Corbyn, J labour
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TARGET PALANTIR NHS PVTIZ 10 26
10 26
US spy-tech firm Palantir has been accused of "intimidation" after writing letters to MPs who raised concerns about its involvement with the UK Government.
Novara Media reported that parliamentarians including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had been sent letters after publicly raising concerns about the company, which has close ties to both the Israeli military and the Trump administration in the US.
In the UK, Palantir has contracts totalling hundreds of millions of pounds with bodies including the Ministry of Defence, NHS England, and the Cabinet Office.
In June, Corbyn told the Commons: "Palantir is a very big and very dangerous outfit. The Government are developing a close relationship with Palantir, platforming and so on.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
"Could the minister assure the House that everything to do with Palantir will now be paused until we can get to the heart of the matter of how it first became embroiled in government contracts, how it gained them and what its influence over this government is, particularly via Peter Mandelson?"
Disgraced Labour grandee Mandelson – who is under police investigation due to his close friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – owned the now defunct Global Counsel, which had represented Palantir.
Novara reported that Corbyn had been sent a letter by Palantir two days later.
The former Labour leader said: "I am in no doubt as to why Palantir is writing these letters to MPs: to intimidate its critics into silence.
"Their tactics of intimidation will not work and they will not shut me up. I will never be deterred from speaking out against Palantir, which should have no place in our public services whatsoever."
READ MORE: Amnesty backs calls to scrap Palantir's NHS contract
Labour MP Rachael Maskell and independent MP Shockat Adam were also contacted by Palantir after publicly raising concerns about the company.
Maskell told Novara Media: "Clearly there is a reason as to why Palantir has paid close attention to the scrutiny that MPs have brought to this company which has been handed lucrative contracts by successive governments."
On social media, Palantir UK chief executive Louis Mosley responded to Corbyn saying: "The letter wasn't to silence you, but simply to point out where you are saying things that are not true.
"Perhaps I should have softened the phrase 'I hope this alleviates any concerns you had'?"
A Palantir spokesperson said: "There are a great deal of incorrect claims about Palantir circulating online. When politicians – sometimes inadvertently – amplify these falsehoods, they risk misleading the public.
"The purpose of these letters was to set the record straight. If politicians continue to repeat false claims, we will continue to correct them."
Elsewhere, Labour MP Clive Lewis has been involved in a public row with Labour peer and former party deputy leader Tom Watson, who recently joined Palantir as a senior vice president.
Lewis accused Watson of deploying "the opaque and misleading arguments used to defend Palantir".
READ MORE: Palantir boss given VIP viewing of Bayeux tapestry by British Museum
Speaking to the BBC earlier this month, Watson said: "One of the things I'd say to my former colleagues is 'Do you want to let the rule of law lead procurement practice, or do you want to let mob rule to lead procurement practices?' Because you get yourself in a lot of trouble if you go down on the latter one."
He added: "I think we are very targeted by the people that are targeting Israeli companies. We're not an Israeli company, but because of our work in Israel, we found ourselves in the middle of the row of the Gaza protests."
Watson also told the BBC that Palantir would work with a Reform UK government on immigration crackdowns if the situation arose, saying: "We don't actually work in that sector, but yes, of course we would."
