But, while on the subject of Western Civilisation, and its American version, did you see that 12% of Americans believe that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife?
Oddly, to me, all of this blather comes in the context of the US basically telling Europe to fuck off. Which seems… inconsistent with an emphasis on “preserving our Western identity”.
Yes, and regarding nous's comment in the other thread about the standing ovation Rubio got, it just shows how pathetically (and I really mean that) grateful they all were that, unlike Vance, Rubio was taking the trouble to put it in more flattering, quasi-ingratiating diplomatic-style language. FFS.
(Glib is pretty good, but as an adjective "facile" might be as or even more pejoritive, whereas as a noun "facility" seems to me to lose that somewhat insulting implication.)
I wanted to post this from today's Guardian. I didn't look at the Focaldata source link, but I thought the charts shown in the Guardian article were pretty interesting:
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has accelerated a profound shift in the global order, according to new analysis. A report from Focaldata, which analyses UN voting records, reveals how Washington’s “America First” agenda has started to redraw the geopolitical map in favour of China. In 2026, the world is now diplomatically closer to Beijing than it has been in recent memory, with significant shifts in alignments taking place during the start of Trump’s second presidential term.
lj: we seem (in "Recent Posts") to have had 11 new posts in the last 14 days, but as far as I can tell we do not have a current Open Thread (the last one I found is from January 8th). Would it be possible always (each month- isn't that their lifetime?) to have one, with that name, going simultaneously with the others? Speaking for myself, I really miss them.
Don't know which thread to put this in, but I have just seen this in the Independent - the subheading says "Pullout from Minneapolis comes as Trump's approval ratings on immigration enforcement have thanked":
The Trump administration is ending the “surge” of thousands of immigration and law enforcement agents to Minnesota that sparked months of protests and led to the shooting deaths of two American citizens who were protesting the federal presence there. White House Border Czar Tom Homan told reporters in Minneapolis on Thursday that there has been a “big change” in state and local officials’ willingness to assist in providing some support for federal operations in the state and said there has been less of a need to deploy “quick reaction forces” to protect agents from protesters. “With that and [the] success that has been made arresting public safety threats and other priorities since this search operation began, as well as the unprecedented levels of coordination we have obtained from state officials and local law enforcement, I have proposed — and President Trump has concurred — that this surge operation conclude a significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through the next week,” Homan said.
He added that “a small footprint of personnel” would remain in the area to supervise the transfer of “full command and control” of immigration enforcement in the state back to the ICE field office that has been in Minneapolis for decades. Homan also said he would remain in Minneapolis “for a little longer” to “oversee the drawdown of this operation” while stressing that the massive deployment of agents that had been dubbed “Operation Metro Surge” by administration officials was in fact “ending.”
The administration's decision to withdraw the thousands of agents whose roving patrols and aggressive tactics roiled Twin Cities streets in what appeared to be a deliberate effort to punish Minnesotans for having voted against President Donald Trump in the 2024, 2020 and 2016 elections comes weeks after the White House dispatched Homan there in the wake of the shooting death of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of a Border Patrol agent. Federal officials announced the deployment in early December, ostensibly to combat what the administration claimed was a wave of public benefits fraud by Somali immigrants after a viral video by a right-wing YouTube creator alleging that Minneapolis was filled with fake child care centers and medical businesses run by Somalis gained attention in conservative media circles. Administration officials say the months-long effort has led to more than 4,000 arrests of what they allege to be “dangerous criminal illegal aliens” but that number has also included numerous American citizens and people without criminal records.
The White House had justified the outsized presence and roving patrols as necessary because Minnesota does not allow state and local law enforcement to conduct civil immigration enforcement, though Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have maintained that ICE officers have always been permitted to take custody of people who are being released from jails and prisons at the end of a court-imposed sentence. At one recent White House press briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed there are “thousands” of “criminal illegal aliens” held in Minnesota facilities and being released back into the community without notifying federal officials. One Department of Homeland Security press release recent alleged that there were “more than 1,360 active detainers for criminals in Minnesota jails” as well.
