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Anthony McIntyre ⚽ With four victories out of four games notched up Liverpool lead the English Premier League.


While it might sound churlish to quarrel with success, apprehensions abound. Last night against Atletico Madrid in the Champions League their league form carried over, seeing them snatch a winner in the dying minutes, having let a two goal lead slip. That is the third time since the start of the new season that a two goal lead has been surrendered only for a late strike to shift the dial back towards the Kop end.

An article in today's Independent posed the question: It can’t carry on like this, can it? Ridiculous Liverpool maintain winning start.

One thing seems certain, if Liverpool continue to play as they are, they will fall on their sword long before the season's end. Last gasp winners don't come from a tank containing an inexhaustible supply. 

That they have not yet got their act together despite huge investment over the summer that saw key additions make their way into the squad, might simply be down to the players needing time to get used to each other: an integration that will slowly knit into place. At present, the infusion of talent has not paid dividends at the back where they they still seem weak, with Andy Robinson showing against both Burnley and Atletico that it takes an old dog for the hard road. Kerkez at left back is like an excitable puppy, leaping in when a cooler head might consider caution. His positional awareness remains well off the pace set by Robinson. 

Soboslai in midfield is the current heartbeat of the team, a versatile and prodigious midfielder whose energy is masking the gaps elsewhere. But this is his third season. Wirtz was brought in to split the lines with the killer pass. His success rate thus far has not been impressive. Salah, until last night has been largely anonymous. It is not just his lack of goals from open play but his distribution of the ball has been quite poor. Ekitiki has done some of what he is supposed to do but parts of his play resemble that of Darwin Nunez whose services were not retained because he squandered too many chances in front of goal. 

On Sunday I sat down in a hotel bar in Kilkenny to watch Liverpool visit Burnley. The guy sitting next to me asked why Izak was not in the squad. I suggested that they probably didn't need him. It was Burnley after all, never a side in contention for a top six finish. Despite their previous four under par performances since the start of the new season, if the Community Shield is counted, I felt this was one Liverpool could safely ride out. Anything but. That they came away with all three points was down to a time added on penalty which Salah put away ably enough. 

For all their possession in and around the Burnley box, the Reds seemed to lack the know how to break down a stubborn defence. There will be more of them as the season progresses. It used to be joked that Alex Ferguson once considered buying Arthur Scargill upon being informed that he was the best striker in England. Maybe somebody will suggest to Arne Slot that he should pursue some Italian fella called Viagra, somebody that will allow penetration from an attack that looks quite flaccid at the minute. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.


Liverpool In Kilkenny

Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭ On Saturday 13th September a crowd reportedly in excess of 100,000 marched in London at the invitation of far-right political activist, Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon. 

The protest was against immigration into Britain by people who perhaps without thinking things out logically for themselves believe they have genuine grievances regarding the amount of people entering Britain. Many of those demonstrating may well have been of racial or ethnic minority origins themselves and perhaps not yet having worked out where such exclusion policies as those preached by Robinson can, and have, lead. 

Robinson is a hate filled far-right activist and he organised this rally to protest against immigration. He is tapping into people’s fears, fuelled by the media, both social and regular, in much the same way as did Hitler in the 1920s and early 30s in Germany. Speaking via video link US neo-Nazi Elon Musk -  remember him doing the Nazi salute on stage after his then mate, Donald Trump, had been elected President of the USA? Musk appeared on stage with Trump, himself a far-right theorist, giving a Nazi salute and then set about waving a chain saw around demonstrating how he was going to cut thousands of public sector jobs in the US. Musk urged people on the demonstration to use “violence” to combat immigration his views were echoed strongly by Robinson. It was almost as if the use of violence was legitimised by Musk, the world’s second wealthiest man, given his position in the US establishment.