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How Elon Musk went from Tesla CEO to the 'most powerful civilian, non-governmental actor in history
Fri, 23 October 2026
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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/13/uk_election_boris_johnson_jeremy_corbyn
on DN corbyn loss, no brakes as in US Congress and constit, so monarch powers?! as problems are revealed, go for racist scapgoating
the British Conservative Party has won a decisive majority in Thursday’s general election, winning seats in Labour Party strongholds and paving the way for Britain’s exit from the European Union by January 31. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is projected to have 364 seats in the House of Commons compared to Labour’s 203 seats. That would give the Conservatives about a 75-seat majority, the largest since Margaret Thatcher’s landslide in the 1987 election. Johnson’s message throughout the campaign was focused on “getting Brexit done,” reflecting public exhaustion with the issue that has paralyzed British politics ever since the 2016 referendum. His win comes despite his long record of racist and anti-Muslim statements, as well as accusations of sexual harassment. Following the election, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn announced he will resign as party leader, though he will continue to sit as an MP. The Labour membership grew dramatically during Corbyn’s tenure, with the party adopting radical policies focused on ending austerity, reinvesting in the National Health Service and promoting social justice. We get response from George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian and author of “Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis,” and Priya Gopal, university lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and author of the new book “Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent"
omg
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/after-a-big-win-for-boris-johnson-and-brexit-the-british-left-faces-the-darkness
no lnx
After a big win for Boris Johnson and Brexit, the British left faces the darkness
Written by Andrew O'Hehir / Salon December 13, 2019
British general elections have a tendency to deliver last-minute surprises, and the U.K.’s third in less than five years did not disappoint. Unfortunately for the Labour Party, the British left and the anti-Brexit forces, the surprise of 2019 appears to be a catastrophic wipeout.
Polls leading into Thursday’s election had suggested a tightening race that could end in a “hung parliament.” Lines — sorry, queues — at polling places were lengthy, and British social media buzzed with the possibility that left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn might win just enough seats to forge a coalition government with the Scottish National Party, ousting preening, Trump-flavored Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party and paving the way for a second Brexit referendum.
None of that will happen now. As Johnson told a cheering crowd at Conservative Party headquarters in London, the Tories had won a “stonking” victory, which will ensure that the U.K. leaves the European Union sooner rather than later, and will lock down the right’s hold on power in Britain for the next several years.
With most votes counted early on Friday morning, the BBC reports that the Tories will win an outright majority of roughly 364 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, a gain of 47 from the indecisive 2017 election.
If possible, the news for Labour and Corbyn, its controversial leader, is even worse than that. While the Conservative vote share is only slightly higher than it was in 2017, Labour’s vote has declined by roughly 8 percent. After gaining 30 seats in 2017 for a total of 261 — its biggest electoral gain for 20 years — Labour stands to lose 57 or 58 seats this time around, potentially its worst overall election result since World War II.
There are several interesting footnotes to this election, including abig comeback by the Scottish National Party, who have won at least 48 seats, virtually wiping out both Labour and the Tories north of the border and reigniting the push for Scottish independence. The centrist Liberal Democrats, who had hoped to thrive by being the only party clearly against Brexit, remain irrelevant, with party leader Jo Swinson losing her seat to the SNP.
But for Labour and the overall British left, no sugarcoating is possible. This election is an unmitigated disaster.
As author and journalist David Kogan told me in a recent interview, the British left saw Corbyn’s unexpected victory in the Labour leadership campaign of 2015 as a historic opportunity to pursue systemic progressive change. That opportunity is gone now, and for years to come. Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that for many people in Britain and around the world, this is a crushing blow.
Whatever you make ofJeremy Corbyn, he is a person of great moral decency and unbending principle, who engaged and aroused a generation of young activists. For practical purposes his political career is now over: Late on Thursday, Corbyn said he intended to remain as leader for a period of “reflection,” although many in the party would clearly prefer he quit immediately. He certainly will not try to lead Labour into another election.
Exactly why did this election go so badly south for Labour, and what lessons does this debacle hold for Americans who yearn to defeat Donald Trump next November? It’s way too early to offer definitive answers to those questions — especially from thousands of miles away — but if you spent any time on political Twitter on Thursday evening, you know that plenty of people gave it a try.
The fairest answer is probably that damn near everything went wrong for Labour, and that outside observers will draw whatever lessons they like, mostly the ones that support whatever they already believe. Democratic “moderates” in the U.S. are already using the Corbyn catastrophe, for instance, to warn darkly that their own party must not take a chance on a leftist or progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in 2020. Whatever the merits of that argument, it doesn’t have much to do with what just happened across the pond.
It’s perfectly true that Corbyn was the most prominent leftist leader of any major political party in any major Western democracy over the last several years, and that he pushed an unrepentant progressive agenda. But that agenda — expanding public services and ending the era of austerity — was widely popular in almost every detail, and was not the reason Labour lost this election so badly.