But the administration’s claims and purported justifications have also been undermined by Minnesota officials who have pointed out that only as many as 380 non-citizens were being held in state prisons — and of those, only 270 were subject to “detainers” filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Minnesota Department of Corrections also said there are roughly 100 non-citizens with “detainers” filed against them in county and local jails as well. And while the administration has repeatedly claimed the aggressive operations in Minnesota were justified by the state government’s refusal to cooperate with federal enforcement efforts, Attorney General Pam Bondi further undermined those arguments last month when she sent a letter to state officials demanding access to the state’s voter database in exchange for removing agents from Minneapolis streets. President Donald Trump has in recent months repeatedly lied about his electoral history in the Gopher State by claiming to have won it three times even though he has never carried the state’s electoral votes and no Republican has done so since the 1972 presidential election. Walz had said earlier in the week that he expected the federal deployment to end in “days, not weeks and months” based on his own talks with administration officials, including Homan and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. And in the wake of Homan’s announcement, Walz said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the “surge of untrained, aggressive federal agents are going to leave Minnesota.”
Edited version of Alastair Campbell's monologue from The Rest is Politics on the Mandelson/Epstein affair:
I’m having sleepless nights. These usually happen when I am anxious, angry, depressed or confused. There is so much out of the Epstein scandal to make me feel all of the above. It is, on so many levels, almost impossible to process, personally and politically. Let’s start with angry. I’m angry at the content and the context of Epstein, which is so disgusting on so many levels, and frankly it gets to the point where you can’t face reading any more of it. I’ve heard some MPs, some Tory, some Labour, Nigel Farage, journalists too, call the Peter Mandelson betrayal “the biggest scandal of the century.” Journalist Marina Hyde wrote a brilliant piece in which she said “it’s not even the biggest scandal of the scandal.” She is right about that. The real scandal is the trafficking, the abuse, and the attitudes to women of so many rich powerful men. As Amelia Gentleman, in the Guardian, chronicled the way Epstein & Co talked about women in the files. How they see the role of women as being mere logistics, food, drink and sex. It’s horrible. It’s disgusting. I get angry that we all get tarred with the same brush, now not least because of the Peter Mandelson association, as if anyone who knows him somehow enabled Epstein. It all plays into the narrative that “they’re all the same, all in it for themselves, have no principles.” We are NOT all the same. I am very proud of the New Labour project, and many of the things we did, and despite everything believe politics and politicians can be a force for good. But this Labour government is now looking like the last Tory one as it lurches from one big bad moment to the next. That makes me angry given the size of the majority the country gave them, the scale of the things that need fixing, and the way so much of the first two years has been wasted. It’s a week now since we started to take stock of all this, and I still cannot, for the life of me, get my head round how close Peter Mandelson and Epstein seem to have been. That as I was part of the team trying to advise Gordon Brown after the 2010 election, and in talks with Nick Clegg to see if we could do a Lib-Lab agreement, Peter was talking to Epstein and boasting that he had persuaded Gordon to go. I can’t get my head round him sending Epstein confidential notes about big economic decisions during The Crash. I’ve known Peter for more than forty years. We’ve had many good times together, and some bad. Sometimes we’ve gone years without speaking, for example after his second resignation. I’ve always known he is tricky, manipulative, can be secretive, as well as charming and clever. But I genuinely cannot fathom some of his exchanges with Epstein. Like when Epstein, on the day he was released, and they were joking about strippers and young girls. Was there nothing in Peter to say “Jeffrey, have you learned nothing?” Yet also – and here lies some of my confusion and anxiety – precisely because I have known him so long, I have concern about where this might all end for him. I really don’t get how people can go from boasting of being a “close friend” one day to ”lock him up and throw away the key” the next. I was angry and concerned at the decision to appoint Peter as Ambassador to the US. I understood the attraction. He’s a big figure, he had the New Labour connection, he knows trade and the global economy, and Keir Starmer clearly felt he needed more than a conventional diplomat to handle the Trump administration. But as risk-reward decisions go, I always had a worry that this would not end well (if not quite like this) and I said so to the people making the decision. Listeners to my The Rest Is Politics podcast may recall how Rory Stewart outed me awhile back because he had heard me talking to one of the decision makers about David Miliband as a prospective ambassador, and I still think that would have been a better call. And I’m angry with myself maybe. I could have made a big thing about it, but I am conscious, sometimes, of having to balance the public-facing part of my life with the fact I often have privileged access to people who expect at least some element of confidentiality when I am acting either as an activist or being asked for advice, as does happen. That being said, I’m not terribly impressed with the scale of the dumping and the distancing since the Mandelson scandal broke. Would it not have made more sense for Keir