. Hobson, well known to all serious students of British politics but apparently new to many Fleet Street scribblers.
Hobson was among the most prominent critics of the British Empire’s war in South Africa – the Boer War – in which among other outrages the British Empire pioneered the use of concentration camps to intern Boer civilians.
In the build-up to the war prominent Jewish financiers plotted with the gentile and Rothschild ally Cecil Rhodes to stage a “false flag” incident known to history as the Jameson Raid. This conspiracy failed, but it was not long before some of the same characters had successfully provoked a brutal war. There were almost 50,000 civilian casualties, including more than 26,000 Boer civilian women and children killed in British concentration camps.
Before, during and after the conflict, several leading opponents of the war – ranging from Marxists to Labour Party founders to Liberals – explicitly denounced what they saw as the Jewish influence in provoking and sustaining the conflict.
British Marxist (and first-class cricketer) Henry Hyndman attacked Jewish newspaper owners as “poisoners of the wells of public information”; he went on to condemn “this shameful attempt of a sordid capitalism to drag us into a policy of conquest in tropical regions which can benefit no living Englishman in the long run, though it may swell the overgrown fortunes of the meanest creatures on the earth”.
After the failure of the Jameson Raid, Liberal MP and journalist Henry Labouchère wrote of the plotters arrested by Boer leaders: “Many of the prisoners bear English names but are nonetheless mostly of foreign Hebrew origin, the kind of people frequently having a penchant to Anglicise their names”.
Socialist journalist Harry Quelch (later a friend of Lenin) wrote: “The Jew financier is the personfication of that gold international which today dominates the government and the jingo press of all countries.” Quelch later added: “We have denounced this as a Jew-Capitalist war, and seeing the prominent part Jew-capitalists have taken in the Johannesburg agitation, and seeing their intimate relations with Cabinet ministers here at home and the vituperative fury of their organs in the press, we consider the terms fully justified.”
In September 1899 the radical editor of Reynolds’s Newsapaper, W.M. Thompson, wrote: “The Transvaal policy of the present government is undoubtedly controlled by Jews so that England too is passing under the dominion of the foreigners from the East.”
Labour Party founder Keir Hardie concluded in 1900: “Modern imperialism is really run by half a dozen financial houses, many of them Jewish, to whom politics is a counter in the game of buying and selling securities.”
Even David Lloyd George (who as Prime Minister seventeen years later was to preside over the first official British backing for a Zionist homeland in Palestine) denounced the Tory government’s Boer War policies, sarcastically noting that “all our righteousness, all our hatred of wrongs was reserved for a community of Jews six thousand miles away in Johannesburg who ran away when the fighting came for their own cause.”
One of the most explicitly “anti-semitic” interventions by an opponent of the war was a speech by trade unionist and MP John Burns in February 1900. Burns told the House of Commons: “Wherever we examine, there is the financial Jew, operating, directing, inspiring the agonies that have led to this war. …The trail of the financial serpent is over this war from beginning to end.”
Partly inspired by Burns, the Trade Union Congress passed a resolution at its conference in September 1900 opposing the Boer War as having been waged “to secure the gold fields of South Africa for cosmopolitan Jews most of whom had no patriotism and no country”.
So the author at the centre of the latest Corbyn controversy – J.A. Hobson – was by no means out of line with the prevailing anti-Jewish sentiments of Boer War opponents. He had first been sent to South Africa to report on the brewing conflict by the liberal Manchester Guardian in 1899, and a year later his Guardian journalism was collected into a book. Writing to Guardian proprietor and editor C.P. Scott, Hobson described how he had begun to perceive the Jewish role in South African events: “Many of these men have taken English names, and the extent of the Jew power is thus concealed. I am not exaggerating one whit. I think I can prove it.”
Hobson continued in his letter to Scott (whose family trust still owns today’s Guardian newspaper): “They fastened on the Rand …as they are prepared to fasten upon any other spot on the globe in order to exploit it for the attainment of huge profits and quick return. This small confederacy of international financiers …chiefly foreign Jews, are the economic rulers of South Africa.”
Unlike those who have so keenly jumped on the bandwagon to atack Corbyn for publishing a Foreword praising the “anti-semite” Hobson, H&D actually knows a bit about British imperial history, including the Boer War. The question should not be whether Corbyn, Hobson and others are anti-Jewish. The question should be: are they telling the truth?
Chuka’s family secrets
Chuka Umunna is keen to promote himself as ‘leader’ of the so-called Independent Group of MPs who have broken away from the Labour and Conservative parties. TIG (as it is presently known) is likely to become a properly registered political party later this year.
