Miriam Cates is the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.

Among those of us who sat as Conservative MPs in the last parliament, the current political turmoil evokes a strong sense of deja-vu. The parallels between the Mandelson affair and the last weeks of Boris Johnson’s premiership are uncanny. Although Partygate and the Epstein files are worlds apart in terms of their seriousness, both scandals bolstered campaigns to oust sitting prime ministers with large parliamentary majorities.

Both Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer relied on powerful advisors who became lightning rods for  backbench discontent. Although Dominic Cummings resigned 18 months before Johnson’s demise, he played a similar role to Morgan McSweeney, who on Sunday was scapegoated for the Mandelson debacle and left Downing Street. In the run up to his departure, Johnson ‘revamped’ his Number 10 operation, losing key aides Dan Rosenfeld and Munira Mirza, and bringing in Guto Hari and Steve Barclay to ‘reboot’ his comms strategy. Similarly for Starmer, Tim Allen is out, standing down to allow “a new No 10 team to be built”.

The first signs of the end for Johnson – and perhaps for Starmer – began with being publicly undermined by a string of senior MPs calling publicly for their Party leader to step down. I will never forget watching David Davis rise to his feet in a packed House of Commons in January 2022 and implore Johnson “for the love of God man; go”. Clive Lewis’ scathing tweets about our current prime minister are somewhat less rousing.

In another parallel between the two cases, the beleaguered prime ministers’ Scottish deputies were among the first to break ranks. In January 2022, Ruth Davidson declared Johnson ‘unfit for office’; on Monday, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar called for Starmer to step down. Politicians north of the border are clearly ahead of the curve.

Ultimately, Johnson was toppled by a slew of ministers resigning en masse; so far Starmer’s cabinet is holding firm, although the support expressed in their tightly coordinated loyal social media posts seems neither heartfelt nor unconditional. And, just as then-chancellor Rishi Sunak was accused of starting a covert leadership campaign early in 2022, so Wes Streeting is thought to be on manoeuvers now.

After a well-received performance at the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting on Monday, Starmer seems safe for now – as did Johnson after he won (narrowly) a vote of no confidence in June 2022. Yet as it was for Johnson, this may yet be a temporary reprieve. Seven weeks after that vote, Johnson was gone, brought down by the fallout from accusations that Chris Pincher, the deputy chief whip drunkenly groped a man in the Carlton Club. For Starmer, any number of potential bumps in the road in the coming weeks may re-ignite the smoking embers of a coup.

If Sir Keir quits, whatever the immediate catalyst for his departure – poor by-election results, a badly received spring statement or perhaps another ministerial scandal – it will not be the true cause of his undoing, just as Johnson’s poor judgement in dithering over Chris Pincher was not the primary reason for his downfall. For both prime ministers, a leadership crisis followed a steady loss of confidence among their MPs that eroded their authority with each political hiccup.

Johnson and Starmer have a tendency to U-turn under pressure; sending backbenchers out to defend unpopular policies one day which are then reversed the next is a surefire way to lose support. But it’s not only U-turns that cause disaffection. Just like Johnson’s Tories in 2022, Starmer’s Labour MPs are watching the plunging polls with horror. I remember the unease in the House of Commons tea room when the Conservative vote share started to fall below 35 per cent in the final months of 2021. The Labour Party is now polling consistently below 20 per cent; backbenchers have every reason to panic. Poor polling convinces many MPs that they have nothing to lose – and everything to gain – by switching leaders.

Of course no two events in politics or history are identical. Just because Johnson was forced out, precipitating a slow and painful Tory demise doesn’t mean the same will happen to Sir Keir and Labour. But the fact that two prime ministers of such different characters, in different parties and under different circumstances, can face such similar situations may indicate that this state of affairs has more to do with our political system than the specific weaknesses of Starmer and Johnson.