simply to say he made a judgement, in the round at the time, based on the pluses and minuses, which were fully assessed, and it’s now transpired it was a bad judgement, and I apologise? Putting all the blame on the vetting, and being lied to, is what has made this even more a question of his judgement and also the competence of his operation, with all the inevitable changes now under way. I’m also angry that so many in the media, along with people like Farage and Michael Gove, who said it was a smart appointment at the time, now say it was obviously a bad judgement call. I hate hypocrisy and these people are never challenged over that. And of course the media tend, in the main, only to do one volume – very loud and very anti-Labour – which means anyone who has ever had anything to do with Peter Mandelson is somehow presented as tainted for having failed to know what he was up to and with whom. I understand the call from Gordon Brown to clean up politics, and at least he had an agenda about how to address it. But there’s a real risk when he makes that call in the way he did that, just as the expenses scandal harmed the reputation of all, not just the cheats, this too plays into the Reform framing: They’re all the same, everyone is corrupt, the system stinks, nobody can be trusted. Their answer? Trust the man who sold us Brexit on a pack of lies, and is now getting money from home, abroad and crypto and boasting about it, and stick him in Downing St. One thing that especially riles me up is the way the right wing, here and in America, are getting a free pass on all this. I got a message from Tommy Vietor, one of Barack Obama’s former staffers and now a successful podcaster with Pod Save America. He said: “If Epstein forces out Starmer and Trump survives, I will explode.” There are so many scandals in these files, yet the Trump-Bannon-Musk-Howard Lutnick crowd is getting off so lightly. And of course I’m angry about the way Epstein and his pals like Peter Thiel boast about Brexit being “just the beginning” and wonder, did Peter Mandelson not realise that this was part of his game too? As for the anxiety, it’s about what happens next and what it means for politics, and for the country. If Labour do not get their act together, and fast, then Farage is being gifted power, which I believe would be a disaster for this country. In that scenario, I fear we would soon see in Britain the kind of things currently debasing politics in Trump’s United States; the victory of slogan over substance; open and brazen corruption; the deliberate stoking of division and hate; threats to free media and the rule of law. It will be another gift to Putin. Another gift to the tech bros to whom this right wing populism is a route to a world in which they, rather than democratically elected politicians, have all the power. So I totally understand the calls for Starmer to go. So many MPs are angry, so many members of the public are frustrated and disappointed. Me too. I have felt for some time Morgan McSweeney’s position was vulnerable because whatever talents he has that helped Keir become leader and then Prime Minister, it’s a big problem if you are the chief strategist and the strategy isn’t working, or you are the Chief of Staff and the operation isn’t working. But the job of Prime Minister is a whole different level and those urging for change must have some idea of what happens next, and why it would be better. People really underestimate the skills you need for the job of Prime Minister. Maybe Keir Starmer underestimated them too. But I am far from convinced by the names currently in the frame. And that leads me to the most depressing thought of all. That because of the nature of our politics, the quality of people going into politics, the nihilism of the mainstream media, the anarchy of social media, with dissonance, hypocrisy, short-termism, naivety, industrialised rage and wilful ignorance off the scale, we are becoming ungovernable. That neither the parties nor the public are really prepared to face up to the big things that need to happen to turn this country round, given the sheer scale of real problems we actually face. So that’s the confusion to add to the anxiety. I am normally quite good at thinking ahead. I can usually see a course. Right now, as I write, I feel that is far from easy. So no. I can’t sleep. And I know from talking to plenty of other Labour people, I am not alone.
lj, it's all of those things except, as you say, 2. The Tories have got a fucking nerve, after the corruption of BoJo, not to mention the PPE/Covid VIP lane scandal
which is estimated to have cost the nation about £1.4 billion.
CaseyL: hard agree with what you say. Apart from the man that nous so memorably calls the Clementine Caligula, I am still amazed that, for example, Bannon's involvement in trying to rehabilitate Epstein's image has not done more damage to MAGA.
I don't have a ton of time until I get in later tonight, but I was very struck by this piece by Marina Hyde a couple of days ago, and rather think most feminists agree, particularly with this sentence:
I had a mirthless laugh at the New Statesman’s cover this week, which characterised the Mandelson affair as “the scandal of the century”. Guys, it’s not even the biggest scandal of the scandal.
Obviously, we have all (lefty/liberals that is) been discussing this incessantly. I can tell you that in general the consensus among people I know (several of whom are rather involved in Labour) is this, all of which also reflects my opinion:
We foolishly thought that because Mandelson is gay he must have been unaware of all the disgusting sex abuse stuff. The consorting with Epstein when he knew about the conviction etc was certainly very bad, but we thought maybe he didn't believe it because he'd never seen any sign of it. Ridiculously naive, I now see.
Most of us (not all) reluctantly believed that although Mandelson is a rather brilliant Machiavellian snake, that made him the perfect person to deal with the snake pit in the White House.