Corbyn himself, as a political personality, is another matter. Four years as party leader have exposed the fact that he was a lifelong activist with no management experience. He has alternately seemed too weak and too autocratic — and has also been subjected to relentless vilification by the pro-Tory press.Fairly or not, people in Britain who didn’t adore him had largely come to fear and dislike him. So far, it seems that many Labour candidates think Corbyn’s presence at the top of the party is the biggest reason they lost, but not necessarily because middle-ground voters perceived him as too radical.
It was hugely damaging that Corbyn refused to take a clear position on Brexit, the overarching political issue that dominated this election. To be fair, he didn’t have great options, and his promise to act as a “neutral referee” on Brexit reflected an awkward split within his party’s base.To oversimplify the equation slightly, traditional working-class Labour voters in the north of England tended to support Brexit, while affluent, cosmopolitan Labour voters in and around London overwhelmingly opposed it. Still, if the party’s leader had taken a clear position and stuck with it (as in fact he did in the 2017 campaign), the results might have been different.
Corbyn also appeared indecisive, or somewhat worse than that, when it came to Labour’s burgeoning anti-Semitism scandal, in which some Jewish Labour MPs or candidates were targeted for abuse by pro-Palestinian leftists. As David Kogan puts it, there was no evidence that Corbyn himself harbored hateful views, but also no evidence that he cared about the problem all that much or understood how badly it had damaged the party’s reputation.
There are no precise parallels to either of those things in American politics, although there are certainly echoes. To this point, allegations of anti-Semitism against Democratic members of Congress have done no lasting damage — largely because their source, one might say, is compromised. But Brexit, I suppose, is metaphorically similar to Donald Trump’s border wall, which is more or less the instrument he used to pry Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania away from the Democrats.
In both cases, we’re talking about a political party struggling to adapt to rapid change, so far without success. One analysis of the British election I encountered late on Tuesday night suggested that Labour might actually gain a few previous Tory seats in London, while losing many more longtime Labour seats in what was once the party’s working-class northern heartland. (This appears accurate so far.) That would be England’s version of the Big Sort, in which geography, educational level and generational identity — along with race, of course — become the dominant social dividing lines and political signifiers.
Jeremy Corbyn and the British left just experienced a painful illustration of this cultural and demographic shift in action, and of how it nourishes a politics of rage and resentment that can undermine and endanger democracy. Americans already know about this: You can feel certain you’re on the right side of history, and still end up, shocked and dismayed, on the wrong side of electoral arithmetic. The trick, of course, is to find a way to win without sacrificing your essential principles. Does anyone ever do that?
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richard seymour
some brexit, mostly corbyn
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-september-9-2019/
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U.K. Labour Leader Corbyn to Call for National Emergency Vote on Climate Change
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Buoyed by the British Labour Party election gains this week, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders on Saturday urged a summit of progressive activists who propelled his presidential candidacy to ramp up efforts to win elections and help remake a Democratic Party he deemed a failure.
"They won those seats by standing up to the ruling class," he said, referring to the British elections and citing wins by progressive US candidates in several state and local races while writing off losses as evidence liberal progressives could still be competitive even in conservative states.
But Mr Sanders, who lost the Democratic nomination nearly a year ago to Hillary Clinton, showed little interest in a push by "Draft Bernie" activists who want him to start his own "People's Party." Many activists blame establishment Democrats for losing to President Donald Trump by failing to embrace a more populist left-leaning agenda.
Jeremy Corbyn's election performance inspires Bernie Sanders followers
Sanders headlined the three-day "People's Summit" in Chicago, attended by celebrity activists including actors Danny Glover and John Cusack, which brought together main progressive groups such as National Nurses United, Democratic Socialists of America and People for Bernie.
Many activists said they hoped to transform the momentum from recent protests such as January's Women's March in Washington into concrete plans to support a growing wave of grassroots candidates to secure electoral power.