This much-promoted and lavishly-funded ‘centre party’ has two principal characteristics. Its ex-Labour members were prompted to leave Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party primarily because of the latter’s alleged “anti-semitism”; while it’s ex-Tory members quit Theresa May’s Conservative Party mainly because they oppose Brexit.
Umunna (MP for the South London constituency of Streatham) was once seen as a future Labour leader (in the Tony Blair tradition) and is still touted as a future Prime Minister.
His father was from the Nigerian Igbo tribal group, but his mother Patricia Milmo is an Anglo-Irish solicitor from a wealthy family. Chuka’s maternal grandfather, Sir Helenus Milmo was a judge who served in the British security and intelligence services during and after the Second World War, where thanks to his prowess as an interrogator he was known as ‘Buster’ Milmo.
Since Chuka is now so keen to smear critics of Israel as “anti-semites”, perhaps he could enlighten us about his grandfather’s views on Jewish terrorism against British soldiers and civilians during 1945 to 1948, and his MI5 colleagues’ experience of combatting this Zionist scourge?
And since it is illegal in several European countries to criticise the Nuremberg trials of alleged war criminals, perhaps Chuka would care to comment on his grandfather’s view of the entire Nuremberg process?
H&D can reveal that on 11th August 1945 ‘Buster’ Milmo wrote to his immediate superior in the British security service MI5 about a short British list of alleged war criminals for potential trial at Nuremberg: “which names about ten candidates to occupy the stage at this grandiose performance”.
Milmo was not alone in taking a jaundiced or cynical view of the Nuremberg charade of “victors’ justice”. No less a figure than Lord Hankey – the main architect of the modern civil service who served as the first ever Cabinet Secretary from 1916 to 1938 told the House of Lords in 1949 that “Contrary to general belief, the history on which the Nuremberg judgments and findings were based is not accurate.”
Lord Hankey added: “There was something cynical and revolting in the spectacle of British, French and American judges sitting on the Bench with colleagues who, however impeccable as individuals, represented a country which before, during and since the trials has perpetrated half the political crimes in the calendar. And in spite of the specious arguments on page 38 of the Nuremberg Judgment, I do not see how anyone can deny that under a cloak of justice these trials were just the old, old story—one law for the victors and another for the vanquished. Vae victis!”
If Chuka Umunna hopes to refresh British politics and renew the UK’s relationship with Europe, he could start by quoting his own family’s heritage to repair the damage caused by what his grandfather called the “grandiose performance” of Nuremberg. And if he is serious about “anti-semitism”, Mr Umunna should be keen to differentiate between what Lord Hankey termed “specious arguments”, and serious efforts to assess historical truth.
Is it Corbyn or the mainstream media who’s “lost the plot”?
Tomorrow’s Daily Mail predictably attacks Jeremy Corbyn for having “lost the plot”, choosing to print a photograph of the Labour leader gardening on his allotment as the storm clouds gathered and seven of his rebellious MPs broke away to form an “Independent Group”.
Their assumption seems to be that it was somehow weird or arrogant for Corbyn to be on his allotment at such a time.
I wonder whether voters will see it that way? They don’t share the obsessions of political journalists and part of Corbyn’s success at the 2017 election was because (despite his ‘extremist’ policies) many Britons saw him as a normal bloke – his allotment and Arsenal allegiances were part of that.
If most voters were concerned about Corbyn’s previous associations with Sinn Fein, or his links with alleged ‘antisemites’, then they would have ditched the Labour Party long ago.
Sadly for Fleet St, and sadly for many H&D readers, most Labour voters are probably more concerned about the effects of Tory austerity cuts than they are about terrorism in Northern Ireland, arguments about Zionism and ‘antisemitism’, or even Britain’s membership of the EU.
That’s why when in 2017 Theresa May offered them the opportunity to elect a House of Commons committed to securing Brexit, the voters instead returned the present hung parliament.
Doubtless the latest split will do some electoral damage to Labour, but a great deal might depend on whether the Tories also split, and especially on whether really heavyweight Tories can be persuaded to join the breakaway.
Latest rumours are that a gang of four female Tory MPs are most likely to defect: Anna Soubry (who has already removed references to the Conservative Party from her Twitter biography), Dr Sarah Wollaston, former cabinet minister Justine Greening, and Heidi Allen.
Perhaps a bigger prize would be Sir Alan Duncan, who is still in Theresa May’s government as a Foreign Office Minister of State responsible for Europe and the Americas. Whereas some of the defectors are pretty much in the ‘wet’ Tory Reform Group (TRG) tradition, Alan Duncan was closely associated with William Hague and in his student days was a leading figure in the so-called ‘Magdalen machine’, the main ‘right-wing’ rival to TRG inside the Oxford University Conservative Association.