Everybody is astounded by the divulging of state economic secrets stuff. None of us would have believed that he was capable of such a thing, given that despite his snakiness we believed that he was, in his way, devoted to Labour and his country (so proud of being Herbert Morrison's grandson etc). The word treason was bandied about between us, but when I looked it up it seems it doesn't apply. He continues to say he has done nothing criminal. We shall see.
All I can say is, now that Morgan McSweeney's gone, I desperately hope this doesn't take Starmer down. There's no obvious successor, and the main alternatives are several orders of magnitude worse (i.e. Tories and Reform). But there's no doubt that Starmer is not in any way cut out to be a politician - it's been very clear for ages that he's no good at it.
This is David French in today's NYT on fairly simple measures that can be taken to protect the midterms, given Trump's "nationalise the election" rhetoric:
Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
And I mean that in the innocent way, which is to say I am prepared to take advantage of any useful ideas, from anywhere, to help combat my adversaries, who in this case are the MAGA movement. Successful campaigns to fight authoritarian regimes - hallelujah. The difference between mobilisation and organisation, and the different effects campaigns focussed on them have had in the past - bring it on. From what I read, including here, almost nobody thinks the Democrats have done a good job of enthusing and galvanising the voting public, and particularly the working class, to win general elections and support their policies. Anything which stands a chance of changing that is worth some attention IMO.
Actually, that New Yorker piece is extremely interesting. It chimes with some of the stuff people have talked about here, but there's obviously a lot more detail about the defining characteristics of what has worked and not worked in the past.
And since I'm posting links, here's one (I don't have a gift button, but let's hope it's viewable) from the New Yorker, called What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organising - and Infighting. I haven't read it, but it sounded as if it might (or might not) be of interest to the ObWi commentariat:
lj asked me to post a guest link to this conversation between Ezra Klein and Adam Tooze, headlined How the World Sees America, which I was very happy to do!
If I have said anything to you, or that would lead anyone here to think I would associate with anything like that, I sincerely apologize.
You didn't, bc. But it strikes me that you have not been exposed to the range of conservative voices that many of us have. It wouldn't be surprising, if so. It's easy to end up living in an information bubble, if one doesn't make an enormous effort not to do so. I see it all the time, and on many ideological sides, including the centrist, left and progressive.
I've wondered about the difference between a dogpile and a pile-on, but from what I see today, they are roughly the same thing. I've previously assumed that if someone comes to ObWi and posts MAGA and Trump exculpating arguments (eg that the Minneapolis protesters will be largely to blame if as a result of their actions Trump invokes the Insurrection Act) that they are prepared to meet questioning, and refutation (an example of the latter is russell's upthread on rightwing v leftwing violence), but perhaps this isn't true? Maybe lj can explain how or to what extent this applies or doesn't....
If the writing is indeed on the wall, let's hope it's for the people we would all want to take down for the greatest good to the greatest number of people.
Damn. I am extremely sorry to hear that. Huge wishes for everything possible of a positive nature. I don't pray, because (as has become clear over the years) I don't believe in God, but if strong feelings of hope and solidarity have any effect at all, you have them from me.
The Trump administration pledged to deport violent criminals—but instead, some of them have been on the payrolls of the federal government’s most aggressive agencies.
ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection employed at least 30 people with sexual and violent criminal histories in recent years, according to a report published Monday by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance with research from the Pacific Antifascist Collective.
At least 20 of those individuals committed offenses with underage victims, according to the report. The 30 listed individuals have been charged with a wide litany of crimes, including gunpoint sexual assault, child sex trafficking, aggravated assault, robbery, rape, torture, kidnapping, sexual abuse of a minor, and possession and production of child sexual abuse materials.
Their transgressions occurred between 2015 and 2025, with the bulk of abuse happening within the last two years.
On “Take your’n and beat his’n”
Speaking of Western Civilisation, I am linking Jamelle Bouie on Rubio's speech and its implications etc:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/marco-rubio-is-failing-western-civ.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NFA.nGv3.IM14r16m3-M0&smid=url-share
But, while on the subject of Western Civilisation, and its American version, did you see that 12% of Americans believe that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife?
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/religion-and-horror-soul-mates-in-popular-culture-1.3065296/joan-of-arc-is-not-noah-s-wife-1.3065328
"
Oddly, to me, all of this blather comes in the context of the US basically telling Europe to fuck off. Which seems… inconsistent with an emphasis on “preserving our Western identity”.