Robinson encouraged the crowd to act in “revolution” against immigration and particularly Islamic people. For some reason Britain still believes it has a special relationship with the USA even when a member of that country’s elite encourages people to use “violence” against British policemen. Great relationship I must say! Could anybody imagine back in 1984/1985 – hypothetically speaking – when the coal miners were out on strike in Britain, in a cause far more legitimate than these fascist gangs, if a member of the then Soviet Union government urged miners to take up arms against police? Imagine if members of the Politburo went on the global airwaves telling workers on strike in Britain to use “violence” against the police. It would have at best caused a diplomatic row yet in the USA this far-right nutter can say what the fuck he likes in support of far-right violence against the police and the government do next to nothing! Musk was giving a hate speech in support of Robinson who himself must now feel emboldened, and why wouldn’t he, after the muti-billionaires intervention. By such criteria it must be asked; if Hitler had not invaded Poland would Britain have had a special relationship with the Third Reich? Or perhaps clandestinely elements in British business did!

On the demonstration itself flags could be seen in a most unholy alliance! There was the union flag (Union Jack) with the Irish Tricolour beneath and the Cross of Saint George below the two propping them up, suggesting all three flags are part of the same allied bloc! To those of us who have even a primitive understanding of history nothing could be further from the truth! The last time something of this nature came to pass was when residents of Coolock, Dublin, paraded the tricolour in Belfast with six county loyalists. These were the same Belfast loyalist gangs, or one strand of loyalism, who wish to see, if they could, the tricolour eradicated from Irish shores. The Coolock residents were in fact subordinating themselves and the tricolour to the ‘Union Jack’ and loyalism. 

I seriously doubt those flying these flags could even begin to see the contradictions and historical enigmas. According to the media, news outlets, most people on this fascist march were not of a racist or far-right mind, something I would question deeply. It is my view based on experience from the past that the majority on this or any similar marches are of a racist and/or fascist leaning political persuasion. It may be true a minority on the march were there due to albeit misguided genuine concerns. But this would have been a minority and not the majority news bulletins optimistically would have us believe. Once the name Tommy Robinson appears there should be no doubt in people’s minds as the true nature of the march.

This was a big march and one of the largest showings of strength by the fascist right of which Robinson is a leading member. The question all anti-fascists should be asking is; how do we stop them? Back in the 1970s the fascist National Front were stopped by the huge anti-Nazi League and, when the SWP wound it up, anti-fascist action (AFA) continued the fight with huge success. It is my view for what it is worth this is only the beginning of the fascist surge. As most people today may not be aware of the history detailing the rise during the nineteen-twenties and thirties of fascism and Nazism in Europe. The Second World War has been over eighty years and most veterans who fought against Hitler and Mussolini, including those members of the British Army who liberated the Nazi camp, Bergen Belsen, will now be long dead. The battle of Caple Street, 1936, was a successful resistance to the British Union of Fascists led by Oswal Moseley and the time may be approaching when such action by socialists, communists, trade unionists, and anti-fascists in general may once again be necessary. In the Twenty-Six Counties we are also witnessing the rise of the far-right. 

Our own bunch of neo-Nazis are under the foolish belief that the big boys in London are not pulling the strings. This is an assumption not to be taken for granted. Remember what ‘Reform UK’ stands for? It represents Britain, the United Kingdom, being reformed and at very least holding on to the Six Counties. Irish unification under Farage is a non-starter and Tommy Robinson may for now consider himself ‘Fuhrer’ Robinson but as time passes the much more respectable looking and sounding Nigel Farage will do doubt take command of the situation. I cannot see him and his Reform UK party allowing such a readymade army of petit-bourgeois street activists supported by an army of working-class ‘concerned citizens’ pass!

 
Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Fascist Bands March In London

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Eight Hundred And Twenty One

 

A Morning Thought @ 2872

 

A Morning Thought @ 2871

Pádraig Drummond ✊Listening to that was like being trapped in a lock-in with a drunk Nazi priest shouting at the walls, convinced the plaster was plotting against him.


The man bellows “Ireland for the Irish” like it’s a holy scripture, when in truth it’s the same old fascist dirge reheated from Berlin ‘33 and Belfast ‘69, just with less talent and more spit on the microphone.
He rants about immigrants like a dog barking at shadows, dragging the names of murdered women into his hate speech as if their tragedies were written just to feed his grubby little cosplay Reich. That’s the real obscenity, turning grief into propaganda, turning lives into excuses for why a gaggle of fascist eejits can’t walk through Dublin without having their uniforms ripped off and their pride shoved down the drain.