We are living through a time of acute political instability. If Starmer premiership ends this year as predicted, he will make way for Britain’s seventh Prime Minister in a decade. The last time a Party leader won a majority at a general election and then went into the next election still as Prime Minister was in 2001, a quarter of a century ago. Of course there have been many periods of turmoil in our history, but the feverish nature of politics over the last 15 years or so feels unprecedented, and shows no signs of abating. Why?

An obvious culprit is the rise of the smartphone, social media and instant messaging. The sheer quantity of information that can now be exchanged, and the ease and instantaneity of communication, have made it vastly easier for MPs to communicate their complaints and opinions with their colleagues  – and with journalists – than in the past. When secret plotting involved arranging to meet unseen in dark corridors at pre-arranged times in the Palace of Westminster, there were practical barriers to arranging a mutiny.

Continuous political updates on Twitter (X) allow MPs to take the political temperature every five minutes, rather than once a day while reading the newspaper over their tea room porridge. Instant communications have sped up time; politics now operates in permanent crisis mode, with overstimulated journalists and MPs living on adrenaline, conditioned to react rather than respond to events.

More frequent polling has also made it difficult for MPs to take a longer view of the political cycle. Since 2016, reforms to polling methods have made predictions far more accurate. A few consecutive surveys that show your party is falling in popularity can no longer be dismissed, and with the constant stream of new data, MPs track the polls like a doctor tracks a critical patient’s heart beat – every fluctuation seems to demand a drastic intervention.

But technology is not the only factor driving dissatisfaction with leaders. We are living through a major political realignment, where previously consensus issues like the necessity of strong borders, what it means to be British, and the importance of providing for yourself and your family are now highly contested. The splits on these issues do not always fall along traditional left-right lines, and so have fractured both Labour and Conservative parties. Although both Johnson and Starmer won large parliamentary majorities, neither prime minister ever had a true majority when it came to political direction. I’m not sure Boris ever knew his own mind on the subject of the welfare state, but had he tried to cut benefits he would have found his party just as split as Starmer’s.

The impotence of government has also played a role in discontent. Blairite reforms stripped power away from both parliament and the executive. The inability of ministers to get a grip on immigration or house building owes more to rule by quango than to the incompetence of our leaders. MPs may express discontent over the ‘direction of travel’, but there is nothing quick that prime ministers can do to fix things, instead resorting to ‘resets’ and meaningless talk about ‘values’.

There has also been a growing trend to play the man not the ball, with opposition parties and the press putting pressure on individuals to resign after mistakes, in much the same way as football managers are told to quit after a few bad performances. In the last parliament, Starmer, Angela Rayner et al made a habit of calling for scalps on an almost weekly basis. Now Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives have taken up where Labour left off, demanding the resignations of Reeves, Rayner, Mandelson and now Starmer.

His Majesty’s Opposition of course exists to challenge the government of the day, but, to me at least, it is unclear how it is in the national interest to continually undermine the position of those in elected office, especially when there are no clear preferable alternatives. If Starmer goes, he may well be replaced by someone far to the left of him; the reaction of the markets would cause genuine pain to voters.

The current political turmoil looks set to continue for some time, and it can’t all be blamed on technology and tactics. Underlying the discontent in both Parliament and the country is a sense that Britain is in decline and that not even a government with a large majority can rescue our country. The public must shoulder some responsibility for our political paralysis; the kinds of painful reforms that are necessary to save Britain – on tax, immigration, energy and planning – are unlikely to command majority support. Most voters – and possibly many MPs – still want lower taxes and higher public spending, something that no prime minister can hope to deliver.

But politicians are to blame too. Johnson and Starmer, like many of their MPs, seem to have no motivating purpose other than ‘managing’ the country well. When ‘management’ fails, it is unsurprising that neither backbenchers nor ministers are able to hold their nerve.

So how do we escape the vortex of political instability? There is no hope to be found in the left of politics; the few individuals who might understand how to rebuild our society and economy are isolated and have insufficient support within their movements.