Yes, and regarding nous's comment in the other thread about the standing ovation Rubio got, it just shows how pathetically (and I really mean that) grateful they all were that, unlike Vance, Rubio was taking the trouble to put it in more flattering, quasi-ingratiating diplomatic-style language. FFS.
(Glib is pretty good, but as an adjective "facile" might be as or even more pejoritive, whereas as a noun "facility" seems to me to lose that somewhat insulting implication.)
On “Open Thread”
Different kinds of agents, I think.
"
I wanted to post this from today's Guardian. I didn't look at the Focaldata source link, but I thought the charts shown in the Guardian article were pretty interesting:
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has accelerated a profound shift in the global order, according to new analysis.
A report from Focaldata, which analyses UN voting records, reveals how Washington’s “America First” agenda has started to redraw the geopolitical map in favour of China.
In 2026, the world is now diplomatically closer to Beijing than it has been in recent memory, with significant shifts in alignments taking place during the start of Trump’s second presidential term.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/feb/13/these-charts-show-how-trump-is-isolating-the-us-on-the-world-stage
On “The Aiken formula”
lj: we seem (in "Recent Posts") to have had 11 new posts in the last 14 days, but as far as I can tell we do not have a current Open Thread (the last one I found is from January 8th). Would it be possible always (each month- isn't that their lifetime?) to have one, with that name, going simultaneously with the others? Speaking for myself, I really miss them.
On “What fresh hell is this?”
Don't know which thread to put this in, but I have just seen this in the Independent - the subheading says "Pullout from Minneapolis comes as Trump's approval ratings on immigration enforcement have thanked":
The Trump administration is ending the “surge” of thousands of immigration and law enforcement agents to Minnesota that sparked months of protests and led to the shooting deaths of two American citizens who were protesting the federal presence there.
White House Border Czar Tom Homan told reporters in Minneapolis on Thursday that there has been a “big change” in state and local officials’ willingness to assist in providing some support for federal operations in the state and said there has been less of a need to deploy “quick reaction forces” to protect agents from protesters.
“With that and [the] success that has been made arresting public safety threats and other priorities since this search operation began, as well as the unprecedented levels of coordination we have obtained from state officials and local law enforcement, I have proposed — and President Trump has concurred — that this surge operation conclude a significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through the next week,” Homan said.
He added that “a small footprint of personnel” would remain in the area to supervise the transfer of “full command and control” of immigration enforcement in the state back to the ICE field office that has been in Minneapolis for decades.
Homan also said he would remain in Minneapolis “for a little longer” to “oversee the drawdown of this operation” while stressing that the massive deployment of agents that had been dubbed “Operation Metro Surge” by administration officials was in fact “ending.”
The administration's decision to withdraw the thousands of agents whose roving patrols and aggressive tactics roiled Twin Cities streets in what appeared to be a deliberate effort to punish Minnesotans for having voted against President Donald Trump in the 2024, 2020 and 2016 elections comes weeks after the White House dispatched Homan there in the wake of the shooting death of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of a Border Patrol agent.
Federal officials announced the deployment in early December, ostensibly to combat what the administration claimed was a wave of public benefits fraud by Somali immigrants after a viral video by a right-wing YouTube creator alleging that Minneapolis was filled with fake child care centers and medical businesses run by Somalis gained attention in conservative media circles.
Administration officials say the months-long effort has led to more than 4,000 arrests of what they allege to be “dangerous criminal illegal aliens” but that number has also included numerous American citizens and people without criminal records.
The White House had justified the outsized presence and roving patrols as necessary because Minnesota does not allow state and local law enforcement to conduct civil immigration enforcement, though Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have maintained that ICE officers have always been permitted to take custody of people who are being released from jails and prisons at the end of a court-imposed sentence.
At one recent White House press briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed there are “thousands” of “criminal illegal aliens” held in Minnesota facilities and being released back into the community without notifying federal officials. One Department of Homeland Security press release recent alleged that there were “more than 1,360 active detainers for criminals in Minnesota jails” as well.
But the administration’s claims and purported justifications have also been undermined by Minnesota officials who have pointed out that only as many as 380 non-citizens were being held in state prisons — and of those, only 270 were subject to “detainers” filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Minnesota Department of Corrections also said there are roughly 100 non-citizens with “detainers” filed against them in county and local jails as well.
And while the administration has repeatedly claimed the aggressive operations in Minnesota were justified by the state government’s refusal to cooperate with federal enforcement efforts, Attorney General Pam Bondi further undermined those arguments last month when she sent a letter to state officials demanding access to the state’s voter database in exchange for removing agents from Minneapolis streets.