The thing he’ll never admit, no matter how many times he bangs his podium and calls women “lesbians” like it’s a curse word, is that Dublin already answered him. His great nationalist army came dressed like Poundshop stormtroopers, posed for a few photos, and then legged it the second the locals reminded them where they were. That’s not a struggle. That’s not destiny. That’s a failed panto performance in St. Patrick’s Park, followed by a sprint to the car park with the jackboots flapping.

And spare us the “Great Replacement” mythology, another imported American hallucination, just the Klan’s bedtime story in a tricolour dust-jacket. Dublin is working-class, immigrant, queer, socialist, anti-fascist, republican, and proud. We don’t need lectures from a Nazi who can’t hold a rally longer than the length of a Snapchat.

So here’s the news, pal: you can scream “Ireland for the Irish” ‘til your throat tears, but you’ll never own the streets. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Ireland belongs to its people, all of them, and the only extinction on the cards is the slow, humiliating demise of your sad little cosplay army.

⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.

Poundshop Stormtroopers

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Eight Hundred And Twenty

 

A Morning Thought @ 2870

 

A Morning Thought @ 2869

Barry Gilheany ✍ Writing before the latest and possibly most consequential act of misfortune to hit premiership of Sir Keir Starmer, the resignation of Peter Mandelson UK ambassador to the US after the ‘Prince of Darkness’ fessing up to the extent of his friendship with the late financier and under age sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, veteran writer and columnist Polly Toynbee opined on what for her is the overriding mission for the Labour government: preventing the coming to power of Nigel Farage and his insurgent Reform UK party. 

For “it is the urgent patriotic duty of this government…” to prevent “an extremist, racist, authoritarian takeover that would be against the will of the overwhelming majority of the population.” It is Starmer’s one existential task for “Nothing else matters more.”[1]

It may well be an existential task and much needed defining objective for the Labour government, party, and wider movement but it is becoming a growing possibility that it will not be Starmer who will be seeing this project through. For confidence in the Prime Minister’s judgement and his political antennae has been severely shaken by the unravelling of Mandelson’s ambassadorship. The trigger was the publication on the Monday of a gushing 50th birthday tribute by Mandelson (alongside Donald Trump’s pubic sketch) to his “best pal” Epstein, written before his conviction for soliciting prosecution from minors. At Wednesday’s PMQs, Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, finally discovered her mojo for the first time in her leadership, by using all her allocated six questions to the PM about what he knew at the time of Mandelson’s appointment and would he terminate his post. Starmer gave Mandelson’s the football chairman’s vote of confidence but when later that day emails surfaced (the publication of which Mandelson sheepishly forecast), that he had fondly urged his now disgraced friend to fight for early release and promising that “your friends stay with you and love you”[2], the US ambassador’s position truly became untenable and his dismissal quickly followed.

The previous week had seen the resignation of Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister, Party Leader and Housing, Communities and Local Government, after she had admitted not paying full stamp duty on a property purchased in Hove, East Sussex on the basis of inaccurate legal advice. While the government’s ethics adviser, Laurie Magner, found that she had behaved with integrity throughout, she had breached the Ministerial Code and Ms Rayner accordingly resigned. But the contrast between her departure and the grubbiness of the Mandelson episode could not be starker. Angela Rayner’s departure set in train a major Cabinet reshuffle, widely seen as a tack to the right, and also an election for the Deputy Leadership which could be seen as a surrogate referendum on Starmer’s leadership.

