Keir Starmer’s Number 10 is refusing to say whether new peer — and ‘Labour Friend of Israel’ member — Matthew Doyle ended his friendship with paedophile former ‘Labour rising star‘ Sean Morton after Morton’s conviction. The PM’s office is also refusing to say what Starmer knew about the status of the pair’s friendship before Doyle was made a peer last month.

The 2018 conviction

Morton is a Scottish former Labour councillor convicted in 2018 of counts of possessing serious child sexual abuse images and extreme pornography. He was placed on the sex offenders register and, in another example of light sentencing of Labour paedophiles, made to do 140 hours of community service.

The questions come as Starmer admitted this week to knowing about Peter Mandelson’s ongoing, ardent relationship with serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer knew about it when he appointed Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US. He must also have known about Mandelson’s insider-trading with Epstein.

It’s already a matter of record that Starmer gave Doyle the peerage despite knowing Doyle campaigned for Morton’s election after Morton had been charged. The refusal to deny it also strongly suggests that Doyle continued the friendship after conviction — and that Starmer knew. It suggests it so strongly that even liberal Zionist Gabriel Pogrund finds the silence “weird”. Pogrund said that:

This is getting weird now

In response to @TomTugendhat, Darren Jones doesn’t even acknowledge question re Lord Doyle

PM/McSweeney warned about his links to paedophile Sean Morton, so ordered investigation before peerage approved

Yet zero info on what it found, inc when… https://t.co/lNmsewhBbb pic.twitter.com/x6iGMC4a3c

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) February 3, 2026

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As well as being another example of Starmer appointing friends of paedophiles, the Doyle-Morton case is the latest in Labour’s long list of Zionist child abusers. Former Blair and Starmer adviser Doyle is a member of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), the Israel lobby group connected with Israeli embassy cash and anti-Palestinian racism. He has also been a listed speaker at events held by notorious lobby group BICOM.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar is under pressure to kick MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy out of the party altogether for her friendship with Sean Morton. Duncan-Glancy resigned her front-bench position and said she will not seek re-election, calling the friendship a “serious lapse in professional judgment”. Right. Sarwar appears no better than Starmer, but Duncan-Glancy at least fell on her sword.

But all this is just the tip of a very large nonceberg of the overlap between paedophilia and ‘Labour’ support for Israel.

Starmer about to hit the Nonceberg

Starmeroid MP Dan Norris’s recent arrest for rape was his second on suspicion of sex offences. The first, in 2025, was for alleged rape and paedophilia and is still under investigation. As we’ve seen, Starmer’s mentor and chief adviser Peter Mandelson resigned over his notorious links with serial child rapist and Israeli agent Jeffrey Epstein. In early January, Israel fanatic Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) organiser Liron Velleman admitted child sex offences.

We’re just getting started.

In January last year, former Blair minister Ivor Caplin was arrested in a sting operation as he allegedly attempted to meet a 15-year-old boy for sex. Local police went after local left-winger Greg Hadfield for exposing the explicit content Caplin posted on his X feed – Hadfield defeated the ‘vexatious’ charge in November 2025. However, no charges have yet been brought against Caplin and a court did not impose bail conditions after his initial bail expired. Despite the ongoing police investigation, Caplin was recently invited to speak on LBC about Keir Starmer’s move to block Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham’s bid to stand in a parliamentary election.

There’s more

Hackney councillor Tom Dewey, an organiser in pro-Israel group ‘Labour First’, admitted possession of the most serious category of child rape images in 2023. The party knew of his arrest when it allowed him to stand for election. After his conviction, it blocked local women members from its systems to prevent them discussing the case.

And in March 2025 Sam Gould, who worked for Starmer’s health secretary Wes Streeting, quit as a Redbridge councillor after being convicted on two separate counts of indecent exposure to a 13-year-old girl.

The LFI/JLM paedophile issue mirrors the even wider issue in Israel itself. The regime is currently ignoring well over 2,000 extradition requests for alleged and convicted paedophiles. In April 2025, Shoshana Strook, the daughter of Israel’s far-right settlements minister fled to police and asked them to protect her, accusing both her parents and one of her brothers of raping her as a child, over a period of years, and filming the rapes.

Jewish anti-Zionist academic Norman Finkelstein says Israeli society is “rotten to the core”. That sickness doesn’t stop at the border.

Featured image via the Canary

Mass arrests by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are overwhelming the US court system in Minnesota.

The Trump administration’s massive deportation spree in Minnesota – pompously titled ‘Operation Metro Surge’ – created a corresponding surge in emergency legal cases. This left courts so short-staffed that several top lawyers quit outright. Still others have voiced their intention to follow suit in recent weeks.

The Minnesota US attorney’s office stated that:

The Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in this district has been utterly overwhelmed by the number of recent habeas petitions in Minnesota, during a time when the Office is short staffed.