The answers lie on the right, and as we approach the next election, conservatives in both Reform and the Conservative Party must prepare a radical and detailed programme for government, including repealing Tony Blair’s assault on democratic power. And both parties – and their leaders – must define and communicate a vision for Britain that goes beyond good management, inspiring patriotism and preparing the public for the kind of hardship that will be inevitable if we are going to turn the country around. Stable leadership is still possible; but not for at least three more long years.

Sir John Redwood is a former MP for Wokingham and a former Secretary of State for Wales. He will soon join the House of Lords.

Many ministers are intelligent and well-intentioned people. When Rishi Sunak said “Stop the boats” he meant it. When Yvette Cooper said “smash the gangs”, she probably meant it. Yet illegal migration came down only a bit under Sunak, and shot up again under Labour. It was not stopped or drastically reduced as people want. It is going to take more changes of our laws and instructions to courts to deliver. The system seems to thwart the policy.

Conservative and Labour governments in recent years have put huge extra money into the NHS. Ministers have asked for more consultations and treatments to get waiting lists down. Instead, there has been a big collapse in productivity. Labour’s reduction in waiting lists is mainly an exercise in removing the dead, ending double-counting and dropping those who have recovered from the lists. Conservative ministers wanted the lists made accurate, but it did not happen. (The lists should always have been more accurate.)

Both Conservative and Labour have tipped ever more subsidy into the railways and have taken more government control over how they are run. As a reward, the fully-nationalised HS2 has run ever later behind schedule and presented taxpayers with ever bigger bills. Both governments agreed that the performance was so bad, and the costs so huge, the railway would no longer reach the North, its planned destination and main original purpose.

So why does nothing work? Sometimes it is politicians who let appearances triumph over reality. Labour ministers who say they want less  illegal migration may want more legal migration and are looking at ways of switching people from illegal to legal. More normally, however, it is a worrying failure of public sector management. Ministers set targets and issue instructions. They vote through more money. But things do not work.

There may in some cases be ministers who expect too much and contribute too little. Regardless, they are ultimately responsible and have to take the blame. For example, Labour thought it could set a target of building 1.5 m homes and tried to get more planning permissions agreed; it did not understand its tax and economic policy meant people could not afford the homes so the builders cannot build them all.

Quite often, however, the fault lies in failure by senior executives and officials in the public sector. Targets and general policies are agreed, but they do not follow through, or do not design the detail in ways that can work.

Part of the answer can be ministers who do more of the detail and take more daily interest in the implementation and management of policy. Ministers can intervene in many ways, and demand good regular reports on outcomes.

It would help if they stayed longer in a job, and would improve chances of success if they had agreed with the prime minister (or their secretary of state) what their main tasks and objectives are, so they can concentrate on the differences they wish to make. The Conservative deployment of Nick Gibb as an schools minister to raise literacy standards shows how powerful this approach can be. He led the schools to use synthetic phonics to teach reading – and England’s reading standards rose well.

Part of the answer is to improve bonus and performance monitoring schemes for top officials. Some of the biggest disasters like HS2 and the Post Office have occurred where public sector CEOs are paid £500,000 or more, well over civil service norms. The CEOs also were often paid bonuses, yet their organisations were losing large sums, over-running budgets, and creating many problems. By all means pay some senior managers big money – but only if they beat budgets, deliver on time or sooner, show an ability to get better value for money, and drive higher productivity and quality. Pay no bonus if things are going wrong, or remove them promptly from the job if poor performance is likely to be endemic.

I have been drawing up a toolkit of methods used by good managers to align staff and service users interests, to demonstrate efficiency  and quality are two sides of the same coin, to reduce the cash demands needed for the provision of good services. The public sector often keeps too much stock, part occupies too many buildings, has too many staff in roles  that do not assist its main tasks, and uses too many expensive  consultancies  and agency staff for  things it could get its own employees to do in house.