President Donald Trump has in recent months repeatedly lied about his electoral history in the Gopher State by claiming to have won it three times even though he has never carried the state’s electoral votes and no Republican has done so since the 1972 presidential election.
Walz had said earlier in the week that he expected the federal deployment to end in “days, not weeks and months” based on his own talks with administration officials, including Homan and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
And in the wake of Homan’s announcement, Walz said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the “surge of untrained, aggressive federal agents are going to leave Minnesota.”
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
hsh beat me to it! That's what I understood it to mean too.
On bamboozled, I always thought it meant thoroughly confused, but I see that both meanings are possible. You live and learn.
On “Separated by a common language”
‘support for pathetic patriarchy’ describes the fundamental mindset of a very large group of Americans. sadly.
And not just Americans, I am sad to say.
"
Edited version of Alastair Campbell's monologue from The Rest is Politics on the Mandelson/Epstein affair:
I’m having sleepless nights. These usually happen when I am anxious, angry, depressed or confused. There is so much out of the Epstein scandal to make me feel all of the above. It is, on so many levels, almost impossible to process, personally and politically.
Let’s start with angry. I’m angry at the content and the context of Epstein, which is so disgusting on so many levels, and frankly it gets to the point where you can’t face reading any more of it.
I’ve heard some MPs, some Tory, some Labour, Nigel Farage, journalists too, call the Peter Mandelson betrayal “the biggest scandal of the century.” Journalist Marina Hyde wrote a brilliant piece in which she said “it’s not even the biggest scandal of the scandal.” She is right about that. The real scandal is the trafficking, the abuse, and the attitudes to women of so many rich powerful men.
As Amelia Gentleman, in the Guardian, chronicled the way Epstein & Co talked about women in the files. How they see the role of women as being mere logistics, food, drink and sex. It’s horrible. It’s disgusting.
I get angry that we all get tarred with the same brush, now not least because of the Peter Mandelson association, as if anyone who knows him somehow enabled Epstein. It all plays into the narrative that “they’re all the same, all in it for themselves, have no principles.”
We are NOT all the same. I am very proud of the New Labour project, and many of the things we did, and despite everything believe politics and politicians can be a force for good.
But this Labour government is now looking like the last Tory one as it lurches from one big bad moment to the next. That makes me angry given the size of the majority the country gave them, the scale of the things that need fixing, and the way so much of the first two years has been wasted.
It’s a week now since we started to take stock of all this, and I still cannot, for the life of me, get my head round how close Peter Mandelson and Epstein seem to have been.
That as I was part of the team trying to advise Gordon Brown after the 2010 election, and in talks with Nick Clegg to see if we could do a Lib-Lab agreement, Peter was talking to Epstein and boasting that he had persuaded Gordon to go. I can’t get my head round him sending Epstein confidential notes about big economic decisions during The Crash.
I’ve known Peter for more than forty years. We’ve had many good times together, and some bad. Sometimes we’ve gone years without speaking, for example after his second resignation.
I’ve always known he is tricky, manipulative, can be secretive, as well as charming and clever. But I genuinely cannot fathom some of his exchanges with Epstein. Like when Epstein, on the day he was released, and they were joking about strippers and young girls. Was there nothing in Peter to say “Jeffrey, have you learned nothing?”
Yet also – and here lies some of my confusion and anxiety – precisely because I have known him so long, I have concern about where this might all end for him. I really don’t get how people can go from boasting of being a “close friend” one day to ”lock him up and throw away the key” the next.
I was angry and concerned at the decision to appoint Peter as Ambassador to the US. I understood the attraction. He’s a big figure, he had the New Labour connection, he knows trade and the global economy, and Keir Starmer clearly felt he needed more than a conventional diplomat to handle the Trump administration.
But as risk-reward decisions go, I always had a worry that this would not end well (if not quite like this) and I said so to the people making the decision. Listeners to my The Rest Is Politics podcast may recall how Rory Stewart outed me awhile back because he had heard me talking to one of the decision makers about David Miliband as a prospective ambassador, and I still think that would have been a better call.
And I’m angry with myself maybe. I could have made a big thing about it, but I am conscious, sometimes, of having to balance the public-facing part of my life with the fact I often have privileged access to people who expect at least some element of confidentiality when I am acting either as an activist or being asked for advice, as does happen.
That being said, I’m not terribly impressed with the scale of the dumping and the distancing since the Mandelson scandal broke. Would it not have made more sense for Keir simply to say he made a judgement, in the round at the time, based on the pluses and minuses, which were fully assessed, and it’s now transpired it was a bad judgement, and I apologise?