The Mandelson episode is a potential precipitator moment for Labour as doubts and grievances about the direction and even purpose of the government which came to power on a landslide majority on the promise of “Change.” Now even loyal MPs are positing a challenge to his faltering leadership. For one MP “the clock is ticking and ... it happens to people who are incredibly well meaning, but you can pass that tipping point and can’t recover." Lucy Powell, who was sacked from the cabinet in the reshuffle and who is vying with the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson for the Deputy Leadership, has called for a “change in culture” in an overly factional and error-prone Downing Street in which there’s “ a bit of groupthink happening at the top, that culture of not being receptive to differing viewpoints”.[3]

So how has Labour got itself to this point? Do the origins of the current malaise in government lie in the very pathways that saw Labour win a landslide victory of 174 seats in the general election of July 2024 just five years after suffering its worst general election defeat since 1935 in December 2019 when they lost 80 seats? Or do its troubles lie more closely in the exact metrics of its win; last year Labour gained over 200 seats but only increased its share of the vote by less than two percentage points to 34%? (In 1992, a 35% share of the general election vote condemned Labour to a fourth successive defeat at the hands of the Conservatives by a margin of 21 seats). To critics of the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system; the 2024 outcome was another triumph of crude majoritarianism; another grotesque distortion of voters’ preferences. Set against it is that the sheer unpopularity of the then Conservative government led voters to informally game the electoral system to ensure the defeat of Conservative candidates in as many constituencies as possible. The election also saw the election of five members of Reform (now down to four due to a resignation, a suspension and the by-election victory of Sarah Poochin); the quadrupling of Green members to four and the election of seven assorted Independents including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and pro-Palestinian representatives opposed to the Labour leadership’s stance on Gaza. More about the peril that alignments arising out of this melange could pose for Labour in the next General Election later.

As described in forensic but captivating detail by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund in their book Get In, Labour’s election romp was due very largely to the efforts of one person – its legendary Cork born organiser and now PM Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney.  Having cut his political teeth in helping to vanquish the hard left control of Lambeth Borough Council in 2006, he turned his attention during the Corbyn leadership 2015-19 to what should happen after what he saw as the inevitable defeat of the party and to ensuring that the hard left never gain any traction in any key organs of the Labour Parry again. Many observers of Labour politics see Keir Starmer - the politico who only became an MP in 2015 after a career in human rights law and serving as England’s Director of Public Prosecutions - as essentially Morgan MacSweeney’s creation. After Labour’s by-election loss in Hartlepool on 6 May 2021, the possibility of Starmer staying on as party leader looked as implausible as the prospect of him becoming PM three years later.

After a narrow victory in another crucial by-election in Batley and Spen on 1 July 2021 which saw Kim Leadbeater, sister of the murdered MP for this constituency Jo Cox, ward off a Labour nemesis George Galloway, the tide turned. McSweeney plotted Labour’s path to power by focusing on winning back the “hero voters”; those in the “Red Wall” who had deserted Labour due to its supposedly metropolitan character and concerns and many of whom had voted for Brexit; the micromanagement of the selection process for election candidates and the relentless focus of messaging.

That it delivered a Labour PM in 10 Downing Street with a mandate to “Change” is one side of the story. The other is the absence, in the eyes and ears of many, of a coherent narrative and agenda. Allies say he doesn’t like the “V” word (think of President George HW Bush’s alleged lack of “the vision thing) and has made no secret of being a distinctly non-ideological politician. Instead, he believes the government should demonstrate change by making a significant difference to people’s lives, through schools, the NHS, the immigration system, and the economy, even if that is in relatively slow, incremental steps.[4]

The absence of a firm ideological compass should not necessarily be a burden on a Labour Prime Minister. Tony Blair famously travelled light on ideology but conveyed a sense of the transformative through mantras such as “New Labour. New Britain,” “Modernise, Modernise", “and “Education, Education, Education.” Harold Wilson, a deft manager of Labour’s ideological chasms, heralded the dawn of “The White Heat of Technology” in the early 1960s. It helps that both Wilson and Blair took office at moments of cultural optimism and that such sentiment among the British public is in short supply at the moment. However, in the words of one minister:

It’s hopeless …Too many people feel the country is in decline and the only route back is big radical solutions. We’re doing lots of good stuff, but it barely gets noticed. It just doesn’t hit the mark.[5]