As I take up the privilege of becoming a peer in the House of Lords, I look forward to more opportunities to develop this debate on how ministers and managers in the public sector can work together better to achieve so much more for the service users. We also need to save taxpayers more of the costs of waste and failure, which are part of the  cause of high taxes and excessive borrowing. If the UK public sector could recoup lost productivity since 2019 the largest part of the current deficit would disappear. If it could manage just a one per cent% annual productivity gain; but even that saves £13bn a year.

The Department for Work and Pensions’ most senior civil servant has resigned. Peter Schofield has faced furious criticism since the true scale of the carers’ allowance scandal was brought to light. However, the decision is said to be due to personal reasons, rather than taking responsibility for the DWP’s failures.

A catalogue of failures from the DWP

In November 2025, an independent review found that the scandal was in no way the carers’ fault. Instead, it placed the blame squarely at the feet of the DWP. The review said longstanding systemic issues within the department, unlawful internal guidance and poor design and communication were to blame.

The review found that many carers ended up in thousands of pounds of debt. Some also contemplated suicide due to the distress of being expected to pay back their overpayments.

You’d think, in light of the review, that the DWP would show a tiny bit of remorse. But another senior official in the department came under fire when he blamed carers for failing to report changes.

In an internal blog post, Neil Couling said:

Incidentally, what has been missed in all the [media] coverage is that this error (and hands up we made it and we will put it right) affects only a relatively small number of cases and wasn’t the cause of the original complaint. Because at the heart of the overpayment issues in CA is a failure to report changes of circumstances

This is despite the government taking responsibility. In a statement read by Baroness Sherlock, Stephen Timms said

The Review finds that some carers could not have known that they were building up overpayments because it was not clear how their earnings would affect their entitlement, and this lack of clarity was due to issues with operational guidance. The Government accepts this and we will act to put it right.

Schofield hauled before the committee

In January 2026, Schofield was forced to answer to the Work and Pensions committee for the department’s crimes, as well as Couling’s disgusting comments. Chair of the committee Debbie Abrahams asked him how the DWP could justify not making any changes and the department’s attitude towards carers.

His response was a masterclass in bluster, culminating in

We were making a difference

Schofield was also taken to task by disabled MP Steve Darling, who accused him of basically talking rubbish:

You’ve given me a lot of blancmange that I’m finding difficult to nail to the ceiling what clear evidence of management change is there and I’m concerned that you’re not able to give me any.

What a coincidence

Whilst neither the DWP or Schofield mentioned the carers allowance scandal in their statements, it feels like a pretty big coincidence

In a message to colleagues, Schofield said

My decision to leave the department is not one I have taken lightly. It has been an absolute privilege to serve, first as director general, finance and then as your permanent secretary.

He said one of his highlights was

the massive achievement of completing the rollout of Universal Credit for our working age customers

He continued that this

paved the way for our transformation journey – and our continued focus on doing things better for our customers and colleagues – providing support in better and more effective ways

I’m not sure I would class something that left thousands of vulnerable claimants at the mercy of cruel sanctions as a success, but then I’m not a DWP ghoul.

It’s also another absolutely huge coincidence that this was announced whilst the press is distracted by Keir Starmer’s premiership imploding.

Campaigners must keep the pressure on DWP

Schofield will remain in his role until July, which means there’s still plenty of time for him to be held accountable. His leaving also shouldn’t see the end of pressure on the government for justice for the victims of the carers’ scandal.

We need to fight harder than ever to ensure the department and his predecessor to take responsibility.

Featured image via the Canary

The Jewish Anti-Zionist Action group has disrupted Nigel Farage’s so-called ‘Reform Jewish Alliance’ launch. Jews for fascism, who’da thought?

A statement on the group’s social media says that:

As well as picketing outside the Central Synagogue, which was hosting the event, we also infiltrated and disrupted from inside, reminding Farage and all in attendance what Reform actually stands for:

Racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, queerphobia, and xenophobic anti-immigration policies that would have seen Jewish refugees, many of which were our own family, prevented from entering the UK last century.

We will not stand by whilst fascists are welcomed into our community and places of worship.