Putting all the blame on the vetting, and being lied to, is what has made this even more a question of his judgement and also the competence of his operation, with all the inevitable changes now under way.
I’m also angry that so many in the media, along with people like Farage and Michael Gove, who said it was a smart appointment at the time, now say it was obviously a bad judgement call.
I hate hypocrisy and these people are never challenged over that. And of course the media tend, in the main, only to do one volume – very loud and very anti-Labour – which means anyone who has ever had anything to do with Peter Mandelson is somehow presented as tainted for having failed to know what he was up to and with whom.
I understand the call from Gordon Brown to clean up politics, and at least he had an agenda about how to address it. But there’s a real risk when he makes that call in the way he did that, just as the expenses scandal harmed the reputation of all, not just the cheats, this too plays into the Reform framing: They’re all the same, everyone is corrupt, the system stinks, nobody can be trusted. Their answer? Trust the man who sold us Brexit on a pack of lies, and is now getting money from home, abroad and crypto and boasting about it, and stick him in Downing St.
One thing that especially riles me up is the way the right wing, here and in America, are getting a free pass on all this.
I got a message from Tommy Vietor, one of Barack Obama’s former staffers and now a successful podcaster with Pod Save America. He said: “If Epstein forces out Starmer and Trump survives, I will explode.” There are so many scandals in these files, yet the Trump-Bannon-Musk-Howard Lutnick crowd is getting off so lightly.
And of course I’m angry about the way Epstein and his pals like Peter Thiel boast about Brexit being “just the beginning” and wonder, did Peter Mandelson not realise that this was part of his game too?
As for the anxiety, it’s about what happens next and what it means for politics, and for the country.
If Labour do not get their act together, and fast, then Farage is being gifted power, which I believe would be a disaster for this country.
In that scenario, I fear we would soon see in Britain the kind of things currently debasing politics in Trump’s United States; the victory of slogan over substance; open and brazen corruption; the deliberate stoking of division and hate; threats to free media and the rule of law.
It will be another gift to Putin. Another gift to the tech bros to whom this right wing populism is a route to a world in which they, rather than democratically elected politicians, have all the power.
So I totally understand the calls for Starmer to go. So many MPs are angry, so many members of the public are frustrated and disappointed. Me too.
I have felt for some time Morgan McSweeney’s position was vulnerable because whatever talents he has that helped Keir become leader and then Prime Minister, it’s a big problem if you are the chief strategist and the strategy isn’t working, or you are the Chief of Staff and the operation isn’t working.
But the job of Prime Minister is a whole different level and those urging for change must have some idea of what happens next, and why it would be better.
People really underestimate the skills you need for the job of Prime Minister. Maybe Keir Starmer underestimated them too. But I am far from convinced by the names currently in the frame.
And that leads me to the most depressing thought of all. That because of the nature of our politics, the quality of people going into politics, the nihilism of the mainstream media, the anarchy of social media, with dissonance, hypocrisy, short-termism, naivety, industrialised rage and wilful ignorance off the scale, we are becoming ungovernable.
That neither the parties nor the public are really prepared to face up to the big things that need to happen to turn this country round, given the sheer scale of real problems we actually face.
So that’s the confusion to add to the anxiety. I am normally quite good at thinking ahead. I can usually see a course. Right now, as I write, I feel that is far from easy.
So no. I can’t sleep. And I know from talking to plenty of other Labour people, I am not alone.
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lj, it's all of those things except, as you say, 2. The Tories have got a fucking nerve, after the corruption of BoJo, not to mention the PPE/Covid VIP lane scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_regarding_COVID-19_contracts_in_the_United_Kingdom
which is estimated to have cost the nation about £1.4 billion.
CaseyL: hard agree with what you say. Apart from the man that nous so memorably calls the Clementine Caligula, I am still amazed that, for example, Bannon's involvement in trying to rehabilitate Epstein's image has not done more damage to MAGA.
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I don't have a ton of time until I get in later tonight, but I was very struck by this piece by Marina Hyde a couple of days ago, and rather think most feminists agree, particularly with this sentence:
I had a mirthless laugh at the New Statesman’s cover this week, which characterised the Mandelson affair as “the scandal of the century”. Guys, it’s not even the biggest scandal of the scandal.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/06/jeffrey-epstein-scandal-politics-mass-abuse-women-girls
Obviously, we have all (lefty/liberals that is) been discussing this incessantly. I can tell you that in general the consensus among people I know (several of whom are rather involved in Labour) is this, all of which also reflects my opinion:
All I can say is, now that Morgan McSweeney's gone, I desperately hope this doesn't take Starmer down. There's no obvious successor, and the main alternatives are several orders of magnitude worse (i.e. Tories and Reform). But there's no doubt that Starmer is not in any way cut out to be a politician - it's been very clear for ages that he's no good at it.