While Morgan McSweeney may be a lightning rod for the anger and disappointment of MPs, it is tempting to suggest that under Sue Gray, the PM’s ousted former Chief of Staff, Peter Mandelson, would not have been made US ambassador. As someone who took such a forensic approach towards the wrongdoings of Boris Johnson in Downing Street over Partygate, she would have taken seriously the assessment of the security services as well as what was already in the public domain about Mandelson’s links to Epstein. Keir Starmer and his advisers took a calculated risk in replacing the highly regarded incumbent ambassador Karen Pierce with “Mandy” in the belief that his ability to schmooze the rich and powerful would secure a trade deal with Donald Trump (yet another lamentable consequence of the UK’s exit from the European Single Market and Customs Union). The deal was ultimately secured (could Ms Pearce not been able to negotiate and achieve the same?) but at what political and moral cost for Starmer’s government?

But this has not been the only significant misjudgement of the Starmer administration. It is always dangerous for governments to promise to operate to the highest possible moral standards given that its ministers, like the rest of the population, are mere normal mortals with universal fallibility. Just as Tony Blair pledged “the highest standards of honesty and propriety in public life” but was then discovered to have allowed Labour to accept a donation of £1m from Bernie Ecclestone, the boss of Formula One, just before the 1997 election and so able to take a government decision favouring the support. So when as leader of the opposition in 2022 Keir Starmer spelt out his “contract with the British people” including those same high standards that Blair, it was rather unfortunate that he and his wife were found to have accepted gifts of clothing and fashionable new spectacles from the Labour peer Lord Ali after he had become Prime Minister.[6]

But more serious was the resignation of the housing minister, Rushanara Ali, who while steering the long-awaited Renters’ Rights bill into law was found to have acted against the interests of the people to whom she was trusted to represent by not renewing the lease of her tenant, claiming she intended to sell the house she had rented to them and then, months later, putting it back on the lettings market at a rent 20% higher. While Rushanara Ali had the awareness to resign once the matter became public, a longer running saga about glaring conflicts of interest in a key ministry concerned the City minister Tulip Siddiq whose anti-corruption brief proved to rightly incompatible with the acceptance of land from her aunt, the ousted prime minister of Bangladesh facing multiple corruption charges in her country. Since Siddiq’s familial connections to the former Bangladeshi has been a matter of public debate for some years, it seems inconceivable that warning lights did not flash on the dashboard when Starmer appointed his neighbouring North London MP to this role. Add the kerfuffle around Rachel Reeves embellishing her banking experience and not crediting the people whose work she had raided in order to write her book on economists in order to prove her credentials to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a pattern appears to emerge; one sadly emblematic of governments of all stripes.[7]

A scenario that is increasingly being sketched out by commentators and the growing number of Labour MPs despairing of Starmer’s aptitude for the job of prime minister is a leadership challenge after what are feared to be disastrous results for Labour in next year’s elections to English local authority and mayoralties, the Cymru Senedd and Scottish Parliament. Many see as the main challenger former Blair minister and current Greater Manchester Mayor - Andy Burnham. Andy’s main obstacle at the moment is his lack of a parliamentary seat; it is conjectured that a Greater Manchester Labour MP from a safe seat will resign to enable his return to Parliament in the subsequent by-election. Always assuming that the seat does not fall to Reform.

In the immediate to short term, the Deputy Leadership election campaign will act as a mini referendum on Starmer’s leadership. A tight timetabling schedule has left Labour members with the choice between the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson and the former Leader of the Commons, Lucy Powell. Both represent Northern English seats with Bridget having a similar backstory to Angela Rayner as the daughter of a single mother who grew up in straightened circumstances and who has worked with survivors of domestic violence. So far, she has preached a message of unity in the face of a possible Reform insurgency. Lucy is widely regarded as on the “soft left” of Labour, close to Andy Burnham and will see herself as the conduit from the PLP and the wider party to the Party Leader.