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🗣Shame on Central Synagogue, and every member of our self elected leadership for collaborating on this event and initiative🗣

The peaceful but noisy protesters were forcibly ejected for daring to point out what Reform UK (Ltd) really stands for:

Featured image via the Canary

An invoice featured in the latest batch of Epstein files, reveals that Jeffrey ordered 330 gallons of concentrated sulphuric acid to be delivered to his paedophile island in 2018. The order was placed on the same day the FBI opened a new child-trafficking case against him:

Other documents in the latest US government release suggest that Epstein used sulphuric acid for water treatment. However, the acid has also notoriously been used by criminal gangs to dissolve bodies. Orders for large quantities of acid would, of course, need a pretext.

The US justice department (DOJ) has admitted that evidence is it still withholding includes footage of torture, rape and murder. Many victims of Epstein and his twisted circle have never been found. Files in the DOJ release even accuse Epstein and his guests of eating some victims.

Featured image via the Canary

The final election phase to decide Your Party’s collective leadership has begun. And for many, it has become a race to determine how much member empowerment and control there will be. As one candidate for Yorkshire & The Humber told the Canary:

This party and its growth and its development shouldn’t be down to what a few people—who have found themselves at the top of it before any democratic structure’s been put in place—think it should be like.

‘Open Your Party up to the hundreds of thousands of people who need it’

Chris Saltmarsh is on the Grassroots Left slate in the Central Executive Committee (CEC) elections. And while he called this slate “really diverse,” he described how everyone participating broadly shares:

A political vision and understanding for what we want the party to be.

That centres around “maximum member democracy”.

Saltmarsh explained why this is so important for him, saying:

Most people have seen the [Your Party founding] process and thought: ‘oh, this doesn’t feel like a welcoming space where I can come and express my politics and learn and develop and contribute to building this project. It feels like a space where I have to come and pick a side in a factional feud and I’m expected to care about this very detailed and, probably to most people, irrelevant stuff.’

I think people don’t want to be involved in a party where it appears that it’s the source for people to litigate these personal feuds. And I think they don’t want to be involved in a party where it doesn’t feel like they have any say.

Statistics seem to back that up. Because while around 800,000 people initially expressed interest, only about 1% actually became full members who participated in the votes at the Your Party’s founding conference. Something that deterred hundreds of thousands of people. And for many, it’s clear what that was.

Saltmarsh called for an open, inclusive culture going forwards, stressing:

We should open this up to the hundreds of thousands of people who have a stake in this party existing. If I want the party to be eco-socialist… then it’s not for me or anyone else to say that that absolutely has to be the case. What we need is a genuine democratic structure so that we can organise around those ideas openly and transparently.

Reflecting on the challenges that Your Party has faced and the possible election results, he said:

For all the demotivation that people might have, this is an incredibly important moment. And I would just plead that people – even if it’s just voting – do get involved and do participate in this. Because I think what the British left looks like in 1, 5, 10, 20 years really could be quite different, depending on how this election goes.

Whatever the outcome, though, he believes there is democracy in Your Party and there will still be space for people with differing views to make their cases.

Your Party or the Greens?

Saltmarsh previously co-founded Labour for a Green New Deal. And because he believes climate politics is ‘a question of justice, inequality and oppression’, he thinks it’s important to bring:

an environmental or climate perspective into left spaces, but also a kind of socialist politics into climate spaces

The wealthiest 10% of people in the world have been responsible for the overwhelming majority of global warming. And while richer countries do the most damage, the poorest countries suffer the most as a result of climate breakdown.

Saltmarsh isn’t in the Green Party, however, because he thinks an explicitly socialist mass organisation on the left is necessary. And while the Greens are already “up and running” and have a leader in Zack Polanski who’s “clearly very skilled at communicating”, he said:

A cynical interpretation would be, it’s like a really good Instagram account.