"We could have 10,000 people marching, but if we don't have some means of translating that into winning political office
and enacting a legislative progressive agenda, at the end of the day, what does it amount to?" said Nick Brana, the former staffer for the Sanders campaign leading the "Draft Bernie" group.
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Bernie Sanders says Labour party shows the way to beat Donald ...
www.independent.co.uk › News › World › Americas › US politics
- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:N-T0gt_9-4IJ:www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/bernie-sanders-labour-party-beat-donald-trump-a7785071.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ushttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:N-T0gt_9-4IJ:www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/bernie-sanders-labour-party-beat-donald-trump-a7785071.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
UK election: Bernie Sanders congratulates Jeremy Corbyn, saying he ...
www.independent.co.uk › News › UK › UK Politics
- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fMM3ZgYwXhEJ:www.independent.co.uk/News/uk/politics/uk-election-bernie-sanders-jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-result-win-seats-increase-us-senator-leader-a7780771.html+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ushttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fMM3ZgYwXhEJ:www.independent.co.uk/News/uk/politics/uk-election-bernie-sanders-jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-result-win-seats-increase-us-senator-leader-a7780771.html+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fMM3ZgYwXhEJ:www.independent.co.uk/News/uk/politics/uk-election-bernie-sanders-jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-result-win-seats-increase-us-senator-leader-a7780771.html+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
http://www.alternet.org/world/corporate-media-undermining-one-worlds-key-left-wing-leaders
Noam Chomsky has claimed that any serious future for the Labour party must come from the leftwing pressure group Momentum and the army of new members attracted by the party’s leadership.
In an interview with the Guardian, the radical intellectual threw his weight behind Jeremy Corbyn, claiming that Labour would be doing far better in opinion polls if it were not for the “bitter” hostility of the mainstream media. “If I were a voter in Britain, I would vote for him,” said Chomsky, who admitted that the current polling position suggested Labour was not yet gaining popular support for the policy positions that he supported.
“There are various reasons for that – partly an extremely hostile media, partly his own personal style which I happen to like but perhaps that doesn’t fit with the current mood of the electorate,” he said. “He’s quiet, reserved, serious, he’s not a performer. The parliamentary Labour party has been strongly opposed to him. It has been an uphill battle.”
He said there were a lot of factors involved, but insisted that Labour would not be trailing the Conservatives so heavily in the polls if the media was more open to Corbyn’s agenda. “If he had a fair treatment from the media – that would make a big difference.”
Asked what motivation he thought newspapers had to oppose Corbyn, Chomsky said the Labour leader had, like Bernie Sanders in the US, broken out of the “elite, liberal consensus” that he claimed was “pretty conservative”.
The academic, who is in Britain to deliver a lecture at the University of Reading on what he believes is the deteriorating state of western democracy, claimed that voters had turned to the Conservatives in recent years because of “an absence of anything else”.
“The shift in the Labour party under [Tony] Blair made it a pale image of the Conservatives which, given the nature of the policies and their very visible results, had very little appeal for good reasons.”
He said Labour needed to “reconstruct itself” in the interests of working people, with concerns about human and civil rights at its core, arguing that such a programme could appeal to the majority of people.
But ahead of what could be a bitter split within the Labour movement if Corbyn’s party is defeated in the June election, Chomsky claimed the future must lie with the left of the party. “The constituency of the Labour party, the new participants, the Momentum group and so on … if there is to be a serious future for the Labour party that is where it is in my opinion,” he said.
The comments came as Chomsky prepared to deliver a university lecture entitled Racing for the precipice: is the human experiment doomed?
He told the Guardian that he believed people had created a “perfect storm” in which the key defence against the existential threats of climate change and the nuclear age were being radically weakened.
“Each of those is a major threat to survival, a threat that the human species has never faced before, and the third element of this pincer is that the socio-economic programmes, particularly in the last generation, but the political culture generally has undermined the one potential defence against these threats,” he said.
Chomsky described the defence as a “functioning democratic society with engaged, informed citizens deliberating and reaching measures to deal with and overcome the threats”.
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