ICE flouting orders

Justice Department records show massive numbers of legal violations by ICE, including violations of judges’ orders, illegal arrests, and botched court filings.

Minnesota judges are particularly alarmed at defiance from Homeland Security and their Justice Department counterparts in Washington. In particular, ICE is regularly flouting orders to bring their detainees before a judge when ordered – a legal right and duty known as habeas corpus.

Politico described one situation in which:

In one recent case, ICE arrested a man with no criminal record who was residing legally in Minnesota on a rare “T” visa, meant for victims of a severe form of human trafficking or who aided law enforcement in a trafficking investigation. A day after a magistrate judge inquired about the case, the Justice Department said it should be dismissed because the man had been released. Four days later, however, DOJ sent a cryptic filing misidentifying the man as “she” and suggesting he had been relocated to a detention facility in El Paso.

DOJ then blew off the deadline to clarify what had occurred, leading the judge to conclude that “ICE transferred Petitioner from Minnesota to Texas without notice and indeed, from this record it appears that even [DOJ] may not have known about the transfer.”

‘Broken system’

Underscoring the depths of the crisis, on Tuesday 2 February, a judge asked prosecutor Julie Le why his federal court orders were being ignored by ICE. Le, in apparent distress, said:

The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.

She went on to add that:

Sometime I wish you would just hold me in contempt, your honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep.

Le argued that ICE officials simply ignore her and other Justice Department lawyers when they tell them to obey the courts. Even simple inquiries went completely unanswered, and Le’s threats of legal repercussions made no impact.

The prosecutor branded the situation a “broken system”, and even revealed that she’d tried to quit – but there was no-one ready to replace her.

Open authoritarianism

However, Trump’s team are denying their responsibility for the situation. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), tried to blame the judges themselves for the crisis:

The Trump administration is more than prepared to handle the legal caseload necessary to deliver President Trump’s deportation agenda for the American people. It should come as no surprise that more habeas petitions are being filed by illegal aliens — especially after many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.

This line of reasoning is severely faulty. It is a court’s role, when necessary, to determine the legality of an individual’s actions. If the state could ignore a habeas petition on the grounds of an individual being “illegal”, it could simply declare anybody illegal without trial.

This is both clearly a monstrous abuse of power, and precisely what the Trump administration is doing.

A Justice Department spokesperson likewise blamed “rogue judges” for the massive increase in detention cases. They argued that without the judges rulings, there wouldn’t be any “concern over DHS following orders.”

That is to say, if the judges didn’t demand that ICE follows the law, there would be no issue. Again, an openly authoritarian proclamation.

Shock and awe

The fact that Minnesota’s courts are overwhelmed is not a glitch in the system. It’s not a result of the Justice Department being understaffed, or – God forbid – ICE being under-resourced. Rather, this overwhelm is part of the plan.

Trump has always relied on shock and awe tactics. He perpetrates as many open crimes and heinous violations of basic human decency as quickly as possible, such that his opponents barely have time to muster a reaction before the next onslaught.

Because the courts are overwhelmed, ICE and the Trump administration can act with impunity. The administration has said outright that if it’s allowed to break the law, then there won’t be any issues. It intends to break the law; it intends to ignore basic legal rights; it intends to deport anyone it sees fit. This was always the plan.

Featured image via the Canary

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The Trump administration has returned $500 million in oil money from previous oil transactions with Venezuela. A US official said it was to keep the country’s services running. The US kidnapped Venezuela president Nicolas Maduro on 3 January. In his place, former oil minister deputy Delcy Rodriguez is running the oil-rich nation.

A US official told The New Arab on 4 February:

Venezuela has officially received all $500 million from the first Venezuelan oil sale.

The unnamed individual said the money would be:

disbursed for the benefit of the Venezuelan people at the discretion of the US government.

The cash seems to have been from an oil deal struck in January:

So in essence, we allowed Venezuela to use their own oil to generate revenue to pay teachers and firefighters and police officers and keep the function of government operating so we didn’t have systemic collapse.

The official said the money, which had been held in Qatar, was a:

temporary, short-term account to ensure Venezuela received the funds needed to operate.

Venezuela: agreed-upon procedures

The official even explained there were plans to move money from future oil sales:

into a fund located in the US and to authorise expenditures for any obligation or expense of the government of Venezuela or its agencies and instrumentalities upon instructions that are consistent with agreed-upon procedures. 

The New Arab also reported pro-Maduro street protests. Maduro’s son Nicolasito was in attendance. He told reporters of the demonstrators:

These people are not American.  We have achieved a profound anti-imperialist consciousness.