While asserting that communication is definitely important, he also thinks Your Party is about taking “a longer view” than just elections. Its mission, he stressed, is to:

build in communities, to organise hundreds or thousands of socialists in any given town and city, not just to win elections when that’s expedient but also to coordinate campaigns, to raise consciousness, to build socialism through social infrastructure.

That means building a “collective political life” in communities, with things like:

socialist schools, where members and supporters come along and learn about socialism

And it means having a party where, from the beginning, members agree on a socialist, anti-imperialist platform.

“An incredibly important moment”

Saltmarsh isn’t the only person who thinks the CEC elections are “an incredibly important moment”. Because the Canary has interviewed a range of candidates who want a member-led party that breaks with top-down, personality-driven politics.

Candidates have emphasised the importance of transparency, accountability, and a collective leadership that focuses on solidarity, bringing people together, and empowering as many people as possible. This message has shone through from everyone who’s spoken to us.

There absolutely have been questions surrounding accountability and transparency during the founding phase of Your Party. And whether you think this messy start was avoidable or unavoidable, countless members and candidates want that to change, and hope the CEC elections will help to overcome these challenges.

If you’re a Your Party member and you want to vote:

1. You need to log in on the top right of the party’s website.
2. On the Your Party Members Area page that will pop up after logging in, you will see “EVENTS” on the right hand side. Below this, you will see “VOTES AND ELECTIONS”, and two options: “CEC Election – Public Office Holders” and “CEC Election – [the name of your local section of the party]”.
3. If you click on each of those ‘CEC Election’ links, you’ll be able to see the candidates and their statements. You then need to put a number next to all the candidates you want to support (1 being your favourite, 2 your second favourite, and so on).

Featured image via the Canary

Recently, Rory Stewart argued that western politicians are “impoverished” on their lofty annual salaries of £93,904, attempting to excuse their corruption.

He ignored the generous expenses MPs claim from taxpayers, and critics have condemned what they view as a blatantly self-interested attempt to provide political cover for corruption. Since then, the Canary has spoken with Andrew Feinstein for his take on corruption in the UK government, the disgraced Mandelson, and his response to Rory Stewart.

Feinstein is a former ANC member alongside Nelson Mandela and has built his career fighting corruption linked to the global arms trade. He also challenged UK prime minister Keir Starmer in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency during the 2024 general election. His experience gives him a unique perspective on corruption.

And unsurprisingly, Feinstein was far from impressed at Rory Stewart’s desperate defence.

An existential moment in human history

Recent revelations involving Mandelson and public figures connected to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein have exposed a sprawling web of corruption among powerful men. This elite group of politicians and royal family members have used women and girls, trading them around the world to serve their nefarious, self-interested agendas. Their actions reveal a disturbing pattern of exploitation at the highest levels of power. The extent of their abuse continues to outrage the global public.

Rory Stewart’s remarks compound the damage, showing disregard for the severe harms ordinary people suffer.

Here’s Rory Stewart describing MPs as being on “low incomes”.

Their basic annual salary is £93,904, putting them in the top 5% of earners.

There’s a nuanced debate to be had about MPs’ pay, but describing them as “low income” is an insult to those who really are. pic.twitter.com/2qE8fYn1sJ

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— James Hanson (@jhansonradio) February 4, 2026

Andrew Feinstein — ‘From the belly of the corrupted beast’

Our own Joe Glenton recently gave his take on Rory Stewart’s desperate attempt to defend the indefensible, writing:

The average wage in the UK seems to be about £30,000. The mathematical geniuses among us will notice that that is…. quite a lot less than what MPs get paid.

It’s almost like Roderick James Nugent “Rory” Stewart – a humble Oxford educated one-time tutor to the future king of England, former army officer, and imperial governor of a province of Iraq – hasn’t got a fucking clue what he is talking about.

When we put Rory’s defence of ‘impoverished MPs’ to Feinstein, he responded with:

So that tells you everything you need to know about Rory Stewart, whose podcast, of course, is co-hosted by a war criminal in Alastair Campbell, who enabled Tony Blair’s extreme war profiteering and lied in order to get Britain into the invasion of Iraq. So I take that comment as coming from the belly of the corrupted beast.