On “Moral insanity”
This is David French in today's NYT on fairly simple measures that can be taken to protect the midterms, given Trump's "nationalise the election" rhetoric:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/opinion/trump-nationalize-elections-midterms.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J1A.41j0.KnVRs-ShXqZm&smid=url-share
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This, from Jamelle Bouie in today's NYT, seems a pretty succinct summing up of the governing idea behind the Trump presidency:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/opinion/trump-presidential-power-comments.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J1A.ZFRC.nNClfSmkgGZn&smid=url-share
On “It is never “Simple as that””
What cleek said.
On “What’cha doing?”
Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
And I mean that in the innocent way, which is to say I am prepared to take advantage of any useful ideas, from anywhere, to help combat my adversaries, who in this case are the MAGA movement. Successful campaigns to fight authoritarian regimes - hallelujah. The difference between mobilisation and organisation, and the different effects campaigns focussed on them have had in the past - bring it on. From what I read, including here, almost nobody thinks the Democrats have done a good job of enthusing and galvanising the voting public, and particularly the working class, to win general elections and support their policies. Anything which stands a chance of changing that is worth some attention IMO.
On “Moral insanity”
Actually, that New Yorker piece is extremely interesting. It chimes with some of the stuff people have talked about here, but there's obviously a lot more detail about the defining characteristics of what has worked and not worked in the past.
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And since I'm posting links, here's one (I don't have a gift button, but let's hope it's viewable) from the New Yorker, called What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organising - and Infighting. I haven't read it, but it sounded as if it might (or might not) be of interest to the ObWi commentariat:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/02/what-maga-can-teach-democrats-about-organizing-and-infighting
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lj asked me to post a guest link to this conversation between Ezra Klein and Adam Tooze, headlined How the World Sees America, which I was very happy to do!
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-adam-tooze.html?unlocked_article_code=1.IlA.4-M0.6_WnTjSfoDKr&smid=url-share
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If I have said anything to you, or that would lead anyone here to think I would associate with anything like that, I sincerely apologize.
You didn't, bc. But it strikes me that you have not been exposed to the range of conservative voices that many of us have. It wouldn't be surprising, if so. It's easy to end up living in an information bubble, if one doesn't make an enormous effort not to do so. I see it all the time, and on many ideological sides, including the centrist, left and progressive.
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I've wondered about the difference between a dogpile and a pile-on, but from what I see today, they are roughly the same thing. I've previously assumed that if someone comes to ObWi and posts MAGA and Trump exculpating arguments (eg that the Minneapolis protesters will be largely to blame if as a result of their actions Trump invokes the Insurrection Act) that they are prepared to meet questioning, and refutation (an example of the latter is russell's upthread on rightwing v leftwing violence), but perhaps this isn't true? Maybe lj can explain how or to what extent this applies or doesn't....
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This is an interesting piece about the current incarnation of antifa, and their project to unmask ICE agents et al:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/30/antifa-unmasking-ice
On “What are those words on the wall?”
If the writing is indeed on the wall, let's hope it's for the people we would all want to take down for the greatest good to the greatest number of people.
On “But tell me what you really mean”
Damn. I am extremely sorry to hear that. Huge wishes for everything possible of a positive nature. I don't pray, because (as has become clear over the years) I don't believe in God, but if strong feelings of hope and solidarity have any effect at all, you have them from me.
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I very much hope that does not mean what it appears to mean.
On “Moral insanity”
Well well, talking of undesirable criminals:
The Trump administration pledged to deport violent criminals—but instead, some of them have been on the payrolls of the federal government’s most aggressive agencies.
ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection employed at least 30 people with sexual and violent criminal histories in recent years, according to a report published Monday by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance with research from the Pacific Antifascist Collective.
At least 20 of those individuals committed offenses with underage victims, according to the report.
The 30 listed individuals have been charged with a wide litany of crimes, including gunpoint sexual assault, child sex trafficking, aggravated assault, robbery, rape, torture, kidnapping, sexual abuse of a minor, and possession and production of child sexual abuse materials.
Their transgressions occurred between 2015 and 2025, with the bulk of abuse happening within the last two years.
https://newrepublic.com/post/205719/ice-cbp-agents-alleged-sex-crimes-children
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