Maduro is in a New York jail. He claims he is a prisoner of war. The US has indicted him for drugs and weapon possession charges Yet whatever the balance of power in Venezuela is now – and whatever the anti-imperialist rhetoric on display – this seems to suggest that the Venezuelan government is not calling the shots any more.

Trump’s massive military build-up and eventual special forces raid on Venezuela seems to have done the job. The US seeks to dominate the Western hemisphere entirely. Trump has now moved onto bullying Iran. The Venezuelan revolution, whatever its merits and shortcomings, seems to have stalled for now.

Time will tell if it becomes another footnote in US imperial history.

Featured image via the Canary

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At a press conference on Thursday, Farage unveiled former Conservative councillor Dan Thomas as Reform’s new leader in Wales, making him the latest Tory to make the switch.

Fellow defectors Laura Anne Jones and James Evans were in the audience in Newport’s International Convention Centre. The recent flow of defections, which includes former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and ex-shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, is seen by Reform figures as helping maintain the party’s momentum heading into the May elections.

Reform is expected to make significant gains at the Senedd elections, with recent polling putting the party far ahead of Labour, which has dominated politics in Wales since its devolved institutions were established at the turn of the century, as well as the Tories. The contest to lead Wales is seen as a two-horse race between Reform and Plaid Cymru.

Thomas, a former council leader in north London, said he had “fond memories” of growing up in south Wales, where his grandfather and great-grandfather were miners.

It is not the first time that Farage has been on the cusp of an electoral breakthrough in Wales, though.

In 2016, his former party, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), won 13 per cent of the popular vote to return seven Senedd seats. By the end of that parliament in 2021, however, after a period of splits and infighting, just one of those seven sought re-election.

Last year, UKIP’s former leader in Wales, who went on to lead Reform in Cardiff, Nathan Gill, was sentenced to prison for taking pro-Russia bribes.

Asked by PoliticsHome how his current party would avoid the mistakes of UKIP in Wales, Farage said that candidate vetting would be “absolutely key”. The party, which continues to lead UK-wide opinion polls, though there are some signs that its support has dipped in recent weeks, is asking candidates to go through media training led by TV personality Jeremy Kyle and ex-LBC presenter Colin Brazier in Reform HQ.

“The choice of candidates in some cases that were picked to stand for UKIP at that moment in time were completely against my [vision] as leader of the party,” Farage told PoliticsHome.

Farage added: “Two or three of them were wholly unsuitable in every way. But leaders don’t always get their way… and quite shortly thereafter, after [a] quarter of a century, I left [UKIP] believing it was going in the wrong direction.”

Llyr Powell, who was the Reform candidate at last year’s Caerphilly by-election and who worked in the UKIP press team during the 2016 Senedd election, suggested that her former party was destined to fall away in Wales, having achieved its aim of successfully campaigning for Brexit.

“Nigel’s goal in UKIP was always to win an in-out referendum,” she said.

“We’re all united behind the fact we want to see Nigel Farage in Number 10 now.”

While Farage said he wants tighter control of candidate selection, he also conceded that Thomas and any newly elected Reform Senedd members must be given space by Reform’s Westminster operation to make their own decisions.

“When it comes to devolved matters, it’s up to Reform UK in Wales to make those decisions,” he told PoliticsHome.

He added: “I wouldn’t even pretend that I knew what needs to happen within the failing NHS in Wales.”

US President Donald Trump said it “bothers” him that former President Bill Clinton is facing scrutiny and an order to testify about his past ties to the late child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, who Trump infamously also had a relationship with.

“It bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton. See, I like Bill Clinton. I still like Bill Clinton,” Trump told NBC News in a White House interview Wednesday.

Asked what he likes about the former president, Trump answered: “I liked his behaviour towards me. I thought he got me, he understood me.”

This expressed support came one day after Trump called it “a shame” that Clinton and his wife, Hillary, have been subpoenaed to testify about their ties to Epstein.

Bill Clinton’s relationship with Epstein was documented in investigative files released by the Justice Department last week. The files include a shirtless photo of Clinton in a hot tub with someone that a DOJ official described as a “victim” of Epstein’s sexual abuse. He has denied wrongdoing and having any knowledge that Epstein was abusing underage girls.

Trump, who also faces unverified allegations of sexual misconduct involving minors in the documents and has denied wrongdoing, said it’s time to “move on” from the Epstein files and expressed support for the Clintons. This about-face follows Trump infamously calling for the former secretary of state to be locked up during and long after their vitriolic 2016 presidential campaign battle.

“I think it’s a shame, to be honest. I always liked him. Her? Yeah, she’s a very capable woman. She was better in debating than some of the other people, I will tell you that,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “She was smarter. She’s a smart woman. I hate to see it in many ways. I hate to see it, but then look at me, they went after me like — you know, they wanted me to go to jail for the rest of my life. Then it turned out I was innocent.”