A dreadful way to run both a country and a party, and it will end badly

Labour’s hollowed-out machine can’t keep masking its failures. The 2026 Senedd results, where Labour’s vote will crater, will be the catalyst for Westminster’s implosion. Yet few MPs in London seem aware of the political shockwave coming from Cardiff Bay. The disconnect is astonishing, and unsustainable.

Excellent opinion piece as usual, Martin. Very eye opening and this pair of indecisive, weak governments seem headed for the shredder.

Great analysis as ever from Martin Shipton. The 'keeping out' of Owain Williams et al serves to undermine the 'connectedness' between Labour and the people/electorate and this political recklessness only serves to shoot Labour in the proverbial foot. Like an unbalanced iceberg turning upside down, Labour can't stop itself turning away from the people it pretends to serve.  'Party before People' is Labour's focus and will lead to its undoing.   

"The party bureaucracy is riddled with control freakery, " It doesn't look good.does it ? The snake has ate itself . Yet as you say the prospect of Farage arriving is much worse . Martin's excellent article will unfortunately be seized on with glee by Reformites Anything but Reform Farage and his cronies who take control freakery to new levels The running of Kent. The expulsions and suspensions by Council Leader Kemkaran  Councillors told to "suck it up" ' The loss of Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe Habib was toast as soon as he said Reform was bigger than Farage. It wasn't Meanwhile the Welsh Reform branches have been on the receiving end of the heavy hand of Cllr Thomas Can Labour redeem themselves in any way in the next few months ? At least just enough to keep Reform out .

The Man from Cork...Clark, Red Sonia, West Streeting, all characters in Smiley McSweeney's dark political farce...Revisit 'The Fly' with Jeff Goldblum for the Sweeney/Clark/Superman melding...great that this latest installment of 'The King's Men' gets a spot on N.C...

That photograph of Rees Mogg sliming the conservative front bench brought back the ghost of Gove working his evil in the Lords and then a movement in the stagnant waters of a putrid moat, the Hunchback of West Minster leans into his Panto Churchill and torpedo's the BBC... The Effect will leave us a festering sore which Farage will devour like one of GNS's giant crabs, morsel by morsel !

'Eluned Morgan has no control over the party apparatchiks who run Welsh Labour from their offices in Cardiff. They are loyal to Keir Starmer, not to her, and their control freakery in Wales replicates the control freakery deployed by McSweeney and his crew in UK Labour.' Labour MS Lee Waters appears to endorse that exact view in a podcast on Welsh politics which I watched a couple of days back, in which he asserted that 'London Labour' had absolutely insisted on taking over and directing Labour's campaign prior to the Caerffili Senedd by-election, and that the dismal outcome for Labour was in no small part made worse than it might have been as a consequence of Westminster Labour apparatchiks' failure to realize that the context of Welsh politics - and maybe especially that of south Wales valleys - is simply not the same as that which applies in the English constituencies with which they would have been more familiar. '... Labour Together had been involved in undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party by setting up “astroturf” organisations to push the line that the party had a massive problem with antisemitism ...' The very clear campaign - starting almost as soon as Labour members had elected him as UK party leader - to displace Jeremy Corbyn on the grounds that he both tolerated anti-semitism within the party and even that he had fostered and encouraged it always seemed utterly incredible to me, given that Corbyn's been in the Commons a very long time and his absolute opposition to all forms of racism and discrimination is beyond dispute to anyone who has followed his career with any degree of attention. The imputation always seemed to me to be completely incredible. That's not to suggest that I believe Corbyn would have turned out to be a good or an effective prime minister if he'd won an election. I don't think that he would have been. But I think that for entirely different reasons! The man simply doesn't seem to me to possess the Machiavellian guile to project anti-racist principles while simultaneously nursing clandestine anti-Jewish sentiments and promoting a culture of anti-semitism within the party. For me at least, his failings would lie very much elsewhere.

The fundamental problem in UK politics is the broad church parties that FPTP creates. It's inevitable that any single party trying to occupy such a large part of the political spectrum will be constantly at war with themselves. The only surprise is that people are still surprised by this. Things will only change when we change the voting system, and have more smaller parties and permanent coalitions. We had the opportunity to do this in 2011 but the Labour left refused to back AV because the Daily Mail told them not to. They are responsible for everything that followed, including Brexit and Boris, and are again working hard to get a proper right-wing government back in power.

I feel sorry for Starmer to a certain extent as he can't even choose his own Deputy PM as that's done by the party. Losing Rayner and getting Powell is undoubtedly the cruelest of blows. Appointing the unqualified Reeves as Chancellor, however, is his mistake, and one that could ultimately prove fatal. One thing he does have going for him though is his obvious utter disdain for Welsh Labour and The Circus. That's one issue upon which he has my unwavering support...

For one minute I thought the RNLI had two new volunteers from Drowning Street, a day in a Rib bouncing round the channel in a 3-5 at less than a yard above sea level would be a good way for them to see things from the other end of the telescope...

Labour under Corbyn was antisemitic although when pushed he fudged answers. His revolutionary friends like the Irish left wing are overtly antisemitic. Hamas makes no secret of their position - if you can bring yourself to read their manifesto plodding through loads of hard to follow Islamic quotes it clearly states that their aim is the death of all Jews. Latterly they pretend for convenience sometimes they don’t mean it. Some subscribe to the “After Saturday comes Sunday” school of thought which is a euphemism for when we have disposed of the Jews we will start on the Christians (=West). In the Middle East militant Islam has substantially achieved that already in Syria and Iraq and in Palestine as well their genocide of the religious minorities in Iraq like the Yazidis whose men they massacred and whose women they enslaved and raped. So the short answer is that most if not all who are anti Zionist are antisemitic when properly examined.