To return to the case introduced in the opening paragraph, the animating mission for Labour going forward, under whatever leader, has to be to confront Reform UK and the wider far right nativist nationalist movement and the racist discourse that structures this cultural milieu. Anti racism is a sine qua non of Labour along with equality. Labour may divide and has divided over welfare reform, defence, nationalisation, pension reform, foreign policy especially the Middle East with Gaza at the top of so many progressives’ concerns. In dealing with the top mobilising issue for the contemporary Alt-Right, immigration, Labour has contorted itself in trying to deal with “the legitimate concerns” of people over irregular immigration and the invasion of the “small boats” by “smashing the gangs” and gung-ho public deportations while trying to remain true to its professed opposition to racism.

For the strategy of continuing to bend to the whims of socially conservative, migration averse, mythical “Hero Voters” of the Red Wall is in the long term a vote loser for Labour. For in the aftermath of Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech which caused so much angst among progressive constituencies and which the PM has had to regret, Mathew Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, in a review of a survey of 30,000 people taken after that speech, found that Starmer had “increased the salience of immigration and decreased the Labour vote without getting any voters back from Reform”.[8]

John Curtice, leading psephologist at the National Institute for Social Research, has found that half of Boris Johnston’s 2019 voters now back Reform, while Labour has lost just one in eight of its 2024 voters to Reform. These anti-migrant, pro-Brexit, socially conservative climate sceptics are almost completely unaligned with average British opinion. About 49% of them say equal opportunities for Black and Asian people have gone too far: only 18% of the population agree.[9] Other sources suggest that for every vote Labour would gain from Reform; three would be lost to the Liberal Democrats and Greens.

So, the message is clear. Aping Reform over migration will not work. It will merely feed the crocodile and, as the Tories are discovering (another defection to Reform today, of Daniel Kruger MP), will lead to the cannibalisation of parties that do it. Silence in the face of racist remarks such as those from former Tory and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell who tweeted “From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul free!” is complicity. Hammer Farage for the Brexit calamity and dispense with the fear of alienating Reform voters – they are not coming back. Labour needs to stop being seen as part of the “elite” and leave misguided Tories to scrabble for the electoral scraps of the Reform table. Fight the next GE on natural Labour terrain and Labour achievements: falling NHS waiting lists, free breakfast clubs of schoolchildren, free nursery places, the Employment Rights Bill/Act, new towns; mega-developments on green energy – all as part of a compelling and transformative story.[10]

A welcome development in the taking of the fight to Reform and the far-right ecosphere was Starmer’s statement in the wake of the disturbances at Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally this weekend in London in which there would be ‘no surrender of the St George’s flag and British values.' 10 Downing Street strategists have promised that he will use his speech at the Labour Party conference this month to go on the offensive against the far right in the language of Labour values. Labour could do a lot worse than dusting down a 2005 speech by Tony Blair which was unequivocal on the need to tighten immigration and asylum but also on the need to condemn and reject racism, calling out division of Tory and Reform messaging and praising the contribution of migrant communities.[11]

Take the Fight to the Fagash Fuhrer!

[1] Polly Toynbee, Starmer’s one existential task: defeat Farage at all costs. The Guardian Journal 9th September 2025 pp.1-2.

[2] Gaby Hinsliff, Mandelson had three chances. How many left for Starmer? The Guardian Opinion 13th September 2025 p.3.

[3] Peter Walker, Eleni Courea & Pippa Crerar,Time is running out, MPs warn, MPs warn Starmer. The Guardian 13th September 2025 p.1, p.8.

[4] Pippa Crear, Can Starmer survive? Whispers and plotting as PM feels the heat. The Guardian Saturday Read 13th September 2025 pp.10-11.

[5] Ibid

[6] Patience Wheatcroft, Labour have lost the moral high ground. The New World 14th August 2025 p.14

[7] Ibid

[8] Polly Toynbee op cit.

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid

[11] Jessica Elgot Labour MPs will hope PM’s ‘no surrender’ speech marks start of progressives’ fightback The Guardian 15th September 2025 p.13

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Love’s Labour Lost 🟥 How To Regain It After The Angela Rayner And Mandelson Fiascos And A First Year Of Disappointment

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Eight Hundred And Nineteen

 

A Morning Thought @ 2868

 

A Morning Thought @ 2867

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