To think that a political class, an MP, earning £94,000 a year before expenses, and as we all know, claim ridiculous expenses, is frankly an appalling insult to the vast majority of people in Britain. And if that’s what he thinks is impoverishment, then he needs to get his head out of the sand or out of the fancy restaurant he spends his life in and actually understand how many people in Britain are living right now.

Because in Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell’s Britain, we have more billionaires than at any time in this country’s history, while more families are having to use food banks to feed themselves than at any time since the end of the Second World War. And if he thinks the solution to that is to pay our mendacious, mediocre, corrupted politicians more money, then he’s even more stupid than I thought he was.

But at the same time, it’s important to say that I’ve experienced a totally corrupted political class in apartheid South Africa. And South Africa again now, 30 odd years after our democracy, has another corrupted political class running it. But we still managed to defeat the system of apartheid. We didn’t get rid of any of the economic problems. But simply by dint of the fact that we managed to defeat the apartheid state, it makes me think that enough committed people within a country around the world can bring fundamental political change.

We also asked Feinstein for his perspective on the importance of radical honesty and transparency in government. Referring to known war criminals and the recently exposed shadiness of Mandelson and co, he said:

Absolutely. I think we, just as responsible citizens, have a duty to expose the lies of our leaders, remembering that we elected them, that they exist because of the money that we pay to the state, and they’re ingratiating themselves and their billionaire friends and corporate donors. And I like the idea of radical truth, because if we are truthful about our political systems, we would have to admit that they are not fit for purpose and require fundamental change.

I mean in Britain as we speak, we have someone [Mandelson] who is and has been for decades incredibly powerful and influential in our politics. Not only being close friends with a convicted pedophile and sex trafficker but actually giving information to this person that is then used in this web of influence and deceit.

And all the while, we are participating in conflict and often causing conflict around the world from which again, the same elites profit. And the corollary of that is that our own democratic space is closing so rapidly because it’s the only way you can maintain such a totally corrupted system is if you reduce democracy, you reduce civil rights.

And the companies that are central to these conflicts now, the AI companies, the big tech companies, are exactly the same companies who are central to the erosion of our democracies, are central to the authoritarianism that is becoming a part of our daily lives in the US and Britain and in much of Europe. And so, by being aware of what we’re doing in the rest of the world, we’re also becoming aware of what is being done to us by our own leaders. We’re at an existential moment in human history. And if we don’t inform ourselves and challenge our political and economic elite who have become one and the same thing, we’re effectively consigning our countries to despotism. So that’s really the scale of the moment we’re in.

The agency to decide how our world is organised

Finally, Feinstein finished with a rallying cry to voters and activists across the country:

And I think that’s what we need to do. We need to realise that one of the things that the sort of late era neoliberal capitalism does is it intentionally stifles our imaginations and our creativity to make us believe there is no alternative. As Margaret Thatcher famously and evilly said, to believe that this is the only way the world can be organised. And it’s not. We have the agency to decide how our world should be organised and we need to take that agency.

Referring to his upcoming book set for release in Autumn this year, he added:

And this book [Making a Killing] is an attempt to give people the information and to propose some of the ways in which we can take agency about something that is destroying our societies and our politics. And I’m always reminded when people feel very depressed and defeated, which of course I sometimes do too, I’m always reminded of what Nelson Mandela said when he was asked how he retained hope in an apartheid prison and in very dark and depressing days.

And he [Mandela] said, because anything is always impossible only until it’s done.

And I think we have the ability, we have the brains amongst us ordinary people to change the world profoundly and fundamentally. And I hope that this book will be a very small contribution towards that.

Rory Stewart and his neoliberal ilk can consider themselves ‘told’ after this brilliant takedown from a man who makes fighting corruption his day job.

Featured image via the Canary