In common with several other leaders of the ‘Magdalen machine’, Sir Alan is a homosexual. He is also unusual among modern Tories in taking a broadly pro-Palestinian line on Middle East matters, and was among the main targets for the covert Israeli Embassy lobbyist Shai Mosat, exposed by Al Jazeera in 2017.
In this respect Sir Alan would make an unusual ally for the solidly pro-Zionist Labour faction who have created the ‘Independent Group’. However it’s possible these hardcore Zionists might welcome him for this very reason, as it would help to deflect suspicions that the whole business is a Mossad plot to prevent a Corbyn premiership!
Labour splits: is this the end of the two-party system?
This morning the long-expected split began in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Seven MPs resigned and will now sit as an ‘Independent Group’ in the House of Commons.
The group includes one relic of the 1990s New Labour project, Stockport MP Ann Coffey who was Tony Blair’s parliamentary private secretary. However another is Chris Leslie, MP for Nottingham East, who during New Labour’s civil war was a supporter of Gordon Brown rather than Blair, and is married to one of Brown’s former aides.
Two others are among the most strongly pro-Zionist MPs in Parliament: Luciana Berger, Jewish MP for Liverpool Wavertree, and Mike Gapes, who though not Jewish himself is best known for his five years as a very pro-Zionist chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.
It seems likely that some of Corbyn’s other Jewish critics have deliberately avoided joining the rebel group because they didn’t want it to be perceived as disproportionately Jewish. If significant numbers join the seven initial members, one would expect them eventually to include Dame Margaret Hodge and Dame Louise Ellman, though the latter has tweeted that she will continue to “fight the virus of antisemitism in the Labour Party from within”.
For the time being the “Independent Group” will not be a registered political party and will not fight elections. This avoids them having to contest the forthcoming local elections in May, where they would doubtless be crushed.
Yet the intellectual leader of the group, half-Nigerian MP for Streatham, Chuka Umunna, has strongly implied that he sees the group evolving into a new “centrist” party. Umunna is a former City lawyer whose maternal grandfather, Sir Helenus ‘Buster’ Milmo, was the leading MI5 interrogator during the Second World War before becoming a High Court judge.
Westminster has been rife with rumours for the last fortnight that Umunna was about to launch such a party alongside Anna Soubry and other fanatically pro-EU Conservatives. Perhaps these rebel Tories have been put off by the undoubted practical difficulties of launching a new party, but if Theresa May does eventually position the Conservative Party as unequivocally pro-Brexit, or if she is replaced by a Brexiteer such as Boris Johnson, we can assume Ms Soubry and a few others will team up with Mr Umunna.
According to an email circular this morning from Stephen Bush, the well-connected political editor of the New Statesman, it was Gavin Shuker, MP for Luton South, who helped persuade the other six that it was time for a formal split. Mr Shuker is an unusual character, who in one respect has nothing in common with New Labour ‘centrism’. Before standing for parliament in 2010 he was leader and pastor of the City Life Church in Luton: he opposes ‘gay marriage’ and has taken a number of other stances on ‘moral questions’ that put him at odds with the liberal consensus.
The group is not registered as a party with the Electoral Commission, but it operates from an office in Altrincham, near Manchester, in the name of a limited company called ‘Gemini A Ltd’ which Shuker created on January 16th this year.
One of the Labour rebels, Angela Smith, MP for the marginal Yorkshire seat Penistone & Stocksbridge, made much of her working-class roots (in contrast to the well-heeled Umunna). But a problem for such people is that while working-class Britons might find their traditional Labour loyalties strained by Corbyn’s trendy-left, London-dominated Momentum faction, many such voters (including in Ms Smith’s own constituency) voted to leave the EU and remain pro-Brexit.
Umunna’s “independents” have made it clear that being pro-EU and campaigning for a second referendum to overturn the 2016 result is a fundamental component of their so-called ‘centrism’.
That’s why the best known earlier anti-Corbyn rebel, Birkenhead MP Frank Field who quit Labour to sit as an independent last August, will certainly not be joining Umunna’s group. Similarly other anti-Corbyn MPs who might be thought on the right of Labour – Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer and John Mann – will certainly not be on board.
In fact one might logically expect two Independent Groups to the right of Corbyn’s Labour – one pro-Brexit and one pro-Remain!
If this really is the long-overdue breakup of the two-party stranglehold on British politics, one eventual consequence will have to be a change in the electoral system.
Only then will we see a realistic chance for the views of forgotten millions of British voters to be represented at Westminster, and a real challenge to the dead consensus of multiracialism.
